Dr. David McGrogan – The Daily Sceptic – September 27, 2022
It is encouraging that Tory MPs are taking seriously the threat to an open society posed by PayPal’s demonetisation of UsForThem, Toby Young, the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic. And it is more encouraging still that they are likely to respond to the threat through legislation – possibly through an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill. It is vital, however, that they get this response right, and understanding the purported legal basis for a company like PayPal excluding a user from its services is crucial in this regard.
To get some preliminary matters out of the way, it is important first to distinguish a financial services provider like PayPal from a social media outfit like Twitter or Facebook/Meta. There is a case to be made (although it is ultimately not one I would concur with) that it is legitimate for a social media operator to exclude people who express opinions deemed undesirable by its owners. I agree, for example, with the position that the Supreme Court adopted with respect to the baker in the famous ‘gay cake’ case; it is unconscionable for the law to force the owner of a private company to propagate a message that would conflict with said owner’s sincerely held beliefs. I think large social media providers are fundamentally different from the baker in that case, but I can at least understand the basis on which somebody would argue that Twitter booting, say, Andrew Tate, is essentially the same as a Christian baker refusing to bake a cake bearing a message supporting gay marriage (or, let’s say, a hypothetical Muslim printer refusing to print a satirical magazine bearing an image of the prophet). But there is no sense in which PayPal can be construed to be said to be in this position. PayPal does not serve to propagate messages of any kind; nor are its users even publicly known or identifiable for the large part; whether or not the Daily Sceptic is a customer of PayPal places no requirement on the latter to associate itself with the expression of any view whatsoever. It is a different kettle of fish.
It is also important to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons for a business like PayPal seeking to exclude users who express certain kinds of views that might be connected with criminal offences, even indirectly. To use an obvious and extreme example, there would be nothing wrong with PayPal closing an account it discovered to be connected to an organisation dedicated to sharing positive perspectives on paedophilia; while a group of paedophiles getting together to talk about how wonderful their predilection is would not (I think) in itself constitute a criminal offence, it is easy to see why PayPal would wish to avoid coming within a barge-pole’s distance of any suggestion it was knowingly assisting such a group. However, this kind of concern clearly would not apply with respect to the FSU, UsForThem, the Daily Sceptic or Toby personally.
A company like PayPal cannot therefore fall back on these kinds of excuses in behaving as it has done. And in any case, we can all what is really going on here – it’s nothing to do with matters of conscience or a legitimate attempt to ‘de-risk’ with respect to potentially criminal behaviour. (It is notable, for example, that PayPal appears to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about the risks of being seen to be associated with precisely the kind of paedophile support group I mentioned earlier.) This is simply a case of somebody at PayPal wishing to send a statement: “We’re on the side of the good guys, and if you’re not on our side, mind your P’s and Q’s.” The fact that a very important set of elections is due to take place in the US in November undoubtedly has something to do with this.
It is therefore entirely legitimate for Parliament to legislate to prevent this kind of behaviour, and the question thus becomes: what form should such legislation take?
Looking at the underlying purported legal justification for PayPal’s conduct will give us an answer. The recent closure of the accounts of the Daily Sceptic et al seems to have been done on the basis that these respective parties have violated their respective User Agreements with PayPal. The User Agreement, it must be said, has not been particularly clearly drafted, but this much at least is clear: PayPal may close a user’s account if the user is in breach of its terms. The specific breaches themselves in this case were not, however, made particularly clear. Initially, it seemed that PayPal was accusing the Daily Sceptic et al of breaching its Acceptable Use Policy – namely item 2 (f) of that document, which prohibits the user engaging in ‘the promotion of hate, violence or other forms of intolerance’. This obviously wouldn’t stick, though, and subsequent statements by PayPal have suggested that the accounts were closed on the basis that the Daily Sceptic et al were ‘providing false, inaccurate or misleading information’, which is on the list of ‘restricted activities’ in the User Agreement proper.
The haphazard way in which PayPal appears to have conducted itself is suggestive that the decision was made to close the accounts first, with the justification being worked out afterwards. But we do now know what its legal representatives would trot out as the purported contractual basis for closing the accounts in question: being in breach of the User Agreement by engaging in the restricted activity of providing false, inaccurate or misleading information.
And this in turn would allow us to identify the remedy in the creation of a relatively short Act (or amendment to the Online Safety Bill). I am not a Parliamentary drafter, but my suggestion would be something along the lines of:
A provider of financial services may not by reference to any contract term terminate or suspend the provision of services to a user on the basis of that user spreading false, inaccurate or misleading information, or similar, unless it is satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the spreading of said information would in itself constitute a criminal offence in the laws of England and Wales.
This would quite neatly prevent PayPal or any other such provider from doing this kind of thing in future, while allowing such operators to ‘de-risk’ for the legitimate reason of avoiding any connection to the commission of crime. The consequence would simply be to make a term of a contract between a financial services provider and a customer purporting to allow termination on the grounds of the spreading of false information, etc., unenforceable, and the legislation could be worded to give this immediate effect.
