Jacinda’s duplicity as pupils are told to mask up again or be punished
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | July 27, 2022
LAST week the New Zealand government called for mask wearing to be enforced in schools – and many schools have apparently decided to punish students who do not comply.
Asked whether she was happy with that situation, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ducked the question, denied the mandate, passed the buck, and still managed to appear happy for students to be punished.
She said: ‘We are really open-minded on this issue. We in fact went back multiple times to education and health and said, “Look, if you believe we should bring that mask mandate back we are happy to do that. Whatever you think is going to be in the best interest of our learners, our schools, and our health outcomes.”
‘They came back to us and said we should strongly encourage their use, but we should still allow schools to implement the policies themselves. That’s where we have landed. We have not said mask wearing is compulsory, but we are strongly encouraging it.’
You can watch the full interview here. There is plenty of spin, but not a lot of ambiguity. Head teachers have been given a green light to dust off the detention book.
Some schools are giving students detention either during lunchtime or after school (the modern equivalent of writing out ‘I will wear my mask’ a thousand times), which translates into loss of opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities and sports. This should be unacceptable and is certainly deleterious to a student at any age and may result in them becoming alienated or adversely affected emotionally or socially. Students go to school to learn and understand the process of verifying knowledge, to engage socially, and to develop skills in communication; whereby they may debate and agree or disagree with one another, without the fear of being punished or discriminated against.
There is a considerable body of scientific evidence pointing to the ineffectiveness of masks to stop transmission. Long-term mask use also poses health risks and causes significant learning deficits.
Some parents, and hence their children, will be well aware of this. A policy of punishment for non-mask wearers is the antithesis of a constructive learning environment and teaches: ‘Comply without question or face a penalty.’
School attendance in New Zealand is already at an all-time low. As a result of this move, it is going to fall further. The opportunities for constructive debate are fast disappearing in education, and we can understand why many parents are turning their thoughts to home-schooling.
The problem here is that the public is being deliberately kept in the dark about the ineffectiveness of masks and the dangers of prolonged mask-wearing. Most are following government advice, thinking that they are protecting themselves and others from Covid. They are ending the day with a headache and a sore face, but sure that they have thereby saved the world.
So far, the NZ government has kept a tight hold on the Covid narrative by warning people that alternative news sources and social media conversations are full of misinformation, whilst government announcements are closely following ‘the science’. They also give cash grants to the mainstream media and advertise to the point of saturation.
That is all set to ramp up from today. The government has concluded a formal binding agreement with Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Google (Gmail and YouTube), Amazon (Spark) and Twitter to limit the availability of harmful content including ‘misinformation and disinformation’ in New Zealand.
In a world first, the code is described as ‘voluntary’, but it includes a ‘commitment’ to being held ‘accountable’ which allows its provisions to be ‘enforced’. How is that for doublespeak? And who is deciding what is harmful?
The mask mandate rules and the information censorship have something in common. The government is asking others to do its dirty work, then asking us to believe it has nothing to do with those others. We are not naive: we already know how this works.
The agreement cleverly conflates things that we all feel should be controlled, such as child sexual exploitation and incitement to violence, with rational discussions about drug safety and effectiveness.
YouTube has previously withdrawn Covid content from view at the private request of the Ministry of Health. Apparently this can happen if any content causes the NZ government embarrassment.
I don’t suppose it has escaped your notice that internet censorship is a tool of oppressive governments. The dangers are becoming all too obvious here, where the majority of the public, subjected to blanket government advertising, still believe that regular mRNA boosters and flu shots offer protection for life that is stronger than natural immunity.
This is all taking on a macabre aspect, because official Covid data here and in the EU is showing that boosted individuals are increasingly more likely to die with Covid than are the unvaccinated. The apparent reluctance on the part of the government to engage with the implications of this official Covid data is seriously worrying. Governments traditionally have a general duty of care when it comes to policing public health measures.
This year has been one of the wettest on record in NZ. As a result, ants are coming into homes in record numbers and you may have been struck with how expendable ant populations are.
Ant colonies appear to have a centralised administrative policy whereby any number of workers can be put at risk in the search for homes and food for queens. This is a sort of groupthink which starkly contrasts with human ethics, wherein the individual is highly valued.
Here in New Zealand, we are 90 per cent mRNA vaccinated and we currently have the highest rate of all-cause mortality in the world. Even the Ministry of Health has admitted this is not because of Covid. Yet if you follow the government advertising and press statements, you will probably be unaware of this and happily sure that ‘the science’ is being followed.
I don’t need to draw conclusions for you here. If you are following the current Covid science journal publishing, you will be well aware of mathematical arguments entirely based on collected data which are taking place within a rational framework. Ignoring or hiding these is dangerous.
The author is in New Zealand
This blog is co-authored with Narayani Hatchard.
A Pandemic of the Triple Vaccinated
By Ramesh Thakur | Brownstone Institute | July 26, 2022
Deborah Birx was the White House Covid-19 response coordinator under President Donald Trump. Jeffrey Tucker recently wrote a brutal takedown of her deliberate misrepresentations of science and data in order to manipulate Trump into going along with her preferred but misguided policy interventions to deal with the Covid outbreak.
