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Russian Embassy Refutes Colombian Minister Remarks About Moscow Role in Inciting Violence

Sputnik – 22.05.2021

The Russian Embassy to Colombia has expressed bemusement over the remarks of Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano Aponte, who accused Russia of cyberattacks and inciting violence in the Latin American nation via social networks.

“The Russian Embassy expresses deep bewilderment at the statements of the Colombian defense minister, Mr. Diego Molano, made on May 17 in an interview with one of the main Spanish media, El Mundo. In particular, the high-ranking Colombian official, answering the question of whether there was foreign interference via social networks aimed at inciting violence, said, we quote, ‘there were cyberattacks that came, in particular, from Russia,'” the embassy wrote on its Twitter page on late Friday.

According to the Russian diplomatic mission, the defense minister made similar statements in an interview with the Colombian newspaper Tiempo.

“We strongly reject these claims. Such serious accusations against our country, which we consider completely unfounded and not supported by specific evidence, in no way contribute to the development of traditionally friendly relations between Russia and Colombia,” the embassy noted.

The Russian diplomatic mission has also expressed condolences over the reported fatalities during the protests in Colombia.

The nationwide demonstrations started in Colombia on April 28 in protest of tax reform. Although the reform bill was later withdrawn, the protests continue. Labor and student organizations demand social and healthcare reforms, demilitarization of cities, and dissolution of Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron forces.

Since April, according to the Defense Ministry, more than 1,900 people have been injured in clashes between security forces and protesters. The authorities have confirmed the deaths of 15 people, while human rights activists say more than 50 have been killed in the protests.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

YouTube censors public meeting of Shawnee Mission School District parents for “misinformation”

The public hearing was deleted

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 21, 2021

A video from a school board meeting in Kansas has been removed from YouTube for violation of community standards around “misinformation.”

Shawnee Mission School Board president Heather Ousley announced this on Twitter, adding that the violations had to do with statements made by third parties during a meeting that was open to public comment.

The channel has received a strike, which means that if it is again found in breach of YouTube’s policies over the next 90 days, it will not be allowed to upload new videos for a week – a scenario which Shawnee Mission School District spokesperson David Smith said would represent “a serious interference to our work.”

YouTube is the district’s chosen and only platform for posting videos of public meetings and where they are also live streamed.

Over on Twitter, Ousley went on to say that comments made by those she referred to as third parties do not indicate the position of the board itself, or the school district.

Local media reported that during the meeting, parents and state Senator Mike Thompson urged the district to remove the mask mandate. Ahead of the meeting itself, residents, including the senator, protested against this mandate.

During the meeting, Thompson expressed his belief that masks are ineffective, comparing the size of the virus and the mask fabric to a 6-foot-tall person trying to walk through a 6,000 by 2,000 feet doorway.

Thompson later told the press that there was no medical misinformation presented during the meeting, and said his presence was in support of parents opposed to continued wearing of masks.

According to him, the meeting also heard from students who complained that it was hard to breathe with a mask on, while a parent spoke about their child being separated from the rest of the class and sent to another room for not wearing a mask.

The reason to allow “third party” comments during the meeting is to let taxpayers who fund the school express themselves, he said.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

As US regime-change agency NED admits interference in Belarus, leaked documents also implicate UK Foreign Office

By Kit Klarenberg | RT | May 21, 2021

The full extent of Western meddling in Belarus prior to the country’s contested August 2020 election may never be known. Yet the outlines of a wide-ranging foreign effort to destabilize the government are becoming ever clearer.

As RT reported earlier this week, a pair of Russian pranksters posing as Belarusian opposition figures have duped high-ranking representatives of US regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into exposing the extent of Washington’s clandestine involvement in the unrest that erupted across the country throughout 2020.

Among other bombshell disclosures, Nina Ognianova, who oversees the NED’s work with local groups in the country, suggested “a lot of the people” who were “trained” and “educated” via the organization’s various endeavors there were pivotal to “the events, or the build-up to the events, of last summer.”

Long-time NED chief Carl Gershman – who in September 2013, less than six months prior to the coup that shifted Kiev’s political orientation, dubbed Ukraine “the biggest prize” for Washington – added that his organization was working with controversial opposition figure Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and her team “very, very closely.” In all, the agency bankrolled at least 159 civil society initiatives in Belarus, costing $7,690,689, from 2016 to 2020 alone.

