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After ban on Russian TV news Latvia now will criminalize watching ‘illegal’ cross border channels

RT | February 18, 2021

Tens of thousands of Russian-speaking Latvians will be turning down the volume and listening out for neighborhood snoopers after a new law came into force that will see viewers of unlicensed satellite TV fined just for tuning in.

Earlier this month, local media reported that the Seimas, the Baltic nation’s parliament, had adopted a bill in its final reading that will criminalize people for watching unauthorized broadcasts.

The networks that will be affected are said to include dozens of Russian television channels for which signals can be picked up from across the border. More than one in three Latvians speaks Russian at home, but dozens of broadcasters showing programs in the language have had their licenses revoked and been banned from the country’s airwaves since earlier this month.

Ivars Abolins, the chairman of Latvia’s National Council for Electronic Media (NEPLP), issued a statement backing the ban. “We have protected, are protecting, and will protect our information space,” he said. Regulators claim that talk show guests on the Russian-speaking channels have incited hatred and called for war in Europe.

The Russian Embassy in Riga issued a stern protest in response. In a post to its Facebook page it said that the policy was “in the best traditions of dictatorship.”

Riga’s move has likely been inspired by the fact that “Harmony,” the country’s main opposition party, is led by Russian speakers and has close links to the leftist Russian grouping, “Fair Russia.” Harmony won 23 of the 100 seats in the Seimas in the 2018 election.

“Violation of free speech? That’s just the start of it,” it added. “Apparently, in a free market environment, Latvian television channels cannot compete, even in the information space of their own country.”

However, under the old rules, while the channels themselves were prohibited, plucky viewers intent on getting a fix of their favorite shows in their native language did not fall foul of the law. Now though, consumers themselves are likely to face financial penalties if they are caught watching illicit programming. Lawmakers note that 62,000 households tuned into illegal satellite broadcasts in 2018, the most recent year for which figures were given.

The Reporters Without Borders NGO issued a warning last summer after a number of Baltic nations moved to ban several separate RT channels. The free speech watchdog said that “While it is legitimate to defend and promote independent and reliable news reporting,” it “regards these closures as a misuse of the EU sanctions policy.”

“Rather than banning media outlets on loose grounds and on a flimsy legal basis,” it argued, “countries can require all media to guarantee editorial independence and can then impose legitimate sanctions, subject to judicial control, when it is established that media outlets have not complied with their obligations.”

Ukraine has also recently come under fire from both Russian and European politicians for its decision to block and ban a series of Russian-language outlets, run and produced by Russian-speaking Ukrainians from within the country. One in three Ukrainians speaks Russian at home as a first language, but Kiev has claimed the channels amount to pro-Kremlin propaganda.

February 18, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Navalny and Treason

By Patrick Armstrong | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 8, 2021

Collaborating with foreign intelligence structures to create a poisoning narrative would appear to fit the definition of treason. How about writing a letter to a foreign head of state asking him to sanction your country?

(Thanks to John Helmer who, as far as I know, was the first to suggest that Moscow is preparing a treason accusation against him.)

On 1 February RT published a video taken by the FSB of a meeting between Second Secretary Ford of the British Embassy in Moscow, identified by the FSB as an SIS officer, and Vladimir Ashurkov at a restaurant in Moscow. The video was filmed some time in 2012. Ashurkov is the Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation; he is presently living in the UK where he sought refuge after being charged with embezzlement. In the video he is making a pitch for financial support to the tune of “10, 20 million dollars a year” not, he assures Ford, “a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake”. In short, invest in us us and, when we take over, we’ll pay you back. With interest. Big interest. In the meantime, perhaps Ford could get him some kompromat for use inside Russia. In a word, he’s trying to sell Russia to a foreign power. Which, by any standards, is treason. Ford is non-committal and merely suggests that Ashurkov look to one of the foreign NGOs that the British fund. (It should be understood that the “N” in “NGO”, is silent like the “p” in “pseudo”.). But, given that the video was made six or seven years ago, we don’t know whether the British or others took up Ashurkov on his offer. But we can be reasonably sure that the FSB knows the answer to the question.

I believe that the publication of this video marks a major step towards the Russian government charging Navalny and his organisation with treason. Note that RT attached to its report a discussion of the famous “spy rock”. Utter nonsense: “alleged… allegedly… allegations”, a “fabrication”, more “pressure against Russian NGOs” RFE/RL assured us in 2006; “they had us bang to rights” admitted a British official in 2012. The FSB has cleverly disarmed the expected cries of fake! setup! lies! and other denials from the West by reminding everyone that it was the FSB that told the truth that time.

Security services hate revealing anything. Their unvarying intention is to hang onto information because a little bit of information can be nursed into a lot of information: a seed revealed is just a seed, but a seed kept and nurtured can grow into a forest. I recommend Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America to show how the ancestors of Russia’s security organisations nurtured every little seed until they grew so big a network in the American government that they were probably better informed than the White House. So, to get them to give up a seed is a big step. It doesn’t happen, as they say, by accident.

Consider what seeds and seedlings the FSB gave up with this video.

The video exposed a man the FSB had identified as British intelligence. They could have marked him, followed his career, noticed with whom he associated, where he went, whom he met. Fed him false information, exposed his network, found others, followed them and, who knows, turned or compromised some. Now, he’s blown and probably won’t go anywhere near the Russian world again. The British will be back-checking his contacts and network and making a damage assessment and probably shutting things down. So, the FSB gave up years of exposure and mapping of networks.

The video also reveals the degree to which the FSB is following Navalny’s organisation. Everyone assumed that it was, of course, but it appears that the surveillance team was waiting in the restaurant. So that gives away another part of the FSB’s modus operandi. For all we know, the restaurant was a favourite place of the Navalny organisation; not any more: they won’t be going there again.

