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Victoria government lied about who had access to Covid contact tracing data

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 28, 2021

The government of the Australian state of Victoria not only decided to deliberately keep citizens in the dark about court rulings exposing the fact the privacy of their data collected by contact tracing apps can be compromised – but is now doubling down.

And the way the state’s Acting Premier Jacinta Allan, who has currently taken over while Premier Dan Andrews is being investigated for “concealing treason and fraud,” chose to defend the failure to inform people about matters pertaining to sensitive private information about them was to say the government was – shielding them from misinformation.

Australian media say the attempts to hide the truth have been made repeatedly, and Allan’s logic in defending the move is that if revealed, the Supreme Court’s secret ruling that said the data was not “absolutely protected” would have given rise to a “baseless scare campaign” as media reporting the facts would have caused “fear and misinformation.”

She did not clarify what type of “misinformation and fear” was expected to arise from the truth.

“The decision was taken in the balance of providing confidence in the Victorian community that this wasn’t a matter that needed to have that level of misinformation spread about it,” Allan said on Tuesday of the way the multiple levels of deceit had been handled.

This Supreme Court finding came to light after the Herald Sun reported that despite explicit promises of information safety, and its use only for health purposes, this was a lie – and one ongoing for two years.

Instead of making contact tracing data available only in order to fight the epidemic, it was also available to law enforcement, and authorities like the WorkCover agency.

It was precisely that agency’s demands to be given access to tracing app data that launched the legal case, when the Department of Health asked the court to order WorkCover to stop.

Another revelation is that the state’s Covid commander Jeroen Weimar petitioned the court to keep the case secret for five years. He tried to persuade the court that maintaining Victorians’ trust in the tracing system was what really matters – at the same time downplaying the importance of the citizens’ right to know their data can be shared, despite assurances from Covid tracers that this was not possible.

Asked if it was right to hide from the public the truth about the safety of their data – and the fact a court case was unfolding financed by their tax money, Allan said, “They don’t deserve a fear campaign, they don’t deserve misinformation,” and added that their data “will be protected.”

Shadow Attorney-General Matt Bach sees the scandal differently:

“People should be shocked and appalled. We should never become accustomed to this level of dishonesty.”

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | 3 Comments

China introduces “AI prosecutor” that can automatically charge citizens of a crime

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 27, 2021

While in the West mostly speech and movement of people are policed through automated “AI” censorship and surveillance systems, in China, work appears to be well under way to create a machine that would act as an AI-powered prosecutor.

The product, which has already been tested by the busy Shanghai Pudong prosecutor’s office, is able to achieve 97 percent accuracy in charging people suspected of eight criminal acts, researchers developing it have alleged.

According to the South China Morning Post, the cases that the “AI prosecutor” is allegedly highly competent in handling involve crimes like credit card fraud, dangerous driving, gambling, intentional injury, obstructing officials, theft, but also something called “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

The last one is considered particularly “problematic” since its definition, or lack thereof, can cover different forms of political dissent.

And now the plan is to introduce a machine that would be given decision-making powers, such as whether to file charges, and what sentence to seek on a case-to-case basis.

That, said Professor Shi Yong, who heads the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ big data and knowledge management lab that is behind the project, is a marked difference between this and other “AI” tools that have already been in use in China for years. One of them is System 206, whose tasks are limited to assessing evidence, the danger a suspect poses to the public, and conditions under which they may be apprehended.

But the tech behind the new artificial prosecutor looks to be at the same time far more ambitious, and advanced. What has been disclosed is that it can be run on a desktop PC, processing 1,000 traits extracted from case description filed by humans, and based on that press a charge.

It’s unclear if the database of 17,000 cases spanning five years used to train the algorithms is enough to consider the project as true AI – and if the same result can be achieved by rule-based algorithms.

Either way, not all human prosecutors are thrilled about having some of their workload replaced in this way – although precisely this has been given as the motive for developing the tech.

“The accuracy of 97 per cent may be high from a technological point of view, but there will always be a chance of a mistake. Who will take responsibility when it happens? The prosecutor, the machine or the designer of the algorithm?,” one Guangzhou-based prosecutor noted, speaking on condition of anonymity.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Four Western provocations that led to U.S.-Russia crisis today

The one-sided indictments of Moscow’s behavior invariably ignore numerous missteps that took place, beginning with President Clinton

By Ted Galen Carpenter | Responsible Statecraft | December 28, 2021

At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved — a surprisingly peaceful end to a brutal empire. Russia, as the principal successor state, sought to join the democratic West, and the United States and its European allies officially welcomed that aspiration. Three decades later, however, the West and Russia are locked in an increasingly acrimonious cold war struggle. It is a tragic development, and one that could escalate into a catastrophic armed conflict. Neither side is blameless for the onset of a new cold war, but there is a substantial difference in the degree of culpability. Provocations by the United States and NATO were more numerous, more egregious, and began earlier.