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.
Stop Press: Allysia Finley has written a good comment piece for the Wall St Journal about why the Supreme Court may well uphold the law in Texas prohibiting large social media companies from blocking speech based on viewpoint.
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 27, 2022
During an appearance at the “Goalkeepers 2022” event, investor and philanthropist Bill Gates lamented “misinformation” that was shared about him amid the coronavirus pandemic and complained that so-called misinformation about masks and vaccines reduced compliance with mandates.
“I’d say the biggest tragedy is that it [misinformation] fragmented society where certain sources, if they told you to wear a mask, that was the last thing you were going to do,” Gates said. “Or if they told you, you know, get the vaccine, particularly to protect, reduce transmission to elderly people, they didn’t comply. It is a phenomena that held us back and hurt us in a pretty dramatic way.”
Gates also dismissed “conspiracy theories” about him wanting to track people.
“This whole tracking thing, why would I want to track you?” Gates said. “I don’t know, you know. Do I have time to track all these people?”
While Gates was seemingly referring to vaccines, just one day later, at the “Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit,” Gates admitted that he has a group dedicated to tracking what people say about him online.
“I have a group that tracks what’s on the web that’s talking about things that connect to me,” Gates said. “Overwhelmingly during the pandemic, 95% was all the conspiracy theory stuff. It is calming down now.”
At the Goalkeepers 2022 event, Gates also complained that conspiracy theories are “cynical” and look for “one bad person who’s doing all this stuff” and welcomed “trusted sources” and “fact-checkers” partnering with social media companies to slow down the spread of content that he deems to be misinformation.
Gates’ nonprofit, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to some of the Facebook fact-checkers whose content is used in warning labels that are appended to Facebook posts. When these warning labels are added to Facebook posts, their click-through rates decline by around 95%.
While Gates framed the debate around so-called misinformation and conspiracy theories as a tragedy that reduced compliance with the advice being pushed by trusted sources, he failed to mention that these so-called trusted sources have issued false or conflicting advice throughout the pandemic.
In the early stages of the pandemic, mainstream media outlets downplayed the severity of Covid and health officials in the US urged people to stop wearing masks, then later reversed their stance.
The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab was initially dismissed as a conspiracy before so-called trusted sources finally admitted the lab leak theory was a possibility.
And health experts initially suggested that COVID-19 vaccines were up to 90% effective at preventing Covid before ultimately admitting that the vaccines don’t prevent infection.
Those who challenged or questioned the “trusted sources” were accused of spreading misinformation and censored by Big Tech platforms, even though many of their challenges and questions later turned out to be true.
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | September 27, 2022
Congress is poised this week to approve an estimated $12 billion in new economic aid and military assistance to Ukraine. But don’t expect a lot of debate or even fanfare because it is being rolled into a stopgap measure to keep the entire federal government operating until December.
Called a continuing resolution, the massive spending bill must be passed by Friday to avoid a shutdown. This was obviously the most convenient way for Biden to push the Ukrainian aid measure through: Majority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) spearheaded its inclusion in the resolution, and, with most members of Congress in favor of the previous aid packages and precious few days for any floor discussion, any critics of the proposal have little or no time to question it.
And plus, who’s going to chance being accused of wanting to “shut down the government” by raising a stink?
According to the most recent reports on Monday night, lawmakers have agreed to include $12 billion — $4.5 billion for weapons and equipment, and $2.7 for military, intelligence, and other defense support, plus another $4.5 billion to keep the Ukrainian government running for another quarter.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ attention seems to be focused elsewhere, on a completely different potential stumbling block: a permitting reform measure by Sen Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Nevertheless, the first step is a cloture vote to move the massive bill forward, with the Senate beginning deliberations today.
This new money is on top of the $40 billion approved in May. Since the war began, the U.S. has sent more than $15 billion in weapons and military assistance to Kyiv in its war against invading Russian forces.
But critics say there has been little visible oversight in Washington of the money already spent, whether it is getting to where it needs to go, or being used effectively by the forces that need it.
“Oversight of Ukraine aid is sorely needed,” Julia Gledhill, a defense analyst for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), tells Responsible Statecraft. “The State and Defense departments are handling billions of dollars in Ukraine funding, but neither have permanent inspectors general in place to investigate and prevent abuse of funds.”
The word is that the Democrats are unified behind the new aid package (recall no Democrat in either the House or Senate voted against the $40 billion measure in May). Republicans, on the other hand represent the potential opposition, with 11 GOP senators and 57 House Republicans dissenting on that same vote.
According to recent reports, Republican complaints of this latest tranche have focused on the fact it was being tied to the CR and the lack of debate.
“I haven’t seen a detailed list of exactly how they want to spend the money,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said on Sept. 19. “I think whatever we do on Ukraine, we ought to be doing it separately from the CR. I think we’ve gotta have a clean CR that goes through Congress.”