Note how good the sound recording is. That would presumably reveal something about the technology and trade-craft the FSB possesses. I’m sure that, to those who know these things, other details of trade-craft and equipment were revealed as well.

It is an easy deduction that the FSB has more information that it has not revealed: for example whether Ashurkov’s pitch resulted in a sale. (Note that Navalny’s organisation receives a certain amount of funds via the anonymous Bitcoin). Neither has it revealed any other videos of similar sales pitches that one must assume it has. One can only assume that the FSB already has a good case and can trace the money.

As everyone knows, Navalny fell sick on a flight inside Russia and a few days later, wound up in a hospital in Germany saying he had been poisoned with novichok. While the ever-changing story requires the reader to completely suspend disbelief, as usual in the information war against Russia, new variants are rolled out, confident that its targets aren’t paying attention past the headlines that Putin has poisoned someone again. Thanks to John Helmer’s reporting, we know that the doctors at the Charité Hospital found many health problems when it examined Navalny but no evidence of novichok. The novichok “evidence” comes from German and Swedish military facilities which have declined to publish their findings. Navalny, for his part, has several times asserted that Putin attempted to kill him with novichok. So, we have evidence from two civilian hospitals that show no novichok; there are assertions that it was novichok, but they’re secret and come from military sources; Navalny says it was novichok. Does this look like prima facie evidence that Navalny collaborated with foreign intelligence agencies against his country?

Where did Navalny get the illustrations for his video on Putin’s supposed palace? We know that the building is very far from finished because people went to see it. So somebody supplied the faked-up interiors (complete with Putin himself). A Germany-USA production? “in early December, the [German] studio received a request from the United States about whether it had free production capacity. In strict secrecy, work began on Navalny’s film”. Perhaps there’s another charge here, given the expected importance of this “proof” of Putin’s supposed corruption for Navalny’s campaign. (Another silly story for the gullible, by the way: where would he keep his loot and when does he have time to enjoy it?)

The entire Western propaganda structure leapt on the story. I’ll just quote this one thing from the NYT’s resident sage, Thomas Friedman, because of its amusement value:

Putin is not very important to us at all. He’s a Moscow mafia don who had his agents try to kill an anti-corruption activist, Aleksei Navalny, by sprinkling a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok, in the crotch of his underwear. I’m not making that up! Russia once gave the world Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Dostoyevsky, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin’s Russia will be remembered for giving the world poisoned underwear.

“Poisoned underwear”, “mafia don”, “he keeps stalking us”. Plenty more where that came from: if it’s Putin or Russia, the accusation is the proof. Vide Biden’s demand that “He should be released immediately and without condition“. Suspiciously like a coordinated operation; perhaps the FSB can actually show connections.

Navalny is the latest in a long line of Western anti-Putin heroes. I’ve been in this business for three decades and I’ve forgotten half of them. Reports on protests that carefully avoid mentioning people who would spoil the narritive. Putin is a “moral idiot“. Lots of poisonings of opponents (is the absence from that list of the long-recovered and now-discarded Yushchenko significant?) and even non-poisonings; but no explanations for why the (almost invariably ineffective) poisons change: dioxin, thallium polonium and now novichok. Protests are always about to bring him down. Endless endless nonsense about Putin himself – too much to catalogue. Russophrenia. And so on and on; the people change – Browder and Khodorkovskiy fade to the background, Berezovskiy gives up, begs to be allowed home, kills himself (they say) – but the story never changes. Pussy Riot was huge until it wasn’t. Pavlenskiy does something in Russia, he’s a hero, same thing in France, he’s arrested. Always a fraudulent election in Russia (Moscow should take a leaf out of Washington’s book and call all such claims “conspiracy theories” and block discussion.) Washington says it had the MH17 shootdown on film, but you can’t see it. Nothing is ever proven but it never stops. The audience is assumed to have the IQ and attention span of gnats: Moscow hacked the U.S. election system in 2016 but in 2020 the system was watertight while Russia was hacking everything else. It’s information war; most of it nonsense from proven liars. Maybe Moscow has had enough. The Biden Administration is full of Russia-baiters all fully invested in the Trump/Putin conspiracy theory; there will be no change; it’s time for Moscow to give up expecting anything else.

Maybe Moscow is going to make an example of the latest Western favourite and charge him with treason and prove it. Maybe that’s why this video was released. It would appear to be a case of “providing financial, technical, advisory or other assistance to a foreign state or international organization . . . directed at harming Russia’s security” as the treason law puts it. A revision of the law that came into effect, as it happens, in the year the video was recorded. Collaborating with foreign intelligence structures to create a poisoning narrative would appear to fit the definition too. How about writing a letter to a foreign head of state asking him to sanction your country?

And more hints of evaporated patience: Moscow handed over to the OSCE videos of Western police beating up protesters – Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, the USA, Finland, France and the Czech Republic – helpfully pointing out “For doubters, we have shown a contrasting model. How they do it and how we do it. Feel the difference”. The message is clear: motes and beams; or, as they like to say in the West, “whataboutism“. Moscow then expelled diplomats from three countries, accusing them of participating in protests.

Washington, London et alia will protest in the usual way with all the usual statements about human rights that they themselves are pretty casual about at home (“Почувствуйте разницу”), but I suspect that Moscow doesn’t care much what its enemies say. In this matter it may well be that the idiotic Navalny poisoning story, coming after all the other evidence-free accusations, was the last straw. And perhaps Beijing’s success in shutting down the equally foreign-inspired troubles in Hong Kong was an encouraging example.