U.S. and NATO officials, as well as most of the Western news media, contend that Russia is to blame for the current ugly confrontation. They highlight four Kremlin actions that severely spiked East-West tensions. The first episode, according to that version of history, occurred in 2008 when Russian forces invaded Georgia and advanced to the outskirts of the capital, Tbilisi.  A second, even more serious offense, took place in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed that strategic peninsula after holding a bogus referendum. The third incident followed just months later when Russia orchestrated a separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and then sent in troops to assist the rebellion. During the years that followed, Vladimir Putin’s government exacerbated the emerging cold war by interfering in the internal political affairs of numerous Western countries, especially the United States.

Those allegations contain some truth, but all of them conveniently omit crucial context. For example, the 2008 invasion of Georgia occurred only after the Georgian military fired on Russian peacekeeping troops that had been in the secessionist region of South Ossetia since the early 1990s. Even a European Union investigation concluded that Georgian forces had initiated the fighting. The conflict also occurred in large part because President George W. Bush encouraged Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to believe that the United States and NATO would support his country if it became embroiled in a conflict with Russia.

Putin’s seizure of Crimea was indeed a blatant violation of international law, but it occurred only after the United States and key EU allies had shamelessly assisted demonstrators to overthrow Ukraine’s elected pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych. That thinly disguised coup triggered Russian fears that Ukraine was about to become a forward staging area for NATO military power. Among other worries, the Kremlin suspected that it would lose access to its crucial naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimea peninsula and watch that facility become a hostile NATO base.

The one-sided, self-serving indictments of Russia’s behavior invariably ignore the numerous Western provocations that took place long before Moscow engaged in disruptive measures.  Indeed, the deterioration of the West’s relations with post-communist Russia began during Bill Clinton’s administration.

Western provocation number 1: NATO’s first eastward expansion.

In her memoir “Madame Secretary,” former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of state Madeleine Albright concedes that Clinton administration officials decided already in 1993 to endorse the wishes of Central and East European countries to join NATO. The Alliance proceeded to add Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1998. Albright admitted that Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his associates were extremely unhappy with that development. The Russian reaction was understandable, since the expansion violated informal promises that President George H. W. Bush’s administration had given Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed not only to accept a unified Germany but a united Germany in NATO.  The implicit quid pro quo was that NATO would not move beyond the eastern border of a united Germany. 

Western provocation number 2: NATO’s military intervention in the Balkans.

NATO’s 1995 air war against Bosnian Serbs seeking to secede from the newly minted country of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the imposition of the Dayton Peace Accords greatly annoyed Yeltsin’s government and the Russian people. The Balkans had been a region of considerable religious and strategic interest to Moscow for generations, and it was humiliating for Russians to watch impotently as a U.S.-led alliance dictated outcomes there. The Western powers conducted an even greater provocation four years later when they intervened on behalf of a secessionist insurgency in Serbia’s restless Kosovo province. Detaching that province from Serbia and placing it under U.N. control not only set an unhealthy international precedent, but the move also displayed utter contempt for Russia’s interests and preferences in the Balkans.

The Clinton administration’s decisions to expand NATO and meddle in Bosnia and Kosovo were crucial steps toward creating a new cold war with Russia. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. cites the negative impact that NATO expansion and the U.S.-led military interventions in the Balkans had on Russian attitudes toward the United States and the West: “The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.”

Western provocation number 3: NATO’s subsequent waves of expansion. 

Not content with how the Clinton administration antagonized Moscow by moving NATO into Central Europe, George W. Bush’s administration pushed the allies to give membership to the rest of the defunct Warsaw Pact and to the three Baltic republics. Admitting the latter in 2004 dramatically escalated the West’s military encroachment. Those three small countries had not only been part of the Soviet Union, they also had spent most of their recent history as part of Czarist Russia’s empire. Russia was still too weak to do more than present feeble diplomatic protests, but the level of anger at the West’s arrogant disregard of Russia’s security interests rose.

Expanding NATO to Russia’s border was not the only provocation. Increasingly, the United States was engaging in “rotational” deployments of its military forces in the new alliance members. Even George Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, expressed worries that such actions were creating dangerous tensions. Putin’s February 2007 speech to the annual Munich Security Conference made it extremely clear that the Kremlin’s patience with U.S. and NATO arrogance was coming to an end. Bush, tone-deaf as ever, even tried to secure NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine — a policy that his successors have continued to push, despite resistance from France and Germany.

Western Provocation number 4: treating Russia as an outright enemy in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Western leaders did not take Putin’s warnings seriously enough, however. Instead, the provocations on multiple fronts continued and, in some cases, even accelerated. The United States and key NATO powers bypassed the U.N. Security Council (and a certain Russian veto) in early 2008 to grant Kosovo full independence. Three years later, Barack Obama’s administration misled Russian officials about the purpose of a “humanitarian” U.N. military mission in Libya, convincing Moscow to withhold its veto. The mission promptly turned into a U.S.-led regime-change war to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Shortly thereafter, the United States worked with like-minded Middle East powers in a campaign to oust Russia’s client, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. The egregious U.S.-EU meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics followed.