The team’s unguarded comments represent a rare public admission of the insidious, destabilizing role played by the NED – in 1991, its then-president acknowledged, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” However, leaked UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) files indicate that the US is far from the only foreign power attempting to undermine the country’s government.

In 2017, then-Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled a £100 million kitty, ostensibly for battling Kremlin disinformation. In practice, internal FCDO files leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous made clear the effort was primarily concerned with “weakening the Russian state’s influence,” particularly in its “near abroad.” As a close neighbor and arguably most important ally of Moscow, Belarus was unsurprisingly very much in the FCDO’s crosshairs.

In January of that year, Whitehall commissioned an extensive analysis of Belarusian citizens’ perceptions, motivations, and habits, in order to “identify opportunities” to “appropriately communicate” with them. In particular, London was interested in “existing or potential grievances against their national government” that could be exploited, and “channels and messages” by which the UK government could “appropriately engage with different sub-groups.”

The analysis was conducted by shadowy FCDO contractor Albany Associates, which has, in recent years, also conducted numerous information warfare operations in the Baltic states, in order to “develop greater affinity” among the region’s Russian-speaking minority for the UK, European Union and NATO. While carrying out another Whitehall-funded project targeted at Moscow, the firm closely collaborated with NED-connected French NGO IREX Europe.

An accompanying bio notes IREX has been working in Belarus since 2006 “with print, online and radio outlets,” to “improve the quality of their coverage,” and “increase their understanding of the EU and EU member states.” As part of its youth audience offering in the country, the organization was said to have founded the Warsaw-based Euroradio, along with online outlet 34mag.

Footage produced by Euroradio of violent crackdowns on protesters in Minsk was regularly aired by the Western media, including the BBC, during the strife. The outlet even specifically amplified calls from the British state broadcaster for activists to submit pictures and videos for use in news coverage. Franak Viacorka – an Atlantic Council senior fellow, and now senior advisor to Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – prominently hailed its “fearless” reporting of the upheaval.

Euroradio also repeatedly crops up in documents related to the Open Information Partnership (OIP), which is the “flagship” strand within Whitehall’s multi-pronged propaganda assault on Russia. Bankrolled by the FCDO to the tune of £10 million, the organization maintains a network of 44 partners across Central and Eastern Europe, including “journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and factcheckers.” One of the collective’s primary, covert objectives is influencing “elections taking place in countries of particular interest” to the FCDO.

The classified files make clear the OIP has engaged in numerous astroturfing initiatives throughout the region, helping organizations and individuals produce slick propaganda masquerading as independent citizen journalism, which is then amplified globally via its network.

For instance, in Ukraine, the OIP worked with a 12-strong group of online ‘influencers’ “to counter Kremlin-backed messaging through innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models that reflected the complex and sensitive political environment,” in the process allowing them to “reach wider audiences with compelling content that received over four million views.”

In Russia and Central Asia, the OIP established a covert network of YouTubers, helping them create videos “promoting media integrity and democratic values.” Participants were also taught how to “make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding” and “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages,” while the consortium minimized their “risk of prosecution” and managed “project communications” to ensure the existence of the network, and indeed the OIP’s role, were kept “confidential.”

It would be entirely unsurprising if similar efforts were being undertaken in Belarus. After all, the country – along with Moldova and Ukraine – is referred to in the leaked documents as “the most vital space in the entire network,” and a “high-impact priority” for London, suggesting its 2020 election was very much “of interest” to Whitehall. If so, it would likewise be entirely unsurprising if many of the alleged so-called citizen journalists and media outlets covering the unrest in Minsk received funding and training from the OIP.

All along, too, MEMO 98, an OIP member coincidentally also funded by NED, kept a close eye on the incendiary proceedings, publishing several analyses of media coverage and social media activity related to the protests. It drew particular attention to the output of Belsat TV, a Warsaw-based channel – founded in December 2007 by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it seeks to influence political change in Belarus. MEMO 98 praised the station’s “extensive coverage of protests and related intimidation of activists.”

Strikingly, the leaked FCDO files indicate that Belsat TV received intensive, Whitehall-financed support from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the newswire’s international “charitable” wing, including 150 days’ consultancy in improving “TV output quality and audience reach.”

While the protests have largely fizzled out in recent months, and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s calls for Western leaders to recognise her as the legitimate president of Belarus continue to fall on deaf ears, there are clear signs many other media platforms in Belarus receive life-giving sponsorship from London to this day.