We will see, but it’s another indication that Moscow has had enough. After all, there’s an audience out there that isn’t glued to CNN and the NYT. There’s no chance of changing minds in Washington or London; it might still be possible in Berlin and Paris – Nord Stream II is probably the test – but there are hundreds of millions out there who are listening. Zone B, the Saker calls it.

February 18, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

Bolivia’s Central Bank Returns Añez’s Requested Loan To IMF

teleSUR | February 17, 2021

Bolivia’s Central Bank announced on Wednesday that it had returned US$346.7 million to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a loan irregularly managed by the de facto government of Jeanine Añez.

“This loan, in addition to being irregular and onerous due to its financial conditions, generated additional and millionaire economic costs to the Bolivian State, which as of February 2021 amount to US$24.3 million of which US$19.6 million are due to exchange rate fluctuations 19.6 million for exchange variation and 4.7 million for commissions and interest,” the institution explained in a statement.

The Central Bank denounced that the IMF jeopardized the “country’s sovereignty and economic interests” through its Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI), which conditioned the funds to fiscal, financial, exchange rate monetary duties, which violate the Bolivian legal framework.

Moreover, authorities explain that they would start an investigation to prosecute all officials involved in the IMF’s illegal arrangement.

February 18, 2021 Posted by | Corruption | , , | 1 Comment

Atlantic Council urges Biden to enforce regime change in Belarus

By Paul Antonopoulos | February 18, 2021

A recent online meeting hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank discussed ways to force regime change in Belarus. The think tank detailed a plan with the aim of removing Aleksander Lukashenko, the current president of Belarus, from power by utilizing sanctions and other methods of pressure.

The Washington-based Atlantic Council is affiliated with NATO and receives funding from international billionaires like Adrienne Arsht, global companies like Goldman Sachs, Facebook and Google, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. These are only a few examples of their extensive funding. Some of the most powerful and influential figures in the world participate in the operations of the think tank, as well as a representative of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’ main opposition figure.

Objectives of the virtual meeting, entitled “Biden and Belarus: A strategy for the new administration,” includes organizing Washington’s control over the Belarussian opposition movement. In addition, they suggest a new position for a senior organizer to administer and maintain sanctions against Minsk, and appoint a senior official to administer assistance to the opposition. Their agenda also emphasized recognizing Tikhanovskaya’s position as the true leader of Belarus and delegitimizing Lukashenko by relocating the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the Belarussian capital of Minsk, Julie Fisher, to the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

The Atlantic Council also suggested that U.S. Congressional funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty must be doubled from its current $117.4 million. The think tank also called for the U.S. to offer more advice to Belarussian opposition leaders. John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, suggested in the virtual meeting that Belarussian opposition leaders should reduce public expressions about their aspirations for Minsk to be involved in Western security councils like NATO and economic structures like the European Union so that they do not provoke any response from Moscow.

Economist Anders Åslund, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, also suggested that sanctions should be applied to companies in Russia and not Belarus. He argued that if sanctions hit Belarus, Minsk would be more dependent on Moscow. He also advised the Biden administration to sanction hundreds of Belarussian officials, saying that the aim of the sanctions is to put enough pressure on Belarus so that Lukashenko has no choice but to relinquish power. Åslund emphasized that this is really a group of regime change sanctions. In addition, the think tank suggested that the U.S. should increase its funding of the Belarussian opposition from $60 million to $200 million, saying that this amount came from Belarussian activists themselves.

As Åslund himself says, these measures exist entirely to force regime change against a sovereign nation. The mission of the Atlantic Council is to encourage and embolden the U.S. to control the Belarussian opposition movement with the aim of overthrowing Lukashenko. At the same time, the think tank claims that it respects Belarus’ sovereignty. However, it is evident that the think tank does not respect the sovereignty or self-determination of the Belarussian people and simply wants the Biden administration to install a lackey into power to continue Washington’s campaign of pressure against Russia.

If the Biden administration adopts the recommendations made by the Atlantic Council, this would not only cause significant tensions and further divisions in Belarus, but would also increase tensions between Washington and Moscow, which are already extremely strained.

The Atlantic Council promotes Western hegemony and a U.S.-led unipolar world order. The think tank is ranked seventh in the category of “2020 Top Think Tanks in the United States,” and tenth globally. Along with funding from the world’s richest people and most powerful corporations, the Atlantic Council wields great influence in not only NATO, but also various U.S. power structures like the White House and the Pentagon. For this reason, there is every chance that at some point during Biden’s presidential mandate that he will engage in a significant campaign of pressure against Belarus with the ultimate aim of further isolating Russia in Eastern Europe.

As the Atlantic Council attempts to maintain a U.S.-led unipolar order, Russia is one of its main targets because the Eurasian country inhibits American dominance over large areas of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Because Belarus is the sole friendly state in Eastern Europe towards Russia, Lukashenko’s removal from power will open the path for Russia to be completely isolated in the region. Biden also champions a U.S.-led unipolar order, and because of this there is every chance that at some point in the future he will enact the Atlantic Council’s program against Belarus to target Russia.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

February 18, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | 1 Comment

Incitement is the New Terrorism

By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well |February 15, 2021

You can only make up your own definition of “incitement” in the movies and at presidential impeachment trials. Otherwise the actual law is going to have to do.

The picture is becoming clearer now: 1/6 will be sold to frightened Americans as a new 9/11, the prime mover for a whole new range of “crimes.” Incitement will become this generation’s version of “material support to terrorism,” meaning the complex legal definition will be massaged in the name of safety so that it will become a not-real crime based on the flexibility of a word that will mean whatever the Dems/MSM/FBI want it to mean in a particular scenario.