In that same CNN article, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said he was “open for discussion” about the Ukraine aid. The House side seems a bit more restive: a recent Politico article quoted Rep. Chip Roy, (R-Texas) balking at what seemed to be rubber stamping aid for Ukraine.
“There’s no limiting principle. So no, count me against throwing more money at Ukraine without having a serious conversation about guns and butter, a serious conversation about why we’re spending it and how it’s in our national security interest,” he said.
But these primary concerns — oversight and debate over whether continuing aid is in the U.S. interest (and whether, when not paired with diplomatic strategy, we might be prolonging the war at Ukraine’s ultimate expense) — will be likely overtaken this week by the bipartisan desire to keep sending aid. This includes party leaders and chairs/ranking members of the prominent Armed Services Committees who believe that new and more weapons will put Ukrainians in a position of strength from which to eventually negotiate.
In fact, folks like Sen. James Inhofe want to give more. “This aid package is insufficient to provide the Ukrainians with what they need to win,” the Republican ranking member of the SASC complained on Twitter in early September.
Politically, however, Biden is smart to get this through now. If Republicans take over the House after the November midterms, they are expected to throw up many more roadblocks against additional Biden/Democratic spending, and that might jeopardize further Ukraine aid. But that’s not set in stone: Establishment institutions like the Republican Policy Committee are clear the assistance to Ukraine must continue. In fact, they tie it to our foreign policy writ large:
“We must leave absolutely no doubt in the minds of Russia’s, China’s, or any other nation’s leaders about U.S. resolve to support sovereignty and self-determination around the globe,” the RPC said in Sept. 12 paper. “Decisive military aid to Ukraine will accomplish this task.”
Responsible Statecraft will update this story as it develops.
Samizdat | September 27, 2022
The EU will slap sanctions on anyone involved in referendums on joining Russia in the Donbass republics, as well as in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, according to Peter Stano, a spokesman for the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
“There would be consequences for all people, who participate in the illegal, illegitimate referendums,” Stano warned on Tuesday, the fifth and final day of voting.
Stano did not rule out the possibility of foreign observers, including EU citizens, also facing restrictions over any support they have given to the process. He said it would be up to member states to decide who falls under the sanctions regime.
Another high-ranking EU foreign policy official, Luc Devigne, also told European lawmakers on Tuesday that individuals who are “obviously linked” to the referendums would be targeted in the next sanctions package.
Residents of France, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Brazil and other countries have reportedly arrived to monitor voting in the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republics (LPR), and the regions of Zaporozhye and Kherson, which are mostly controlled by Russian forces.
Ukraine and its Western backers have labeled the referendums a “sham,” vowing that they won’t recognize their results regardless of the outcome. The polls in the plebiscite closed at 4pm local time (1pm GMT) on Tuesday. The head of the LPR, Leonid Pasechnik, said preliminary results would be ready by this evening.
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | September 27, 2022
The arrest of a couple of prominent Palestinian activists, one of whom was Musab Shtayyeh, by Palestinian Authority police on 20 September was not the first time that the notorious Preventive Security Service (PSS) has arrested someone who is wanted by Israel. The PSS is largely linked to the routine arrest and torture of Palestinians who are active against the Israeli occupation.
Several Palestinians have died as a result of PSS violence, the latest being Nizar Banat who was tortured to death on 24 June last year. The killing of Banat ignited a popular revolt against the PA across occupied Palestine.
For years, various Palestinian and international human rights groups have criticised the PA’s violence against dissenting Palestinian voices, quite often within the same human rights reports critical of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. The de facto Hamas government in Gaza also has to take its fair share of blame in terms of violence against dissenters.
In its January 2022 World Report, Human Rights Watch said that, “The Palestinian Authority (PA) manages affairs in parts of the West Bank, where it systematically arrests arbitrarily and tortures dissidents.” This was neither the first nor the last time that a human rights group has made such an accusation.
The link between Israeli and Palestinian violence targeting political dissidents and activists is equally clear to most Palestinians, even though some may at one point have believed that the PA’s role is to serve as a transition between their national liberation project and full independence and sovereignty on the ground. Nearly thirty years after the formation of the PA, though, such a notion has proved to be wishful thinking. Not only has the PA failed to usher in the coveted independent State of Palestine, but it has also morphed into a massively corrupt institution whose existence more or less serves the interests of a small class of Palestinian politicians and business people; in Palestine, they are largely one and the same group.
PA corruption and violence aside, what continues to irk most Palestinians is that the authority, with time, has become another manifestation of the Israeli occupation, curtailing Palestinian freedom of expression and carrying out arrests on behalf of the occupation security services. Sadly, many of those arrested by the Israeli military in the West Bank have experienced arrest by PA goons as well.
Riots in Nablus following Shtayyeh’s arrest were reminiscent of the riots against Israeli occupation forces in the northern West Bank city and elsewhere in occupied Palestine. Unlike previous confrontations between Palestinians and PA police — following the killing of Banat, for example — this time the violence was widespread, and involved protesters from all Palestinian political groups, including the ruling Fatah faction.
Perhaps unaware of the massive collective psychological shift that has taken place in Palestine in recent years, the PA was desperate to contain the violence. Subsequently, a committee that represents united Palestinian factions in Nablus declared on 21 September that it had agreed a “truce” with PA security forces in the city. The committee, which includes prominent Palestinian figures, told Associated Press and other media that the agreement restricts any future arrests of Palestinians in Nablus to the condition that the individual must be implicated in breaking Palestinian, not Israeli, law. That provision alone implies a tacit admission by the PA that the arrest of Shtayyeh and Ameed Tbaileh was motivated by an Israeli, not a Palestinian agenda.
But why would the PA bow down so quickly to pressure from ordinary Palestinians on the street? The answer lies in the changing political mood in Palestine.
In considering this matter it must be stated that resentment of the PA has been brewing for years. One opinion poll after another has indicated the low regard that most Palestinians have of their leadership, of PA President Mahmoud Abbas and particularly of the PA’s “security coordination” with Israel.
Moreover, the torture and death of political dissident Banat last year erased whatever patience Palestinians had with regard to the leadership. Banat’s death demonstrated that the PA is not an ally of the people, but a threat to the people.
It also has to be said that the Unity Intifada of May 2021 has emboldened many segments of society across occupied Palestine. For the first time in years, Palestinians have felt united around a single slogan and are no longer hostage to the geography of politics and factions. A new generation of young Palestinians has advanced the conversation beyond Abbas, the PA and their endless and ineffectual political rhetoric.
Finally, armed struggle in the West Bank has been growing so rapidly that the Israeli army Chief of Staff, Aviv Kochavi, claimed on 6 September that since March, around 1,500 Palestinians have been arrested in the West Bank and that, allegedly, hundreds of attacks against the Israeli military have been thwarted.
In fact, evidence of an armed intifada is growing in the Jenin and Nablus regions. What is particularly interesting, and alarming from the Israeli and PA viewpoint, about the nature of the budding armed struggle, is that it is largely led by the military wing of the ruling Fatah party, in direct cooperation with Hamas and other Islamic and national military wings.
For example, on 9 August, the Israeli army assassinated Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi, a prominent Fatah military commander, along with two others. Not only did the PA do little to stop the Israeli military machine from conducting more such assassinations, but six weeks later it also arrested Shtayyeh, a close comrade of Nabulsi.
Interestingly, Shtayyeh is not a member of Fatah, but a commander within the Hamas military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades. Although Fatah and Hamas are meant to be intense political rivals, their political tussle seems to be of no relevance to military groups in the West Bank.
Unfortunately, more violence is likely to follow because Israel is determined to crush any armed intifada in the West Bank before it spreads across the occupied territories; there is a leadership transition looming within the PA due to Abbas’s old age; and unity is growing among Palestinians around the issue of resistance.
While the Israeli response to all of this can easily be gleaned from its legacy of violence, the PA’s future course of action will likely determine its relationship with Israel and its western supporters on the one hand, and with the Palestinian people on the other. The question has to be asked: whose side is the PA on?
Zionist groups condemn “extremists” unless they are Jews
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 27, 2022
It has been a normal couple of weeks for reporting on what is going on in Israel, which is to say that the bad things it has been doing have been carefully suppressed by the US government and the media. The Israelis continue their program to isolate, humiliate and terrify the Palestinians by destroying their civil and human rights organizations while also limiting foreigner access to the remaining Arab inhabited areas on the West Bank. Israeli Jews now routinely refer to all Palestinians as “terrorists” to justify the harsh measures used to steal their land and homes while also destroying their livelihoods.
The so-called Israel Defense Forces, whose Chief Rabbi Eyal Karim approves of his soldiers raping ‘attracting Gentile women’ as a way to keep up morale, are also continuing to kill Palestinians at an unprecedented rate and have covered-up the murder four months ago of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, admitting only that the woman was apparently killed by a soldier who claimed that he thought her to be an armed Arab rioter. No further action will be taken. A US State Department briefer accepted the verdict saying that the action “underscore[s] the importance of accountability in this case, such as policies and procedures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”
Actually, the Israeli statement does no such thing as it lacks any accountability. The White House should have blocked the $3.3 billion gift that Israel gets every year from the US Treasury for starters. And the shoot-first policies by Israeli soldiers will continue, a position emphasized by Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who firmly rejected proposals to change the Army’s current rules of engagement which led to the Akleh killing, saying that he would not allow outsiders to “dictate our open-fire policies.”
When it comes to the exercise of Jewish power in the United States, the word “hypocrisy” should immediately come to mind. A recent report on extremism in America has been compiled by the indefatigable Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which has a “Center on Extremism” that has examined “more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military. It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August… The data raises fresh concerns about the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military who are tasked with enforcing laws and protecting the US.”
It is not hard to guess what the ADL didn’t look for: radical armed “extremist” Jewish groups fundraising and operating cooperatively in the US and Israel. Nor did it look at black radical groups like Black Lives Matter and the other organizations that were spawned in the wake of the George Floyd death that have produced chaos in a number of American cities. Only white conservatives need apply under the standards of “extremism” set by the ADL, which should surprise no one.
The issue of Jewish and Israeli invisibility when they are doing something horrific struck me recently when I attended a peace rally that included a number of speakers over the course of about five hours. The theme of the gathering was resistance to the warmongering policies that have driven the US government to the verge of nuclear war. When the event was concluded I observed that Israel or the Jewish/Israeli Lobby had not even been mentioned once, even when describing situations in the Middle East that begged for a comment regarding Israeli complicity and its dominance over US policy in the region. One particularly delusional speaker, who would benefit from a basic course in Middle Eastern history, actually claimed that the current hostility between Washington and Tehran is the result of the CIA overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954. That constitutes a cute evasion of reality but the fact is that US-Iran policy is driven not by lingering concerns over Mossadegh, but rather by Israel and its lobby.
To illustrate the level of Israeli control, President Joe Biden bowed to Israeli pressure and has placed “off the table” any consideration of a new nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran, even though it would be in America’s interest. There are no other significant American national interests as Iran does not actually threaten the United States or its economy. The reality is that the US military is in Syria and Iraq for the same reason, i.e. to provide protection and support for Israel, while it also heavily bribes Israel’s neighbors in Egypt and Jordan to keep the peace with the Jewish state.
It is all a world turned upside down with Israel controlling Washington, as former prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have boasted, and part of the control mechanism is to manage the narrative so the American public never really sees what is going on. But what is really interesting is how so-called peace activists, like at the gathering I attended, toe the line and are terrified of offending Israel or the powerful domestic Jewish groups that use their money and political access to promote the wars in the Middle East as well as against Russia in Ukraine. Some of them clearly are fearful of being labeled anti-Semites, which is the weapon most frequently used by groups like ADL to ward off criticism of the Jewish state.
Interestingly, one of the speakers at the meeting I attended demonstrated how it is possible to make a point about Israel and the Jewish power behind it without using either the “I” or “J” word. He observed that the foreign and national security policies of both major US political parties are largely driven by the personal interests of their donors, whom he described as “billionaire oligarchs, some of whom are not even Americans.” The allusion was pretty clear to most members of the audience. It sure sounded like arch globalist George Soros, who has used his money to corrupt local and state governments, and, more to the point, Israeli citizens Haim Saban and the recently deceased Sheldon Adelson. Hollywood denizen Saban, the top single contributor to the Democrats, has said that he is a “one issue guy” and that issue is Israel. Adelson, who is buried in Israel, contributed $100 million to the Republicans and was the man who in return got President Donald Trump to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognize the incorporation of the Golan Heights into the Israeli state, and have a free hand to suppress the Palestinians.
The good news is, however, that pushback is developing, and it is in part coming from some Jews. The Jewish peace group Tikkun has recently published a devastating article by Jeffrey Sachs on the Jews who have been activists for Israel who have been agitating for the post 9/11 wars. It is entitled “Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster” and describes how “The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle…”
It is actually worse than that as a global nuclear confrontation threatens. It is time for those in America and Europe who genuinely want peace to begin to be honest about who is pushing for the wars and why. Euphemisms and evasions to avoid offending the culprits help no one and just empower those who believe themselves “chosen” and would seek to establish the supremacy of one particular ethno-religious state even if it brings disaster to everyone else.
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.
Samizdat | September 27, 2022
German utility RWE has inked a deal with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) for delivery of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the company announced on Sunday.
The deal so far covers only one tanker: a shipment amounting to 137,000 cubic meters of LNG to be delivered by Abu Dhabi National Oil company to RWE in late December or by early 2023, Bloomberg reported, citing the company’s announcement. Separately, RWE also announced it will partner with UAE-based company Masdar to explore offshore wind energy projects and supply 250,000 tons of diesel per month in 2023 to Germany’s fuel distributor Wilhelm Hoyer.
The deal also includes a memorandum of understanding for more LNG deliveries next year, but the document is non-binding and it is unclear how many more LNG deliveries Germany may expect.
The agreement was signed during German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s trip to Abu Dhabi during a tour of the Gulf countries.
“We need to make sure that the production of LNG in the world is advanced to the point where the high demand that exists can be met without having to resort to the production capacity that exists in Russia,” Scholz told reporters prior to the deal’s announcement.
After the UAE, Scholz visited Qatar. However, according to Scholz’s statement issued after the meeting with the Qatari emir, no agreements on LNG supplies have been made there. The two countries have been in talks over LNG supplies for several months now, so far to no avail, as Berlin is reluctant to enter into long-term contracts with Doha.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 21, 2022
The battle with Big Tech for free speech is heating up! States are passing bills to stop the social media censorship, and legislators are holding investigative hearings, while a recent lawsuit including several State Attorneys General is making headway.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 21, 2022
Suddenly, Biden announces the pandemic is over as the narrative is now collapsing from all sides. From boosters to kids shots, the vaccine push is faltering as lawsuits pile up to remove the last covid restrictions.
By Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 23, 2022
Last week, The Epoch Times reported that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), admitted the CDC had stopped monitoring the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines using a method of analysis called proportional reporting ratio (PRR).
Walensky promised to resume the monitoring.
What The Epoch Times missed is that PRR is a fraudulent measure of vaccine harm, designed by the CDC expressly for the new COVID-19 vaccines to disguise the devastation the vaccines are causing.
Why? Because PRR measures the pattern of different vaccine side effects, but it is indifferent to the number of people reporting those side effects.
If some completely new vaccine side effect appears with the introduction of a new vaccine, PRR will catch that.
But the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with huge numbers of people reporting side effects on an unprecedented scale — and, by design, PRR misses this completely.
For example, if one person in a million dies from vaccine A and one person in a thousand dies from vaccine B, then vaccines A and B can have exactly the same PRR score!
PRR is a single number that compares the variety of different side effects for a new vaccine to the variety of side effects from past vaccines.
Of course, there have been many vaccines with different side-effect profiles in the past, and it is difficult to stand out among such a diversity of profiles.
Where the new mRNA vaccines do stand out is the unprecedented number of bad outcomes, including deaths, reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Of all the reports in the 30-year history of VAERS, two-thirds of them were from the COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in the U.S. in December 2020.
This includes three-fourths of all deaths reported to VAERS and three-fourths of all hospitalizations.
Since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, reports to VAERS have skyrocketed off the charts.
These numbers represent only the reports VAERS has processed and posted. Jessica Rose, Ph.D., has reported that VAERS is months behind in posting these reports because its staff has not increased, while its workload is roughly 50 times greater since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The sheer volume of VAERS reports, including deaths, should have set off alarm bells within weeks after the vaccines were introduced.
Reporting only PRR and not the actual count provided a convenient cover for “business as usual.”
I am grateful to Mathew Crawford for pointing this out in an article last year.
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Steve Kirsch | September 21, 2022
A short collection of key pieces of evidence showing the COVID vaccines are not “safe and effective.” Not even close. They are the most deadly vaccines we’ve ever produced.
Here’s a high level collection of some of the most compelling pieces of evidence I’ve seen to date. This is not an exhaustive list, but just the key pieces of data that are impossible to explain if the vaccines are safe and effective.
I’ve divided the collection into sections and I’ve tried to limit each section to the most compelling data points. So don’t be disappointed if your favorite item isn’t mentioned in this article; I wanted to keep it short enough to be read..
I’ll try to keep this updated over time. It can be found in the Reference section of my Substack.
Can you spot the unsafe vaccine? People at the CDC don’t see any problem with this mortality chart: all the vaccines look perfectly safe.
Are the Covid mRNA Vaccines Safe? was written by Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff who until recently was on vaccine committees of the FDA and CDC. He concluded:
Fraiman and colleagues have produced the best evidence yet regarding the overall safety of the mRNA vaccines. The results are concerning. It is the responsibility of the manufacturers and FDA to ensure that benefits outweigh harms. They have failed to do so.
Canadian court decisions on the constitutionality of Covid measures are invalid due to jurisdictional errors of law reviews court decisions on COVID and emphasizes the courts’ repeated over reliance on government expert testimony. Courts are supposed to find the truth and not rely on government representations or propaganda.
There are specialized tests required to diagnose a death from the COVID vaccine.
The CDC has never told any medical examiner in the US about these tests.
So the medical examiners aren’t implicating the vaccine in any of the deaths.
The question is we know what the tests are, we know there is solid evidence from multiple countries that the vaccine causes death, yet we refuse to even consider the possibility that the vaccine caused the deaths. Why?
This paper, A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products, was retracted because the publisher didn’t like the result. So he unilaterally decided to retract the paper. This is unethical.
Here’s the “withdrawn” notice.
Here is the backstory as well as this censorship update.
The publisher hasn’t fixed the problem in over a year despite assurances it would be quickly resolved.
Here is another retracted paper that was correct:
Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19? by Ron Kostoff
“Compared with the 28,000 deaths the CDC stated were due to COVID-19 and not associated morbidities for the 65+ age range, the inoculation-based deaths are an order-of-magnitude greater than the COVID-19 deaths!”
That is basically what I found: the vaccines kill >10X more people than the number of COVID deaths that they save. The paper passed peer review and was published. The editor of the journal quit after he was overridden by the publisher on the retraction.
The reason cited for the retraction:
This is completely bogus for two reasons:
Can anyone explain how these anecdotes are possible?
Once I established a policy of always recording calls with “fact checkers,” I’ve not had a single call from them trying to refute anything I’ve written.
None of the drug companies that make these products will refute anything I’ve written or supply a representative to debate me or any of my colleagues in a live debate. They have immunity from liability and they are not willing to be held accountable in the court of public opinion either.
This was a very well done study, but it is of course attacked by the pro narrative people. We’d love to have an open debate about this study, but the other side doesn’t want to talk about it in a neutral forum.
A LITERATURE REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWNS ON COVID-19 MORTALITY
Masks don’t work at all. See this article which has plenty of references. If anything, masks are more likely to hurt you than to benefit you.
There is no study at all on the 6 foot distance rule. They just made that one up.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs was tasked by The Lancet to lead an independent investigation into the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. After he determined it came from US biotechnology, all of a sudden nobody wanted to pursue the investigation any further.
Tony Fauci gets paid every time you get a Moderna shot. He won’t disclose how much he makes and you can’t get via FOIA (it’s blacked out). If the Republicans get control of the Senate, that will change. Watch this video from Sept 20, 2022 of Rand Paul commenting on this as well as the well founded accusation that Fauci created the virus in the first place and then desperately tried to make it look like it came from nature after top scientists said it was a lab leak (watch the video at 2:00 onwards). Rand Paul called it, quite rightly, “the biggest cover-up in the history of science.”
The question you have to ask yourself is why is Fauci keeping his funding of the gain of function research and also his compensation for each vaccine dose a secret?
Tony Fauci was the primary reason that all early treatments were ignored by the government. It appears he did that because it would cut into his revenue stream.
Early in the pandemic, two physicians, George Fareed and Brian Tyson, developed a treatment protocol using a variety of safe, low cost drugs and supplements with little to no side effects that had a near 100% success track record in preventing hospitalization, death, and long haul COVID if the patient started treatment shortly after realizing they were infected. They’ve treated over 10,000 patients. They wrote a best-selling book about it.
Today, more than two years later, the FDA and the CDC have not returned their calls.
Questions I’d love to get the answer to. These were asked, but never answered.
People who disagree with the mainstream narrative are rewarded with censorship, permanent bans on posting on social media, demonetization of your YouTube account, revocation of your medical license, revocation of your medical certifications, loss of hospital privileges, loss of job, loss of funding, loss of friends, and a Wikipedia entry labeling you a “misinformation spreader” and/or “conspiracy theorist.”
This is a problem. I am not aware of any paper published in the medical literature that shows that such tactics result in better health decisions.
Should we use the same rules at the UN when nations disagree? Do you think that will result in better outcomes?
The way people resolve differences is by confronting the issues and talking through them. But we are not doing this:
This is objective proof of a broken system. It is indefensible. Caught on video camera. There is no reason that anyone in a position of authority on the COVID vaccines would refuse an opportunity to see the most thorough post-vaccine safety study ever done: one that shows causality of serious adverse events.
From Israeli Investigators Find COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Side Effects: Leaked Video:
Rechallenge changes a causal link “from possible to definitive,” Dr. Mati Berkovitch, head of the research team and a pediatric specialist, said at the meeting.
and
Many of the reported adverse events were found to be long-lasting, which researchers said in the meeting was surprising since the brochure handed to vaccine recipients says otherwise. They also said Pfizer officials told them that Pfizer did not know of any long-lasting symptoms.
and
In the official report later issued to the public, the MoH did not detail how researchers were caught off guard by the duration of the events and side effects. The health agency also stated that there were no new events identified.
It concludes:
The choice to omit some of the crucial findings discussed in the meeting from the public report is “a recipe to destroy” the entire vaccine program, according to Levi, an Israeli native and an expert in risk management.
“The more pro-vaccine, the more disturbed you need to be from something like this,” Levi told The Epoch Times. “And the reason is that the two most important enablers for vaccine programs … to be successful is trust and transparency, that you actually communicate to people the real risk-benefits and allow them to make choices about what they want to do. The second thing is that you take care of the people that were harmed by the vaccine because no vaccine has 100 percent safety.”
“I think we have in this example … where we violate these two very important principles,” he added. “This is a recipe to basically destroy all vaccine programs, so the more pro-vaccine you are, you should be more disturbed by this.”
How can you have the chair of a safety committee not interested in seeing important safety data? Professor Grace Lee should be removed from her position by the CDC. Why isn’t she? Does anyone care?
Why does Dr. Paul Offit ignore requests to see the same data?
According to the Epoch Times article, everyone declined to comment on the story: the scientists, the MOH officials, and the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office declined to comment on the Israeli findings.
If the above isn’t enough, there are hundreds more “hard to explain” data points.
There is an excellent article written in August 2020 by Norman Doidge entitled “Medicine’s Fundamentalists” which talks about the “all-available-evidence approach.” It should be read by every doctor in America. This is how medical science should work.
The precautionary principle medicine seems to have been thrown under the bus during the pandemic. It says in the face of uncertainty, one should take reasonable measures to avoid threats that are serious and plausible.
For example, the Pfizer clinical trial showed the vaccine saved only one COVID death per 22,000 injected. That means we might only save around 10,000 lives if we inject 200M Americans. So if VAERS, which is at least 41 times under reported, is showing over 12,000 deaths associated with the vaccine, any reasonable person should say that killing more than 41 people to save 1 life is nonsensical… shouldn’t we put a PAUSE on this intervention until we resolve the uncertainty?
In the current system, questioning the CDC or other authorities results in serious retribution as mentioned earlier.
Is that really the right way to handle scientific dissent?
Are the vaccines “safe and effective” as claimed?
To answer this, science requires that we look at all the available data and see whether the data is more consistent with the hypothesis of “safe and effective” or “not safe and effective.”
All the data that I and my colleagues have seen end up being placed in the “not” bucket.
We are open to being shown we got it wrong on the hundreds of pieces of evidence we have examined, but nobody is willing to discuss the data with us to resolve the issue, not even for $1M dollars.
I even went to extraordinary lengths to offer the Israeli safety data to ACIP Chair Grace Lee. Her response: she called the police on me. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know: they simply refuse to look at any data that goes against their currently held beliefs. That’s the way science works.
By Sam Husseini | September 7, 2022
Twenty years ago, the “Cheney-Bush junta” — as Gore Vidal called it — launched its propaganda campaign to invade Iraq, effectively casting the dye for much of the historic period since.
On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, the New York Times ran on its front page the story “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller.
The same day, then Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, hyping the New York Times story as evidence that Hussein was attempting to acquire “the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.” Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice followed Cheney’s lead on other shows.
In 2005, I confronted Miller about her reporting, asking her at if she would name the anonymous lying source who she allegedly relied on to falsely report “the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported” the CIA claim that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program. In fact, it would later be established, the nuclear scientists did not support such an assessment and were effectively muzzled. When I questioned her, Miller refused to name the source that fed her this false information and Marvin Kalb, the moderator of the event, see video, ran interference, stopping further follow-ups. (See my piece “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?”)
Many serious analysts early on deduced that the source was Cheney himself, likely through his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.
Even the mainstream Bob Simon of CBS would later remark to Bill Moyers about Cheney: “You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that’s a remarkable thing to do.”
Remarkable is actually an understatement. It’s engaging in a de facto conspiracy to deceive the U.S. public into war.
In April of 2020, a journalist asked at the daily White House press briefing: “Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?”
Anthony Fauci replied: “There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
What Fauci was talking about was the piece “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine.
That article was widely accepted by the major media as eviscerating the possibility of lab origin of Covid, shutting down debate at that critical time and continuing to hinder it to this day.
The thing is, Fauci seems to have had a serious role in that article’s appearing.
One of the few people objecting to the piece when it was first published, in the Spring of 2020 was Meryl Nass, who asked: “Why are some of the US’s top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?” She would go on to argue that the signers of the Nature Medicine article were pushed to write it.
In 2021, limited Freedom of Information Act findings showed that Fauci had at minimum effectively coordinated with the named authors of the Nature Medicine article. See Nass’ write-up and subsequent reporting by some mainstream outlets such as USA Today.
Thus, this insidious tactic of helping to plant a story pushing the line you want in a media outlet and then citing it as evidence for your case was employed by both longtime creatures of Washington at historic junctures.
There are other notable parallels. Both Fauci and Cheney have also both been leading beneficiaries of Trumpwashing.
Ashley Rindsberg makes some serious arguments in his piece, “How Dick Cheney created Anthony Fauci,” including about the buildup of US bio“defense” after 9/11 (actually the anthrax attacks) — a trend several observers have noted. Alexis Baden-Mayer traces such arguments back to 1976, when Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld apparently pressured President Ford to order massive inoculations in the Swine Flu scare, which he would be widely mocked for.
While the antiwar forces and “left” criticism of the Iraq WMD propaganda were wholly inadequate, they at least manifested themselves on the national stage to some extent. Covid origins has hardly been recognized as an antiwar issue by most and the “left” at times has actually played a detrimental role, explicitly doing the establishment’s bidding in irrationally denying or minimizing the possibility of lab origin of the pandemic.
One thing that should be kept in mind as one parses through the claims and “exposés” is that some are de facto cover stories.
The Bush administration ramped up their propaganda campaign for the Iraq invasion, as noted at the beginning of this article, in September of 2002.
Why then? Sophisticates at the time would quote Andrew Card: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” said Bush’s chief of staff.
With the Bush administration cynically using the one year anniversary of 9/11 as a backdrop to launch their push for invading Iraq, the rationale articulated by Card was actually a remarkably benign motivation, a likely cover, in comparison to the war makers actual thinking.
or go to
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The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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