It is unfair to judge Russia’s aggressive and destabilizing actions, including the annexation of Crimea, the ongoing military intervention in Syria, continuing support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, and attempted interference in the political affairs of other countries, without acknowledging the multitude of preceding Western abuses. The West, not Russia, is largely responsible for the onset of the new cold war.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | 2 Comments

Russia says it will put a stop to continued NATO enlargement

By Jonny Tickle | RT | December 28, 2021

At upcoming talks with Washington, Moscow will not only obstruct but will put a complete stop to any eastwards expansion of the US-led NATO military bloc, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister said on Tuesday.

Speaking to news agency Interfax, Sergey Ryabkov said his country would go into the negotiations with a clear agenda and reject any attempts by US diplomats to dilute the proposed agreement between the two parties.

“Our leadership has repeatedly said we can no longer tolerate the situation that is developing in the immediate vicinity of our borders. We cannot tolerate NATO expansion. We will not just prevent it. We will put a stop to it,” Ryabkov said.

The talks, due to be held on January 10, will focus on two publicly released draft treaties that include a list of promises Russia wants to obtain from the US and NATO. As well as pledges that the bloc won’t expand eastwards, the proposals also include the end of Western cooperation with post-Soviet countries, the removal of US nuclear weapons from Europe, and the withdrawal of NATO troops and missiles away from the Russian border.

However, according to Ryabkov, the US wants to ignore Russia’s firm demands, instead proposing a less structured form of negotiations. “We should not come up with some kind of dimensionless agenda when it is in our interest to include topics that have long been sorted out through other channels. We have to focus exclusively on the two draft documents that we have presented,” he said.

Ryabkov’s comments followed quotes in the Western media from unnamed sources in the White House claiming the forthcoming talks would focus on arms control, as well as the situation on the Russian-Ukrainian border.

“That in itself is a very difficult task, given the degree of disagreement between us and the US, and us and NATO, on these issues,” the deputy FM said, explaining that Russia would not accept any American attempt to “dilute” the discussion over the proposed treaties.

“We would conclude, in such a case, that the US is not ready for a serious conversation. We call for negotiations, intensively and quickly. We believe that the issue is not just overdue. It is overripe,” he added.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Militarism | , | 1 Comment

Israel refuses to provide evidence for banning Palestinian rights groups

MEMO | December 28, 2021

The Israeli occupation authorities have failed to provide evidence for outlawing six Palestinian human rights and civil society groups, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) said on Tuesday.

“The organisations have not received any of the evidentiary materials that the Israeli authorities purport to justify this draconian and sweeping measure,” Adalah said in a statement.

Adalah pointed out that it had sent a letter to the Israeli security authorities, demanding that they reveal all of the evidence forming the bases of the designations.

“There is no justice, fairness or due process for the organisations, without access to these materials in their entirety in order to defend themselves,” Adalah stressed.

On 19 October 2021, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz designated six leading Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as “terrorist organisations” under Israel’s domestic Counter-Terrorism Law which was ratified in 2016.

The Israeli military commander in the occupied West Bank also outlawed all the six groups, declaring them “unlawful associations.”

Adalah’s legal team said that “the designations constitute a blatant political decision aimed at destroying Palestinian civil society, based on arbitrary law and emergency measures.”

In its statement, Adalah described the six groups as “the most vocal against Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies locally and internationally and provide needed services to a wide range of Palestinian communities,” hinting that this is the real reason behind banning them.

“These baseless designations aim to delegitimise and discredit the work of these groups, placing the organisations, their staff and their supporters in danger of criminal charges,” the statement said.

Adalah reiterated that the six groups did not have any information about the reason for their designation. “To date, they have had no meaningful opportunity to review and challenge the bases of the designations, as no evidence has been provided to them,” Adalah said.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | 1 Comment

Why is Israel Amending Its Open-Fire Policy: Three Possible Answers

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | December 28, 2021

At the outset, the Israeli military decision to revise its open-fire policies in the occupied West Bank seems puzzling. What would be the logic of giving Israeli soldiers the space to shoot more Palestinians when existing army manuals had already granted them near-total immunity and little legal accountability?

The military’s new rules now allow Israeli soldiers to shoot, even kill, fleeing Palestinian youngsters with live ammunition for allegedly throwing rocks at Israeli ‘civilian’ cars. This also applies to situations where the alleged Palestinian ‘attackers’ are not holding rocks at the time of the shooting.

The reference to ‘civilians’ in the revised army manual applies to armed Israeli Jewish settlers who have colonised the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in defiance of international law and Palestinian sovereignty. These settlers, who often operate as paramilitary forces in direct coordination with the Israeli army, endanger the lives of their own families by residing on occupied Palestinian land. Per Israel’s twisted standards, these violent Israelis, who have killed and wounded numerous Palestinians throughout the years, are ‘civilians’ in need of protection from rock-throwing Palestinian ‘assailants.’