So the kid in his bedroom chatting online will be talking to a Fed pretending to be a white supremacist instead of pretending to be ISIS. The kid’s arrest for incitement (those social media messages supposedly about white supremacy) will be played across the news and, like post-9/11, add fuel to the fires calling for more censorship, more surveillance, more arrests. It is literally the exact playbook from 2001.

Only better. The upgrade to the old playbook is that incitement scales well. So instead of just being pointed at naive kids online, it can be a death ray aimed at a conservative writer, a Congressperson, anyone with a platform. It is a way to eliminate an opinion, take out a rival, even impeach a president. That is why incitement is not aimed at stopping violence but alongside big tech censorship, a tool aimed at thought, at unpopular ideologies, a tool to crush free speech. All in the name of preserving democracy.

What stands in the way is current law, which following the evolution of free speech over the decades, has created increasingly specifics test on when speech becomes such a danger it must be stopped. And there’s a lot more to it than just that old bit about not being allowed to shout fire in a crowded theatre.

From its earliest days concerns existed about the interplay between the 1A and the ability of  speech to incite violence to the point where words should be censored or criminalized. It sounds easy to sort out, until you consider almost any political viewpoint, passionately expressed, has the potential to incite. But a democracy can’t exactly lock up everyone who says aloud “abortion is murder” or accuses the president of murdering young boys sent into an unwanted war. Speech which inspires, motivates, stirs up the blood is not incitement, and in fact is an important part of a rugged democracy. Can every speaker be held responsible for what people who hear him talk do later? A finer line was needed.

The Fire! quote from the Supreme Court decision in Schenck v. United States is often cited as justification for limiting free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger.”

Words in these decisions have hyper-specific legal meanings, often defined through multiple cases, which is why simply Googling a term and passing judgment on its vernacular via Twitter usually is wrong. The Fire! line is actually a kind of inaccurate shorthand. The full decision says the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that meets three conditions: 1) the speech must be demonstrably false; 2) it must be likely to cause real harm, not just offense or hurt feelings, and 3) must do so immediately.

But Schenck was what jurists call bad law, in that it sought to use the Espionage Act against a Socialist pamphleteer opposing WWI to stop free speech, not protect it. The case was eventually overturned, and Holmes’ statement is better understood not as a 21st century test but to simply mean that while the First Amendment is not absolute, restrictions on speech should be narrow and limited. It would be for the later case of Brandenburg v. Ohio to refine the modern standard for restricting speech.

Brandenburg v. Ohio (Clarence Brandenburg was an Ohio KKK leader who used the N-word with malice) precludes speech from being sanctioned as incitement to violence unless 1) the speech explicitly or implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action; 2) the speaker intends their speech will result in the use of violence or lawless action, and 3) the imminent use of violence or lawless action is the likely result of the speech, a more specific definition than in Schenck. Brandenburg is the Supreme Court’s final statement to date on what government may do about speech that seeks to incite others to lawless action. It was intended to resolve the debate between those who urge greater control of speech and those who favor as much speech as possible before relying on the marketplace of ideas to sort things out.

Intent as included in Brandenburg is purposely hard to prove. A hostile reaction of a crowd does not automatically transform protected speech into incitement. Listeners’ reaction to speech is thus not alone a basis for regulation, or for taking an enforcement action against a speaker. The speaker had to clearly want to, and succeed in, causing some specific violent act. The reliance on intent exposes the danger of the 1A not applying to corporate censors. Twitter suppressed the speech of 70,000 users simply for retweeting material with “the potential to lead to offline harm” under its Orwellian named Civic Integrity Policy, no intent required. They made up their own version of the law.

The law is similar for (incitement to) sedition, seeking to overthrow the U.S. government by force. It is intimately tied to the concept of free speech in that any true attempt at overthrow, as well as any legitimate criticism of the government, will include persuasion and stirring up of crowds. The line between criticizing the government and organizing for it to be overthrown is a critical juncture in a democracy. Current law requires the government prove someone conspired to use force. Simply advocating broadly for the use of violence is not the same thing as violence and in most cases is protected as free speech. For example, suggesting the need for revolution “by any means necessary” is unlikely to be seen as conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. But actively planning such an action (distributing guns, working out the logistics, actively opposing lawful authority, etc.) could be considered sedition.

A 1982 case, Claiborne v. NAACP, not only made clear the Court’s strict standards on blocking speech for incitement but also how such suppression can strike any view, not just conservative ones. In the 1982 Claiborne v. NAACP the Court ruled NAACP civil rights leaders were not responsible for a crowd which, after hearing them speak, burned down a white man’s hardware store. The state of Mississippi had wanted to charge the NAACP leaders with incitement on the grounds their speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores incited their followers to burn down a store. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew their inflammatory rhetoric would drive the crowd to violence.

The Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated in the name of that cause. The Court wrote “there is no evidence — apart from the speeches themselves that [the NAACP leader] authorized, ratified, or directly threatened acts of violence… To impose liability without a finding that the NAACP authorized — either actually or apparently — or ratified unlawful conduct would impermissibly burden the rights of political association that are protected by the First Amendment.” They concluded instead the NAACP “through exercise of their First Amendment rights of speech, assembly, association, and petition, rather than through riot or revolution, sought to bring about political, social, and economic change.”

All of this may soon change, however. Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress are actively considering new laws (“Patriot Act 2.0”) against domestic terrorism which will likely draw from and enlarge the current definitions of incitement and sedition, with the Trump impeachment as their philosophical touchstone. The new laws may seek to define beliefs such as “whites are a superior race” not as bad science or an unsavory opinion but as an actual threat, an illegal thought. Proposals include prohibiting people with such beliefs from joining the military or law enforcement.

The groundwork is already in place. Don’t forget Biden often claims credit for writing the original Patriot Act. The MSM has been priming Americans to believe they have too many rights for their own safety. The NYT is openly soliciting stories about “right wing extremism” in the military.