In March 2021, the FCDO published an update on the progress of its global ‘Media Freedom Campaign’, which revealed that, over the past year, Whitehall had allocated £950,000 in financing to Belarusian news outlets, enabling them to “remain open and maintain a functional level of equipment.”

“Without this support, they would otherwise have been forced to close by government measures,” the document stated. “The funding has saved jobs and ensured that independent media can still hold the government to account during a period of increasingly violent action by the security forces.”

Evidently, even during a global pandemic, the regime-change show must go on – and the UK government is committed to ensuring people the world over continue to receive a steady deluge of slanted agitprop from the streets of Minsk, in order to turn public opinion against the government not only of Belarus, but of Russia too.

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ex-FBI Boss Reportedly Sent $100K to Joe Biden’s Grandkids’ Trust as He Mulled ‘Profitable Matters’

By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 21.05.2021

In 2016, former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and met with the then-US vice president in a bid to pursue “some very good and profitable matters” with him, the New York Post reports, referring to newly surfaced emails.

In October 2020, the newspaper published an article containing several emails allegedly retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop claiming that he had arranged meetings with foreign officials for his father when the latter served in the Obama administration.

The “donation” mentioned in the emails reported by the NY Post on Thursday, was sent to a trust for the children of Hallie Biden, the widow of Joe’s late son Beau, who later became Hunter’s lover.

The Daily Mail on Thursday referred to an email marked “confidential and privileged”, in which Freeh wrote to Hunter that he “would be delighted to do future work with” Biden’s son.

“I also spoke to Dad [Joe Biden] a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options. I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun, and rewarding”, the July 2016 email reportedly read.

The ex-FBI boss floated the idea again a month later, ostensibly saying he was working for then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who was at the time embroiled in a scandal over one of the world’s biggest financial frauds, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2020.

“I would like to talk with you and Dad about working together next year. No doubt both he and you have many options and probably some which are more attractive than my small shop”, Freeh purportedly wrote in August 2016, in an apparent nod to his consultancy firm.

The Daily Mail reported that the correspondence raises the question about whether Joe Biden was “discussing future private business deals while still in office” with Freeh, who was allegedly collaborating with “three men who were later found to be corrupt foreign criminals”. Apart from Razak, they include French-Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz and Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu.

When publishing Hunter Biden’s alleged emails in mid-October 2020, the New York Post claimed that in one of the documents, Vadym Pozharskyi, then a top official at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thanked the president’s son for organising a meeting with his father, while in a second email, Pozharskyi asked Hunter how he could use his influence to support Burisma.

Former US President Donald Trump has repeatedly slammed the media for not covering the alleged corrupt dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine, since the story about possible misconduct on the latter’s part was mainly ignored by the mainstream media, apart from Fox News, and temporarily blocked from sharing on Twitter.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 2 Comments

Tornadoes: The New Normal That Wasn’t

By Dan Sutter | American Thinker | May 21, 2021

Tornadoes killed 553 Americans in 2011, the deadliest year since 1925. May 22 marks the 10th anniversary of the Joplin, Missouri tornado that killed 161, the first triple-digit toll since 1953. The U.S. had been averaging 60 tornado deaths annually.

This death toll shocked the public, weather forecasters, and researchers. Improvements in weather radar, National Weather Service warnings, and the advent of real-time, street-level tracking had seemingly rendered such death tolls a historical relic.

Some experts had a ready answer for the devastation: man-made climate change. Bill McKibben took a tongue-in-cheek tack in the Washington Post, with a headline, “A Link Between Climate Change and Joplin Tornadoes? Never!” He opined, “When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that.” Researchers Kevin Trenberth and Michael Mann also stated that global warming is making tornadoes worse.

When the unexpected happens, researchers need to ask why and examine the data. Kevin Simmons and I had just published a book on the societal impacts of tornadoes. We sought to assess whether the 2011 death tolls were due to the tornadoes which occurred, societal vulnerability, or perhaps some other factor. We published our findings in a book, Deadly Season: Analysis of the 2011 Tornado Outbreaks, and a paper in Natural Hazards Review.

Our conclusion: it was the tornadoes.  The total number of tornadoes rated EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale for tornado damage, the highest rating, provides a short answer. Six EF-5 tornadoes occurred in 2011, including four in Mississippi and Alabama on April 27. The nation averages less than one per year (59 since 1950), with only one since 2011. The year’s activity was extreme, but not unprecedented. For instance, seven EF-5’s occurred in the April 3, 1974 tornado outbreak.

