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Yemen’s Ansarullah turns down GCC invitation for talks with Saudi Arabia in Riyadh

Press TV – March 19, 2022

Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement has declined to attend talks to be held by the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at the regional union’s headquarters in Riyadh, stressing that it will welcome talks to discuss a peaceful settlement to the ongoing conflict if the venue is a “neutral country”, and that the priority is lifting “arbitrary” restrictions on Yemeni ports and Sana’a airport.

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a top-ranking Ansarullah official and a member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council, wrote in a post published on his Twitter page that a solution to the Yemeni crisis would be within reach in case members of the Saudi-led military coalition and their Takfiri militants demonstrated a genuine will for peace.

“Riyadh is a party in the war not a mediator,” Houthi highlighted.

The senior Ansarullah official said Saudi Arabia and its regional allies, which are involved in a devastating military campaign against Yemen, must feel ashamed for their actions and must put an end to the current fuel crisis in Yemen that has been triggered by a combination of tighter restrictions on fuel shipments into the country’s Red Sea ports and long holding delays.

Houthi said Yemen’s fuel crisis as a result of the continued detention of Yemen-bound tankers is badly hurting the Yemeni nation.

Abdulmalik al-Ajri, another senior Ansarullah official, also stated that his group is seriously interested in the establishment of comprehensive and just peace.

He sharply rebuked the Saudi-led coalition for its cruel and inhumane treatment of Yemenis, stating that the people have been unfairly treated by the alliance because of their race or ethnicity.

“Peace is sacred to us. We will welcome a fair and just peace once we come across it, no matter the initiative is developed in the East or in the West,” he tweeted.

Moreover, Yemeni Information Minister Zaifullah al-Shami said “the Saudi-led coalition has intensified its aggressive attacks against Yemen.”

He said the parties involved in the bloody Saudi-led onslaught against Yemen are attempting to escape the repercussions of the war, which entered its eighth year last Tuesday.

Shami said those involved in the bloodshed against the Yemenis are financing their Takfiri mercenaries.

‘Saudi-led coalition is not serious about peace’

Additionally, Yemen’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein al-Ezzi said the Saudi-led coalition continues to dither when it comes to stopping the war and establishment of peace.

“No one is deceived. This is not good… Peace and war are two different paths; each of which requires special behavior and clear indications,” Ezzi tweeted, commenting on the GCC’s intention to invite the Ansarullah movement and other Yemeni parties for consultations in Riyadh this month.

“Unfortunately, the opposite side is still indecisive about peace and left us with no option but to either surrender or fight back. Certainly, we do not want either of them,” he said.

“Only peace is all we want (for them and ourselves). This is what differentiates us,” Ezzi said.

Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war against Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with a number of its allies and with arms and logistics support from the US and several Western states.

The objective was to bring back to power the former Riyadh-backed regime and crush the popular Ansarullah resistance movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of an effective government in Yemen.

The war has stopped well short of all of its goals, despite killing hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and turning the entire country into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , | Leave a comment

US to remove IRGC from terror blacklist

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 19, 2022

Axios reported earlier this week citing Israeli officials and US sources that the Biden administration is considering the removal of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] from its terror blacklist, in return for a ‘public commitment from Tehran to de-escalation in the region.’

It is improbable that Tehran will give any such ‘public commitment’. But, a ‘private commitment’? Well, that may be possible. Indeed, the Axios report acknowledged that ‘The IRGC designation is not directly related to the nuclear deal, and any decision would take the form of a separate bilateral understanding between the US and Iran.’

No doubt, the lifting of the US sanctions is incompatible with the ban on the IRGC. The IRGC is deeply incorporated into the country’s economy and business. According to some estimates, up to 60% of Iran’s economy — including both state and private companies — is controlled by individuals and entities linked to the IRGC.

And the IRGC is well represented in the organs of the state. Executing a nuclear deal at Vienna while excluding the IRGC elites from plucking its low-hanging fruits is simply unrealistic. Arguably, even Americans wouldn’t want that to happen.

It is entirely conceivable that they too are eagerly looking forward to doing business with the IRGC top brass. After all, it’s best to do business with those who matter most in Tehran.