It is necessary to say it again. America at present, on paper at least, legally holds apart from some very narrow exceptions free speech exists independent of the content of that speech. This is one of the most fundamental precepts of our democracy. There is no need for protection for things people agree with, things that are not challenging or debatable or offensive. Free speech is not needed to discuss the weather or sports. The true tests for a democracy come at the edges, not in the middle.

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Truth Slips Out in Coronavirus Vaccine Deaths ‘Fact Check’?

By Adam Dick | February 17, 2021

The big money media that have been working for a year to stir up maximum fear of coronavirus have been taking the opposite tack regarding coronavirus vaccines. These experimental vaccines, which are not even vaccines under the normal understanding of what qualifies as a vaccine, rushed to the public without the regular testing, the big money media insists, are safe and should be taken by everyone.

Yet, even in this Pollyanna coverage of the experimental vaccines, occasionally the truth slips out.

On February 3, ABC News ran an article by Stephanie Widmer titled “Fact-check: No link between COVID-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” The main thrust of the article is that all the people who die after taking the experimental coronavirus vaccines would have died anyway: The vaccine never caused the death no matter how soon the death occurred after a person received a shot or how out of the blue and strange the circumstances of the death. The deaths are all just a coincidence, the article suggests. Plenty of people — around 8,000 people according to the article — die each day in America, you know.

This seems like some fanciful thinking. And the thinking is the opposite of the thinking employed in attributing deaths to coronavirus. With coronavirus, the presumption generally employed by government and big money media in America is that coronavirus is the killer if a person who tested positive for coronavirus dies, no matter what other health problems he had and irrespective of coronavirus tests producing many false positive results.

Still, there is some value in this ABC News article for people not interested in reading yet another big money media article promoting everyone having an experimental vaccine injected into his arm. Around halfway through the article is a sentence that suggests something much less fanciful to explain the conclusion that the experimental coronavirus vaccines kill nobody. The article states. “Every time someone gets sick or dies shortly after getting a vaccine, government agencies investigate to ensure there’s no link.” Is this the truth slipping out?

Copyright © 2021 Ron Paul Institute

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Involuntarily masked drivers BANNED from wearing sunglasses or hats: Germany’s Saxony state

RT | February 17, 2021

Drivers must still be identifiable by traffic cameras, even when they follow existing health protocols and wear masks, a new rule in Germany’s eastern region says.

According to the Bild newspaper, Saxony became the first region in Germany to ban hats and sunglasses on masked drivers.

“Wearing a hat and sunglasses in addition to a mask that covers the face and mouth makes [the driver] unrecognizable. So that’s not allowed,” Saxony’s Interior Minister Roland Woller said.

Woller explained that “general facial features” of the driver must still be visible to the road safety cameras. He added that officials responsible for handing out fines to drivers were advised to handle the new rule on a case-by-case basis.

Starting from Monday, people are required to wear masks in vehicles in Saxony if members of more than two households are traveling together.

Last month, Germans were mandated to wear medical-grade respirator-type masks on public transport and when going to supermarkets. Simple cloth or homemade masks are not allowed in such cases.

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

A Doctor’s View About the New mRNA Vaccines

By Thomas Siler | American Thinker | February 15, 2021

It’s important to know both what we know about the new vaccines and what we don’t know.

I’ve practiced for 35 years. I am always honest with my patients, even if conversations are difficult or confrontational. I will also be honest about saying “I don’t know.” This happens when a diagnosis is not readily apparent or when there are limits to the help I can give. With the passage of time, I’ve learned that what we don’t know about medicine outweighs what we do know.

I’ve always been a proponent of older, more established vaccines. However, they are imperfect and, like all medical treatments, can have side effects. Unfortunately, in the conversation about the new COVID-19 vaccines, the tenets of honesty and a willingness to admit ignorance are being compromised.

Operation Warp Speed was remarkable, but it leaves an uncomfortable question: Is it a good thing to rush a vaccine (or medicine) to the public without the usual safeguards? Operation Warp Speed might be a great business objective or military goal, but is it great for a medical treatment?

The pharmaceutical industry, government health authorities, and the media insist the new vaccines are safe and effective. While the initial results are promising, this is not the whole truth. Both honesty and acknowledging ignorance require answering a few questions.

What do we know about the new TYPE of vaccine being given?

Pfizer and Moderna were the first COVID-19 vaccines to be approved. Both use a new technology called mRNA vaccine, which has never been broadly given to a human population to prevent any disease.

Let that sink in for a moment.

All previous vaccines take a weakened virus or a piece of the virus and inject it into humans to induce an immune response sufficient to prevent a disease. Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines inject mRNA, which is a protein code that instructs the body to make a part of COVID-19’s spike protein that will then induce an immune response.

Our bodies daily use our own mRNA to carry instructions from DNA to make various proteins the body uses. While this new vaccine science sounds intriguing, it has never been tried in humans in this scope. It may be a breathtaking scientific advancement heralding a new path for all vaccines. It may also be less effective or have currently unknown side effects.

Is the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 safe?

So far, the limited study of the vaccines approved for emergency use (one major study for each vaccine approved) has shown some short-term side effects. The vaccine is a two-shot series and side effects were prominent after the second shot. Side effects were more common if the recipient was younger than 65 years old.

Side effects 

Pain at the injection site has usually gone away in 4-5 days. The other side effects resolve, on average, in 2-3 days.

Early reports after giving the vaccine have also included allergic reactions ranging from mild to a few cases of anaphylaxis (serious allergic reaction). Allergy may be to mRNA itself or the lipid nanoparticles/PEG vehicle it is housed in. The long-term side effects are not currently known, as the main study length and follow up have only been four months.