In Israel, throwing rocks is a “serious crime” and Palestinians who throw rocks are “criminals”, according to Liron Libman, Israel’s former chief military prosecutor, commenting on the new rules. For Israelis, there is little disagreement on these assertions, even by those who are questioning the legality of the new rules. The point of contention, according to Libman and others, is that “a person who is fleeing does not present a threat,” though, according to Libman himself, “the new policy could potentially be justified,” The Times of Israel reported.

The ‘debate’ on the new open-fire policy in Israeli media, gives one the false impression that something fundamental has changed in the Israeli army’s relationship with occupied Palestinians. This is not the case at all. There are numerous, daily examples in which Palestinians, including children, are shot and killed with impunity, whether throwing rocks or not, going to school or merely protesting the illegal confiscation of their land by the Israeli military or armed settlers.

In the Palestinian village of Beita, in the northern occupied West Bank, eight unarmed Palestinians have been killed since May. This small village has been the scene of regular demonstrations against Jewish settlement expansion and against the illegal settlement outpost of Eviatar, in the Palestinian rural area of Mount Sabih. The victims include Muhammad Ali Khabisa, the 28-year-old father of an eight-month-old child, who was shot dead last September.

Though the new rules have placed much emphasis on the status of the supposed Israeli victims, labelling them ‘civilians’, in practice, the Israeli military has used the exact same standard to shoot, maim and kill Palestinian alleged rock-throwers, even when armed settlers are not present.

A famous case, in 2015, involved the killing of a 17-year-old Palestinian teenager, Mohammad Kosba, at the hands of an Israeli army colonel, Yisrael Shomer. The latter alleged that Kosba had thrown a rock at his car. Subsequently, Shomer chased down the Palestinian teenager and shot him in the back, killing him.

The Israeli officer was “censored” for his conduct, not for killing the boy, but for not stopping “in order to aim properly,” according to The Times of Israel. The Israeli military chief prosecutor at the time concluded that “Shomer’s use of deadly force under the framework of the arrest protocol was justified from the circumstances of the incident.”

Israel’s disregard of international law in its targeting of Palestinians is not a secret. Israeli and international human rights groups have repeatedly condemned the Israeli army’s inhumane and barbaric behaviour in the occupied territories.

In an extensive report as early as 2014, Amnesty International condemned Israel’s “callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank” over the years. AI said that such killings had taken place “with near total impunity.”

“The frequency and persistence of arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and police officers – and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators – suggests that it is carried out as a matter of policy,” the Amnesty report read.

Even Israel’s own rights group, B’tselem, concurs. The organisation decried the Israeli army’s “shoot-to-kill policy”, which is also applied to “people who have already been ‘neutralized'”. Indeed, in the case of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian man who was shot point-blank in Al-Khalil (Hebron), by an Israeli military medic, Elor Azaria, in 2016, was not only ‘neutralized’ but also unconscious.

According to B’tselem, Israeli “soldiers and police officers have become judge, jury and executioner”. With this tragic and sinister trajectory in mind, one is left to wonder why the Israeli army would amend its open-fire policy at this particular moment. There are three possible answers:

One, the Israeli government and army are anticipating a surge in Palestinian popular resistance in the coming months, possibly as a result of the massive expansion of illegal settlements and forced evictions in occupied East Jerusalem.

Two, by perfectly aligning the existing open-fire policy with the aggressive shoot-to-kill military practice already in place, Israeli courts would no longer have to contend with any legal repercussions for killing Palestinians, including children, regardless of the circumstances of their murders.

Finally, the revised rules would allow Israel to make a case for itself in response to the open investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC), concerning human rights violations and war crimes in occupied Palestine. Israel’s Attorney General will now argue that no war crimes are taking place in Palestine since the killing of Palestinians is consistent with Israel’s own military conduct and judicial system. Since the ICC is investigating alleged war criminals, not the government itself, Israel hopes that it can spare its own murderers from having to contend with the legal expectations of the Court.

Though the timing of the Israeli military decision to amend its open-fire policy may appear sudden and without much context, the decision is still ominous, nonetheless. When a country’s military decides that shooting a child in the back without any proof that the alleged ‘criminal’ posed any danger whatsoever is a legal act, the international community must take notice.

It is true that Israel operates outside the minimum standards of international and humanitarian laws, but it is the responsibility of the international community to protect Palestinians, whose lives remain precious even if Israel disagrees.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Biggest pandemic lie: PCR tests accurately detect cases and deaths

By Joel S Hirschhorn | December 28, 2021

As of this Friday, December 31 the ubiquitous and infamous PCR test used universally by the public health and medical establishments is gone, according to a CDC declaration issued last July.

To all of the propaganda victims of the pandemic collusion mafia, now is the time (belatedly) to face facts. A huge fraction of all the fear-producing data in COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths are sheer crap. From the very beginning in early 2020 there were experts who said that the PCR test should not have been so used universally as a way to detect and document COVID infection and disease.

You may have noticed that there has been no coverage of this rather important act by CDC in the leftist mainstream media. Why not? Because now they have to admit that massive false positive results from PCR tests have produced totally unreliable data. These PCR tests had the capability of calling the common flu or cold COVID. And so much of the time they were run at very high cycles to create false positives.

FDA has other approved tests for COVID that will be used.

The larger point after two pandemic years is that the public should better appreciate just how easy it has been for public health, medical and public policy establishments to totally lie about virtually all aspects of the pandemic.

It started with PCR testing and continues to this day with COVID vaccines. If you were stupid enough to trust testing, then you probably remain stupid enough to trust everything said about vaccines and boosters as ways to curb the pandemic. And add on masking, lockdowns and school closings to the BIG LIES endlessly promoted by Big Media, Big Government and Big Pharma.

And now keep believing, if you remain gullible, that omicron is a huge health threat.

Starting with my book Pandemic Blunder I have worked endlessly to be a truth-teller. But it is not easy to combat the disinformation and lies from all the powerful forces determined to instill fear so that governments can coerce and control the public.

Though I prefer to focus on COVID deaths, there are reasons why these data are also problematic. So many have died with COVID but not from COVID.

Hospitals have utterly failed to effectively prevent COVID related deaths, now over 830,000 and that will surely reach 1 million by the end of March. Why? Because severely ill, late-stage COVID patients in ICUs are not being saved by current hospital protocols. Those patients got to that point because the government prevented wide use of generic medicines for early home treatment and even now for late-stage COVID.

Everywhere I look I see widespread dishonesty, incompetence and corruption. These have produced widespread suffering in all aspects of lives. Time for the revolution. If you have enough critical thinking capability to see all the many lies from the powerful, especially the evil Fauci.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 3 Comments

A More Aggressive Israel Lobby Is Coming in 2022

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW  • DECEMBER 28, 2021

Those Americans who dare to challenge the strangle-hold that Israel and its friends have over US foreign policy will likely find themselves targeted even more aggressively in the upcoming year. Two weeks ago the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), widely reckoned to be the largest and most powerful component of the Jewish state’s lobby, declared that it will now begin directly funding political candidates who are perceived as pro-Israel. Up until now, AIPAC has preferred to operate somewhat in the shadows, representing itself as a organization that is in part “educational” to justify its 501(c)3 tax exempt status which it uses to send all new congressmen on propaganda trips to Israel.

Of course, that has always been a bit of a fiction enabled by a Justice Department that is inclined to ignore all Israeli misbehavior. There are a number of reasons why AIPAC should be regarded for what it is, i.e. an organization that has as a priority the promotion of Israeli interests without any concern for the damage being done to the United States and its institutions. Under US law, specifically the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1937, AIPAC should be compelled to forfeit its special tax status and register, which would permit the government to have full access to its finances and also require a record of its frequent meetings with the Israeli Embassy in Washington as well as with senior Israeli officials in Israel. It would also have to report its significant and unparalleled lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. AIPAC would deny that it is actually directed or possibly funded in part by the Israeli government, but its website somewhat puts the lie to that conceit where it describes itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby” before elaborating how “We are proud to be a diverse movement of passionate pro-Israel Americans.”

The other lie promoted by AIPAC is that, up until now, it has not funded the political campaigns of its many friends both in Congress and in state and local governments. The reality is that AIPAC and some of its associated groups have aggressively vetted candidates for office at all levels. During its annual summit in Washington, politicians in attendance have routinely held fundraisers at hotels and restaurants not at the AIPAC event but often at hotels within walking distance. It is known that AIPAC publishes for-internal-use-only a candidates’ “scoring card” prior to elections reflective of views on Israel. As AIPAC is itself funded by Jewish billionaires and is in regular contact with them, the exchange of information on who is a “friend” and deserving of campaign money would be easily accomplished without having to use AIPAC as a conduit.

The new structure will consist of a regular political action committee (PAC) able to contribute $5,000 maximum donations to identified candidates per race, and a super PAC, which can raise unlimited money for an individual candidate. AIPAC PAC will be the name of the regular PAC, while the super PAC has not yet received a label.

AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman sent out an email explaining the changes. In perhaps one of the most chilling statements that I have read recently, Wittman asserts that “The creation of a PAC and a super PAC is an opportunity to significantly deepen and strengthen the involvement of the pro-Israel community in politics.” Given Israel’s current dominance of Congress, the White House and the mainstream media one fears what might come next if stronger “involvement of the pro-Israel community in politics” becomes a reality. Jews constitute less than 2% of the US population and they already are hugely overrepresented in elite professions and politics while at the same time reserving to themselves perpetual victimhood to justify the preferential anti-democratic policies that they actually promote. Will Joe “I’m a Zionist” Biden’s cabinet be required by law to be 100% Jewish? Will Congress require a Jewish majority? Will the government be setting up gulags somewhere out west for people like me who oppose such dominance and the “Israel Project”? Where does this ever end to satisfy the Jewish lobby?

One might well ask why AIPAC is changing its platform to make itself even more accessible since it would seem that the shift to PACs does not much change what happens behind closed doors when politicians come begging for money. The answer may lie in the perception by Jewish groups and the Israeli government that Zionism is in trouble due to the accumulation of egregious human rights violations and war crime attacks on neighbors. The world view of Israel is increasingly negative. So the response is to open the door a bit to visibly dangle more money, which the Israeli Lobby has plenty of, to take on critics.

Israel and its friends are particularly concerned over the handful of progressives in Congress who have expressed reservations about the blind approval of Israeli crimes against humanity. The PACs will enable a more robust response by providing readily available money to run pro-Israel candidates against them to bring about their removal from Congress. The Zionists also worry about the growing support for the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which seeks to put the same kind of economic pressure on Israel that once brought about change in South Africa. Already Israel advocacy groups at the state level have succeeded in passing legislation in 27 states that in one way or another punishes anyone one who supports “boycotting” Israel. AIPAC would like that number to become 50 and it is also pushing hard on Congress for “hate legislation” that creates harsh criminal and civil penalties for anyone who questions the holocaust or criticizes Israel, which will be defined by the legislation as anti-Semitic acts.

Hand in hand with the moves at the state level, Jewish groups are rewriting text books to include more on the so-called holocaust, to sometimes include mandatory holocaust instruction at grade school and high school levels. In one bizarre incident in Washington DC, students were made to reenact “scenes” from the holocaust including mass executions and burials. One student was made to portray Adolph Hitler and instructed to include a simulated suicide at the end of the exercise.

This overreach all comes packaged together with alarming reports, put out inevitably by Jewish groups, regarding a surge in what it chooses to label as anti-Semitic crimes. Such “crimes” include numerous no-victim incidents like scrawled graffiti on walls or display of posters defending the Palestinians. The Anti-Defamation-League (ADL), which leads the pack in its constant cries of anti-Semitism, hypocritically claims blandly that it is working to “Combat Extremism and Hate.” That definition apparently does not include the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of its co-religionists in Israel.

Indeed, the tendency of the Israel Lobby to overreach because it has become so arrogant due to its power is perhaps the key to bringing it down. A recent exchange in Florida demonstrates how the ADL, sensitive to any possible slight, actually reacted harshly to someone who was actually on its side. Five weeks ago, rabidly pro-Israeli Governor Ron DeSantis’ Press Secretary, Christina Pushaw tweeted a sarcastic comment stating that there was “no weird conspiracy theory stuff here” about press reports regarding the Republic of Georgia’s Prime Minister meeting with Rothschild & Co about investment opportunities. The ADL Florida Regional Director Sarah Emmons took offense and responded with the following:

“The belief that the Rothschilds manipulate currency and influence global events for personal enrichment and world domination is a staple of antisemitic conspiracy theorists. It’s deeply disturbing to see these kinds of conspiracies promoted by a member of Governor Ron DeSantis’ staff. Conspiracy theories, especially those with antisemitic origins, don’t belong in Florida’s highest office — or anywhere in the Sunshine State. We’ll be reaching out to the governor’s office to voice our concerns and discuss the issue.”

Jews and banking in the same sentence? Must be an anti-Semitic trope, as the expression goes. What if Pushaw had actually been bold enough to say something more to the point, like “Israel is trying to drag us into an unnecessary war with Iran”? In any event, the Zionists are preparing their offensive and we of the Israel-as-ally-agnostic community will find the upcoming year to be even more trying as the Jewish state and its friends tighten the screws to eliminate and even criminalize all criticism. Be prepared!

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

What really happened at Simpsonwood and why it matters today

By Steve Kirsch | December 27, 2021

If you read my story about RFK Jr. and how he became an anti-vaxxer, it mentions the Simpsonwood transcripts.

There is a book, “Evidence of harm” that talks about what happened there in detail. Some people think the author wasn’t sure who was telling the truth. That’s not true. The book author takes an objective viewpoint, leaving it to the reader to determine who was telling the truth. If your brain is working, it’s easy to figure out.

Basically, Simpsonwood was a meeting where the CDC was scrambling to figure out how to cover up the “signal” caused by thimerosal in vaccines.

Here is the original Verstraeten study which shows the connection with autism. RR=7.6 is huge. It means mercury causes autism.

Here is a transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting which was held to figure out what to do about the paper.

It’s a long read, so this excerpt gives you the highlights in a much shorter amount of time. The key thing was the study by Verstraeten. Version #3 was presented at that meeting.

This web page describes each version of the Verstraeten study. Search for “A “SIGNAL” DISAPPEARS ACROSS FIVE GENERATIONS OF STUDY.” In that section they’ll talk about a signal that “won’t go away.” They basically massaged the numbers to make the association “go away” so they wouldn’t have to admit making a mistake which would be a PR disaster.

In short, the CDC was more interested in covering their ass (making the signal go away) than protecting kids.

That was all 20 years ago. Why is this relevant today?

Because it shows the agency was corrupt 20 years ago and they haven’t changed. Today, they can ignore all the deaths in VAERS saying “there is no causality.” Bullshit. This is why they don’t debate any of us.

In 2002, the doctors knew that the mercury in thimerosal disappeared from the blood quickly. But it wasn’t until later (in a study by Burbacher in April 2005) that it was discovered where all the mercury went to: your brain. Paul Offit and RFK Jr. knew this.

Yet, fifteen years later the CDC is still lying to the public about the same issue.

Here’s the lie on the CDC website today:

Sure, it’s true that Thimerosal doesn’t stay in your blood a long time; but it’s not true that it doesn’t stay in your body a long time. In fact, it stays in your brain for the rest of your life (unless you use some special methods to remove it over time using chelation). They are not admitting established facts even today. They are still hiding that it stays in your body forever.

Was the Brubaker study wrong about the mercury going into your brain? Nope. It’s been confirmed 21 times. Here’s the most recent review showing that the mercury in thimerosal goes into your brain, confirming what we knew 15 years ago: 22 studies showing ethyl- and methylmercury cross the blood-brain barrier using the same LAT system:

In total, these studies indicate that ethylmercury-containing compounds and Thimerosal readily cross the BBB, convert, for the most part, to highly toxic inorganic mercury-containing compounds, which significantly and persistently bind to tissues in the brain, even in the absence of concurrent detectable blood mercury levels.

So the CDC is clearly lying to the public 15 years later about what happened back then, even after the science is completely settled.

And of course, Wikipedia doesn’t acknowledge this either (see the Disproven autism hypothesis).

So the lesson here is this:

  1. They covered up the dangers of thimerosal back in 2000… the five generations of the Verstraeten study shows that.
  2. But more importantly, and more clearly, they are still covering up the dangers of thimerosal today, claiming it leaves your body when they know it doesn’t. It is obvious to anyone doing a literature search.

So, do you think they are levelling us now about the safety of the COVID vaccines?

Answer: Of course not.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Indian Researchers Find that Natural Immunity Protects Better Against Infection than the AstraZeneca Vaccine

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | December 28, 2021

I’ve already covered three studies that found natural immunity protects better against infection than the vaccines. These comprise two from Israel, and one from Denmark. In each case, individuals who’d already had Covid were much less likely to become infected than those who’d been vaccinated.

Now a fourth study has come to my attention; this time from India. (The study was published as a preprint back in August.)

Malathi Murugesan and colleagues monitored infections in a cohort of healthcare workers between April and June of this year, during the country’s second wave. They compared four groups, corresponding to the different combinations of previously infected or not, and vaccinated or not.

Note: the vast majority of participants had received the AstraZeneca vaccine. This is in contrast to the Israeli and Danish studies, where most individuals had received another vaccine (mainly Pfizer).

Among those who hadn’t been previously infected or vaccinated, the cumulative infection rate was 14.9%. It was slightly lower among those that had been vaccinated but not previously infected, namely 11.1%. And it was dramatically lower among those who had been previously infected: 2.1% among those who hadn’t been vaccinated, and 1.4% among those who had.

To check that these results were robust, the authors ran a statistical model controlling for age, sex, type of work, and the daily incidence of Covid in the surrounding area (the city of Vellore in Southern India).

They estimated the protective effect of natural immunity to be 86% (which is consistent with a recent systematic review). By contrast, vaccine effectiveness was only 32%. As expected, the protective effect of hybrid immunity was 91% – slightly better than that of natural immunity alone.

There are now four separate studies all showing the same thing: several months after the corresponding event, natural immunity provides substantially better protection against infection than the vaccines.

“Vaccination efforts,” the Indian researchers note, “should be optimised by directing vaccination towards the areas where individuals are non-immune.” In other words, there was no need to vaccinate healthy people who’d already had Covid; those vaccines should have gone to the clinically vulnerable in poor countries.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

1 in 95 Boys in Just One School Has Myocarditis From the COVID Jab

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | December 28, 2021

Are myocarditis and pericarditis from the COVID-19 shots as “extremely rare” as the CDC and other world health agencies and officials say? Not by a long shot, says Steve Kirsch, who’s been following and investigating reported side effects of the COVID jabs.

A retired engineer with two degrees, Kirsch has no conflicts of interest in this issue; he’s just interested in the truth. And the truth is the rates of myocarditis in boys after a COVID jab are as much as 100 times higher than the 1 in 13,000 you’re being told.

Even before Kirsch’s latest findings, the CDC’s own numbers showed it was more like 41 times higher. But now the numbers from a school in California indicate the number is closer 1 in 95.

This is not something to be swept aside, Kirsch says, because children are being sacrificed for the sake of the shot, and they are going to die unnecessarily unless somebody speaks out. And that, he says, is why he is telling the world the truth, even though he knows the CDC will deny the numbers.

In his latest blog, he meticulously lays out those truths — including the fact that the CDC is lying about the rates of vaccine-induced myocarditis compared to COVID-induced myocarditis.

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Kennedy’s Fauci revelations – Part Two

By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | December 22, 2021

This is the second of two parts. The first appeared yesterday

THE revelations in Robert F Kennedy Jnr’s book about Anthony Fauci’s handling of the Covid crisis are damning. That is putting it politely.

He illustrates how the United States chief medical adviser, in charge of healthcare for the American people for over 40 years, presided over the worst coronavirus death rate in the world, nearly double that of many countries. The US suffered 2,107 deaths per 100,000 citizens, while Sweden, who accidentally became the world’s control group by ignoring damaging lockdown and mask mandates, had 1,444 deaths per 100,000.

Fauci is blinkered to affordable treatments, and inexplicably banned them. The rest of the world followed suit with the result that thousands who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were left to deteriorate at home until gasping for breath, when they were finally admitted to hospital and ventilated. Many never came home.

RFK Jnr, 67, son of assassinated US attorney general Bobby Kennedy and nephew of assassinated President John F Kennedy, began his legal career as an environment lawyer. Time.com named him ‘hero for the planet’. These days he is accused of being an antivaxxer, but like most activists in this arena he is simply pro-vaccine safety.

As he says at the beginning of his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health: ‘Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the Internet, or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power. Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of both government institutions and large corporations.’

Many formerly respected medics, as well as RFK Jnr, now find they are victims of cancel culture, while those in power are able to dictate undemocratic, unproven and draconian measures with the capability to destroy our lives and economies without censure or challenge.

Here is an edited extract from chapter 1:

‘Peer-reviewed science offered anaemic if any support for masking, quarantines and social distancing, and Dr Fauci offered no citations or justifications to support his diktats. Both common sense and the weight of scientific evidence suggest that all these strategies, and unquestionably shutting down the global economy, caused far more injuries and deaths than they averted.

‘During a speech to HHS [Health and Human Services] regulators, Fauci explained the fruitlessness of masking asymptomatic people. “The one thing historically people need to realise, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”

‘Dr Fauci observed in March 2020 that a mask’s only real efficacy may be in “making people feel a little better”. Perhaps he recognised that what masking lacked in efficacy against contagion, it compensated for with powerful psychological effects. These symbolic powers demonstrated strategic benefits for the larger enterprise of encouraging public compliance with draconian medical mandates. Dr Fauci’s switch to endorsing masks after first recommending against them came at a time of increasing political polarisation, and masks quickly became important tribal badges – signals of rectitude for those who embraced Dr Fauci, and the stigmata of blind obedience to undeserving authority among those who balked. Moreover, masking, by amplifying everyone’s fear, helped inoculate the public against critical thinking.

‘By serving as persistent reminders that each of our fellow citizens was a potentially dangerous and germ-infected threat to us, masks increased social isolation and fostered divisions and fractionalisation – thereby impeding organised political resistance.

‘The impact of masking on the national psyche reminded me of the subtle contribution of the “duck and cover drills” of my youth, drills that sustained and cemented the militaristic ideology of the Cold War. Those futile exercises reinforced what my uncle John F Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, called “National Mass Psychosis”. By suggesting to Americans that full-scale nuclear war was possible, but also survivable, ruinous investments in that project were justified. For the government and mandarins of the Military Industrial Complex, this absurd narrative yielded trillions in appropriations.

‘Social distancing mandates also rested on a dubious scientific footing. In September 2021, former FDA Commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb admitted that the six-foot distancing rule that Dr Fauci and his HHS colleagues imposed upon Americans was “arbitrary,” and not, after all, science-backed. The process for making that policy choice, Gottlieb continued, “is a perfect example of the lack of rigour around how CDC made recommendations”.

‘Finally, the lockdowns of the healthy were so unprecedented that the World Health Organisation’s official pandemic protocols recommended against them. Some WHO officials were passionate on the topic, among them Professor David Nabarro, Senior Envoy on Covid-19, a position reporting to the Director General.

‘On October 8, 2020, he said, “We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of controlling this virus. We may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We’ll have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents in poor families are not able to afford it. This is a terrible, ghastly, global catastrophe, actually, and so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method . . . lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle – and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”

‘Dr Fauci and other officials made no inquiry or claims as to whether lockdowns would cause more harm and death than they averted. Subsequent studies have strongly suggested that lockdowns had no impact in reducing infection rates. There is no convincing difference in Covid infections and deaths between laissez-faire jurisdictions and those that enforced rigid lockdowns and masks. Dr Fauci’s mask deceptions were among several “noble lies” that, his critics complained, revealed a manipulative and deceptive disposition undesirable in an even-handed public health official. Dr Fauci explained to the New York Times that he had upgraded his estimate of the vaccine coverage needed to insure “herd immunity” from 70 per cent in March to 80-90 per cent in September not based on science, but rather in response to polling that indicated rising rates of vaccine acceptance.

‘He supported Covid jabs for previously infected Americans, defying overwhelming scientific evidence that post-Covid inoculations were both unnecessary and dangerous.’

Under questioning on September 9, 2021, Dr Fauci conceded he could cite no scientific justification for this policy.

‘In September 2021, in a statement justifying Covid vaccine mandates to school children, Dr Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade-school measles and mumps vaccines – an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Dr Fauci [who is 80 years old] attended grade school in the 1940s. Dr Fauci’s little perjuries about masks, measles, mumps, herd immunity, and natural immunity attest to his dismaying willingness to manipulate facts to serve a political agenda.’

December 28, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment