2021 January « Aletho News

Cybersecurity group admits SolarWinds hack came from within the US, but doubles down on blaming Russia

RT | January 4, 2021

Internet security firm FireEye has revealed the enormous SolarWinds hack that left upwards of 250 agencies and businesses unprotected for weeks was launched from inside the US – but that hasn’t stopped them from blaming Moscow.

The mega-hack, which affected 250 networks including US government agencies, went undetected by Washington’s security systems because it originated within the US, FireEye told the New York Times. But while one might expect this revelation to pour cold water on the metastasizing, baseless claims that Russia was responsible for the intrusion, speculation about the country’s role has only increased.

The western media establishment has remained largely silent about the latest development in the SolarWinds saga, perhaps embarrassed to blame a foreign country for one’s own inability to safeguard clients’ data. Indeed, the US agencies supposedly tasked with detecting and preventing such attacks – the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command – all missed the breach. Instead, it took FireEye, a firm that even the AP admits specializes in pinning American security fails on the Kremlin, to uncover the sprawling security snafu.

FireEye allegedly discovered the vulnerability only after those “state actors” broke into its own network to steal security tools, and the Times acknowledged the company has “a history of lackluster security for its products.” However, the same outlet’s coverage suggests such a breach could only have been accomplished with high-level hacking tools backed by a state.

Even the usual Russia hawks were baffled at why the Kremlin would go through all the trouble of infiltrating stateside servers only to – as far as experts can tell – take nothing and leave the system itself intact. “We still don’t know what Russia’s strategic objectives were,” former DHS official Suzanne Spaulding told the New York Times on Sunday – apparently unwilling to consider the heretical notion that Russia might not be the culprit.

Despite the media’s decision to take the “Russia did it” narrative and run with it, FireEye itself has shied away from explicitly pinning the attack on the Kremlin, instead merely claiming it was a government-backed hack. The Associated Press, however, stepped in to fill the blanks, declaring “industry experts” had said it “bore the hallmarks of Russian tradecraft.”

One of those “experts”, Dmitri Alperovitch, was the CEO of CrowdStrike, which famously accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Even though the software used to pull off those hacks was widely available and the firm itself could only muster “low to medium” confidence regarding a supposed link to the Russian government, that didn’t stop the company from presenting its conclusions as if set in stone. CrowdStrike claimed last week that it was also targeted for hacking by the latest group of “Russians,” but claimed that unlike FireEye, it had withstood the infiltration attempt.

January 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | United States | 1 Comment

America’s Epiphany Moment

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 4, 2021

The blanketing canopy pressing down across the globe of TINA (there is no alternative) is rupturing. The fabric is tearing at the seams. Now, with the U.S. courts having abdicated their role in adjudicating suits in connection with the 3rd November election, it seems that President Trump will make a last effort to change the course of events between 6–20 January (inauguration day). At point of writing, some 140 Republican Representatives say they will challenge the outcome of certain elections on 6 January. Whether this challenge will succeed (in all its dimensions) is moot.

What then? Well, Red America – whether rightly or wrongly – sees that 20 January may prove to be ‘the end of the line’ for them. Eight out of ten Republicans believe the election stolen; that the crucial Georgia Senatorial race likely will be ‘stolen’ too; that the destruction of small and mid-sized businesses through lockdown was a premeditated strategy to further consolidate Big Business Oligarchs; and that ultimately Red Americans will face ‘cancellation’ by an incoming woke ‘soft-totalitarianism’, orchestrated by Big Tech. This is their perspective – their Epiphany revelation. It is, to say the least, bleak.

With such a dark prospect facing Red America, talk has turned toward secession or separation (though not yet to divorce) – the more optimistic see an orderly agreement, allowing Red and Blue America to find political living-space, whilst acknowledging the practical bonds of geography, commerce, currency, debt, diplomacy and military force. But many expect a vengeful repression, and no civility.

Secession, per se, however, is unlikely – and if attempted, likely would end badly. Separation however is already happening in a small de facto way: House moves (estate agents say) are being driven firstly by the overarching ‘colour’ of the neighbourhood being vacated, as well as by the desired destination’s ‘colour’ (i.e. Red or Blue), as America separates into two ‘tribes’.

Yes, many American (and western) myths about American identity and politics lie shattered on the ground. Many still are in a state of shock. They had imagined their elections as somehow sacrosanct. They had imagined the courts as arbitrators. And they never imagined to see a U.S. President ridiculed and humiliated so, by the MSM. Reality has arrived as a slap in the face.

And yes – TINA is over; a market for alternatives is now open for business. The ripples from this unexpected shock of an American epiphany will cascade into the European Union (though European leaders presently, are presenting a Nelsonian (blind) eye to the telescope), and the European media is compliant in simply ignoring anything, save the Tech narrative of reality.

But much more than this, the tear to that oppressive TINA canopy allows other civilisational-states assertively to reject criticisms, or policies, which have been weaponised against their value-systems. If Red America can utterly reject woke values, and vice versa, then why should other civilisations not reject western Enlightenment values?

This is already afoot: as Hungary successfully has faced down the EU over its particular values (which progressive Brussels disdains as illiberal), and as China has made it clear that a trade relationship with Beijing will come only when Europeans put an end to their virtue signalling at others.

Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial debate. A 2014 study concluded that economic power now was so concentrated in the hands of a tiny clique of billionaire-oligarchs that they had amassed virtually unchallengeable political power, leaving next-to-no power in anyone else’s hands. The report concluded that the U.S. resembled an oligarchy, rather than a functioning democracy. Big Tech’s narrative repression during the last months has rubbed painfully home the point of unchallengeable institutional power – to half America.

That debate about when U.S. democracy was lost, however, has been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the Covid era: A combination of sustained lockdowns; the demise of small businesses; and of massive state-mandated pandemic support flowing primarily to corporate élites, has left these oligarchs, together with their Silicon Valley and Wall Street allies, further entrenched, with literally unassailable economic and political power.

Which brings us to the European Union. Perry Anderson, in a lengthy forensic examination entitled Ever Closer Union, details how Europe has steered its course towards an identical oligarchic destination – including all the same pathologies as are now present in the U.S.:

“… It [the EU] is not, obviously enough, a parliamentary democracy, lacking division between a government and an opposition, competition between parties for office, or accountability to voters. There is neither a separation between executive and legislative powers, along American lines; nor a connection between them, along British or Continental lines, in which an executive is invested by an elected legislature to which it remains responsible.

“Rather it is the inverse that holds: an unelected executive holds a monopoly of legislative initiative, while a judiciary, self-invested with an independence subject to no constitutional audit or control, issues decisions that are effectively unalterable, whether or not they conform to the treaties on which they are nominally based. The rule of the Union’s proceedings, whether they are presided over by judges, bankers, bureaucrats, deputies or prime ministers, are secret wherever possible, and their outcome, [proclaimed to represent] unanimity.”

In a striking parallel to the recent course of judicial events in the U.S., Anderson notes that the European Court of Justice, the ECJ, is a “court [its’ judges unelected, its deliberations secret], with an agenda that does not correspond to the intentions of its founders, seeing itself ‘neither as the guardian of the rights of the signatory states, nor as a neutral arbiter between the states and the Community, but rather the driving force of integration”. (This tallies closely with the complaints made against U.S. Supreme Court judicial activism, in respect to the Constitution. It too, has facilitated integration and concentration).

“The ECJs’ assertion of the supremacy of Community over domestic, let alone constitutional laws, has no basis in the Treaty of Rome, which granted it rights of judicial review only ‘with respect to acts of the Union institutions’, not those of member states.

“Yet, in effect, this is exactly what the court now undertakes on a routine basis X proceeding as if ‘the treaty framework, as touchstone on the internal constitutionality of all EU institutional activity X has never actually meant what [the Rome Treaty] so clearly states’.”

Again – as in the U.S. – this ECJ judicial ‘activism’ is setting new rules, well beyond ‘Treaty’ frameworks, without mandate, without legislative validation, or the electorates of Europe being even informed.

The ECJ’s current court president, the Belgian, Koen Lenaerts, has spelled out explicitly the Court’s integrationist ambitions. In his words: ‘There is simply no nucleus of sovereignty that the member states can invoke, as such, against the Community’. The court aims at ‘the same practical outcome as the one that would be obtained through a direct invalidation of member state law’. (The parallel here is with the U.S. Court dismissing any standing for disputes between the fifty co-sovereign U.S. states, over unconstitutional practices).

Again, following in the U.S. path, when confronted with ‘’’[19]68 Woodstock activism’ that seemed to threaten their economic interests – U.S. Big Business simply set-up the K-Street lobbying ‘industry’ that now effectively writes almost all Congressional legislation. The EU duly has followed suit here, too: “Brussels quickly became a magnet for corporate lawyers and investors from America, on the lookout for market opportunities and bringing with them the expectations and practices of a powerful federation”.

These latter soon formed close relations with the substantial number of high-flying Belgian commercial jurists, who, taking full advantage of an ECJ having “‘a settled and consistent policy of promoting European federalism’ … and which has interpreted ‘prohibitions of discrimination against foreign companies so widely’ that ‘almost any national [i.e. member state] regulation could be understood as a market access obstacle …’”. Thus, Anderson concludes, “the ECJ effectively deprived member states of ‘the power to determine the borderline between the private and public sector, market and state’”.

There are now around 30,000 registered lobbyists in Brussels – that is more than double the number infesting Washington, reckoned at a mere 12,000. In Brussels, 63% are corporate and consultant lobbyists, 26% are from NGOs, 7% from think tanks and 5% municipal. “That Europe’s executive could resist infection from the vapours of this swamp is implausible”, writes Anderson

But here is the rub: the deliberate de-linking of political process from society. Christopher Bickerton’s European Integration has as its subtitle, the seemingly anodyne: From Nation-States to Member States. Everyone has an idea what a nation-state is, and many know that 27 countries (with the UK’s departure) are ‘member states’. What is the conceptual difference between the two?

Here, Bickerton’s definition is succinct: ‘The concept of the member state expresses a fundamental change in the political structure of the state: With horizontal ties between national executives taking precedence over vertical ties between [national] governments – and their own societies’. The connection between 27 electorates and the political process thus is severed.

By the time the Cold War had ended in 1990, European executives already had consolidated this transition to member-statehood when crisis intervened: the Euro – far from bringing renewed growth and prosperity – had plunged Italy into prolonged stagnation and regression, and had taken the Eurozone as a whole into turmoil. The EU response then was not to loosen the corsets of ‘member-hood’, but rather to tighten them still further. Today, the response to the pandemic – which precisely highlighted Europe’s lack of solidarity and competence – again brought forth the ‘ever closer union’ and ‘solidarity’ mantra.

The southern belt of European states, however, still pay the price of a misconceived currency union that cannot now be reversed. For, even if currency union, absent fiscal or political union, was a huge mistake, the dissolution of the Eurozone remains something no mainstream Euro-politician sees feasible. Yet, if a second big shock (comparable to the impact of the Great Financial Crisis (of 2008)) were to hit the system – such as, for instance, through continuing lockdowns triggering depression – the European project would have to be radically rebuilt from the bottom up – or discarded.

Hence the ‘trap’ Europe is in – it can neither move forwards, nor backwards. The EU decision to rescue the single currency rather than dismantle it, created an economically repressive and politically authoritarian Euro regime that was hugely counter-productive. “By forcing member states in trouble to adopt fiscal austerity and internal devaluation, reducing labour costs, together with permanent downward pressure on wage incomes, social transfers and public transfers, official policy was ‘utterly devoid of democratic legitimacy”, Fritz Scharpf has suggested.

“In sum”, Anderson finally concludes, “the order of the Union is that of an oligarchy … Regrettably, an EU-wide democracy does not exist, and the reforms adopted since the crisis of 2008 – banking union, stricter fiscal oversight – have made the Union more technocratic, less accountable, and more distant from European electorates”.

But did not ‘the Project’ – for all its flaws – bring peace to Europe? The truth, of course, is that after 1945 there was never any risk of another outbreak of hostilities between Germany and France, or any other of the countries of Western Europe, because the Cold War made the whole region an American security protectorate.

And, just as is the case with the U.S. (now plainly in view, in wake of 3 November), the Union’s path to ‘ever closer union’ and to oligarchy, has created similar carbuncles of division across the European body politic. The strife is economic, cultural and political. Europe has two economies and they are diverging fast; they do different jobs, in different industries, in different places, for different pay. The elites and the have-nots.

On the one hand, Brussels adheres tightly to its trenchantly secular, and ‘progressive’ view, whilst on the other hand, a substantial portion of Europeans (and some member states), hue to a more traditional, spiritual and cultural ethos. And, as Brussels becomes more committed to a tech-led ‘Great Re-set’, these élites occupy a world wholly divorced from that of most working Europeans – two separate disconnected realities, in fact. And with European anger rising at the lockdowns – and at the destruction of small and medium sized businesses (just as in the U.S. people are moving from being financially squeezed, to going hungry).

America may possibly be on the brink of its ‘de-coupling moment’ – in shock at the raw revelation of just how undemocratic America has become; how unchallengeable its’ oligarchy and institutions have become (its’ epiphany in other words). Inwardly, they knew; but suddenly, sharply – like the crack of a crystal breaking – it has become luminously conscious to all.

The European élites pretend not to notice, repeating that all is about to revert ‘to normal’ with a Biden Administration; that the old relationship with the Democratic Party will be resumed. Europe never had a relationship with America, per se – Brussels has always been the European arm of America’s ‘Blue State’, to which it is joined at the hip – as Anderson’s account of the EU ‘acquis’ of all the attributes of unchallengeable power affirms. Yet, there is no ‘normal’; no civility; no ‘working across the aisle’ in Washington, to which Europe can share its ‘return’ with a Harris-Biden Admin.

The big ‘domino’ has fallen: Red America; and Brexit is a second. Does anyone believe that this American epiphany; this exploding of American delusions, will leave Europe untouched? Or, that other states will not observe it too, and understand from it that the past need to submit their own cultures to European moral scrutiny is over?

On 10 December, Rush Limbaugh, a well-known American conservative political show host, said: “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’”

How long before Europeans more generally say, ‘What in the world do we have in common with those technocrats who operate in Brussels?’

Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat and also a founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

January 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | ECJ, European Union, United States | Leave a comment

The Year Ahead

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | January 4, 2021

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” — Aristotle

2020 ended with freedom under attack and few rising to freedom’s defense.

The United States is poised to enter 2021 with an illegitimate president, Biden, put in office by an election stolen in plain view. The incumbent president, Donald Trump, won the election. He received 10 million more votes in the 2020 election than he did when he won in 2016 and three times the black votes. His campaign rallies were enthusiastically attended by overflow crowds. As Americans went to sleep the night of November 3 President Trump had carried the red states and had large leads in the critical swing states. Without foul play it was impossible for Biden to win.

The morning of November 4 when they awoke, the American people found the presstitutes had declared Joe Biden president. In the middle of the night massive vote dumps of fraudulent mail-in ballots in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia erased Trump’s large lead and tipped the swing states to Biden.

No crowds had turned out for Biden. In the Democrat primary, there was no enthusiasm for him or Kamala. In the election Biden got less votes than Obama had received and did worse with blacks and Hispanics. Biden carried neither the bellwether counties that have always predicted the election outcome nor the bellwether states of Ohio and Florida. He underperformed Hillary’s 2016 vote in every urban US county but with fraud’s help outperformed Hillary in Democrat-controlled Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, the precise cities where the most obvious and most blatant electoral fraud was committed.

No one has explained how it is possible that Biden who generated no enthusiasm even among Democrats won 302 electoral votes while Trump who excited the multitudes only received 232 electoral votes. The fraud is so overdone that no one, not even its beneficiaries, believe the results.

The obvious electoral fraud was attested to by hundreds of affidavits signed under penalty of perjury by people of both genders and all races who witnessed massive amounts of fraudulent mail-in ballots added to Biden’s total. Election experts testified and issued reports explaining how the voting machines and software used had been programmed to weight the votes in Biden’s favor.

It was all to no avail. The presstitutes declared with one voice that there was no evidence of electoral fraud without ever examining the evidence. Democrats began demanding that Trump and his supporters be arrested for claiming that the election had been stolen. The Democrat state attorney general in Michigan is now prosecuting attorneys who represented clients in bringing electoral fraud lawsuits.

The courts controlled by Democrats in swing states refused to accept the lawsuits filed as that would mean the courts would have to look at the massive evidence and see the fraud. The US Supreme Court side-stepped the issue by ruling (incorrectly it seems) that the suit brought by the State of Texas joined by other states had no standing. With few exceptions, the Republican Party turned a blind eye to the electoral theft.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, proved by acquiescing in the fraud that it is pointless to vote for Republicans. Like Democrats, Republicans represent the Establishment, not the people. The US Establishment has succeeded in doing what it intended—getting rid of a non-establishment president who was in the way of the Establishment’s agendas.

The United States, which invades and bombs countries as part of “bringing them democracy” has now proven to the entire world that America herself has no democracy. Just stolen elections like any other third world gangster state.

American “moral speak” is Washington’s language for justifying the mass murder of other countries, their peoples, infrastructures, and prospects, producing millions of displaced peoples from eight countries since the Clinton regime and millions of orphans and widows. And now this criminal state has stolen an election from its own people.

This is how America will henceforth be seen both at home and abroad. Its moral authority is gone and its soft power with it. Its hard military power doesn’t stack up to the Russians’, much less to the combined hard power of the American Establishment’s three chosen enemies—Russia, China, and Iran. Eastern Europeans are already rethinking their alignment with a sexually and culturally degenerate West. Every country is tired of American threats and of Washington’s belief that US law takes precedence over their own law.

Sanctions are forcing other countries to turn their back on the dollar and to cease using it for their international payments. As the demand for dollars drops, the Federal Reserve is committed to printing more in order to support the stock market, bond prices, the big banks’ bad investments, and Covid unemployment. The Federal Reserve can prop up the stock market or it can prop up the dollar. It can’t do both. When the time arrives that American economic mistakes—largely greed driven—force the Federal Reserve to choose between the dollar and the stock market, the house of cards falls down.

So much damage has been done to the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that recovery from economic collapse seems impossible. For a quarter century US corporations have been moving high productivity, high value-added jobs out of America. This has dismantled the ladders of upward mobility that made the United States an “opportunity society.” It has destroyed the careers and prospects of millions of Americans and the tax base of cities, states, and federal government—the basis of public pension systems and infrastructure maintenance. The lost manufacturing jobs have destroyed supply chains and a skilled work force. In their place we have Walmart shelf stockers and telemarketing calls. Even the latter are now being done by robots.

Artificial intelligence is taking away more forms of human employment. Globalists speak of the better new jobs that will be created. Globalists have been speaking this way since jobs offshoring began, and we are yet to see a single one of the promised better new jobs. The jobs created by offshoring are in China, India, and elsewhere in Asia.

It was the technology, capital, business knowhow, and jobs that America’s corporations took to China that resulted in China’s surprisingly rapid economic and military rise. Washington thought it would be 50 years before China became a power. Instead, it happened in 5 years. Today our tech companies cannot compete with China’s Huawei, and the US is reduced to arresting the company’s executives on false charges and applying sanctions to countries that do business with Huawei. Washington has launched a full scale propaganda campaign against China—the kind experienced in war—and the American rightwing is buying the view that it was China, not the American Establishment, that stole the presidency from Trump.

Americans, already economically devastated by jobs offshoring and buildup in consumer debt as people tried to maintain their living standards, now experience the loss of their jobs and businesses from lockdowns that serve agendas different from a health agenda. Americans are being forced to accept executive mandates, not laws passed by legislators, that limit their ability to operate a business and their freedom of movement and association. More restraints are in the works including Soviet Union-type internal passports. You accept vaccination or you cannot leave your home or have family over for Christmas and birthdays.

With Biden—a proven gangster by an Ukrainian investigation — and Kamala, who hates white people, in office, the United States will have leaders far below the quality of Putin and Xi. Indeed, the information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is in the hands of the FBI, thereby guaranteeing there will be no prosecution, indicates that Biden will sell US government favors to any country. The Clintons inaugurated the sale of government office for money, and Biden continues the tradition.

We hear much propaganda about “gangster state Russia,” but it is Western governments that are gangster states. They are such gangster states that their corporations now find their profits in looting the public sectors of their own countries as is done in Ukraine.

Countries can for awhile survive corruption, but not evil. The US Establishment is evil beyond comprehension—pedophilia, imprisonment of the innocent, destruction of jobs and hopes so that corporate executives can have higher bonus packages, destruction of entire countries for the sake of the profits of the defense industry and the neocons’ ideology of American hegemony, torture in order to silence those who tell the truth, destruction of the US Constitution in order to make Americans “safe” from terrorists, Covid, or whatever is the orchestrated threat. These and more evils that have become characteristics of the United States are incomprehensible to Americans who are taught that they are the exceptional and indispensable people and to foreigners who fell for decades of Washington’s propaganda that America is a light unto the world.

The incomprehensibility of the evil and its destructiveness that the establishment has imposed on our country is the reason that the rest of the world doesn’t understand America. Putin spent years thinking that Washington’s hostility toward Russia was a misunderstanding that could be worked out by Russia showing non-confrontational behavior and accepting Washington’s insults and abuse.

Sooner or later Putin, Xi, and the Mullahs in Iran will comprehend that you can sell your soul to evil as Western Europe, UK, Canada, and Australia have done, but you can’t make a deal with it.

Evil is all devouring, and evil is devouring America.

Rep. Gohmert Understands the Situation—A Stolen Election that the Courts Refuse to Touch

“The bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘we’re not going to touch this, you have no remedy.’ Basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you got to go to the streets and be as violent as an Antifa and BLM,” said US Representative Louie Gohmert (R, Texas).

January 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | United States | 1 Comment

Navalny and Handlers Lose the Plot… He Is a Convicted Felon on Probation

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 2, 2021

Russia’s federal prison authorities were right to jolt Alexei Navalny this week by warning him to return immediately from Germany or else face a suspended sentence being made into jail time.

The “professional” opposition activist claims to be convalescing in Germany after he was allegedly poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in August. Western news media dutifully repeat the claim that Navalny is “recuperating” in Germany after having survived an assassination plot by Kremlin agents. Navalny has personally accused Russia’s President Vladimir Putin of ordering the alleged hit.

Last week, a team of medics from the Berlin hospital where Navalny had been staying published a paper in The Lancet medical journal in which they claimed he had been poisoned with Novichok nerve agent. Their findings are dubious because the medics acknowledged the involvement of German military intelligence laboratories in conducting their analysis.

But one thing the German doctors did let slip was that a 55-day follow-up check on Navalny ascertained that he had made a “near-complete recovery”.

The Russian dissident figure was flown to Berlin on August 22, two days after he was treated in a hospital in Omsk, Russia. Thus, the German medical team are indicating – no doubt inadvertently – that Navalny’s health recovered nearly two months ago, if not before that.

That means there is no medical reason why he should remain at large in Germany. His claims of “convalescing” and the Western media’s indulgence of those claims are false, if the German doctors are correct about his “recovery”.

Despite Navalny’s arrogant disdain for Russian state laws, he is nevertheless answerable to those authorities as a citizen. While in Germany he was on probation for a suspended jail sentence concerning a fraud conviction in 2014. His so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has a checkered history of shady financing, from allegations of foreign funding by the U.S. State Department to charges of embezzling millions of dollars. Ironically, the blogger and media activist produces slick programs accusing the Russian government of corruption.

In any case, under the laws of the Russian Federation, the 44-year-old Navalny was on probation during the past four months of his stay in Germany. For the last two months, he is in good health, according to his German doctors. So there are no grounds for why he should abscond from Russian territory and evade the laws for which he is answerable.

Not only is Navalny living as if he above the law, he has also shown flagrant contempt for the Russian authorities.

Last week, he published a video on his website claiming that he had pranked a named member of Russia’s security service, the FSB, into admitting that agents had poisoned him while he was visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk on August 20. He was later flown in an emergency to Omsk where he was treated after having apparently fallen ill onboard a flight to Moscow.

The FSB dismissed Navalny’s prank telephone claim as a “deep fake”. The Russian doctors who treated him in Omsk – and who probably saved his life – have repeatedly stated that their tests showed there was no poison in Navalny’s body, and specifically no traces of nerve agent. They said his illness was due to a metabolic disorder. Perhaps self-induced as a ruse to later transfer to Germany?

The transcript of Navalny’s purported prank call to the FSB agent reads like a comic set-up. Posing as a senior member of Russia’s national security council, Navalny affects to bully the supposed agent as if he is a pathetic stooge.

A telling segment is where the self-styled super sleuth fishes for compliments about his own character from the purported FSB man, betraying the narcissism of a megalomaniac.

Again, incredibly, we are expected to believe that someone who had a near-death experience with a lethal nerve poison and who is “convalescing” still in Germany somehow managed to find the energy and mental reserves to pull off a daring 45-minute telephone sting.

If Navalny is fit enough to participate in such practical jokes – regardless of their credibility – then he is surely fit enough to abide by Russian laws and respect his probation terms. As the Russian Federal Prison Service stated this week: “The convicted man is not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate.”

One gets the unerring impression that Navalny and his foreign handlers have become so self-intoxicated with hubris that they are blind to their own absurd implausibilities.

Why was he permitted to fly by air ambulance to Berlin in the first place if the Russian authorities had evil designs against him?

While there, as a guest of the German government, Navalny has wildly accused President Putin of ordering his alleged assassination. The European governments have subsequently and rashly imposed sanctions on Russia in support of Navalny’s unfounded claims. Then we have the media activist mounting further provocations parlayed into even more outlandish accusations against President Putin and the Kremlin.

All the while there has been no evidence of poisoning presented to support these claims, other than unverifiable assertions by German doctors working with German military intelligence labs, as well as two other NATO laboratories and the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons. All of them including the OPCW (the latter compromised over complicity in NATO false-flag provocations in Syria) have refused to share their analytical data and samples with Russia, and yet they are demanding that Moscow launch a criminal investigation into the Navalny case.

The abdication by European governments of due process and of respect for Russian state laws, its government, and its president is astounding. They are indulging a foreign-sponsored gadfly as if he is the sovereign representative of the Russian Federation.

Navalny and his foreign allies have lost the plot in their own telling of an alleged assassination plot.

First things first: he is a convicted felon who is answerable to Russian law. Pushing false flags and slanderous falsehoods from abroad with the intent of damaging Russia’s sovereignty is an abuse of his rights.

Arrogant and overindulged Navalny is patently incapable of even understanding his obligations under law as a Russian citizen. He evidently feels above the law, like many of his Western backers. That’s why Russia is right to tell him to put up or shut up.

January 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | 1 Comment

Iran’s IRGC impounds South Korean-flagged tanker in Persian Gulf over environmental violations

Press TV | January 4, 2021

The naval force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has impounded a South Korean-flagged tanker in the Persian Gulf waters for repetitive violation of maritime environmental law.

The IRGC Navy said in a statement on Monday that the tanker HANKUK CHEMI had departed from the Petroleum Chemical Quay in Saudi Arabia’s Jubail port before being impounded earlier in the day for polluting the Persian Gulf waters with chemicals.

The statement added that the ship, which carried 7,200 tonnes of ethanol, is now being held at Iran’s southern Bandar Abbas port city.

The IRGC further stated that the vessel’s crewmembers, who hail from South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar, have been detained, adding that the case will be handed over to Iran’s judicial officials for further investigation.

The IRGC said the ship was impounded at the request of Ports and Maritime Department of Hormogzan Province and upon judicial order of the provincial prosecutor.

The IRGC Navy has been diligently countering contamination of the Persian Gulf’s maritime environment in past years, and in line with its duties in this area, has impounded various ships found to be violating the Persian Gulf’s environmental regulations.

It confiscated a foreign oil tanker in the Persian Gulf in August 2019 that was smuggling fuel to some Arab countries.

A commander with the IRGC, Ramezan Zirahi, said that patrols from the IRGC’s Naval District 2 had seized the ship near the Persian Gulf island of Farsi after intelligence gathering.

The IRGC seized the Panamanian-flagged Riah tanker for smuggling one million liters of Iranian fuel south of Larak Island in the Persian Gulf on July 14, 2019.

The IRGC also impounded the 30,000-tonne UK-flagged Stena Impero tanker on June 19, 2019 as it was passing through the Strait of Hormuz en route to Saudi Arabia “for failing to respect international maritime rules.”

The vessel was involved in an accident with an Iranian fishing boat and had ignored its distress call, changing its route.

January 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Iran | Leave a comment

Dr Humphries, MD: Is the flu going to kill you?

Vax Not | 2018

Dr Humphries, MD shows the science on flu shot non-efficacy. Video recorded 2018, Austin, Texas. Please use the following links to read the REAL evidence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?…

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Israel Grants Settlers Millions to Monitor Palestinian Construction in West Bank

Israeli forces carry out a demolition in the Massafer Yatta area. (Photo: via Twitter)

Palestine Chronicle | January 2, 2021

Israel has granted illegal settlements more than $6 million to fund drones and patrol units to monitor “unauthorized” Palestinian building in the occupied West Bank.

The Settlement Affairs Ministry published on Thursday the criteria for settlement councils to gain access to the $6.2 million in funding, Haaretz reported.

The councils will be able to buy drones, vehicles and electronic monitoring equipment and pay the salaries of inspectors with the funding.

Those inspectors will monitor Palestinian construction in Area C of the occupied West Bank, which is under full Israeli control.

Palestinians living in Area C must acquire Israeli permission to build, but such permits are near-impossible to get. Just 1.4 percent of requests were approved between 2016 and 2018, according to official data.

Buildings constructed without an Israeli permit are regularly demolished by the military.

The funding will also go to erecting fences to close-off areas.

It is the first time settlement councils will have access to such funds as part of the state budget.

Under the arrangement, settlement councils will then report to an “Area C situation room” to report to officials what Settlement Affairs Minister Tzachi Hanegbi described as the “hostile takeover of land in Area C”.

More than 400,000 Israelis live in settlement communities in the occupied West Bank which are considered illegal under international law.

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Israel, Israeli settlement, Palestine, Zionism | 1 Comment

American Tax Payers Spend At Least $23 Billion On Israel Every Year

By Eric Striker – National Justice – January 1, 2021

Last September, Donald Trump accidentally upended an entire generation of myths invented by the left and right that purport to explain America’s costly and unpopular military adventures in the Middle East:

“The fact is, we don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. We’ve been very good to Israel. Other than that, we don’t have to be in the Middle East. You know there was a time we needed desperately oil, we don’t need that anymore.”

As Mondoweiss pointed out at the time, the explosive admission went completely unmentioned in the mainstream media, which traditionally hangs on every one of Trump’s words and reacts hysterically.

Categorizing America’s foreign policy catastrophes as done in the service to Israel has until the Trump era always been dismissed by media tastemakers and political gatekeepers as rank anti-Semitism driven by reductionist, simplistic and conspiratorial thinking, even when intelligence officials like Michael Scheuer and foreign policy experts affirm the view.

Trump’s lack of subtlety when remarking on using American blood and treasure to incrementally advance the interests of the Jewish state is one reason why the Israel lobby, which is perpetually paranoid about the public noticing their activities, is not keen on reciprocating his often suffocating love.

Their paranoia is justified. This year Congress made the mistake of combining its $900 billion dollar coronavirus stimulus bill, which suffering people are closely following the development of, with the yearly $1.4 trillion dollar fiscal budget, which is typically ignored.

A deluge of popular anger was provoked by news that we would only be receiving a $600 dollar check under the guise of budget austerity. At the same time, buried deep in the 5,600 monstrosity was a provision setting aside supposed budget constraints to give Israel the equivalent of $5,000 dollars for each of its citizens.

Jews in the media responded to the controversy by calling indignant American tax payers, including actress Alyssa Milano and various left-wing journalists, “fools” and “anti-Semites.” They doubled down by stating that the $500 million dollars provided to Israel was a drop in a $2.3 trillion dollar bucket. They pointed out that other countries, such as Jordan, were receiving foreign aid as well.

But even critics of Israel do not properly calculate the true price Americans pay for a state that — unlike South Korea or Germany — does not provide any economic or military benefits to the homeland. America does not have military bases in Israel, nor does Israel have anything to trade.

The general figure provided for annual US aid to Israel is $3.8 billion, but as former CIA intelligence officer Philip Giraldi has written, this figure excludes our completely artificial $9 billion dollar trade deficit with that country, as well as the $8 billion provided in “loan guarantees” that are basically giveaways since the US Treasury pays interest and principal on these loans.

The Black Budget

Covert “black budget” funding to the Jewish state is another topic shrouded in mystery.

In 2015 a public interest group, the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, sued the CIA for its refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding records on how much is spent in service of Israel, including in respect to intelligence gathering efforts on American citizens that is then sent to the Mossad.

The Department of Justice fought a ferocious, four year long legal battle to keep this information secret and ultimately won.

Based on publicly available pre-1990 black budget expenses, the CIA is dedicating between $13.2 billion to Israeli interests every year if spending has been tacked to inflation. The number may be even higher under the Trump administration, especially since it has escalated the conflict with Iran.

US Spending To Advance Israel

Rarely discussed is how US foreign aid to Muslim countries is, as Trump has constantly reminded us, nothing more than bribing them into cooperating with Israel. US aid to Israel, by contrast, is unconditional.

All of the nations that share a border with Israel (Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and even to certain players in Palestinians and Syria) receive payments from the United States. Were it not for the peculiar, thankless relationship America has with Israel, US tax dollars would not be bankrolling the entire Egyptian military, nor would we be propping up the basket case monarchy in Jordan by handing them 4% of their GDP every year.

The following is a list of expenses — financial, geopolitical, and human — that the American people must shoulder to guarantee the security, stability and geopolitical expansion of 9 million Israelis.

1) Egypt — $2.2 billion a year

The United States’ foreign aid to Egypt, about $1.3 billion which goes to its military and the rest to its economy, is entirely predicated on the country’s military dictators maintaining a close intelligence and diplomatic relationship with Israel. The country’s current leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, took power in 2014 in an Israeli-backed coup that deposed the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt, which was once a regional superpower that fought the Israelis during the Six Days War, restored diplomatic ties with Israel in 1979 under a US brokered deal.

The single-issue relationship was put on display when Senator Rand Paul attempted to cut aid to Egypt during a 2017 Congressional fight. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), five US Senators and Benjamin Netanyahu himself all intervened to block Paul’s amendment, which was crushed in the Senate by a large majority after Jewish groups penned a letter demanding the aid continue as usual. According to both Netanyahu and AIPAC, America’s payoff to the Egyptian military establishment is the only thing keeping Israel’s formidable neighbor from attacking them.

2) Jordan — $1.5 billion a year

In 1994, Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to restore formal ties with Israel.

Prior to 1994, Jordan received a smaller sum of aid from the US, but the country retained relative geopolitical independence, including support for Saddam Hussein during the first Persian Gulf War.

As a state bordering Palestine that for years retained its claim to the West Bank, the Jordanian monarchs have been a useful asset for Israel. The country’s establishment is widely despised by Palestinians, even though the Jordanian public is broadly sympathetic to their plight.

In exchange for breaking solidarity with the Arab world’s boycott of Israel, the United States signed a generous free trade agreement with Jordan, where we prop up their economy by buying 25% of their exports and hand them $1.5 billion a year (close to 4% of their GDP) via USAID.

3) Iraq — $1.1 Billion (Excluding cost of the Iraq war)

The Iraq war, and our continued presence in the country 17 years later, is the product of Jews in Washington primarily loyal to the state of Israel.

This is the opinion of the man who went before the United Nations and went down in history as having sold the weapons of mass destruction lie, former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In Karen DeYoung’s 2007 biography of Powell, Soldier, he singles out Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz as the real architects of war. In one interview with DeYoung, Powell even refers to Donald Rumsfeld — the Gentile who is usually blamed alongside Dick Cheney for the Iraq debacle — as a man controlled by the “JINSA crowd” in the Defense Department. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is an Israel lobbying firm similar to AIPAC.

If JINSA and the “card-carrying Likud members,” as Powell is reported to have remarked once, were not making foreign policy calls in Washington the war would’ve never happened.

It could be argued that the trillions spent on perhaps the most wasteful military conflict in American history was a subsidy to Israel.

4) Saudi Arabia – $1.1 Billion a year

Saudi Arabia, the nation which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, also lobbies the United States government through AIPAC.

The Trump administration was able to secure public Saudi support for Israel by promising $100 billion dollars in modern weapons, including F-35s, to the Gulf state. AIPAC and the Israeli government are both considered to have been the kingmakers in the deal.

The Saudi government, along with another nation that recently established official ties to Israel the, United Arab Emirates, are both state-sponsors of terrorism, including sending American weapons to Al-Qaeda.

The official sect of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is Wahhabism, which is the puritanical and violent dogma that inspires both the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda.

To understand how deep terrorist ideology is penetrated in Saudi society, a Saudi Royal Air Force pilot being trained in a $740 million dollar US-funded Pentagon program to learn how to fly the F-35s killed three American servicemen and injured eight others at the Pensacola Air Station in Florida in a quickly memory holed terrorist attack last year. A study from 2014 found that citizens of Saudi Arabia were the largest private donors to ISIS in Syria and beyond.

5) Afghanistan – $5.4 Billion a year

As with Iraq, the 2001 war in Afghanistan and our ongoing presence there, is part of a containment strategy of Iran done in the interest of Israel.

According to former National Security Agency analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, the Pentagon’s logic behind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was to create a military pincer that would surround Iran. In a 2009 interview, Kwiatkowski stressed that Iran was not a threat to the United States or its interests, but rather only to Israeli regional hegemony,

The Israelis have been using Afghanistan to spy on the Iranian military and engage in various black ops against their country. The Iranians appear to be fighting back, including by restoring ties for their historical nemesis, the Taliban. Israel fears that an unconditional US withdrawal could end up working to the advantage of Iran.

When earlier this year Donald Trump said he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — a move supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people — JINSA and AIPAC were the sole interest groups to vocalize opposition and began pressuring the Senate to ensure it didn’t happen. The Jewish lobby succeeded, and Rand Paul’s bill last July that would’ve brought our soldiers home was defeated by a bipartisan vote of 60 to 33.

6) Palestine, Lebanon, Syria — Fluctuates

The three nations bordering or occupied by Israel receive aid from the United States in an attempt to present carrots and sticks that prevent factions from fully uniting, but the spigot is turned off and on regularly at the behest of Israel.

Last year, the US State Department cut aid to Lebanon’s military in half after a direct appeal to do so by the Netanyahu government. The complaint was that the Lebanese military was not doing “enough” to undermine Shi’ite military and political power. The US typically funds the Lebanese military as a counter-force to Hezbollah, but after the Shi’ite militia successfully defended Lebanon’s territory from an Israeli invasion in the 2006 war, the group has enjoyed nationalist support across the diverse religious groups in the country.

Hezbollah’s work in defending Christians from ISIS in recent years has also been a political game changer, as traditionally grievances from Christian organizations have been exploited by Israel to leverage against the Palestinian cause.

In Palestine itself, the Palestinian Authority under Mohammad Abbas has enjoyed about half a billion US dollars in aid, both to politically divide him from Hamas controlled Gaza, as well as subsidize the humanitarian costs of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank.

Abbas’ strategy of “negotiating” with Israel through America is in retrospect an abject failure. Illegal settlements in the West Bank have continued uninhibited, and the Palestinians in the territory narrowly avoided the full annexation of their land by Israel. While the annexation project appears to have been put off, experts believe Israel will attempt to do so once Israel has a better foothold in the region.

In Syria, which Wikileaks of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposed as nothing more than a regime change operation on behalf of Israel, the United States continues to spend close to a billion dollars every year in “humanitarian” relief.

While the coalition of the Syrian Army, Russia and Iran have largely defeated the ISIS and Al Qaeda rebels, the US is combining its humanitarian aid to anti-Assad areas while attempting to starve the country with crippling sanctions. By providing support to certain regions through USAID, Washington and Israel are artificially extending the conflict between Assad and the anti-government fighters, the latter which would’ve totally surrendered otherwise.

Future Expenses Under Trump’s “Israel-First” Agenda

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have been able to secure support from multiple Muslim nations for Israel by directly offering big payments and controversial favors as a trade.

Here is what this “diplomacy” will cost Americans.

1) Morocco –$3 Billion and the Western Sahara

Under Trump’s deal with Morocco, its king Mohammed VI will receive $3 billion dollars in investments courtesy of the US taxpayer through the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity created by Donald Trump, in exchange for recognizing Israel.

The more concerning aspect of the deal is Trump’s recognition of the disputed Western Sahara as Moroccan, as well as a deal to sell the Moroccan military billions in American arms to give them a strategic edge over Algeria and Western Saharan natives.

The interests of the Western Saharans are represented by the Polisario Front, a nationalist group seeking independence and self-governance. The Moroccans and Polisario Front have been engaging in intensifying armed battles since November, a month before Trump’s outreach to Mohammed VI. With American recognition of the Western Sahara, the Polisario Fronto will have lost diplomatic leverage and potentially have no choice but to fight the Moroccans — thus initiating a potential conflagration in North Africa if Algeria maintains its pro-Saharan position.

2) Indonesia — $2 Billion

Trump’s DFC is reaching out to Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim nation — to provide $2 billion in US aid in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel.

The offer appears to have been rejected, with Jakarta announcing that it stands firmly behind the Palestinian cause.

Unlike Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Indonesia is a parliamentary democracy. Supporting Israel remains highly taboo among the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, so it remains to be seen if the Indonesian state will end up accepting America’s money.

3) Sudan — $1 Billion and Taken Off State-Supporter of Terrorism List

Sudan is an important flashpoint in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Iran uses Sudan as a transit point for smuggling arms to the Palestinian resistance.

The Israelis and the United States have exploited racial strife between blacks and Arabs in Sudan — funding the black side in Darfur (South Sudan) — during the country’s bloody civil war. The conflict has been winding down, but the Sudanese state and economy remains in dire straits largely due to sanctions over being a state-sponsor of terrorism.

During the 1990s, Sudan was blamed for housing Osama Bin Laden following the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Under Trump’s deal, Sudan will be absolved of all blame after paying a fine and receive a billion dollars in debt forgiveness and economic aid in exchange for establishing formal relations with Israel.

4) Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, etc — Unknown

The Saudis have been sinking billions of dollars into fellow Gulf States to encourage them to support Israel since 2018, according to leaks to Arab media.

According to the documents, the Saudis were working on behalf of the US government in this endeavor, promising their neighbors a “generous aid package” from America just for collaborating with the Jewish state.

As written before, the Saudis and UAE are receiving over $120 billion in US weapons — an idea that previously would’ve been a non-starter in Washington due to potentially undermining Israel’s qualitative military edge over Arabs.

By showing loyalty to Israel, Saudi Arabia has been able to secure support in Washington for its barbaric war in Yemen. When the US Congress passed a resolution to end US support for the Saudi war effort, Donald Trump vetoed the bill and, unlike the NDAA, no attempt was made to override this decision.

The full extent of what the US plans to provide Gulf States for their internally unpopular backing for Israel is not yet possible to know.

The Real Cost of Israel

While previous packages of US foreign aid to Muslim countries on behalf of Israel were presented as an objective pursuit for “peace in the Middle East,” the Trump administration’s efforts have directly led to new and bloody conflicts (the Yemen war), and opened up the floodgates for new ones around the world.

All that is certain is that Trump’s concessions and arm’s deals pursuit of recognition for Israel is objectively making the world more dangerous and unstable.

A perfect dollar estimate of how much Israel is costing our country is impossible due to the opaque nature of Washington’s servility to the Zionist state.

In spite of this, we can arrive at a range. The on paper cost of Israel, when we include the “loan guarantee” scam and payments to neighboring countries to advance Israel’s interests, is at least $23.1 billion a year.

This figure excludes speculative figures on the black budget in service to Israel, which if correct, would bring that number to $36.3 billion. It also excludes aid to Palestine and Lebanon (which may return next year), as well as costs related to the proxy conflict with Iran, which almost all foreign policy experts agree is entirely motivated by Israeli — not American — interests.

This number will balloon under Donald Trump’s plan, which is expected to be continued uninhibited under a Joe Biden presidency. Trump’s outreach to the Arab world will put us on the hook for at least an extra $6 billion, which again, is an extremely conservative estimate since we are excluding the shady deals with the Saudis and other Gulf States.

Thus, the $3.8 billion figure that already outrages much of the American public is at the bare minimum about $23 billion per year, but could potentially be closer to $50 billion.

This price of this luxury item in the Middle East is almost half of all American foreign aid, and does not serve any humanitarian purpose (often times, the other way around), much less the interests of the American people. Understanding the outrage this sum would provoke among US voters and taxpayers, groups like JINSA and AIPAC, along with the disproportionately Jewish owned media, ensure that it is never accurately reported.

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism | 2 Comments

Police Keep Secret List of Kids with Bad Grades Labeling Them “Potential Criminals”

By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | January 2, 2021

Pasco County, FL — In the ostensible land of the free, we are told that all people are presumed innocent until proven guilty by their peers. To those who’ve been paying attention, however, we know that “innocent until proven guilty” is a farce into today’s police state. If you doubt this assertion, you need only look at the data to see that a whopping 74% of people in jails across the country — have not been convicted of a crime.

While it is true that many of these folks are awaiting trial for crimes they did commit, there are innocent people behind bars for the sole reason that they cannot afford bail. A free country — who claims to protect the rights of citizens — should not be keeping hundreds of thousands of presumed innocent people in cages, yet this is the status quo.

A recent report from the Tampa Bay Times shows just how determined the American police state is to guarantee an assembly line of otherwise entirely innocent people to continue this process. Police in Florida are targeting children in an attempt to label them as criminals at a young age — despite the children being entirely innocent.

The Pasco sheriff’s office has a secret list of students it believes could “fall into a life of crime” based on ridiculous standards like their grades.

By these standards, people like Thomas Edison, one of the most successful inventors in human history, could’ve been labeled a criminal after he was kicked out of school at age 12 for being poor at math and unable to concentrate.

Steven Spielberg, the famous movie producer, may have been labeled a criminal as well after he temporarily dropped out of high school only to return to be put in a “special ed” class.

Kids often make poor choices when they are younger and these choices should never put them on some police watch list or criminal database. This is nothing short of “pre-crime” tactics that ultimately lead to segregation of dystopian societies based on ratings from the state.

Nevertheless, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office uses data from the Pasco County Schools district and the state Department of Children and Families to compile this very list from middle and high schools who they think will turn out to be criminals.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sheriff’s office defended the tactics and said its data-sharing practices with the school district goes back 20 years and are intended to keeping school campuses safe. Only a juvenile intelligence analyst and the school resource officers have access to the information, it said.

The department says they use this information to help troubled kids, but the parents of these kids have no idea that police are surveilling their children to potentially label them as future criminals.

“These programs, in conjunction with the School District’s Early Warning System, provides recommendations to community or school based programs or resources, and mentorship to those who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, something academically proven to lead the possibility of increased victimization, mental health concerns and other aspects,” a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

School officials explained that they didn’t even realize this child surveillance was happening.

School District Superintendent Kurt Browning and the principals of two high schools told the newspaper they were unaware the sheriff’s office was using school data to identify kids who might become criminals.

“We have an agreement with the Sheriff’s Office,” Browning said in a statement. “That relationship has been strengthened in the wake of the tragedy at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and that includes processes for a two-way sharing of information that could save lives and result in timely interventions with students who are at risk.”

The program, called the Early Warning System tracks students’ grades, attendance and behavior. If a student was a victim of abuse or witnessed abuse, this increases their chances of police labeling them a criminal.

What qualifies for an “at risk” designation could be anything from getting a “D” on a report card to missing school more than three times in a quarter, according to the program’s manual. Other factors include witnessing domestic violence, having a parent in prison and being the victim of abuse or neglect.

The sheriff’s office then compiles this information — combined with grades and other data sets — and puts it into a system that scores children in 16 categories. The unwitting children are then each assigned a label: On Track, At Risk, Off-Track or Critical.

Hundreds of children are on this list.

The sheriff’s office denies that the list is used to label kids as criminals, and claims it is instead used to identify kids at risk for victimization, truancy, self-harm and substance abuse. As the Times reports, however, future criminal behavior is the only designation on the list and the office had a hard time proving anything else:

But the intelligence manual — an 82-page document that school resource officers and other deputies are required to read — doesn’t mention those other risks. Instead, in five separate places, it describes efforts to pinpoint kids who are likely to become criminals.

The office could not provide any documents instructing school resource officers to interpret the list another way.

The idea of cops spying on children in an effort to predict future criminal behavior is chilling. Thankfully, the Tampa Bay Times’ report has shed some much-needed light on the practice.

“Can you imagine having your kid in that county and they might be on a list that says they may become a criminal?’ Linnette Attai, a consultant works with student privacy laws,” told the Times. “And you have no way of finding out if they are on that list? This is a district that is sending millions of dollars to the sheriff of Pasco County to target its students as criminals.”

Indeed, this is worse than Minority Report.

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | United States | 1 Comment

2020 – what a year of climate alarmism tells us about green ideology

Climate Resistance | January 1, 2021

Many climate alarmist’s failed predictions were centred around 2020. This video examines just ten, and argues that they were produced not by science, but by ideology. This is proved by the fact that rather than suffering any consequences to their careers or public standing, fearmongering individuals and institutions enjoy continued and undeserved success.

The analysis of the ten predictions was produced by Steve Milloy and can be read at his website: https://junkscience.com/2020/12/wrong…

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | 1 Comment

To Promote Climate Alarm, Good News Is Regularly Portrayed as a Disaster

By H. Sterling Burnett | Watts Up With that? | January 1, 2021

Dishonesty has seemingly become the hallmark of reporting on climate research. In 2020, the dishonesty reached new heights as multiple studies which actually presented (or that could have presented) good news, were portrayed by the researchers involved and media hacks covering them as if they showed purported human-caused climate change was causing various disasters. The truth is, time and again, the data—often including data provided by the studies—refutes the claimed climate disaster, instead showing the environment getting better. Below I’ll deconstruct a few examples of this fearmongering habit.

Recently, The Guardian and other media outlets have claimed an updated atlas of bird habitats shows global warming is “pushing” birds further north. The Guardian’s story would lead one to believe birds en masse are being forced out of shrinking natural habitats into unsuitable locations by climate change. This is not true. As The Heartland Institute’s President James Taylor wrote in a Climate Realism post responding to The Guardian’s article, the atlas itself tells a completely different story.

“Rather than ‘pushing’ birds out of their normal ranges and forcing them north, birds are benefiting from a warming climate by expanding their overall ranges—thriving in new, northern regions while still flourishing in southern regions as well. The result of climate change is not a negative ‘pushing’ of birds out of their habitat, but rather birds enjoying larger habitat ranges, while adding to biological diversity in their new ranges.”

Indeed, despite the misleading, alarm-raising, title of the story, “Atlas reveals birds pushed further north amid climate crisis,” if you dig deeper into the story, The Guardian admitted the atlas records: “Overall, 35 percent of birds increased their breeding range, 25 percent contracted their breeding range and the rest did not show any change, or the trend is unknown.” This is good news since, as the newspaper acknowledged, according to the atlas, “Generally, if a species is present in more areas it is less likely to go extinct.”

Another scary, but demonstrably untrue, climate-alarm narrative pushed this year came in the form of dozens, if not hundreds, of stories asserting climate change (supposedly of human origin) is responsible for an increase in the number and severity of both hurricanes and wildfires. An example of this flawed analysis/bad-reporting combo can be seen in a story published by Bloomberg titled, “Climate Change Led to Record Insurance Payouts in 2020.”

Bloomberg writes, “Christian Aid, the relief arm of 41 churches in the U.K. and Ireland, ranked the 15 most destructive climate disasters of the year based on insurance losses.” Christian Aid’s study, which The Guardian also covered as if it were divinely inspired revealed truth, claims the world’s 10 costliest weather disasters of 2020 alone accrued $150 billion in damages, with the total figure for all climate change related disasters setting new records in 2020. In particular, Christian Aid’s study blamed climate-change-exacerbated wildfires and hurricanes for the increased damages and higher insurance payouts. Lo and behold, once again, real-world data on wildfires and hurricanes tells a different story, but the good news was ignored.

Concerning wildfires, long-term data show the number of and acreage consumed by wildfires has declined dramatically over the past century. Just looking at 2020, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reports “that 2020 was one of the lowest years for active fires globally.”

Indeed, NASA reports on a recent study in Science which found, “[g]lobally, the total acreage burned by fires each year declined by 24 percent between 1998 and 2015. In total, the global amount of area burned annually has declined by more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of last century to 1.4 million square miles today.”

Wildfires have declined sharply over the course of the past century in the United States, as well. As reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, long-term data from the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show wildfires have declined in number and severity since the early 1900s. Assessing data on U.S. wildfires from as far back as 1926, NIFC reports the numbers of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, with the current acres burned running just one-fourth to one-fifth of the amount of land that typically burned in the 1930s.

Data on hurricanes is equally clear and compelling: Despite 2020’s busy hurricane season, contrary to The Guardian’s claims—and as reported in an earlier Climate Realism article—it is quite possible 2020 did not set a record for Atlantic hurricanes. Before 1950, hurricane tracking was relatively primitive and sparse and it was uncommon to name a storm unless it made landfall somewhere.

In addition, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports there is, “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” And data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), as Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes notes, show that “The United States recently went more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, which is the longest such period in recorded history. The United States also recently experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes in any eight-year period (2009 through 2017) in recorded history.”

The Christian Aid study focuses on the possibly record-breaking costs of 2020’s weather related natural disasters. But in doing so it ignores what Bjorn Lomborg refers to in his book, False Alarm, as the “expanding bulls-eye effect.” The increased costs of natural disasters in recent decades is due to communities increasingly expanding into areas historically prone to natural disasters—such as flood plains, forests, and coastal areas, erecting increasingly expensive structures and infrastructure there. As a result, when extreme weather events strike, more and more expensive property is destroyed. Accordingly, the increasing costs of natural disasters stem not from human-caused climate change, but is rather a directly measurable anthropogenic factor: the rise in the number and value of assets placed in the bullseye as a result of demographic shifts in where people live and the lifestyles they pursue.

Another important “good news” story, climate alarmists tried to portray as a tragedy in 2020 can be found in the numerous news stories covering a World Bank report which claims water scarcity in the Middle East—caused by human induced climate change—threatens crop production. Once again, the authors of the World Bank report and the leftist media outlets publicizing it couldn’t be bothered to check the actual data. If they had done so, they would have found crop production in the Middle Eastern countries discussed in the report was booming, in large part due to the carbon dioxide fertilization effect.

The World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, in particular. In point of fact, data show that, despite considerable political turmoil and ongoing conflicts in the region, the naturally arid Middle East has seen its crop production grow as the earth has modestly warmed.

Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:

· Cereal crop production in Iraq increased 91 percent, even as the acreage being harvested fell 5 percent.

· Cereal crop production in Iran increased 187 percent, while the acreage harvested increased by just 2.6 percent.

· Cereal Crop production in Jordan increased 15 percent, even as the acreage harvested declined 30 percent.

· Cereal Crop production in Lebanon increased 115 percent, while acreage harvested increased 30 percent.

· Cereal Crop production in Syria increased 22 percent, even as acreage harvested declined 66 percent.

· Cereal Crop production in Turkey increased 46 percent, even though acreage harvested declined 19 percent.

That Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production—even as many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts—is clearly good news. It is not evidence of a climate crisis.

Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water through transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change-induced water shortages leading to crop failure.

Sadly, for claim after claim, power hungry bureaucrats and leftist mainstream media organizations embrace unsubstantiated speculations that various climate disasters are occurring—while ignoring facts indicating no such climate catastrophes are in the offing. I can only speculate they do this because good news does not encourage a stampede towards authoritarian climate change policies giving elites control over businesses and peoples’ lives.

SOURCES: Climate Realism; The Guardian; Phys.org; Climate Realism; World Bank; Bloomberg; Food and Agriculture Organization

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Lockdown: a deadly, failed experiment

By FRASER MYERS | Spiked | December 27, 2020

The country this year which has been most ravaged by Covid-19 – losing a shocking 1,600 people in every million to the virus at the time of writing – is Belgium.

That might come as something of a surprise. You could be forgiven for thinking it was America, thanks to Trump’s alleged ignorance of science. Or what about Britain, which locked down ‘too late’ because of its government’s short-lived but foolish belief in freedom? Or Brazil, whose right-wing leader complained that lockdowns and masks were for ‘fags’? If not those, then surely Sweden, where there has famously been no hard lockdown at all?

But no, it’s Belgium. There’s nothing particularly unusual about Belgium’s response. Nothing that diverged significantly from the consensus. It did the same thing as everyone else around the same time as everyone else. It even garnered praise for its testing capacity.

There’s one caveat: Belgium’s unparalleled death rate might be down to how the deaths are counted. Some say Belgium is merely the ‘most honest’ country – while others have accused officials of overcounting and including all kinds of deaths not caused by Covid.

But go down the list of deaths per million and you find more places you might not expect. Hard-hit Italy is in second place, but it was the first to get hit in the West so we should let them off. Then there’s Slovenia, which was relatively unscathed in the spring. After that, it’s Peru. Peru announced one of the earliest lockdowns in the world on 16 March – also the first in Latin America. The restrictions were some of the most stringent on the planet, enforced by the military. Masks were made mandatory in public. But by May, two months in, cases began to jump considerably. This was despite the country doing ‘everything right’ and ‘right on time’. There was some easing of the lockdown from June onwards. But social gatherings were still illegal in August, by which point 200 people were still dying per day.

Elsewhere in Latin America, Argentina experienced a similar mid-lockdown explosion in cases and deaths. Its lockdown began on 20 March and was supposed to be short and sharp. It ended up becoming the longest continuous lockdown in the world. In June, Time magazine hailed Argentina’s success in containing the virus. But not long after, cases began to surge. The deadliest day of its pandemic was on day 145 of lockdown.

Lockdowns have become central to any discussion of Covid-19. The assumption that lockdown is the only way to prevent Covid deaths has become embedded in mainstream thinking. Apparently, the only permitted questions are if we are locking down early enough, hard enough or for long enough. Lockdown has similarly become the default response to rises in cases (though sometimes these now take local rather than national form). But the conventional wisdom that more lockdown means fewer deaths simply does not hold true in the real world. There is globally no association, let alone causation, between lockdowns and Covid deaths.

And yet the harms of the policy are extreme. Developed countries have this year experienced record drops in economic output. Britain, for instance, has experienced its worst recession in 300 years (since the Great Frost of 1709, if you were wondering). The burden of this has fallen overwhelmingly on the poorest in society, while billionaires have watched their wealth multiply. In the developing world, the World Bank estimates that an additional 150million people will fall into ‘extreme poverty’.

Children have born a disproportionate brunt of the lockdowns – even though children face very minor risks from Covid and school closures are not associated with reduced transmission. Nevertheless, an estimated 1.5 billion children – 87 per cent – have been affected by school closures around the world. There is now an obscene gulf in access to education between rich and poor, between the privately and state educated, and between those with access to home learning via the internet and those without.

The effect on broader health has been similarly catastrophic. Hospital appointments, operations and screenings have been cancelled, often in cases where capacity was nowhere close to being reached. Patients took ‘stay at home’ messages far too much to heart and didn’t get serious illnesses checked out, including cancers which could have been detected and stopped. The number of Brits waiting for routine hospital treatment has risen from 1,613 to over 160,000 this year – a hundredfold increase.

In the developing world, where Covid itself has had a much lesser impact than in the West, lockdowns have disrupted an estimated 80 per cent of programmes aimed at treating tuberculosis. In 2019, TB killed 1.4million people worldwide. But this year, thanks to a 25 per cent reduction in case detections, 1.7million deaths have been projected.

One of the greatest costs – which cannot be quantified in lives lost or dollar signs – has been to freedom. And this goes deeper than the (hopefully) temporary curbs on everyday life. Our entire culture of freedom has collapsed. We now need and expect the state’s explicit permission for whatever limited activities we can do. Even Christmas can now be cancelled by the state.

None of this is to say we can throw off all the restrictions tomorrow and everything will be fine. But it is striking just how little questioning there has been of either the efficacy or the harms of the defining policy of the pandemic. Even if the lockdown debate becomes academic at some point in the new year, and despite the fact that lockdown has clearly failed, there is a danger lockdown becomes the default policy for the next pandemic – if not for some other threat. And there will be another one.

We cannot let this deadly, failed experiment be repeated. 2020 must be the last year of lockdown.

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

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