Is the mRNA vaccine effective?

In the main study from Pfizer’s vaccine, 8/17,000 patients got symptomatic COVID-19 in the treatment group during the short follow up. In the placebo group, 162/17,000 patients got symptomatic COVID-19 during the study time. There was also a trend towards those getting the vaccine having a less severe disease and needing less hospitalization.

The Moderna study had 30,000 patients split into treatment and placebo arms. In the vaccine group, 11/15,000 patients came down with COVID-19. In the placebo group, 185/15,000 patients came down with COVID-19.

It was hard to ascertain death avoidance in these small studies. However, the two initial studies are favorable and show a 95% efficacy. Now that more information about the studies is known, Peter Doshi, associate editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial that the true efficacy may be much lower because the study excluded people with COVID-19 symptoms but a negative test and other factors.

How long does immunity last?

This is unknown.  Injected mRNA goes away in days, but it is thought that the immune response will be long lasting. Whether patients will need boosters at some point is not known.

What about mutations in the COVID-19 virus? Will the vaccine still work?

Viruses always mutate and scientists following COVID-19 estimate it mutates, on average, twice a month. Most of these mutations are minor and will likely not change the vaccine effectiveness. These mutations also usually do not make the virus more deadly.

What is antibody dependent enhancement?

COVID-19 is in the family of Coronavirus that causes the common cold. The pharmaceutical industry has been trying without success for the last two decades to make a vaccine against the common cold. A safe vaccine against the common cold would make some company a lot of money!

One problem in the animal studies on coronavirus family vaccines was “antibody dependent enhancement.” When animals were inoculated, they developed a robust immune response, which is a good result.

However, when the animals were later exposed to the coronavirus against which they were vaccinated, their immune system went into overdrive, and they developed an overwhelming, fatal immune response called a “cytokine storm.” Fatal cytokine storms also happened to some COVID-19 patients when their infection was severe.

Human responses do not always correlate to animal responses. So far, there have been no signs that humans have a cytokine storm when exposed to COVID-19 after receiving the vaccine. Obviously, this would be catastrophic for any vaccine.

Should we be concerned about other long term side effects from mRNA vaccines?

A concern that deserves mention is the possibility that a cross-reaction and immunity to other parts of the spike protein could cause auto-immune disease or other problems.

A former Pfizer VP, Dr. Michael Yeadon, who has over 30 years of experience in immunology and drug research, filed a Stay of Action petition with the European Medicine Agency (like our FDA) to halt the trials of mRNA vaccines over concerns it might affect sterility in women.

Yeadon is worried that the mRNA vaccine was coded for a region of the spike protein that was similar to Syncytin-1, which is a protein that is essential for the development of the placenta. If a woman’s body makes antibodies to this protein, she could become sterile when vaccinated for COVID-19. This is a theory, not a proven fact, and no one has studied it. Yeadon’s insistence on more studies to make sure this will not happen seems reasonable.

What to make of all these concerns?

Medicine is always about a risk/benefit analysis, subject to the first maxim of “do no harm.” Usually, new medicines or new vaccines are used only after multiple studies show over long periods of time (for vaccines, at least five years) prove they’re safe and better than the older treatments.

While the new mRNA vaccines have good initial results and may be a breakthrough, they should be viewed as experimental and would best be used in high-risk patients (older patients or those with health conditions raising COVID-19 mortality) until we know more. Patients should receive extensive informed consent to understand the risks and benefits. Patients also need to know that if they have a serious complication, Congress already protected the pharmaceutical companies from litigation around emergency vaccines.

The mantra of “safe and effective” is not only incomplete, but it also ignores other pathways out of the pandemic. For healthy people, early outpatient treatments are being developed to treat COVID-19. These would be a safer option than taking an experimental vaccine. Young people (<60 years old) who have very low mortality from COVID-19 should approach getting the new vaccine as if they were consenting to be in an experimental trial of a new vaccine.

Our history shows there are good reasons why new medicines and vaccines are not rushed into widespread use until we have multiple studies and time to assess the safety and efficacy of the new treatments. If the death rate from COVID-19 were much higher, it might make the risks acceptable to try an experimental vaccine. Given that the COVID-19 death rate is a little higher than a bad flu, my opinion is that younger and healthier people need a more rigorous risk/benefit analysis before taking the mRNA vaccines.

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Leaked Tape: Zuckerberg Told Facebook Employees ‘Vaccines Modify DNA and RNA’

Rules for thee, but not for me?

21rst CENTURY WIRE | FEBRUARY 17, 2021

This latest reveal leaves many asking the question: while his social media platform aggressively censors anyone asking legitimate questions regarding the safety and efficacy of corporate pharmaceutical products, will Mark Zuckerberg and his family will be taking the new experimental mRNA vaccine?

In new leaked tape from Project Veritas reveals how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted his own ‘anti-vax’ position to his companies staff, which according to his own draconian rules, would be in violation of his own platform’s latest censorship policy update.

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

How deadly is COVID19?

By Dr Malclm Kendrick |  February 17, 2021

I have spent large chunks of my life trying to untangle medial data and research. COVID19 has long since defeated me. I have been unable to make any sense of the information we are bombarded with daily. So, I decided to go back to basics.

At the start of the COVID19 saga, I was interested to know what the infection fatality rate (IFR) was likely to be. I felt I could then have a go at comparing it to other diseases, primarily influenza.

The infection fatality is the number of people infected with the virus who then die. This is very different to the case fatality rate (CFR), which is the number of people infected with the disease who become unwell enough (sometimes, but not always) to be admitted to hospital – the ‘cases’. Who then die.