In an ABC podcast on December 15, 2020, she said: “I understand the safety of the vaccine … I understand the depth of the efficacy of this vaccine. This is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal.”
Appearing on Fox News on July 22, however, she claimed: “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.”
This might help to explain why there has been such a concerning collapse of public confidence in leading health institutions and “authorities.”
Biden’s claim of a pandemic of the unvaccinated
During a CNN Town Hall event on July 21, 2021, President Joe Biden said: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you are not going to die.”
On May 16, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed that vaccination did not just protect the individual, but also the community, because “by preventing the spread of the virus … you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.”
Relying in the judgment of his chief medical adviser, Biden took to talking about the pandemic of the unvaccinated in a two-track effort both to encourage vaccine takeup and to vilify, demonize and shame those who remained uncertain enough of the balance of benefits and short and long-term risks of the rushed Covid-19 vaccines to avoid succumbing to the multiple pressures to go along with the zeitgeist in order to get along with everyone.
We have now had both Dr. Fauci, the public face of the US management of the pandemic, revered in some quarters and reviled in others, and President Biden himself get infected with Covid, despite both being double-vaccinated and double-boosted.
Inevitably, to try and stop the official narrative on the benefits of the vaccine from unraveling completely and in order to encourage continuing vaccine and boosters takeup, they insist that their updated vaccination status helped to limit the severity of their infection. This is based on a cult-like faith, akin to self-validating and self-canceling explanations put forth by astrologers for predictions that come true and don’t, as the case may be.
Although on July 20, Fauci admitted that the data do make it clear that “vaccines – because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus – don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked why the media was not holding Fauci “accountable for the costly national policies and the lockdowns that were utterly built upon his initial assertion that the vaccines would prevent transmission and end the pandemic.”
Equally, of course, one must ask again: if vaccines don’t stop transmission, how does the government justify vaccination mandates for travel to the US?
In a matching vein, the New South Wales (NSW) Health report for the week ending 16 July claims that: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly overrepresented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19.”
The following challenges that claim using their own data.
By drawing on the distinction between the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines, it’s possible to argue that in NSW, rather than a pandemic of the unvaccinated, what we have witnessed is a pandemic of the triple-vaccinated.
NSW health facts
In September 2021, NSW had 844 staffed ICU beds, of which 173 (20.5 percent) were occupied by Covid-19 patients. (Australia-wide, the number of ICU beds is 2,183.) By January 2022, the number had increased to around 1,000. If necessary, this can be bumped up further by utilizing the limited number of ICU beds in private hospitals.
There are 9,500 general ward beds in public and another 3,000 beds in private hospitals in NSW. In mid-July 2022, there were 2,058 people in hospital with Covid-19 in NSW, or 21.7 percent of the public system’s capacity and 16.5 percent of the state’s total hospital beds capacity. An additional 6,500 people were in hospital for non-Covid reasons.
During the week of July 10–16, a total of 806 people were admitted to hospital with Covid-19, another 77 into ICU, and 142 people died with Covid-19 illness (though not necessarily as the primary cause of death). Moreover, of the 142 deaths, only four were aged below 60, so that people aged 60 and above accounted for 97.2 percent of all Covid-related deaths in the state.
Additionally, of the 142 dead, the vaccination status of 2 was not known. One hundred and eighteen of the remaining 140 – 84.3 percent – were at least double-vaccinated and 69 had received three doses of the vaccine: by far the biggest single cohort and almost equal to all the others combined. Hence the thought that perhaps what we are experiencing is a pandemic of the triple-vaccinated.
Efficacy vs. effectiveness
The Cambridge Dictionary defines efficacy as “how well a particular treatment or drug works under carefully controlled scientific testing conditions.” By contrast, effectiveness is defined as “how well a particular treatment or drug works when people are using it, as opposed to how well it works under carefully controlled scientific testing conditions.”
Thus doubts about the effectiveness of a new product in treating any disease can only be resolved once the vaccine is widely available and administered in the target population. GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), now called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is a partnership between the World Health Organization, Unicef, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Writing for GAVI, Priya Joi offers similar definitions, describing “efficacy” as the measure of how much a vaccine prevents infection (and possibly also transmission) under ideal, controlled conditions where a vaccinated group is compared with a placebo group. She adds: “Vaccines do not always need to have an exceptionally high effectiveness to be useful, for example the influenza vaccine is 40-60% effective yet saves thousands of lives every year.”
Examining the percentage of the thrice-jabbed in hospital admissions, ICU beds, and dead against the baseline of their share in the overall population, preferably age-adjusted, is critical to calculating vaccine efficacy. I’m not sure how helpful that is to assessing the effectiveness of vaccines in keeping the absolute numbers down below the state’s or country’s capacity thresholds of hospital and ICU beds.
If the primary public health justification for universal vaccination is to reduce the burden on the health infrastructure and prevent hospitals and ICU capacity from being overwhelmed – which was indeed the main justification in the language of two-three weeks to flatten the curve – then the key question becomes: How effective are the vaccines in preventing hospital admissions and ICU occupancy? Their role in preventing infection by itself is less important than their effectiveness in controlling the severity of the disease.
For example, a report from the Dutch health ministry found that the effectiveness of two doses of vaccines after one year had fallen overall to 0 percent against hospitalizations and minus 20 percent against ICU admission. Perhaps more pertinently in relation to NSW, Dr. Eyal Shahar notes signs in Israel of a short-term fatality rate of a third dose.
Efficacy is more helpful to an individual in assessing the relative risk of infection if vaccinated or not. Because Covid vaccines were granted emergency-use authorization and long-term efficacy and safety profiles were simply not available, doubts have persisted about the integrity, credibility and long-term reliability of data and results from the trials conducted by the vaccine manufacturers.
Moreover, as we’ve been made aware with respect to the UK, different branches of the government like the Health Security Agency and the Office of National Statistics use different and hotly contested methodologies for calculating the numbers and proportions of the population infected by Covid, which in turn determines the estimated infection fatality rate (IFR).
In any case, even if we agree that the IFR and case fatality rate (CFR) of flu and Covid are broadly comparable by now, the scale and magnitude of Covid means that similar IFR and CFR still produce vastly different orders of challenges for public health policy.
By contrast the effectiveness of the vaccines for controlling hospital admissions, ICU bed occupancy and mortality is measured by solid and reliable information that is both accurate and comprehensive in Western countries. This makes vaccine effectiveness a better policy tool for deciding on population-wide mandates while efficacy might be the more relevant for informed individual decisions.
Covid in NSW
In the period for the weeks ending May 28 to July 16, 2022 in NSW, of those whose vaccination status was known, only eight unvaccinated people were among the 3,509 who required hospital admission (Figure 1). The numbers in ICU were 5 unvaccinated and 316 with 2-4 doses (Figure 2); the number of Covid dead were 110 unvaccinated and 662 with 2–4 doses (Figure 3).
With 83 percent of people at least double-vaccinated, they accounted for 99.4, 96.3, and 85.4 percent, respectively, of NSW Covid hospital admission, ICU and deaths in these seven weeks.
In the final week of this seven-week period, of those whose vaccination status was known, there were exactly zero – zilch, nada – unvaccinated people among the 624 hospital and 59 ICU Covid-19 admissions, compared to 615 with two, three and four vaccine doses in hospital and 58 in ICU beds. Just the triple-vaccinated, who account for 68 percent of the population of NSW, made up 57.5 percent in hospital, 53.7 percent in ICU and 53.5 percent of the Covid dead.
The claim that the unvaccinated are “significantly overrepresented” in Covid-19 hospital admissions and ICU occupancy is not just misleading, it’s downright false. Seriously, do they look at the data in their own reports before drawing policy conclusions?
As knowledge about the rapidly fading efficacy of the vaccines, and in particular of each successor booster dose, has firmed, and also as the vaccine escape properties of the newer variants of Covid-19 have become better known, the equivalent question now is: are we into the era of the pandemic of the triple -vaccinated? The biggest strain on NSW hospitals and ICU beds is coming from their numbers.
Public health officials can talk and dissemble all they want about the baselines for comparisons and pretend to possess great sophistication in their understanding of the current state of the disease. They still cannot spin their way out of the hard data.
Instead they are exhibiting a severe case of cognitive dissonance in encouraging the double-vaccinated to get boosted and double-boosted. The ineffectiveness of vaccines in reducing hospital admissions and ICU demand is in itself sufficient to torpedo vaccine mandates. Doubts on their efficacy and concerns about their adverse effects and long-term safety further strengthens the case against mandates.
Ramesh Thakur, a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, is emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
CHD Demands D.C. Schools Rescind COVID Vaccine Mandate, Says It Violates Federal Law
By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | July 25, 2022
Schools in Washington, D.C., will require all students ages 12 and older to get the COVID-19 vaccine before they can attend school in the fall, despite warnings from legal experts who say the mandate violates federal law.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education announced on July 19 that student immunization requirements for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year will include the COVID-19 vaccine for all students who are of an age for which there is a vaccine fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“On July 8, 2022, the FDA fully approved the COVID-19 vaccine commonly known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for individuals 12 to 15 years old,” said State Superintendent of Education Christina Grant in a press release.
“The approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for individuals 12 to 15 means that, unless exempted, any student age 12-15 at the start of the 2022-23 school year must have received the primary COVID-19 vaccine series or have started receiving the shot by Sept. 16, 2022,” she said.
“We want to make sure that all of our students have everything they need for a healthy start to the school year,” Grant added. “This means making sure children see their primary medical provider for a well-child visit and receive all needed immunizations.”
D.C. law requires students in all area schools, including private, parochial and independent schools, to be fully compliant with mandated vaccinations, unless they have an approved exemption. The law also requires schools to verify immunization certification for all students.
The requirement was detailed in a law the D.C. Council approved last year and is the first legislation of its kind in the region.
CHD demands D.C. Schools rescind mandate
In a letter sent today to Grant, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), asked Grant to rescind the program or CHD would sue to overturn the mandate.
Kennedy said Grant’s press release was incorrect because the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was never fully approved and still remains under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
The FDA earlier this month granted full approval to Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine for adolescents 12 through 15 years old, without convening its vaccine advisory panel.
In August 2021, the agency granted full licensing of the Comirnaty vaccine for ages 16 and older.
However, there are no Comirnaty-labeled vaccines available in the U.S., for any age group.
Although courts have upheld many childhood vaccination requirements for licensed and approved vaccines, no court has ever upheld a mandate for schoolchildren for an EUA vaccine, according to Kennedy.
Kennedy wrote:
“In fact, a District of Columbia United States District Court held that EUA vaccines cannot be mandated to soldiers in the U.S. military, who enjoy far fewer rights than civilians. Doe #1 v. Rumsfeld, 297 F.Supp.2d 119 (2003). That court held: ‘… the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.’ Id. at 135.
“Federal law 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III) requires that the person to whom an EUA vaccine is administered be advised, ‘of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.’
“The reason for the right of refusal stems from the fact that EUA products are by definition experimental.
“Under the Nuremberg Code, a universal legal norm, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is ‘absolutely essential.’ The liability for forced participation in a medical experiment, not to mention liability for injury from such coerced medical intervention, may be incalculable.”
Commenting on the D.C. mandate, CHD President Mary Holland said, “It violates fundamental human rights and international law to force people, and especially children, to take experimental medical products.”
“We sincerely hope the District will reconsider its misguided policy for schoolchildren,” Holland added.
Another organization — Liberty Counsel — said it may also challenge the District of Columbia’s vaccine mandate.
“There is no FDA-approved COVID shot available and therefore, individuals have a right under the emergency use authorization to refuse these shots,” Matthew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, told The Epoch Times.
Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, people receiving an EUA product must be advised that some benefits and risks “are unknown” and given the “option to accept or refuse administration of the product.”
“It is your choice to receive or not receive [the vaccine],” Staver said. “Should you decide not to receive it, it will not change your standard medical care,” according to FDA fact sheets on EUA COVID-19 vaccines.
Several other school systems have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to implement a COVID-19 vaccine mandate:
• Louisiana: The Louisiana Department of Health in May said it would no longer seek to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory for the upcoming school year because the shot had not received full FDA approval for people under the age of 16.
The decision came after CHD and thousands of concerned parents on March 16 filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit seeking to stop the Louisana Department of Health from adding COVID-19 vaccines to the state’s school immunization schedule.
The joint lawsuit was filed in December 2021, by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and state Rep. Raymond Crews against Gov. John Bel Edwards after he announced COVID-19 vaccines would be mandatory for all children age 5 and over at public or private schools.
• Los Angeles: Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on April 28 recommended the district postpone its COVID-19 student vaccination mandate until at least July 2023 because the FDA had not fully approved the COVID-19 vaccine for all ages covering grades 7 through 12.
LAUSD officials announced last fall students 12 and older would be required to be vaccinated by the start of the 2022-2023 school year but delayed the mandate because tens of thousands of students still had not complied with the requirement.
• Washington: The Washington State Board of Health in April voted unanimously against adding COVID-19 vaccines to the requirements for students to attend K-12 schools this fall after its advisory group recommended against the requirement. The board said more data was needed about vaccines for ages 5 to 11 and raised concerns that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has yet to be fully approved for ages 5 to 15.
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
© 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.
Ugly Covid Lies
By Ron Paul | July 25, 2022
After two years of unprecedented government tyranny in the name of fighting a virus, the prime instigators of this infamy are walking free, writing books, and openly pretending they never said the things they clearly said over and over.
Take Trump’s White House Covid response coordinator Deborah Birx, for example. She was, as the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker points out in a recent article, the principal architect of the disastrous “lockdown” policy that destroyed more lives than Covid itself. Birx knew that locking a country down in response to a virus was a radical move that would never be endorsed. So, as she admits in her new book, she lied about it.
She sold the White House on the out-of-thin-air “fifteen days to slow the spread” all the while knowing there was no evidence it would do any such thing. As she wrote in her new book, Silent Invasion, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.”
She was playing for time with no evidence. As it turns out, she was also destroying the lives of millions of Americans. The hysteria she created led to countless businesses destroyed, countless suicides, major depressions, drug and alcohol addictions. It led to countless deaths due to delays in treatment for other diseases. It may turn out to be the most deadly mistake [?] in medical history.
As she revealed in her book, she actually wanted to isolate every single person in the United States! Writing about how many people would be allowed to gather, she said: “If I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”
She wanted to prevent even two people from meeting. How is it possible that someone like this came to gain so much power over our lives? One virus and we suddenly become Communist China?
Last week in a Fox News interview she again revealed the extent of her treachery. After months of relentlessly demanding that all Americans get the Covid shots, she revealed that the “vaccines” were not vaccines at all!
“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,” she told Fox. “And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.”
So when did she know this? Did she know it when she told ABC in late 2020 that “this is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic about the vaccine”?
If she knew all along that the “vaccines” were not vaccines, why didn’t she tell us? Because, as she admits in her book, she believes it’s just fine to lie to people in order to get them to do what she wants.
She admits that she employed “subterfuge” against her boss – President Donald Trump – to implement Covid policies he opposed. So it should be no surprise that she lied to the American people about the efficacy of the Covid shots.
The big question now, after what appears to be a tsunami of vaccine-related injuries, will anyone be forced to pay for the lies and subterfuge? Will anyone be held to account for the lives lost for the arrogance of the Birxes and Faucis of the world?
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.
AP instructs news media to avoid certain words when referring to transgender issues
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 26, 2022
The Associated Press Stylebook, used as a style manual by most media outlets, has been updated to include a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage.
The guide says writers should use “unbiased language” when referring to trans people. It also says writers should “avoid false balance” by “giving [a] platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”
“A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time,” the guide further states.
The guide adds: “Avoid terms like biological male, which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for assigned male at birth, and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”
It tells writers to describe the amputation of genitals and breasts as “gender-confirmation procedures” or “gender affirming care” because these treatments “can improve psychological well-being and reduce suicidal behavior.”
Other rules include: “Don’t refer in interviews or stories to ‘preferred’ or ‘chosen’ pronouns. Instead, write ‘the pronouns they use,’ ‘whose pronouns are,’ ‘who uses the pronouns,’ etc.”
Google “disinformation” and “election integrity” expert joins The White House
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | July 26, 2022
The long-since established “revolving door” scheme between the White House and Big Tech has continued with the appointment of former Google executive Camille Stewart Gloster as Deputy National Cyber Director with the Office of the National Cyber Director.
And before she joined Google, Gloster was already once working for the government – as a policy adviser in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.
The White House Office of the National Cyber Director has been operating for a year now, with Gloster slated to deal with workforce programs and security issues pertaining to supply chain; reports say that she will be joining other deputies in the Office who come from Microsoft, the CIA, and the National Security Council.
The practice of giving government jobs to former Big Tech execs, and of Big Tech employing former government officials is frowned upon as one way to establish an infrastructure of what critics fear can – and does – easily turn into “systemic collusion.”
Gloster, meanwhile, is known for her focus at Google, combating what the tech behemoth defines as misinformation on the Android platform – specifically, to “reduce the risk of user harm from misinformation.”
“She joins ONCD from Google, where she most recently served as Global Head of Product Security Strategy, and before that as Head of Security Policy and Election Integrity for Google Play and Android,” the announcement states.
Gloster has praised US and Chinese social media giants, favoring Twitter’s testing of “a community-based points system” to combat “misinformation” – a social credit style fact-checking system for politicians and public figures.
She also welcomed TikTok announcing new rules banning “harmful misinformation,” noting that it was good the super-popular video platform was aware that content posted there can influence political discourse.
Another way to influence political discourse, of course, is to arbitrarily declare content as misinformation and ban or downrank it, a method Big Tech has been employing in earnest over the past years.
Hunter Biden Evidence Wrongly Labeled Disinformation by FBI: Whistleblower
By Oleg Burunov | Samizdat | July 26, 2022
While Hunter Biden was initially probed for his financial and business dealings in foreign countries during his father’s vice presidency, US prosecutors then significantly widened their scope to include Joe Biden’s son’s business associates, their related deals, and the purchase of at least one firearm.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley has demanded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) answer a DoJ whistleblower’s allegations that the FBI downplayed damning information about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Grassley is the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI and the DoJ.
In letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, the senator revealed that a “highly credible” whistleblower had come forward alleging a widespread effort by some FBI officials to turn a blind eye to negative evidence on President Joe Biden’s son.
“The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” the letter, in particular, reads.
Grassley insisted that in October 2020, one month before the US presidential election, “an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed” by a senior FBI agent at the bureau’s Washington Field office.
The senator argued that the allegations obtained by his office “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”
According to the Senate Judiciary Committee member, “the volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter.”
DoJ’s Hunter Biden Probe Reportedly Reaches Critical Stage
His letter comes after CNN cited unnamed sources as saying last week that the federal probe into Hunter Biden had reached a “critical juncture” and investigators are weighing whether to charge the president’s son.
The sources told the broadcaster that prosecutors are now primarily focused on tax- and gun-related charges against POTUS’ son.
The firearm charge relates to at least one false statement made by Hunter in his procurement of a weapon. It is believed Biden’s son should have been prohibited from purchasing a firearm due to his self-professed struggles with drug addiction.
In recent months, prosecutors have discussed the matter with DoJ officials and investigators from both the FBI and Internal Revenue Service (IRS), according to the insiders.
The DoJ’s probe specifically looks into the contents of Hunter Biden’s so-called “laptop from Hell”, including compromising emails, naked photos and graphic videos that have been released since 2020, when the New York Post was the first to make public several emails from the device.
The laptop uncovered details about unseemly and potentially illegal activities by the president’s son, ranging from crack cocaine and alcohol-fueled parties with high-priced prostitutes to “business deals” involving the trading of cash for access to the elder Biden during his tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Joe Biden has repeatedly dismissed any knowledge of his son’s business activities, and most news outlets and social media companies successfully shielded him from the laptop’s revelations ahead of the 2020 presidential election campaign, at which time the computer was dismissed as a “Russian disinformation operation.”
Earlier this year, the New York Times and The Washington Post changed course, confirming that the laptop was authentic and that the damning information contained within was real.
The All-American Lie Factory
Government and the media work together to promote war on Russia
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 26, 2022
This article is derived from a speech I made at the July 23rd Peace and Freedom Rally in Kingston New York
There are some things that I believe to be true about the anarchy that purports to be US foreign policy. First, and most important, I do not believe that any voter cast a ballot for Joe Biden because he or she wanted him to relentlessly pursue a needless conflict with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war with unimaginable consequences for all parties. Biden has recently declared that the US will support Ukraine “until we win” and, as there are already tens of billions of dollars of weapons going to Ukraine plus American “advisers” on the ground, it constitutes a scenario in which American and Russian soldiers will soon likely be shooting at each other. The President of Serbia and columnists like Pat Buchanan and Tulsi Gabbard believe that we are already de facto in World War 3 and one has to wonder how the White House is getting away with ignoring the War Powers mandates in the US Constitution.
Second, I believe that the Russians approached the United States and its allies with some quite reasonable requests regarding their own national security given that a hostile military alliance was about to land on its doorsteps. The issues at stake were fully negotiable but the US refused to budge on anything and Russia felt compelled to take military action. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a good war. I categorically reject anyone invading anyone else unless there is a dire and immediate threat, but the onus on how the Ukraine situation developed the way it did is on Washington.
Third, I believe that the US and British governments in particularly have been relentlessly lying to the people and that the media in most of west is party to the dissemination of the lies to sustain the war effort against Russia in Ukraine. The lies include both the genesis and progress of the war and there has also been a sustained effort to demonize President Vladimir Putin and anything Russian, including food, drinks, the Russian language and culture and even professional athletes. The latest victim is a Tchaikovsky symphony banned in Canada. Putin is being personally blamed for inflation, food shortages and energy problems which more properly are the fault of the Washington-led ill-thought-out reaction to him. There is considerable irony in the fact that Biden is giving Ukraine $1.7 billion for healthcare, while healthcare in the US is generally considered among the poorest in the developed world.
I believe that Russia is winning the war comfortably and Ukraine will be forced to give up territory while the American taxpayer gets the bill for the reckless spending policies, currently totaling more than $60 billion, while also looking forward to runaway inflation, energy shortages, and, in a worst-case scenario, a possible collapse of the dollar.
All of the above and the politics behind it has led me to believe that the United States, assisted by some of its allies, has become addicted to war as an excuse for domestic failures as well as a replacement for diplomacy to settle international disputes. The White House hypocritically describes its role as “global leadership” or maintaining a “rules based international order” or even defending “democracy against authoritarianism.” But at the same time the Biden Administration has just completed a fiasco evacuation that ended a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from Afghanistan, there are now US troops illegally present in Syria and Iraq and Washington is conniving to attack Iran over false claims made by Israel that the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon. Neither Syria nor Iraq nor Iran in any way threaten the United States, just as the Russians did not threaten Americans prior to a regime change intervention in Ukraine starting in 2014, when the US arranged the overthrow of a government that was friendly to Moscow. The US has also begun to energize NATO to start looking at steps to take to confront the alleged Chinese threat.
The toll coming from constant warfare and fearmongering has also enabled a steady erosion of the liberties that Americans once enjoyed, including free speech and freedom to associate. I would like to discuss what the ordinary concerned citizen can do to cut through all the lies surrounding what is currently taking place, which might well be described as the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, far more extensive than the lying and dissimulation by the White House and Pentagon officials that preceded the disastrous Iraq war. It is an information plus propaganda war that sustains the actual fighting on the ground, and it is in some senses far more dangerous as it seeks to involve more countries in the carnage while also creating a global threat perception that will be used to justify further military interventions.
Part of the problem is that the US government is awash with bad information that it does not know how to manage so it makes it hard to identify anything that might actually be true. Back in my time as an intelligence officer operating overseas, there were a number of short cuts that were used to categorize and evaluate information. For example, if one were hanging out in a local bar and overheard two apparent government officials discussing something of interest that might be happening in the next week, one might report it to Washington with a source description FNU/LNU, which stood for “first name unknown” and “last name unknown.” In other words, it was unverifiable hearsay coming from two individuals who could not be identified. As such it was pretty much worthless, but it clogged up the system and invited speculation.
My personal favorite, however, was the more precise source descriptions developed by military intelligence using an alphabet letter followed by a number in a sequence running from A-1 to F-6. At the top of an intelligence report there would be an assessment of the source, or agent. A-1 meant a piece of information that was both credible and had been confirmed by other sources and that was also produced by an agent that had actual access to the information in question. At the other end of the scale, an F-6 was information that was dubious produced by a source that appeared to have no actual access to the information.
By that standard, we Americans have been fed a lot of largely fabricated F-6 “fake information” coming from both the government and the media to justify the Ukraine disaster. Here is how you can spot it. If it is a newspaper or magazine article skim all the way down the text until you reach a point towards the end where the sourcing of the information is generally hidden. If it is attributed to a named individual who indeed indisputably had direct access to the information it would at least suggest that the reporting contains a kernel of truth. But that is almost never the case, and one normally sees the source described as an “anonymous source” or a “government official” or even, in many cases, there is no source attribution at all. That generally means that the information conveyed in the reporting is completely unreliable and should be considered the product of a fabricator or a government and media propaganda mill. When a story is written by a journalist who claims to be on the scene it is also important to check out whether he or she is actually on site or working from a pool operating safely in Poland to produce the reporting. Yahoo News takes the prize in spreading propaganda as it currently reproduces press releases originating with the Ukrainian government and posts them as if they are unbiased reporting on what is taking place on the ground.
Another trick to making fake news look real is to route it through a third country. When I was in Turkey we in CIA never placed a story in the media there directly. Instead, a journalist on our payroll in France would do the story and the Turkish media would pick it up, believing that because it had appeared in Paris it must be true even though it was not. Currently, I have noted that a lot of apparently MI-6 produced fake stories on Ukraine have been appearing in the British media, most notably the Telegraph and Guardian. They are then replayed in the US media and elsewhere to validate stories that are essentially fabricated.
Television and radio media is even worse than print media as it almost never identifies the sources for the stories that it carries. So my advice is to be skeptical of what you read or hear regarding wars and rumors of wars. The war party is bipartisan in the United States and it is just itching to seize the opportunity to get a new venture going, and they are oblivious to the fact that they might in the process be about to destroy the world as we know it. We must expose their lies and unite and fight to make sure that they can’t get away with it!
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.
Katyusha rockets hit Emirati-owned gas complex in Iraqi Kurdistan
Press TV – July 26, 2022
A number of Katyusha rockets have struck a gas complex in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, in the latest attack to target the facility owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) energy firm Dana Gas.
“It is still not yet clear if there was any damage” in the Monday evening attack on the Khor Mor complex, said Ramak Ramadan, district chief of Chamchamal where the facility is located.
The gas complex lies between the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah, in a region administered by Kurdish authorities.
No individual or group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.
Sadiq Mohammed, an official from the adjacent Qadr Qaram district, said in a statement to the Kurdish-language Kurdistan 24 television news network that the attack was carried out using three Katyusha rockets, without causing any casualties.
Other reports said five rockets were used in the attack.
Earlier in June, the Emirati-owned facility was targeted three separate times by rockets that did not cause casualties or damage. No one claimed responsibility for those attacks either.
A Katyusha rocket on June 25 targeted the Khor Mor gas complex.
“The rocket hit around 500 meters outside the complex,” a local official said at the time. There was no immediate claim for the attack.
Katyusha rocket attacks hit the same facility on June 22 and June 17, also without causing casualties or damage.
Energy infrastructure elsewhere in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region has also come under attack in recent months.
Rockets struck the Kawergost refinery, northwest of the regional capital of Erbil, in April and May.
The assaults have come amid a simmering oil dispute between Kurdistan and the federal government in Baghdad.
The Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have been in a long-standing dispute over Baghdad’s share of Kurdish petrol, with the Iraqi government demanding full control of the region’s crude for years.
Under a deal between the two sides, the Kurdish region delivers 250,000 of its more than 400,000 barrels of daily oil output to Baghdad, in return for its share of the federal budget.
Over the past years, multiple reports have revealed that Iraqi Kurdistan is secretly selling oil to Israel at heavily discounted prices and that more than two-thirds of the occupying regime’s oil has been imported from the Kurdistan Regional Government.
London-based Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper said in a report in March 2019 that Israel was buying significant amounts of Iraqi oil from certain parties and “mafias” in the Kurdistan region for prices as low as $16 or $17 dollars.
British daily the Financial Times had earlier reported that Israel had obtained 75 percent of its oil supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Kurdistan’s secret dealings with Israel, which also include the region’s reported cooperation with the Israeli spy agency Mossad, come as Iraq’s parliament has recently passed a law making it illegal for the country to ever normalize its relations with the Tel Aviv regime.
The passage of the law cemented the Arab country’s invariable and age-old policy of refusing to recognize the occupying regime.
Black Sea and three musketeers
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JULY 26, 2022
As the conflict in Ukraine slouches toward Odessa, the war gets elevated to the sphere of a romantic adventure. If Alexander Dumas was alive, the idea might have struck him to write a sequel to his Three Musketeers, the historical novel written in 1844, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice, highlighting the absurdities of the Ancient Régime in a setting when the debate in France between republicans and monarchists was still fierce.
The absurdity of raking up a non-existent controversy over the Russian missile strike on Odessa on Friday casts Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the second time in a lead role with three swashbuckling musketeers — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
The first time was when Zelensky acted in a Russian musical film based on Dumas’ novel, with three beautiful Soviet actresses — Anna Ardova, Ruslana Pysanka and Alyona Sviridova — as musketeers, which was released in Moscow on New Year’s Eve in 2004.
Coming back to time present, on Friday, it was a controversy waiting to happen when Russia fired four high precision Kalibr missiles and destroyed Ukrainian military infrastructure in Odessa Port just a day after the Russia-Ukraine grain deal was signed in Istanbul, which provides for the resumption of grain exports from the region.
Zelensky promptly shouted that the missile strike was a “barbaric” act. And Blinken came on the line to level charges against Russia; Guterres jumped into the fray “unequivocally” condemning the Russian strike; and, Borrell lazily wrote on Tweeter that the missile strike was “particularly reprehensible & again demonstrates Russia’s total disregard for international law & commitments.”
As for the Russians, well, they slept over it — that is, until Sunday, when late in the afternoon, the Defence Ministry in Moscow inserted two tersely-worded sentences into its customary daily bulletin on the day’s operations in Ukraine:
“Attack launched by high-precision long-range sea-based missiles has resulted in the elimination of Ukrainian military ship and a depot of Harpoon anti-ship missiles delivered by USA to the Kiev regime in the seaport of Odessa. The list of neutralised targets also includes the production facilities of an entity specialised in repairing and modernising the fleet of Ukrainian Navy.”
Zelensky soon issued a clarification that the implementation of the grain deal from Odessa Port was not in doubt. Apparently, he hadn’t coordinated with the three musketeers sitting elsewhere who reacted prematurely. Blinken probably did the logical thing by distracting attention from the corruption concerns being revived in the Beltway regarding America’s gravy train to Ukraine.
Fundamentally, the grain deal is an eyesore for the Biden administration, which in the first instance never expected an agreement could be negotiated that requires great flexibility on the Russian military’s side. Even more galling is that the deal is turning out to be a political victory for Russia.
Moscow is getting good publicity over its pragmatism to lift its naval blockade for addressing the global food crisis. But what is not obvious to most people is that the grain deal is also a back-to-back deal which commits the UN to get the restrictions being put by the EU and the US on Russia’s grain and fertiliser exports lifted.
Besides, apart from the big income out of grain and fertiliser exports, there is that unquantifiable goodwill that Moscow earns from so many countries which critically depend on Russian wheat, especially in West Asia and Africa. Evidently, the itch to spoil the party in Moscow was found irresistible by Blinken & Co.
Enter Sergey Lavrov. From Oyo, Republic of the Congo, deep in the heart of Africa, where he was travelling to follow up on the grain deal — Russia is the number 1 grain supplier to Africa — Foreign Minister Lavrov sensed immense potentials in the emergent situation. Lavrov made three points while flying out of Oyo in the direction of Kampala:
- The grain deal contains nothing “to bar us from continuing the special military operation and hit military infrastructure and other military targets. And the United Nations secretariat representatives… confirmed this interpretation of the documents yesterday.” (Guterres was apparently unaware.)
- The missile strike was aimed at “a separate part of the Odessa port, the so-called military part” and, therefore, “there are no obstacles for shipping grain to contractors under the Istanbul agreements and we have created none.” (Indeed, Zelensky himself is acknowledging it.)
- The missile strike was aimed at the depot where the Pentagon’s Harpoon anti-ship missiles were stored. “These missiles were delivered to pose threats to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Now, they pose no threats.”
What Lavrov didn’t say but would have implied is that the Odessa war theatre has now become “kinetic” and Friday’s attack sets a precedent. The missile strike underscores that Moscow likely anticipated Pentagon’s antics to use the grain deal to shield its deployment of advanced Harpoon missiles in Odessa Port.
Curiously, off Bulgaria, next door to Odessa, on July 14-25, the US took part in a multinational maritime exercise, Breeze 2022, involving 24 warships, cutters, auxiliary vessels, five planes, and four helicopters manned by 1,390 naval personnel from eleven NATO member countries!
The controversy over the missile strike highlights that Russia’s special military operations in Ukraine will remain incomplete and inconclusive until Moscow altogether cuts off the US’ and NATO’s access to Odessa Port and cripples the alliance’s capability in the Black Sea. Obviously, that’s still some way off.
Meanwhile, the great game is accelerating in the Black Sea with Blinken doubling down to woo Azerbaijan. He spoke with President Aliyev on Monday to press Washington’s pending offer “in helping facilitate the opening of regional transportation and communication linkages.” Azerbaijan is the chosen bridgehead for NATO in southern Caucasus. (See my blog Ukraine’s Great Game surfaces in Transcaucasia.)
Romania and US to Hold Military Drills Near Ukrainian Border
Samizdat – 26.07.2022
CHISINAU – US troops stationed in Romania and the Romanian army will hold a joint demonstration exercise and an exhibition of military equipment at a location 125 miles south of the Ukrainian border on July 30, the Romanian defense ministry said on Tuesday.
“Members of the 2nd brigade of the combat group of the 101st US Airborne Division, stationed in Romania in accordance with the decisions of the Madrid Summit, will conduct demonstration exercises together with the soldiers of the 9th mechanized brigade ‘Marasesti,'” the ministry’s statement read.
The drills will take place at the Mihail Kogalniceanu military base in southeastern Romania, situated 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the border with Ukraine. Romania Chief of General Staff Daniel Petrescu and 101st US Airborne Division commander Joseph McGee will be present at the exercise.
Additionally, an exhibition of equipment will be organized, which will feature attack helicopters, tanks, armored amphibious transporters and artillery and anti-aircraft artillery machines, as well as special engineering and first aid equipment.