Historical ratios of fatalities per injury, per millions of dollars of property damage, or per building damaged provide more detail and context. For example, prior to 2011, violent tornadoes killed one person for every $20 million of property damage; this and similar ratios held steady in 2011. The year’s many long-track, violent tornadoes produced enormous damage, with the corresponding casualties.

We further applied statistical models of tornado fatalities we used to examine the impacts of Doppler radar and NWS warnings. The models controlled for tornado and path characteristics like EF-scale rating, path length, and the numbers of persons and mobile homes in the affected counties. Plugging the characteristics of 2011 tornadoes into the model would give a fatality estimate, based on recent patterns.

The analysis predicted more than 500 fatalities for the year’s tornadoes with a high likelihood of a tornado killing more than 100.  Keep in mind, the deadliest tornado over the years used in the statistical analysis (1990-2010) killed 36 people. The tornadoes of 2011 were unlike anything we had witnessed for decades.

There was no upward trend in violent tornadoes prior to 2011; the year was a clear statistical outlier or Black Swan type event. Consequently, we concluded that fatalities should return to the prior normal or decline further due to continued warning process improvements. By contrast, proponents of climate change told us that Joplin and Tuscaloosa were the new normal due to global warming.

The U.S. has averaged 43 tornado deaths over the past nine years, with 76 in the deadliest year (2020). We have had only 11 deaths so far in 2021 (although please knock on some wood when reading this).

Mother Nature can be extreme, variable, and fickle. Events and years unlike recent experience are inevitable. When unexpected (or inconceivable) weather events occur, we should try to figure out what happened and why, instead of lazily attributing it to man-made global warming.

Daniel Sutter (dsutter@troy.eduis the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics and the Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Facebook’s fact-checkers accused of censorship over mask-wearing in kids

The Manhattan Institute says their “fact-checking” is actually “fact-blocking”

By Ben Squires | Reclaim the Net | May 21, 2021

Facebook’s fact checkers are “fact-blockers,” according to Manhattan Institute’s John Tierney, whose article on the downsides of mask-wearing in children was flagged. Mask-wearing in children still remains a controversial topic, where there’s no scientific consensus.

In April, Facebook flagged Tierney’s article on the risks of mask-wearing in children, adding a warning label that the information in the article was “mostly false.”

In the article, published by the City Journal, Tierney argues that masks are not only ineffective, but also psychologically harmful for kids, because they harm the development of their linguistic skills, and cause psychological damage, and other effects.

City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing,” Tierney wrote. “Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.”

A major flaw in Facebook’s appeals process is the lack of a neutral arbiter. Instead, the fact-checker, in this case Science Feedback, was allowed to be its own judge and justify why flagging the article was right.

“This exercise obviously wasn’t about accuracy. The fact-checkers were actually fact-blockers,” Tierney wrote.

Part of the reason Science Feedback flagged the article was because it cited a study by German researchers who interviewed parents about the effects of mask wearing in children. The fact-checker deemed the study flawed and self-selective.

“Any study can be faulted for methodological shortcomings, but that doesn’t mean its results should be ignored or suppressed, particularly when the findings are consistent with a large body of evidence from other researchers,” Tierney argued. He referred to another German peer-reviewed study, that concluded there is “statistically significant evidence of what they termed “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.’”

Another issue Science Feedback noted in Tierney’s article was the reference of a Swedish study that concluded that there was no significant difference in the spread of the virus in older kids studying online and unmasked kids attending in-person classes.

“This makes it seem as if mask-wearing is implemented primarily to protect kids or parents from dying or getting hospitalized. But in reality it is used to limit the spread of the disease in the population, control the epidemic, and prevent the death of individuals at risk,” Science Feedback said.

“To the extent that I can make any sense of this objection, it seems that the fact-checkers at Science Feedback believe that the unmasked schoolchildren were infecting large numbers of Swedish adults while miraculously leaving their own parents unscathed. And I’m the one guilty of ‘flawed reasoning’?” Tierney wrote.