Before COVID19 appeared, there used to be a reasonably clear distinction between the infection fatality rate (IFR), and the case fatality fate (CFR) and it is important that they should not get mixed up. Because the case fatality rate is almost always far higher than the infection fatality rate – as you would expect. People who are ill enough to go into hospital are far more likely to die than people who do not suffer any symptoms. Bear this in mind.

Another thing to bear in mind is that, at the start of any epidemic it is simpler to establish the case fatality rate, because most people who are seriously ill end up in hospital and/or will have tests to see if they have the disease in question. Those with no symptoms may never cross the path of a medical professional and are very unlikely to be tested.

What is the ratio between the two? It depends on the virus. With Ebola the infection fatality rate and case fatality rate are closely matched – more than fifty per cent of people who are infected, die. With the common ‘coronavirus’ cold, the spread is far wider, maybe a hundred to one, or a thousand to one – perhaps more.

The fact that most infections are never noted, is one of the reasons why the infection fatality rate for previous flu epidemics can vary so wildly from paper to paper. However, with influenza the CFR/IFR ratio has generally been estimated to be about ten to one. By which I mean that, for each ten infections, one will be severe, and it is amongst the severe infections that you get the deaths.

Armed with such knowledge, and assuming COVID19 had a similar case: infection ratio to influenza you could have a go at working out the infection fatality rate. Always bearing in mind that people with no symptoms, who are not tested, are very unlikely to appear in any figures.

You are always guessing – to some degree or another.

However, you always know three things:

1: The infection fatality rate must always be lower than the case fatality rate.

2: The case fatality rate will appear to fall as less severely infected people are tested.

3: The infection fatality rate will also appear to fall as more people with no symptoms are found to have had the infection.

For example, in China, at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, the infection fatality rate was reported to be three to four per-cent. This rapidly fell. Then it went up a bit, then it fell, then it went up. Then, everyone started giving different figures. The highly influential Imperial College group, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, decided to use an infection fatality rate of 0.9% for their modelling.

Somewhat later on, John Ioannidis, an influential figure in the world of medical research, estimated the infection fatality rate to be 0.27%. This was a couple of months after the Imperial College figure was published 1.

Peter Gotzsche, who established the highly regarded Nordic Cochrane collaboration, put the figure even lower than this. He looked at a study in Denmark, where blood donors were tested for antibodies. Using these data, the researchers established an infection fatality rate of 0.16% 2. Other figures came in higher, some lower.

The most tested population in the World – per head of population – is Iceland. Last time I looked, Iceland had 6,033 ‘cases,’ and twenty-nine deaths. This represents a case fatality rate of 0.5%, which suggests an infection fatality rate of 0.05% 3.

However, these figures I am quoting from Iceland come from a time after everything changed. At some point, difficult to put an exact date on this, it was decreed that if you had a positive PCR COVID19 test, with or without symptoms, you were to be defined as a case. No matter if you had symptoms, or not. This had the result of making the infection fatality rate, and case fatality rate, the same thing. Suddenly, all cases are infections, and all infections are cases.

Which means that any comparisons of the infection fatality rate with COVID19, and other diseases became virtually meaningless. The infection fatality rate suddenly shot up to match the case fatality rate, which point I gave up trying to work out the infection fatality rate. I doubly gave up when I tried to find out the accuracy of the PCR tests. Were these tests over-diagnosing, or under-diagnosing?

So, I thought I would turn my attention to the population fatality rate instead. That is, how many people has COVID19 killed in a population, or country. This figure is the bald, unvarnished, death rate. It does not, necessarily, tell you how many people have been infected. It does not tell you the percentage of cases, that die. It simply tells you how many people have died… with COVID19 written somewhere on their death certificate. [Or even not written on their death certificate]

At present, in the UK, the total number who have died is one hundred and seventeen thousand. This represents a population death rate of 0.17%. if you knew how many people had been infected, in total, you could work out the infection fatality rate from this. But we don’t know how many people were infected, and now we never will. Because so many people are now being vaccinated. They will show antibodies, and it will not be known if that is because of an infection, or due to vaccination.

So, where to turn to next. If you look at the entire world, the current figure of COVID19 deaths, on the fourteenth of February, stood at 2,406,689 3. Which is a little over one in three thousand, or 0.033%. How many people in the world have been infected? Nobody knows that answer to this question. There are some countries that have done very little testing, others far more.

On the basis that there are so many questions, with very few clear-cut answers, I thought I would try to compare the two point four million figure with previous influenza epidemics.

A study was done in 2016, looking at the influenza epidemic of 1957 – one of the worst in recent history. They extrapolated the mortality figures from 1957 to 2005, because the World’s population doubled during that time period (I am not entirely sure why they chose 2005). Their conclusion was that a flu epidemic of similar magnitude to that of 1957 could kill two point seven million people.

‘In conclusion, our study fills a gap in the availability of global mortality estimates for historical influenza pandemics, which can help guide pandemic planning. Our model extrapolates 2.7 million influenza-related deaths (95% CI, 1.6 million–3.4 million deaths) should a virus of similar severity to the 1957 pandemic influenza A(H2N2) virus return in the 2005 population, which is intermediate between global estimates for the 2009 pandemic (0.3 million–0.4 million deaths and a devastating 1918-like pandemic (62 million deaths; range, 51 million–81 million deaths)’ 4.

Extrapolating onwards to 2020, where the population is significantly greater than in 2005, then the figure from the 1957 epidemic would now be just over three million deaths. Which means that, up to this point COVID19 has been thirty per-cent less deadly than the influenza epidemic of 1957 – per head of population.

If the Imperial College infection fatality rate of 0.9% is accurate, once around eighty per cent of the world’s population has been infected [at which point population wide immunity would be reached] we should see fifty-four million deaths. We are currently nowhere near that figure, and at the current rate of deaths, per year, it will take twenty-two and a half years to reach the fifty-four million figure.

Of course, people will argue that this outbreak is far from over, and millions more will certainly die. Yes, more people will die, but the current number of new cases and deaths is falling pretty rapidly worldwide, rather than rising. We may reach three million, we may not. It is exceedingly hard to believe we would ever have reached fifty-four million even without any vaccines.

So, how deadly is COVID19? It seems, so far, to be equivalent to a bad flu pandemic. Worse than most in recent times. However, it seems to have had an extremely variable impact.

In Singapore, there have been nearly sixty thousand ‘cases’ and twenty-nine deaths. A case fatality rate of around one in two thousand, or 0.02%. The UK has had four million cases and one hundred and seven thousand deaths. A case fatality rate of 3%. Therefore, if you get COVID19 you are one hundred and fifty times more likely to die of it in the UK, than in Singapore 3.

Yes, I went back to basics and the figures still didn’t make any sense.

 

1: https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf

2: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4509/rr

3: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

4: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747626/

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

America’s future is in the hands of inept cretins while creativity and innovation are needed more than ever

By Helen Buyniski | RT | February 16, 2021

The US’ future looks grim indeed in the face of a ‘Great Reset’ proposed by the same powers that steered it into a deadly economic quagmire. Why are Americans allowing those who broke their world the privilege of ‘fixing’ it?

Americans with more power and connections than sense have rushed forward over the last year, attempting to seize the right to ‘fix’ a society broken by shockingly stupid responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entire generations are being rendered suicidally depressed, unemployable, hopelessly alienated, and worse, while the likelihood that the current generation of children will mature into functional adults is rapidly shrinking. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a heterogenous population, and this moment calls for an unprecedented degree of creativity and imagination if we are to survive as a society.

So why are those most victimized by this system running into the arms of the same crew of unimaginative, solipsistic sociopaths who have repeatedly wrecked society in the first place? Whether it’s the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks who asset-stripped the American middle class in 2008, overloading the country’s already fragile social safety net and driving a stake through the heart of the once-achievable American Dream, or the World Economic Forum, a breeding ground for selfish and self-interested corporate hacks who just want to fly their private jets in peace with the option to lecture the ground-bound hoi polloi on their carbon usage, those who’ve put themselves in charge are precisely the wrong ones for the job.

Indeed, the WEF – whose conveniently-timed book Covid 19: The Great Reset surfaced just in time to be seized upon by world governments as a supposedly better-than-nothing playbook for lifting humanity out of a mess even its writers admitted wasn’t nearly as disastrous as it seemed – was the first to claim experimental sovereignty over the poor unfortunates its leaders consigned to misery. Acknowledging they were putting humanity through the largest psychological experiment in history, one which technically violates the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg Code given that informed consent from its experimental test subjects was never obtained, is perhaps the worst possible messiah substitute to lead humanity into a brighter future.

Certainly, no one elected the WEF to guide Americans through the troubled times its members have largely created. The US is trapped in an identity crisis, crushed between the media establishment’s portrait of Our Democracy™ having narrowly escaped orange-tinted fascism and a newly-inaugurated administration that literally admitted to stealing the election on the front cover of Time Magazine. Joe Biden’s administration has claimed for itself the right to ‘Build Back Better’, its plagiarism-prone president once again ripping off his battle cry, this time from the World Economic Forum itself. A scriptwriter who submitted such an on-the-nose screenplay to their producer would be fired on the spot, yet Americans are expected to live with it.

Far from ushering in a golden age of democracy, Biden and his henchmen have held the reins of power in Washington for decades, bringing nothing but suffering to the American people. Despite his cabinet’s swaddling the iron fist of neoliberalism in warm fuzzy buzzwords like “inclusion” and “sustainability,” Biden himself is in large part responsible for the Patriot Act, which stripped American citizens of their most important constitutional rights. He also authored the 1994 crime bill that set up mandatory minimum sentencing for minor drug infractions, funneling tens of thousands of mostly black men into lifetime prison sentences. While he’s finally admitted the latter was a “mistake,” he nevertheless tried to dodge responsibility for having written the disastrous legislation by blaming individual states for how they implemented it. Expecting him to lead Americans into a bright new future is like expecting immaculate table manners from a starving grizzly bear.

Barely unable to keep from gibbering and squealing about a proposed new plan to tackle “domestic extremism,” Biden and his diversity all-stars – whose diversity stops at skin level as they march in ideological lockstep – are as much a menace to American society as the WEF member corporations pulling their strings behind the scenes. Americans seem helplessly caught in the vicious cycle of an abusive relationship, unable to flee the “devils they know” despite full awareness they will come away from their next encounter with a black eye (or an empty bank account, or utter social collapse). Embracing the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ – a future of “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” according to the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, who further clarified this involves technology that can “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior” – is perhaps the worst possible future humanity could enter. Yet we are sleepwalking into precisely this outcome, unaware that we have any other options.

Even as Americans emerge from the fear-based fog that has consumed them for the better part of a year, they’re still – whether they know it or not – following the directions of the same class of authority figures that led them into this mess in the first place. But these figures have no idea what they’re doing any more than those who are merely following their “leaders” out of habit. Why, having suffered so under the leadership of these utterly worthless figures, would they continue to follow? There is no precedent among the current generation for the economic collapse that has seized the US and no evidence that the WEF, or a wildly incompetent presidential administration, or corona czar and resounding failure Dr. Anthony Fauci, have any idea what to do about it.

At this point, diverging from the dysfunctional and downright deadly paths forged by these repulsive figures is not even a matter of making the right choice – it is a matter of survival.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram.

February 17, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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