On balance, therefore, the Biden administration will concede Iran’s demand to drop the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. The crux of the matter is that the US is desperate to normalise with Iran since they also see potential to erode Iran’s friendly ties with Russia. The immediate goal of the Biden administration is to release Iran’s oil reserves. The amount of Iranian oil that may enter the market once sanctions are lifted is estimated at over two million barrels a day!

That said, even a US-Iran ‘bilateral understanding’ over the activities of the IRGC is not easy to achieve. The IRGC functions directly under the Supreme Leader’s supervision. Clearly, while from the American side, it is rather a formality requiring an executive order by the state department to legitimise IRGC, from the Iranian part, there is an ‘operational angle’ to it — namely, a commitment to end Iran’s expansion in the so-called Shiite Crescent of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

That involves the jettisoning of Quds Force’s ‘resistance’ and settling for peaceful co-existence with Israel. Does that look simple? 

But then, when it comes to Iran, nothing is simple, because nothing is iron-cast. Didn’t Iran help in the US invasion of Afghanistan and the creation of a puppet government in Kabul? Resistance politics too was the child of difficult times when the country was besieged. With the lifting of sanctions, Iran is unbound for the first time after the 1979 revolution.

To be sure, there is a growing uneasiness among regional states — and, possibly, even in Moscow — about Iran’s future trajectory. The Raisi government now proclaims a ‘balanced foreign policy’ — ‘neither with the West nor the East.’ The framing of the paradigm in this suggests that Tehran anticipates the world community to queue up on the road to Tehran.

Iran’s few steadfast friends in the region may begin to wonder what lies in the womb of time. Syrian President Assad’s visit to the UAE on Friday hints at realignments. Assad hopes to create more space for himself by rejoining the Arab family. Now, he has never been an acolyte of ‘resistance’ and is well aware that the UAE is Israel’s closest regional ally in West Asia.

The bottom line is that Iran will certainly seek integration with the industrial world, which will help it get the best that money can buy in technology or goods and services. But Iran also harbours ambitions that it will not be a junior partner of the West.

This is going to be a trapeze act. Integration into the world economy will require the freeing of market forces, which, in turn, carries attendant risks, as the pent-up social and economic discontent within the country seeks political expression and the genie gets out of the bottle. Colour revolution can take many forms, as current history shows. When George Soros and company move in, nothing is impossible!

Iran, of course, will be in doubts about the US’ intentions, too. Presently, Washington needs an accommodation with Iran devolving upon its capacity to pump more oil. But the US’ male-fide intentions are yet to be exorcised. And the crimes it has committed to the Iranian nation are no secret, either.

Above all, there is never any consistency in the US policies. Its self-interests come first and last. Iran doesn’t have to look far to see in the next-door Gulf region the debris of the US’ discarded Arab alliances once their purpose was served.

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Google complains about Brazil’s “fake news” bill, says it ignores “negative and unintended consequences”

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 17, 2022

Despite, in many cases, making itself the arbiter of what is and isn’t true, Big Tech giant Google is now concerned that Brazil’s proposed anti-fake news bill will do more harm than good.

The bill has previously been criticized by other online platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as free speech groups.

In an open letter, Google Brazil’s president Fábio Coelho, criticized the proposed legislation, whose purpose is to handle “misinformation” and disinformation on platforms with more than 2 million users.

“We recognize the importance of debating solutions to this problem, but we are concerned that Congress is doing so without considering the negative and unintended consequences the bill could bring,” Coelho argued.

According to Coelho, the bill, which is yet to be voted by Congress, would make it easier to spread fake news.

The bill includes rules that would require platforms like Google to reveal how their algorithms work. These rules make Google’s services less secure, according to Coelho, and would have a negative impact on how small companies market their products.

He said that the rules Google would need to comply with could “significantly impair Google’s ability to combat abuse and spam and protect our users from scams.” He also argued that complying with the rules could “make search engines less secure for everyone and more susceptible to abuse and fraud.”

Coelho also warned that by exposing how its systems work, Google would provide malicious actors instructions on how to bypass its protections and harm the quality of search results.

He explained: “With this, they could manipulate this information to obtain a better position in our search ranking, harming in the process those who produce reliable and relevant content.”

In a joint letter published in February, Facebook, Twitter, and Mercado Libre, an online marketplace, also criticized the proposed legislation.

They said the bill had the potential to,”restrict people’s access to diverse and plural sources of information; discourage platforms from taking steps to maintain a healthy online environment; and negatively impact millions of small and medium businesses looking to connect with their consumers through advertising and digital services.”

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 2 Comments

Ofcom Revokes Licence Of News Channel RT

By Richie Allen | March 18, 2022

Ofcom has revoked the licence of Russian state News channel RT, saying that the channel was not “fit and proper to hold a UK broadcast licence.”

According to The BBC:

RT’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been under investigation by Ofcom, and the channel had already disappeared from UK screens.

RT called Ofcom “a tool of the government”.

The channel became unavailable on all UK broadcast platforms earlier this month as a result of a ban imposed by the European Union.

Although the UK is no longer in the EU, the bloc applied sanctions to satellite companies in Luxembourg and France, which provided the RT feed to Sky, Freesat and Freeview in the UK.

UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who has described the channel as “Putin’s polluting propaganda machine”, said at the time she hoped it would not return to UK screens.

In recent weeks, Ofcom has launched 29 investigations into the “due impartiality of RT’s news and current affairs coverage” of the invasion of Ukraine.

RT deputy editor-in-chief Anna Belkina said Ofcom had “robbed the UK public of access to information”.

“What we have witnessed over the last few days, be it comments from the President of the EU Commission or from PM Boris Johnson, is that none of them had pointed to a single grain of evidence that what RT has reported over these days, and continues to report, is not true.

“Instead, what they have said is that what RT brings to its audience is not allowed in their supposedly free media environment. When it comes to the Russian voice, or just a different perspective from theirs, it is simply not allowed to exist.”

I’ve been watching RT closely since Russia invaded Ukraine. Over the course of the last few weeks, the TV channel and its website has published claims made against the Russian government by NATO countries, right alongside the Kremlin narrative.

In fact, I’ve been astonished at how balanced the content has been. The same cannot be said for the BBC or SKY News.

It’s a sickening blow for free speech, but it’s only the beginning.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

Issues and Insights criticize Google censorship

Demonetized

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | March 17, 2022

Market analysis website Issues & Insights has criticized Google for flagging one of its articles. The site suggested that the article was censored for violating the policy on election integrity.

In a blog post reporting the censorship, I&I said that the article that was censored was a poll, where respondents were asked about the 2024 presidential election.

“This new article wasn’t about climate change. It wasn’t about COVID. It also wasn’t about election fraud. It wasn’t about the Jan. 6 riots. It wasn’t about anything controversial,” I&I reported. “It was an article about the results of our own monthly I&I/TIPP poll, which asked registered voters ‘who do you want to see run for president in 2024.’”

I&I claims it received an email from Google’s AdSense that one of its articles was in violation of terms of service. The email warned that there would be no ads on the article until I&I fixed the violation. The email claimed that the article was flagged for “unreliable and harmful information.”

In the blog post, I&I insisted that it had not violated any of Google’s policies and, considering its appeal was rejected, the censorship was not a mistake.

The website theorized that the article was flagged for violating the policy against content that “could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.”

I&I concluded that “Google is now attacking content for no other reason than that it doesn’t like the facts being reported.”

“You’ve just taken another step towards acting like a totalitarian dictator. Remind us again of what that motto was you used to parade around. Be evil? Be like Stalin? Help us out here,” I&I wrote.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

483 More Deaths After COVID Vaccines Reported to VAERS, as Pfizer and Moderna Push for More Boosters

By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | March 18, 2022

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,183,495 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and March 11, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 25,641 reports of deaths — an increase of 483 over the previous week — and 208,209 reports of serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 4,321 compared with the previous week.

Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 788,624 adverse events, including 11,728 deaths and 76,231 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and March 11, 2022.

Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.

Of the 11,728 U.S. deaths reported as of March 11, 17% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 22% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 60% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 556 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of March 11, including 328 million doses of Pfizer, 209 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to March 11, 2022, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:

The most recent death involves a 7-year-old boy (VAERS I.D. 2152560) from Washington who died 13 days after receiving his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine when he went into shock and suffered cardiac arrest. He was unable to be resuscitated and died in the emergency department.

  • 17 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation).

The CDC uses a narrowed case definition of “myocarditis,” which excludes cases of cardiac arrest, ischemic strokes and deaths due to heart problems that occur before one has the chance to go to the emergency department.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to March 11, 2022, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:

The most recent deaths involve a 17-year-old boy (VAERS I.D. 2171083) from Illinois with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who died from cardiac arrest after receiving his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, and 14-year-old boy from Guam (VAERS I.D. 2157944) who died one week after his first dose of Pfizer when he suddenly committed suicide.

The boy’s VAERS report states:

“Sudden suicide one week after the vaccine. Patient was a perfectly happy child. After the vaccine, he became much more tired and achy and lost interest in doing his sports. One week later, without any warning, he hung himself.”

  • 68 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death — with 96% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
  • 646 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, with 634 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
  • 162 reports of blood clotting disorders, with all cases attributed to Pfizer.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to March 11, 2022, for all age groups combined, show:

Moderna asks FDA to authorize 4th dose for adults 18 and up

Moderna on Thursday asked the FDA to amend Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of its COVID vaccine to include a fourth dose for adults 18 and older.

According to The Associated Press, the request is broader than Pfizer’s. Pfizer earlier this week asked the agency to authorize a fourth dose of its COVID vaccine for adults 65 and older.

In a press release, Moderna said the request to include adults over 18 was made “to provide flexibility for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and healthcare providers to determine the appropriate use of an additional booster dose of mRNA-1273, including for those at higher risk of COVID-19 due to age or comorbidities.”

Moderna said its decision to seek FDA approval was based on studies from the U.S. and Israel about the Omicron variant, but didn’t provide further information. Booster doses of Moderna are half the dose of the first and second doses.

Pfizer and BioNTech ask FDA to authorize fourth vaccine dose for older adults

Pfizer and BioNTech on Tuesday said they submitted a request to the FDA for EUA of an additional booster dose of their COVID vaccine for adults 65 and older.

The companies’ request was not based on robust, peer-reviewed U.S. data, but on two recent studies from Israel — both published on preprint servers without peer review.

The first study was done in conjunction with Israel’s Ministry of Health and involved a review of 1.1 million health records. The study concluded rates of COVID in those who received a fourth dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine were lower compared to those who received only three doses.

According to the preprint published on medRxiv, since Jan. 2 Israel has been administering a fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine only to people over 60 and at-risk populations.

In the second study of Israeli healthcare workers, results showed a fourth dose of either Pfizer’s or Moderna’s vaccine boosted antibody levels, but neither was effective at preventing infections.

CDC deletes thousands of reported COVID-19 deaths in children

The CDC removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had attributed to those younger than 18, The Epoch Times reported. The change was made on March 15 on its COVID data tracker website.

“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC said on the website. The agency also acknowledged COVID death data is not complete.

Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 deaths in children from COVID, along with 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who tracks the CDC’s updates.

The CDC removed 416 deaths among children and more than 71,000 other reported deaths — arriving at a total of about 780,000.

The CDC’s statistics are frequently cited by physicians and experts when pushing for children to receive COVID vaccines. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, referred to the tracker’s death total on November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5 to 11 years old.

Vaccine researcher develops tinnitus 90 minutes after COVID shot, calls for more research

A vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota said he developed tinnitus after receiving his second dose of an mRNA COVID vaccine.

Dr. Gregory Poland’s symptoms began 90 minutes after receiving the vaccine. He described the condition as “fairly severe” and “extraordinarily bothersome, interfering with sleep and the ability to concentrate.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, tinnitus is a sign that something is wrong with the auditory system. It is commonly described as a ringing in the ears, but it also can sound like roaring, clicking, hissing, or buzzing that accompanies soft, loud or high pitches.

According to the most recent VAERS data released on March 11, 19,851 people have reported developing tinnitus after a COVID vaccine, with 12,027 cases attributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

CEO of German health insurer fired after releasing data on underreported COVID vaccine injuries

The CEO of one of Germany’s largest health insurance companies was abruptly fired last month after he released data suggesting German health authorities are significantly underreporting COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

The data, released by Andreas Schofbeck of BKK/ProVita, have since been scrubbed from the company’s website.

Schofbeck, who noticed an unexpected jump in vaccine-related health insurance claims, in February notified the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) — the German equivalent of the CDC — that BKK billing data indicated the PEI was underreporting adverse events to COVID vaccines.

In his letter to the PEI, Schofbeck wrote:

I’m “If these figures are extrapolated to the whole year and to the population in Germany, probably 2.5-3 million people in Germany have received medical treatment for vaccination side effects after Corona vaccination.”

Dr. Dirk Heinrich, chairman of NAV-Virchow Bund, an association of private medical practitioners in Germany, said PEI and BKK would be working closely to examine the billing code data. Heinrich also stated that the conclusions from Schofbeck’s letter are “complete nonsense.”

Children’s Health Defense asks anyone who has experienced an adverse reaction, to any vaccine, to file a report following these three steps.

Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

Hospital restrictions remain absurd and cruel

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | March 18, 2022

Following our recent article highlighting isolation and neglect in care homes, we are appalled to report that the situation is only slowly improving. What is more, many NHS sites are still imposing draconian and vindictive policies. Children are being separated from parents and dying relatives are being abandoned to a lonely end.

It is beyond comprehension that this situation persists. Three weeks to flatten the curve? More like 24 months to bulldoze the social contract. Here is one quote from a UK hospital this week:

“We know that continuing to extend restrictions on visiting will be disappointing and it is not a decision we have taken lightly. We understand how important the support of family and friends can be for patients in their recovery while they are in hospital, however, our number one priority is to keep everyone safe”.

These silken, virtue-signalling words – keeping “everyone safe” – are not only utterly simplistic, they disguise blanket policies that encourage multiple Milgram-esque acts of cruel depravity. We are hearing horrific stories of desperate children being denied access to their dying parents.

“Everyone” is not safe when a nonagenarian, now in declining health, has to spend their remaining weeks – or even days – in soulless incarceration. These individuals spent their entire working lives rebuilding this country after WW2 and then brought up a subsequent generation of taxpayers. Surely we owe these bastions of society the dignity of choice in their final days.

If this situation was not depressing enough, HART has also been made aware of the most cruel of indignities: patients in their final days of life are being denied palliative care if they refuse a covid injection. It is hard to comprehend the wickedness of foisting this particular medical intervention – with all the known short-term adverse effects – on someone with a severely weakened immune system who is already in their final days. It is hard to see this as anything other than battery.

There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people involved in the healthcare services want the best for their patients, so how can these things still be happening? Two years into this depressing saga, perhaps it is too late for those who promote these injustices to take responsibility for the harm caused. However, those that have been ‘going with the flow’, perhaps hoping for an easy life, might want to reconsider whether their consciences can bear any more of this, and whether they want to align themselves with faceless and sadistic despotism.

After all, you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

In Germany, Corona Limps On

The Bundestag passes a new Infection Protection Act

eugyppius | March 18, 2022

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the legal basis for our current regime of unnecessary restrictions and interference in the everyday lives of German citizens expires after tomorrow, but Corona cannot be allowed to end in Germany. The past few weeks have seen fraught negotiations within the coalition government to draft a new Infection Protection Act and continue the circus.

Today, after acrimonious debate, the Bundestag voted in the new legislation. It provides two tiers of ongoing Corona regulation:

1) Automatically and at all times, “basic protection” measures will be available to the federal states. These allow the state governments to impose mask mandates upon local transit and healthcare facilities, and to impose testing requirements on healthcare facilities and schools. Of course, they will all do so. Mask mandates will also continue in long-distance trains and in aeroplanes.

2) State governments will be allowed to impose additional restrictions, including vaccination and testing requirements for restaurants and public events, in the case of so-called “hotspots.” Anytime you encounter English vocabulary in German law, it is a sign of bad things. A vote of the state parliament is necessary to declare a hotspot and these additional restrictions.

The federal states are allowed a transitional period to continue current rules, but this ends on 2 April.

The press is starting to fill with vile articles about the “freedoms” that will be returning to us. The thing is, that these are not freedoms anymore. They have become temporary, seasonal privileges, which can be removed anytime political pressure builds on the state parliaments. A softening of the rules makes things more comfortable in the shorter term, but it extends the political half-life of the Corona regime substantially.

Despite all the crazy discussion in the press and from individual politicians, vaccine mandates appear to be dead in Germany; only about a third of the Bundestag support a universal mandate for adults.

That’s not as good as it sounds: A lot of other members of parliament want mandate-adjacent requirements that are also bad. Andrew Ullmann, from the FDP, has gained some support for his scheme of mandatory vaccine information sessions rather than mandatory vaccination. I agree that forced lectures from ignorant low-level bureaucrats are preferable to forced medical procedures, but the whole scheme also makes me find Andrew Ullmann even more loathsome than I did before.

In case you thought Ullmann was just trying to reach a compromise to ward off the vaccinators, he’s also open to mandates for the 50+ crowd, so he’s not your friend.

Meanwhile, the CDU (and CSU), who are not in government, propose setting up a creepy “vaccination register” so the vaccinators know who to pressure. They want vaccine mandates maybe possibly for certain at-risk groups and for certain professions.

Of 736 Bundestag members, a mere 50 support a resolution against mandatory vaccination, primarily from the FDP and the AfD.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

CDC reports of historical covid deaths drop by 70k to correct “coding error”

this data is still badly wrong, but i have some real concerns about who we are allowing to “fix” it and how unsupervised they will be as they do so

el gato malo – bad cattitude – march 18, 2022

of all the insanity around covid that took what would literally have been a baddish flu year would have passed with little comment or historical import and turned it into a mass hallucination of apocalypse, defining “covid death” as a death not “from covid as a proximate cause” but rather as “death from any cause if you had had a positive PCR test for covid in the previous 28-30 days” carries a special pride of place.

many of us stood up and screamed about this right from the beginning.

it made zero sense. nothing else is counted this way (for a reason) and the confluence of doing so with the staggeringly unprecedented mass testing of healthy people with overclocked PCR tests run at a 40 or higher Ct that was so over-amplified that it lacked any clinical relevance whatsoever and was probably kicking out 70-90% rates of non-clinical positivity was madness.

once this disastrous definition was put in place, apocalypse was assured.

but “the experts” ran with it, defended it, and treated as unarguable truth that “800k+ americans died from covid.” but they didn’t. it was not even close.

and now that the panic they drove has ended and further deaths are “inconvenient” they are starting to walk it back over what they claim was a “coding error.”

these charts are telling.

the one on the left is from BEFORE the one on the right.

historical deaths dropped 72k.

huh.

it’s a start, but this is still a glaring, whopping overstatement.

now do “died from, not merely in proximity to a positive PCR sample for” covid and let’s see what happens.

my bet is that you drop the count by another ~70%.

here’s some fun math:

the average person probably has (to be conservative) 2 episodes a year in which they would, at a 40 Ct, test positive for the common cold. this does not mean you were sick, felt sick, were contagious, or any of that. it just means “you had enough viral genetic material in your mucus that someone using 1 trillion X amplification on it before looking for it could find it.”

let’s say these periods last 3 days and if you die in the 28 days following, this gets called a “common cold death” just as we did for covid.

this gives you something on the order of 62 days a year when getting hit by a car would still get counted as “cold death” just as in covid.

that’s ~17% of the year. (and these times will tend to overlap with peak winter seasons when more people die anyhow, but let’s ignore that.)

  • about 2.9 million people die in the US annually.
  • 17% of 2.9 million is 493,000.

starting to see the problem?

adjust this for higher rates of positive viral tests for the old and infirm who are also more likely to die and this really blows out.

  • 53% of US covid deaths were in the 6.9% of population over 75 years old and 75% were in over 65s’.
  • only about 8% of deaths were in the 39% of the population under 30.

the number of people who “tested positive for covid” was likely overstated by 70-90% when considering who had actual clinical covid and was sick/contagious.

even the NYT figured this out.

and yet the folks at CDC have not, until recently, even tried to address this. this will have had a proportional effect on reported “covid deaths.”

and now they are seeking to erase them and claiming “coding.”

and i do not trust this one whit.

the CDC have not been straight with us from the beginning and have been pushing definitions they knew to be wrong and studies on interventions, especially masking, that were clear, undeniable fraud.

and i fear we are in for more of the same because the CDC are completely, hopelessly politicized and compromised and their federal paymasters need to ensure that 2 things happen:

  1. that non-pharmaceutical interventions look like they worked
  2. that the vaccines they pushed so hard and got so wrong worked

and neither is true.

but i doubt that they will let that stop them. i have spoken many times about how the epidemiology grift is just the climate grift played at 50X fast forward.

many of the tactics and praxis of running and manipulating the scare to grab for cash, prominence and power have been the same and i expect this to remain so. it’s the same playbook.

so let me show you a trick play that has been all too common in climate and that i suspect we’re about to see run here:

when the data goes against you, change the data.

in climate, this has gone on for decades. they literally go back and change the past, cooling the warm periods of the 1930’s and adjusting current temperatures up. bingo, bango, instant warming trend and “unprecedented highs.”

this wonderful gif from steven goddard makes the process clear. and this was LONG before the east anglia “climategate” scandal and the 100 other times they have been caught adulterating data. it’s rife to the point that you pretty much cannot trust anything in the space. i found this so hard to believe i actually once went and checked the paper records myself to comp them to those in the databases. it’s true. they literally inverted the slope of the curve from the 1930’s to 2000 by fiddling the data.

and if you think they will not play this game on covid, i must sincerely ask you: “what movie have you been watching for the last 2 years?”

the fix is about to be in. “adjustments” are going to be applied selectively to make masks look like they worked and vaccines look like they reduced overall societal hospitalization and deaths from covid.

the US data is about to be turned into propaganda.

will this spread globally? who knows? it certainly did in climate. i don’t think this crowd is any nobler and the incentives are the same.

the same people who overstated this situation so aggressively are going to be the ones “fixing” the data to make sure it’s correct.

the same people who pushed and mandated draconian responses that have failed so spectacularly are going to be the ones “adjusting” the data that allows us to assess those outcomes.

we’re already caught them lying who knows how many times.

it is not a conspiracy theory to expect them to lie again.

it is a conspiracy theory to claim they’ll be honest this time.

i recommend grabbing all the data you can now and storing it. the presumption it will be available in unaltered form in the future may not be a good one.

honestly, tracking the changes to the dataset may be the only way to see if the CDC is playing it straight and they look to be disappearing past references already.

this is probably a worthwhile project for some of the datahawks.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 3 Comments

AUKUS to bolster combat capabilities of nuclear submarine fleet to challenge China

By Paul Antonopoulos | March 18, 2022

Australia will become the second home for US and British nuclear submarines, meaning that the island country will effectively become a nuclear staging ground aimed at challenging China in the Asia-Pacific region. In this way, AUKUS – a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, provokes increased confrontation with China.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on March 15 that the Anglo Alliance’s nuclear ships would initially be stationed in the sparsely populated state of Western Australia. However, he added that infrastructure on the east coast is “incredibly important for how we defend our nation.” Morrison explained that a site for a new base would be decided after the upcoming federal elections to be held on or before May 21. It is noted that although the eastern states account for 37% of the country’s total land area, they are home to over 80% of the population as well as Australia’s most important cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane.

Earlier this week, in a virtual speech at the Lowy Institute, the Prime Minister announced his decision to build a new base in the east to support the deployment of Australia’s future nuclear submarine fleet under an agreement signed within the framework of the AUKUS military alliance. Three locations for the new eastern base are under consideration – Brisbane in the northeast state of Queensland, and Newcastle and Port Kembla to the north and south of Sydney respectively.

“The ability of US and UK nuclear-powered submarines to be here on the west coast, and ultimately we’d like to see them on the east coast as well, is all part of what our plan is as we continue to push forward our AUKUS partnership,” the Australian Prime Minister said.

In this way, the US and UK are using Australia as a junior partner to bolster the combat capabilities of the bloc’s nuclear submarine fleet in the Indian and South Pacific as confrontation with Russia and China escalates. With nuclear warships based in Australia, it greatly enhances the abilities of the US and British naval fleets to perform operations far off from home. However, it is likely not just about submarines, and we can maybe expect American and British aircraft carriers to also appear in Australia.

In general, for a long time, Australia banned nuclear vessels from entering its base.

For the goal of containing China in Asia-Pacific, Australia has now become critical for the US and UK. For example, a US aircraft carrier after 5-7 days of conflict with a potential enemy needs to replenish ammunition for aircraft on the carrier, while repairs and additional fuel for the aircraft are usually carried out in port. Australia can now fill this gap since quite obviously British and American ships operating in and around Southeast Asia are far from home.

This elevated importance given to Australia by Britain and the US has already resulted in greater military confrontation with China, with the East Asian country complaining that an Australian surveillance aircraft was flying in a “malicious” and “unprofessional” fashion close to its warships when the plane was targeted by a laser weapon.

Although China was accused of putting lives at risk by the Australian government in February when a laser was directed towards a RAAF P-8 Poseidon plane monitoring two People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) warships sailing through the Arafura Sea, the Chinese Ministry of National Defence released a short video clip recorded on a warship, showing the Australian aircraft flying close by in a “nuisance” manner.

“It is evident in the video taken by the Chinese naval ship that the Australian military aircraft was conducting close-in reconnaissance on Chinese naval vessels,” Senior Colonel Tan Kefei said. “The Australian military aircraft’s conduct was malicious in intention and unprofessional in operation and posed threats to the safety of ships, aircraft and personnel of both sides.”

With Chinese and Australian militaries already skirmishing in such a manner, the entry of US and British nuclear submarines into Australian ports will only further destabilize the situation. It is recalled that Australia’s decision to equip its fleet with nuclear submarines under AUKUS was met with mistrust across the region, especially from Southeast Asian partners like Malaysia and Indonesia.

Now, it has been reported that Australia is actually becoming a “second home” for US and UK nuclear submarines. In the context of growing confrontations between the US and China, including the Taiwan issue, AUKUS in fact raises tensions in the region by encouraging the increasing nuclearization of the region.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 5 Comments

Biden in 1998: I was suggesting we bomb Belgrade, destroy all bridges on the Drina.

By Rick Rozoff | Anti-Bellum | March 17, 2022

The Russians published a video – Biden ordered the bombing of Belgrade

VIDEO

The video shows the current president [deranged tyrant] of the USA, Joe Biden, saying that it was he who proposed the bombing of the capital of the then FR Yugoslavia.

“I suggested bombing of Belgrade. I suggested that American pilots go there and destroy all bridges on the Drina,” Biden said.

Zakharova states that Biden talks about it even before the bombing, explaining that Belgrade was bombed.

“Yugoslavia did not pose a direct or indirect threat to the United States or its citizens. They just needed it,” [Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria] Zakharova concluded.

====

After the 78-day air war:

“I will continue with every fiber in my being to keep America involved with troops that can shoot and kill…”

“I believe it is absolutely essential for American troops to be on the ground with loaded rifles and drawn bayonets.”

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

U.S. outsourced dangerous infections studies to other countries: Lavrov

Pentagon-funded labs in nations bordering Russia and China need to be opened up for inspections, the Russian FM said

Samizdat | March 18, 2022

Russia suspects Pentagon-funded bioresearch laboratories in foreign nations, including those in Ukraine, may pose a threat because of the secrecy surrounding their work, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Washington apparently didn’t want to risk exposing its own people to the pathogenic threat, he suggested.

“The Americans some years ago decided that it was too dangerous to do [such research] on their own soil. So, they moved all these threatening and dangerous activities to other countries,” Lavrov claimed.

“More and more they concentrate their research and experiments around the borders of the Russian Federation and China,” he remarked.

Lavrov was referring to biolabs funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the existence of which was highlighted during Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The Russian military claims it has discovered evidence that the work in Ukrainian labs funded by the US Department of Defense had military applications.

Washington has denied the claims, which had reiterated Russia’s previous suspicions about research undertaken on foreign territory in return for American grants. The US government said the labs existed to study emerging infections throughout the world and served as an epidemic early warning system.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland last week testified under oath that there were “biological research facilities in Ukraine,” and that the US was assisting Kiev in destroying research materials so they would not get into Russia’s hands.

In his interview, Lavrov said that, in his assessment, there were more than 300 biolabs worldwide involved in research for the Pentagon. Such facilities should be subject to international monitoring for compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans any work related to germ warfare. There is no verification mechanism for the treaty – a lapse Moscow wants addressed, Lavrov said.

The UN Security Council is to convene later on Friday at Russia’s request to discuss a legally binding protocol to the convention, “which would require obligatory transparency measures by any participating state,” the minister said. The US stonewalled attempts to implement such a protocol throughout the 1990s before blocking it in 2001, therefore “the Americans … will be against it,” Lavrov predicted, branding the obstruction “not defensible.”

Beijing has previously supported calls for greater transparency about American bioresearch, arguing that Washington would have nothing to hide if all work carried out in foreign labs was as benign as it claimed.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

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