According to Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, the censorship of such articles harms the trust the public has in science.
“Science depends on dissent, free speech, open debate. Yet in the name of science, they’re actually censoring those tools of the scientific method itself,” Ramaswamy said, in an appearance on Fox & Friends on Wednesday.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 2 Comments

Hateful hypocrisy: In hate crime-obsessed Britain, vilifying Covid vaccine ‘refuseniks’ comes with establishment approval

By Neil Clark | RT | May 21, 2021

We hear so much in woke Britain about ‘hate crime’ and how terrible it is. But right now, we’re in the midst of an extremely nasty campaign against those who don’t wish to take a Covid vaccine and somehow that’s deemed acceptable.

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” From George Orwell’s ‘1984.’

“Selfish idiots.” “Refuseniks.” “Anti-vaxxer loonies.” “Holding the country to ransom.” “A menace to their own health and ours.” “They’re like drink drivers.” Just a few of the insults that have been hurled at Brits who, despite the biggest drug promotion campaign in our history, have decided they don’t wish to take one of the new-on-the-market Covid vaccines.

Freedom of choice? Bodily autonomy? They seem to have gone out of the window, along with all the other basic rights we have lost in Britain these past 15 months. The date is 2021, but we’re actually living in Orwell’s ‘1984,’ with its daily ‘Two Minutes Hate.’

A whole succession of obnoxious newspaper columnists, radio ‘shock jocks’ and some ‘celebrities’ have gone out of their way to be as rude as possible to those who don’t want to have a jab – and call for extreme measures to be used against them that would be more associated with a totalitarian state in mid-1930s Europe than a country which still styles itself a ‘democracy’. Or, indeed, with Pretoria, circa 1965.

Apartheid – which we all denounced when in place in South Africa – has had a 2021 public health makeover and is back in vogue, with ‘Covid vaccine passports’ replacing ‘pass laws.’

“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go,” tweeted media motormouth Piers Morgan.

Nick Cohen penned an article for the Observer entitled “It’s only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated.” “Rational people will ask why they should continue to accept restrictions on their freedoms because of ignorant delusions,” he wrote.

Columnist Richard Littlejohn went even further  by calling for the unvaccinated to publicly declare themselves ‘Unclean.’ “If some people don’t like the idea of getting the jab, tough. I wouldn’t force them. But maybe refusniks should have to wear a bell round their necks and sport a sandwich board declaring themselves ‘Unclean’”, he wrote in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled “No jab, no job – it’s a no brainer.”

In similar vein there was Sean O’Grady, an associate editor of the supposedly ‘liberal’ Independent. His article, published earlier this week, was entitled “This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access.”

“The time has come when the hard choices are looming closer,” O’Grady opined. “If we don’t want this Covid crisis to last forever, we need some new simple, guidelines: No jab, no access to NHS healthcare; no jab, no state education for your kids. No jab, no access to pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, stadiums. No jab; no entry to the UK, and much else.” I think we’ve got your point Sean. You wouldn’t make vaccination mandatory, but the unvaccinated wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, or do anything. And if they got ill? Well they’d just have to die because they shouldn’t have access to NHS healthcare. All in the name of ‘the common good’.

On the same day that O’Grady’s piece was published, we had one Sarah Vine weighing in with her penny’worth, too. “We can’t let idiots who don’t want Covid vaccines hold us hostage” was the title of her screed published in the Daily Mail. “You are stupid. Weapons grade stupid,” is how she addressed those who don’t want to take the Coronavirus vaccine. Who cares what this poisonous Vine thinks, I can hear you ask? But actually, it does matter, because her husband is none other than Michael Gove, the UK government minister currently heading a review into vaccine passports. If Gove’s wife thinks the unvaccinated are “weapons grade stupid” then it hardly gives us confidence that her husband won’t decide to discriminate against them.

It’s not just in print that the attacks on ‘refuseniks’ are coming. It’s on the airwaves, too. Iain Dale berated the unvaccinated on his LBC radio call-in show earlier this week. “The fact that people still refuse to get the vaccine for whatever reason, I don’t really care what the reason is, they are not only putting themselves at risk – they are putting other people at risk,” he said. “If you are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old and you still haven’t availed yourself of the opportunity of having the vaccine, I’m afraid you need your head read. You need your head examined. You are a selfish individual.”

Repeat after me: “I am a selfish individual. I am a selfish individual.” Gaslighting really doesn’t get any more obvious.

At least Dale didn’t suggest putting poison into ‘refuseniks’ coffee as his LBC colleague Shelagh Fogarty did. “I’d literally be in fights with these people (vaccine decliners),” she told a caller. “How do you keep seeing them at work without wanting to poison their coffee.”

Let’s not mince words: We are dealing here with the very open, plain-view demonisation of a group of people, with no consequences for those who are doing the demonisation. And all this is happening, lest we forget, in ‘woke’ times when anything you say might be seen as ‘offence’, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘genderism’ or a form of ‘ism’ or ‘phobia.’

To see the egregious double standards, just replace the ‘unvaccinated’ with a minority racial or religious group. But the unvaccinated are fair game. Hate crime, according to the Crown Prosecution Service website, “can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.” Vaccine status is not a “protected characteristic” so it seems people can be as hateful to the unvaccinated as they like.

But that doesn’t make what’s going on right. Far from it.

If someone is vaccinated, why should they care if someone else isn’t? We never had these arguments before about the flu jab. Either the vaccine works to protect the vaccinated, or it doesn’t. Nor were those who decided not to have a flu vaccine labelled ‘anti-vaxxers.’ You can be generally pro-vaccination, but have rational ‘wait and see’ reservations about the new-on-the-market Coronavirus ones, especially if your chances of becoming ill or indeed dying from Covid are extremely low. But that nuanced position is simply not recognised in the current, coercive ‘Just take the bloody jab’ hysteria.

As for the line that it is the unvaccinated who are holding the country hostage by putting in jeopardy an end to Covid restrictions? Sarah Vine really needs to look closer to home. Literally. It was the government of which her husband is a prominent member which assured us that life would be back to normal as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated. In an interview with The Spectator in January, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he would “Cry freedom” as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated.

But we still don’t have freedom. The goalposts have moved from vaccinating the ‘most vulnerable’ to now vaccinating everyone. Is it any surprise there are those who wonder if this is motivated by the introduction of vaccine passports, which in turn could lead to other digitised social credit systems?

But, conveniently, it’s the vaccine ‘refuseniks’, the current subject of the daily Orwellian Two Minutes Hate, who are being blamed for continued restrictions and not the authorities. In these toxic times, ‘divide and rule’ has never been more blatant.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

“No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Unvaxxed”

By Dustin Broadbery | OffGuardian | May 21, 2021

The government is pressing ahead with its Vaccine Passport and plans for a two-tier society are afoot. The effrontery of those leading the charge beggar’s belief.

When they said ‘there were no plans for ‘discriminatory’ Covid vaccine passports’, they were quietly funding at least eight different vaccine passport schemes since last year.

And that’s just the half of it. We are midway through a Europe-wide feasibility study for the development of a common vaccine passport, launched by the European Commission in 2018.

They would have you believe – they were caught with their trousers down, their policies are proportionate to the emergency as it unfolds, and at all times they operate according to a system of informed consent.

But hang on a minute. Since the onset of SARS-CoV-2, they have played the most astonishing game of deception and manipulation. Cooking the books and fiddling the tills.

They have deliberately plunged society into two camps – skeptics and adherents, compliant and non-conformists.

Last year established the mood for pettifogging anyone questioning the narrative, while those refusing to comply were branded narcissists and psychopaths or denounced as ‘Covid deniers’ – the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.

This government has polarised the nation on a scale never before attempted, legitimising a particular brand of prejudice and enmity not seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich. And once the NHS App becomes your ticket to freedom on Monday, they will finally have means to weed out and punish dissidence while rewarding blind faith in authority. No matter how injurious their compliance is to society at large, the silent majority have lost their moral compass.

But it must be understood – this principle of divide and rule is as old as the hills. It was not so long ago that signs hung in the windows of establishments in Britain that read: ‘No dogs, No Irish, No blacks’. The difference today is that it won’t be the colour of your skin, your class, gender or sexual orientation that will condemn you, it will be something far more virulent – your ideology.

That this crucial point has been entirely missed by the chattering classes is astonishing. And despite the most flagrant attempts to marginalise large segments of society, identitarians, the woke brigade and other erstwhile defenders of the most marginalised remain largely unphased. Unless it is to flap their arms in the air over higher rates of vaccine hesitancy amongst ethnic minorities. But the rest of us can go to hell.

Who cares about anyone not from a protected social group, right?

In this bizarre parochial moral imperative, discrimination is only frowned upon if you’re discriminating against someone’s authorised and rubber-stamped marks of distinction, whereas discrimination, of and by itself, is entirely permissible.

These crowd-pleasers would defend their moral high ground by telling you “the unvaccinated are selfishly putting others’ lives at risk”, or that “mask refuseniks are superspreaders”. But hold on a minute. All of this is pure conjecture which, like everything else under the post-COVID sun, has been founded on speculative science and policies pulled straight from the magician’s hat.

Other than taking the government on its word, where is the actual evidence of asymptomatic transmission? Where is the evidence of mask efficacy?

In fact, can someone point me to a single risk assessment for any of these high-risk interventions? But to deny someone entry into an establishment, to prevent them from travelling, shopping, or worse, stepping foot outside of their own bolthole is no moot point. These are very real and tangible forms of discrimination, for no other reason than you personally disagree with their choices.

These people have clearly made peace with the fact that membership to society is now the exception rather than the rule. They labour under some neotribal sense of entitlement – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like their neolithic ancestors they take refuge in the herd from an unseen predator threatening their hand to mouth existences. Positioning themselves in the upper echelons of this looming two-tier system, with others equally desperate to get their lives back and ready to submit to whatever ephemeral demands are made of them in return for one coveted free pass to re-enter polite society.

While the rest of us – who will not be spoken for, bribed or coerced – will risk excommunication from the social-balm in defence of our principles.

This loose association of the poorest and most marginalised, conscientious objectors, lockdown skeptics, and anyone with a shred of faith in their god-given sovereignty of being or bodily autonomy will wage a personal crusade of civil disobedience against the tyranny de jour, as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King did before them. For them, braver men have endured far worse for much less.

But what the first group fails to realise is that they are doing the unofficial bidding of another group – the well-healed members of our political establishment to whom the rules do not apply. Who are protected by more exemptions than the rest of us are governed by regulations. And who, at the onset of the pandemic, were not caught with their pants down, as the general population was.

As this group spoke of herd immunity, they quietly struck a £119 million COVID advertising and propaganda deal with one of the world’s biggest marketing companies. Going on to become the UK’s biggest advertiser in 2020.

Just a day before the first lockdown, their Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) began work on the most criminal propaganda campaign in British history:

Extract from UK gov’t report “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, read the whole thing here.

What most card-carrying conservative voters fail to realise is that this group is the country’s biggest employer, with 17% of the British workforce employed in the public sector, whose every agency has been pointed like a cruise missile launch pad at the general population, to essentially knock our stuffing out and railroad us along a critical path, towards what is arguably a controlled destination – the complete nullification of our rights, indefinitely.

But that’s only half of it. Once you conflate unlawful policies with science that falls apart under the lightest of scrutiny to bring about the most controversial changes to Britain’s laws since the Norman Conquests, it is written in the cards that two types of citizens will be left in the wreckage: those wandering aimlessly into the trap having abandoned all reason and judgement to the trappers; and those whose contempt runs so deep they will lay their life on the line in opposition.

Now here’s the thing – there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about a two-tiered society or the discrimination of certain minority groups by the prevailing social order. And no matter what polite excuse is used to justify vaccine passports, it cannot be denied – this is the same system of caste, class, eugenics, apartheid, persecution and slavery that would inflict those toppling statues with an extreme case of dashed hopes.

But what is even more terrifying than the depths which the political class is prepared to sink, is the collusion of a silent majority – without a vested interest – whose own complicity will result in the persecution of everyone else not toeing the line.

And now, with 353,341 variants at their disposal, the government has 350,000 reasons to keep this fiasco going until hell freezes over.

Riding roughshod over the British public who, make no mistake, will continue to weather such violations, in spectacular ignorance of the fact that only 388 healthy people under the age of 60 died from COVID in 2020, the average age of death was 82, and strangely enough, the vast majority had pre-existing conditions. Equally unremarkable is the fact that between 23%-85% of all deaths attributed to COVID, died from other underlying causes.

And the fact that 2020 had a lower standardised mortality rate than every single year prior to 2009 can be found in the dictionary under ‘Ignorance is Bliss’.

You would also be forgiven for assuming that once the most vulnerable had been vaccinated (which is now), not much remains between the people and their freedom. That any further attempts to “protect us” with more turns of the screw entirely defy common reason.

Yet here we are, fighting a battle for humanity.

The trouble, therefore, with lockdown skeptics such as Peter Hitchens publicly throwing in the towel, or Lord Sumption accepting the inevitability of vaccine passports – they have raised the white flag long before the real battle has begun.

While lockdowns and social distancing represent the abstract of this ideological war, its frontlines are being waged on the physical surrender of our will and bodily autonomies. The former is arbitrary, the latter is systematised. One is going to happen with or without your consent, the latter is wholly dependent on it.

It follows that for each skeptic who surrenders their compliance, they sell the rest of us downriver. The balance swings more in favour of the New Normal. And let’s be honest, vaccine passports only work if a majority of us comply.

So while we still have the illusive veneer of democracy to hold onto, politicians remain duty-bound to at least pretend to be upholding some sort of system of informed consent. Just as we are compelled to at least give the appearance of upholding the necessary checks and balances.

Even if you accept the logic of vaccine passports, where exactly on your map does this end? Three weeks to flatten the curve, three lockdowns later and there is already talk of further lockdowns in the summer, or worse, restrictions lasting two more years.

Meanwhile, in the US, Sloppy Joe has made it clear: ‘get vaccinated or wear a mask indefinitely’.

If none of this strikes the fear of God into you, then perhaps this will:

The Pentagon have developed a microchip that will detect asymptomatic COVID. The chip would be inserted below the skin and trigger a sensor if COVID infects the body. This is despite the internet being flooded with factchekers and MSM pundits debunking what the so-called “tin foil hat brigade” has been warning of all along.

In plain sight, they hide their motives and by small degrees, we continue to surrender ancient rights and protections to an unthinkable dystopia that is now within sniffing distance.

Dustin Broadbery is based in London and is interested in social theory and particularly how a mutual society could bring about great advancements in the social fabric. You can read more of his work at TheCogent.org.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Britain trains Palestinian security forces to protect Israel

MEMO | May 21, 2021

Britain is currently helping to train and develop Palestinian security forces in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in an effort to prevent the “potential overspill of violence into Israel,” an investigation by Declassified UK has revealed.

The Capability, Accountability, Sustainability and Inclusivity Programme aims to provide the Palestinian Authority security forces with support and training in order to make them “more capable” when dealing with “threats to Israel originating in the West Bank”. The promotion of “security cooperation with Israel” is also an objective.

Based in part on records and statistics obtained by a freedom of information request, the investigation discovered that the programme cost British taxpayers £3.3 million last year. This followed the £2.3 million that the Ministry of Defence was allocated in 2017-18 for its “British Support Team” based in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

That funding in turn was sourced from the £1.3 billion cross-government Conflict, Security and Stability Fund (CSSF), a subsidiary of key governmental departments which aims to improve stability in various regions by financing projects that do not directly impact Britain’s national security.

The team which trains the Palestinian security forces, Declassified UK found, is made up of seven military personnel from the British Army and Royal Air Force led by a brigadier. One document related to the programme notes that such British support has been ongoing for seventeen years, and does in fact aim to “reduce potential security threats to the UK” by addressing alleged extremism in the occupied territories.

According to the programme’s literature, however, the long-term aim of the training is to lay the groundwork for a two-state solution and prepare the security forces of a future Palestinian state, a process that the British have long claimed to support. “The UK supports Palestinian security sector reform because a capable PASF [Palestinian Authority Security Forces] is a pre-requisite for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the document explains.

Despite the PA being generally viewed as the legitimate political body representing Palestinians in the West Bank – following its creation in 1994 after the Oslo Accords – there have been widespread concerns regarding its corruption, the lack of political legitimacy of President Mahmoud Abbas (whose term of office should have ended in 2009) and its security coordination with Israel. The PA’s torture of Palestinian detainees has also been well-documented.

The report by Declassified UK also details Whitehall’s other security programmes in the region, including the manufacture and distribution of military vehicles for the PA and Jordanian forces, as well as extensive support and training for Lebanese security forces dealing with Palestinian refugees in the UN-run refugee camps in Lebanon. Although the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office in London claim that such operations serve the purpose of countering the influence of groups such as Hezbollah, the projects under the CSSF all have the common stated aim of preventing Palestinian resistance and “violent extremism” from spilling over into Israel.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 1 Comment

Dr. John Campbell interview with Dr Pierre Kory

Dr Pierre Kory, Part 1, Steroids and anticoagulants

Dr Pierre Kory, Part 2, Ivermectin

Dr. John Campbell | April 25, 2021

Links from Dr. Kory Safety review paper is here on the medincell website https://www.medincell.com/ivermectin

My review paper is on a Pre-print but will be published on line within days – pre print is here: https://osf.io/wx3zn/

My white paper is not published or posted yet but will be soon

My webinar lecture from Wednesday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcLnW…

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment