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How the treacherous GMC victimises honest doctors

By Dr Sarah Myhill | TCW Defending Freedom | November 14, 2022

The General Medical Council was established in 1858 to regulate doctors and to protect patients from charlatans. Quite right too. Doctors are trained to look at the science and translate this into the ‘art’ of treatment for individual patients. This works well for established disease processes, but what happens when a new disease appears?

This became a real issue in the spring of 2020 with Covid-19. Doctors working on the front line used their experience of treating similar viral infections, consulted widely with colleagues, perused the scientific literature as it became available, repurposed old drugs and developed treatments that were biologically plausible and relevant to the clinical imperatives. These treatments were intrinsically safe and, most importantly, remarkably effective. Yes, people died but death rates were no worse than the usual seasonal influenza. We know seasonal flu kills those with co-morbidities such as cancer or heart disease. Covid-19 was the same – it is simply another flu-like illness.

In their management of Covid-19, front-line doctors quickly established three clinical principles that needed tackling: first to improve basic immunity, secondly to reduce the viral load and thirdly to prevent the cytokine storm with anti-inflammatory interventions. For your information, those treatments are:

·       Improve immune function with low carbohydrate diets, vitamin D 10,000iu, zinc 30mg and vitamin C 5g.

·       At the first hint of any symptom, reduce the viral load with vitamin C 5g (and more), iodine mouthwash or inhalation (povidone iodine or Lugol’s iodine), ivermectin 12mg twice daily, hydroxychloroquine 200mg twice daily.

·       Reduce inflammation to prevent the cytokine storm: vitamin C 5g, vitamin D 20,000iu, B complex, curcumin 500mg twice daily, fish oil 4g daily, nigella sativa 500mg twice daily. Possibly NSAIs and steroids.

These safe and effective treatments are inexpensive and available to all. But this did not fit with the prevailing narrative that Covid-19 was extremely dangerous, necessitating draconian measures such as lockdown, mask-wearing and vaccinations. We now know these measures are not just ineffective at preventing Covid-19 but have generated pathology in their own right – lockdown rendered many  stressed, miserable, fat, poor, unfit, ill, un-educated and anti-social. These are all risk factors for cancer, heart disease and dementia.

The official narrative was that there were no treatments available. People were advised to stay at home until they became really ill. Only a vaccine would save us from disease and death. The nation, driven by the BBC, came to believe the official narrative and vaccines were rolled out. The consequence? During 2022, death rates have increased to 16 per cent above average with more than 1,500 people a month dying above the expected rate. We now have consultant cardiologists, paediatricians and obstetricians calling for an immediate halt to the vaccine programme because of the excess death rates, miscarriages and stillbirths directly attributed to vaccines. These doctors expect the situation to get worse since the malign effects of vaccines increase with more doses.

So what happened to all those doctors who advocated these safe and effective interventions, all of which, as a bonus, help to prevent heart disease and cancer? Remember these doctors are advocating low carbohydrate diets, nutritional supplements, herbal preparations and repurposed safe prescription drugs. What happened to those doctors who eschewed the narrative that the only way to prevent covid was a vaccination programme? They have been and continue to be targeted by the General Medical Council. They have or are being investigated because they have stuck to their principles. Principles enshrined by the Hippocratic Oath and GMC codes of conduct and ethical actions. The overriding rule is ‘First, do no harm. Make the patient your first concern’. Any doctor who advises a patient not to receive a Covid vaccine risks prosecution by the GMC – and this risks loss of livelihood, career, income, pension and all such securities. Any doctor who advocates diet, nutrition, herbal or homeopathic remedies or repurposed drugs risks GMC prosecution. It is no surprise that doctors, to save their own skins, have become puppets of the narrative. Many are leaving the NHS demoralised and disempowered.

Any medical intervention, including administering a vaccine, demands informed consent. This is part of English law. It is my experience, and that of many of my colleagues, that people are not getting proper informed consent. Critical parts of informed consent that are being routinely omitted include:

·       The right to be informed of all risks including potential long-term risks;

·       The right to be informed of all alternative treatments;

·       The right not to be coerced.

No vaccinated person who has consulted with me has ever been informed of long-term risks (such as heart disease, infertility, cancer), they have never been informed of the efficacy of safe treatments detailed above and they have been coerced by non-medical issues such as the need to travel, to hold down a job, to be educated or entertained.

I have now reported ten doctors to the GMC for obvious breaches of Good Medical Practice. Some of the nonsenses these doctors have stated in the public arena include:

‘All we can offer is a ventilator . . .’

‘[People should] accept a vaccine with exceptional, and demonstrable, safety and effectiveness.’

‘The vaccine won’t do you any harm.’

‘It’s incredibly safe.’

‘After 12 days from the first vaccination of the AstraZeneca vaccine, you are 100 per cent protected against hospitalisation and death.’

‘It [the vaccine] actually reduces your chance of catching it [Covid-19]  in the first place.’

‘The vaccine reduces your chances of passing it on which is why it is such a good idea.’

The GMC has refused to investigate any of these doctors.

By contrast, I am currently being investigated by the GMC for my advocacy of vitamin C, vitamin D and iodine. These are all scientifically proven, effective, inexpensive, safe interventions which are available to all. The GMC has chosen to ignore the science and punish all these who do such.

The GMC is the longest-established regulatory body in the world. All institutions become self-serving and, in the opinion of many, the GMC is in the terminal stages of senile dementia. It has achieved this by ignoring the science, punishing those doctors who dare question the narrative and allowing bad doctors to spout non-evidence-based opinion. The NHS is in a state of decline largely because the GMC will not allow doctors to doctor.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | 2 Comments

As a Journalist, the Medical Establishment Has Failed Me

By Rav Arora | Human Flourishing | November 14, 2022

As a truth-seeking journalist writing on Covid policies surrounding the young, I have been bewildered by the scientific establishment’s failure to have an honest, rational discussion of the data. Being an ordinary, critical-thinking person with no prior scientific expertise, my impression was always that the costs and benefits of an medical intervention must be carefully weighed before making a decision. Moreover, I assumed there is no “one-size-fits-all” medicine — everything from Tylenol, prescription drugs, to novel psychedelic therapies — that can be universally recommended.

According to the foremost public health “experts”, I was wrong.

This suddenly dawned on me when I watched CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta refuse to acknowledge the risk of vaccine myocarditis in young boys on Joe Rogan’s podcast, then appear on CNN shortly after doubling-down on his assertions by presenting a study finding infection-induced myocarditis poses a greater risk compared to the vaccine (across the population, as opposed to young men specifically).

Publication after publication have printed articles quoting medical experts “debunking” concerns of vaccine myocarditis in young males using flawed CDC data or aggregate population-level data which shows the risk of Covid myocarditis exceeding that from the vaccine.

This is incredibly dishonest. The conversation from the start has always oriented around the specific risk in young men.

Among the most rigorous, comprehensive data we have on vaccine myocarditis is from Katie Sharff who analyzed a database from Kaiser Permanente. She found a 1/1,862 rate of myocarditis after the second dose in young men ages 18 – 24. For boys ages 12 – 17, the rate was 1/2,650. Active surveillance monitoring in Hong Kong shows virtually identical figures.

After failing the Joe Rogan test, Dr. Gupta decided to promote his one-size-fits-all vaccine advocacy on a less questioning and critical-thinking platform: Sesame Street.  “The second vaccine dose gives you stronger, longer, and wider protection,” he stated on the kids program. “Hopefully the protection lasts a long time!”

Leading public health officials who do honestly discuss vaccine risks are immediately punished. Last week, after Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health conceded the possible 1/5,000 risk of myocarditis for healthy young people at a conference promoting the fourth dose, a number of top “doctors” in the province rebuked his remarks.

“The incidence of myocarditis after vaccination is much lower than 1 in 5000,” cardiac radiologist Dr. Kate Hanneman stated, referring to the risk in the wider population.

City News: ‘Much lower than 1-in-5,000’, doctors take issue with Dr. Moore’s myocarditis claim

As a result of the mainstream medical community’s failure to weigh the age-specific cost and benefits of vaccination, young people across North America have been coerced, misinformed, and marginalized. Virtually all across Canada, anyone unvaccinated between 15-30 (and over) was barred from exercising at a gym, dining in at restaurants, and attending large gatherings.

In the United States, a number of school districts are now bizarrely mandating the primary vaccine series for the fall, despite newer variants and a seroprevalence rate indicating prior covid infection in children of 75% (pre-Omicron).

ABC News DC to require students 12 and older to be vaccinated against COVID-19 this fall

As Megyn Kelly recently lamented, her kids are now not only facing exclusion from sports and after school activities, but expulsion if they don’t get double vaccinated at their school in Connecticut.

The institutional push to mandate and coerce vaccination in the young is not only pushed in schools and public health centers, but by journalists as well. As a pro-vaccine writer reporting on vaccine myocarditis in a specific demographic (arguing only for personal choice and no mandates), I have been stunned by a number of reputable outlets refusing to publish anything that acknowledge the risks.

After pitching one editor, she replied:

“The _____ is a pro-vaccine publication. We don’t run any pieces that discourage the public from getting vaccinated.”

Another editor:

“Rav, I don’t know why you’re still writing about this. I personally think everyone should get vaccinated already and stop making this a big deal for everyone. The risks for young men are still incredibly small.”

One editor I had a very close relationship with:

“I think the risk of vaccine myocarditis has been vastly exaggerated. It comprises a minuscule fraction of vaccinations. Please pitch this to another outlet.”

The scientific community’s misleading claims have also permitted the violation of informed consent and a number of preventable vaccine-induced myocarditis incidents.

In a recent long-form investigative article (rejected by several publications), I interviewed a 33-year-old previously healthy and incredibly fit man who unwillingly got double-vaccinated to keep his job in law-enforcement.

He didn’t hear the term “vaccine-induced myocarditis” till the doctor told him his diagnosis when he ended up in the hospital after almost dying from heart failure (210 beats per minute) following the second Pfizer dose.

Or take the recent viral story of a triple-vaccinated mother who followed the advice of public health authorities and got her 14-year-old son double-vaccinated, resulting in vaccine myocarditis:

Mom Whose 14-Year-Old Son Developed Myocarditis After Pfizer Vaccine No Longer Trusts CDC, Public Health Officials

We’ve known that teenage boys are at two to three times higher risk of vaccine myocarditis than Covid hospitalization. We’ve known men under the age of 40 remain at elevated risk of vaccine myocarditis (Oxford analysis).

Yet, the government — as informed by “top epidemiologists” — has not created any public awareness surrounding this issue. Perhaps they are worried this would discourage some people from getting vaccinated, and they want as many people vaccinated as possible.

Instead of making careful, age-stratified recommendations, they now strongly encourage everyone to get three doses. Hardly day goes by without a Canadian government advertisement popping up on YouTube prompting teenagers and young adults get boosted to “prevent serious illness.”

Many in the media and medical establishment promote vaccination to prevent serious illness or death in the elderly, but react to any information that questions the safety and efficacy of vaccination in children with a kind of religious opposition.

Supporting the vaccine means judiciously recommending it to those who have more to gain and less to lose and being transparent about the real risks of vaccination in specific demographics — without either agenda-driven minimization or exaggeration. Obfuscating, downplaying, and misleading the public, on the other hand, undermines trust in public health recommendations.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

They Will Lock You Down Again

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | November 14, 2022

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.

To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.

Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.

Meanwhile, a few points to consider:

The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.

The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.

Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.

Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.

The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.

More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.

The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.

The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.

Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.

In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.

We cannot allow that to happen.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Washington Attempts To Bully India Into Cutting Ties With Russia

By Conor Gallagher | naked capitalism | November 13, 2022

For months the US has repeatedly tried to coerce India into cutting ties with Russia, thereby abandoning its national interests. New Delhi, however, continues to spurn American attempts to subject its economy to Washington’s dictates.

The latest fuss concerns the G7 price cap on Russian oil and EU and UK bans on shipping and related services for Russian crude. India continues to have no interest in joining the US-led initiative as it gets a steep discount on oil from Russia and wants to maintain the relationship with a long-time strategic partner. Indian Foreign Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was just in Moscow on Nov. 8 to discuss continued sales of oil. From the South China Morning Post :

India’s foreign minister hailed New Delhi’s “strong and steady” relationship with Moscow on Tuesday, during his first visit there since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar also declared India’s intention to continue to buy Russian oil, again disregarding the US appeal to allies and partners to isolate Russia from the global markets.

The G-7 plans are likely to send oil prices higher (despite US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claiming the opposite) and reduce tanker availability, both of which will threaten India’s energy security and hurt its economy as India is the third-largest consumer and importer of oil worldwide.

Russia has said it will not sell to any countries that participate in the price cap scheme, and Jaishankar has repeatedly stated that India cannot afford to buy oil at high prices – at least not without undermining its economic growth, which is forecast to be 6.1 percent in 2023, the fastest-growing major economy in the world. According to Energy Intelligence :

Russia emerged as India’s top crude supplier in October, shipping over 900,000 barrels per day or roughly a fifth of India’s demand. The two countries’ biggest concern is ensuring that Russian oil continues to flow after the Dec. 5 EU and UK bans and related G7 price cap.

But despite Jaishankar’s bullish stance in Moscow, India’s state refiners have not placed orders for crude lifting beyond Dec. 5 due to uncertainties about whether shipping and insurance will be available, Energy Intelligence understands. And a recent attempt by an Indian buyer to use the price cap in negotiations with a Russian seller prompted the latter to abandon the deal, market sources said.

The ongoing lack of clarity on the G-7 could be by design. Russian oil exports have already begun to dip, and Bruce Paulsen, a sanctions expert and partner at law firm Seward & Kissel, told American Shipper, “ If guidance on [price cap] compliance doesn’t come soon, some industry players may sit on the sidelines until they can determine that shipments under the price cap are safe.”

The US, in a neat sleight of hand, quit pressuring India to adhere to the price cap, and Yellen now says Washington is “happy” for New Delhi to continue buying as much Russian oil as it wants, including at prices above a G7-imposed price cap. But there are just a few caveats: India wouldn’t be able to use western insurance, finance, or maritime services to transport the oil.

“Russia is going to find it very difficult to continue shipping as much oil as they have done when the EU stops buying Russian oil,” Yellen told Reuters on Friday. “They’re going to be heavily in search of buyers, and many buyers are reliant on Western services.”

More from Energy Intelligence on why this amounts to a de facto price cap:

Indian refiners have the capacity to soak up another 600,000 b/d of Russian crude, provided it outcompetes the staple Mideast grades that are the lifeline of the country’s 5 million b/d refining base. But the availability of shipping and insurance — and payment channels — is key. From Dec. 5, tankers and shipping insurance linked to EU and G7 countries — which dominate oil shipping globally — will be barred from trading Russian crude unless those volumes are sold under the price cap, as yet undetermined.

About 90% of India’s liquids trade is shipped by foreign tankers, presenting challenges, independent energy analyst Narendra Taneja said. Insurance does not appear as problematic, and analysts say that Russian and Chinese firms can handle it.

This could leave Russia reliant on a shadow fleet of older tankers with opaque ownership that do not transact in dollars. According to Freight Waves :

Brokerage Braemar reported that 33 tankers previously handling Iranian or Venezuelan exports have carried Russian exports since April, mostly to China and secondarily to India.

Braemar defined the dark fleet as tankers that have carried Iranian or Venezuelan crude at least once in the past year. It put the current total at 240 tankers, mostly smaller and midsized, with 74% 19 years or older. Eighty of those vessels are very large crude carriers (VLCCs, tankers that carry 2 million barrels) that won’t fit in Russian ports but could be used for ship-to-ship transfers for Russian cargoes.

If the entire dark fleet switched to Russian service and were as efficient as the “mainstream fleet,” it would be more than enough to keep Russian exports flowing, but “vessels engaged in illicit trading are highly inefficient,” Braemar emphasized.

At the same time Washington is pressuring New Delhi to comply with the price cap, it is importing from India more vacuum gasoil, which is mostly used at refineries to produce other products such as gasoline and diesel. From Reuters :

Russia used to be a key VGO supplier to U.S. refiners before the Ukraine war broke out.

“Given that the U.S. is not buying Russian oil, they are looking for any and all alternatives,” said Roslan Khasawneh, senior fuel oil analyst at Vortexa…

U.S. and EU sanctions do not apply to refined products produced from Russian crude exported from a third country as they are not of Russian origin. In India, refiners boosted imports of discounted Russian oil to 793,000 barrels per day between April and October, up from just 38,000 bpd in the same period a year ago, trade data showed.

India joins a list of countries – including Saudi Arabia, Serbia, and Turkey – that are causing heads to explode in Washington for refusing to be bullied into submission.

This all must be coming as a shock in Washington as its Indo-Pacific strategy in recent years has always included a “like-minded” India helping to counter China and do the US’ bidding in southeast Asia. The possibility that India might pursue its own national interests didn’t seem to factor into the strategy.

The tension over the Russian price cap is just the latest in a series of disagreements between New Delhi and Washington. US sanctions on Iran’s oil exports deprive India of cheap Iranian oil, and force it to buy more expensive US energy exports. India is now the largest oil export destination for the US.

Similar to the way Washington is arming Greece and Cyprus in an effort to bully Turkey into breaking off its friendly ties with Russia, the US is doing the same in Pakistan to pressure India. The US has begun to accommodate Pakistan again after the ouster of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, who blames his loss of power in a no-confidence vote on the US.

In September, the U.S. State Department enraged India when it approved a $450 million deal to upgrade Pakistan’s F-16 fleet. Shortly after, the US ambassador to Pakistan created more tension during a visit to the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir, which he called by its Pakistani name instead of the United Nations-approved name “Pakistan-administered Kashmir.”

On Nov. 8 US State Department spokesman Ned Price lectured India on what are in its best interests:

We’ve also been clear that now is not the time for business as usual with Russia, and it’s incumbent on countries around the world to do what they can to lessen those economic ties with Russia. That’s something that’s in the collective interest, but it’s also in the bilateral interest of countries around the world to end and certainly over the course of time to wean their dependence on Russian energy. There have been a number of countries that have learned the hard way of the fact that Russia is not a reliable source of energy. Russia is not a reliable supplier of security assistance. Russia is far from reliable in any realm. So it is not only in the interest of Ukraine, it is not only in the interest of the region, of the collective interests that India decrease its dependence on Russia over time, but it’s also in India’s own bilateral interest, given what we’ve seen from Russia.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Indian people get the message because as of now the opposite is true. India’s Observer Research Foundation released poll results on Nov. 2 that showed that 43 percent of Indians regarded Russia as their country’s most reliable partner, which was far ahead of the US at 27 percent.

Washington would be hard pressed to explain how New Delhi scaling back its economic ties with Russia would be a good thing for India.

Fuelled by a surge in import of oil and fertilizers, India’s bilateral trade with Russia has soared to an all-time high of $18.2 billion over the April-August period of this financial year, according to the latest data available with the Department of Commerce. That makes Russia India’s seventh biggest trading partner — up from its 25th position last year. The US, China, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Indonesia remain ahead of Russia.

India, Iran, and Russia have also spent the past twenty years developing the International North-South Transport Corridor to increase trade between the countries, and it took on increased importance with the western sanctions on Moscow. From The LoadStar :

RZD Logistics, a subsidiary of Russian railway monopoly RZD, has begun regular container train services from Moscow to Iran to serve growing trade with India by transloading.

This is aimed at maximizing use of the alternative International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a Central Asia cross-border multimodal freight network helping the two strategic partners work around supply chain challenges created by western sanctions on Russia.

The inland-ocean leg involves an estimated transit time of 35 days, compared with about 40 with previous traditional shipping, according to industry sources.

©Peter Hermes Furian

In much the same way that US heavy-handedness is backfiring elsewhere, the pressure applied on India seems to only be encouraging New Delhi to find a way around the dollar. The Loadstar adds that the Reserve Bank of India is also implementing new regulatory guidelines to help exporters settle shipments in rupees, instead of US dollars that had run into sanctions-related bottlenecks:

The Federation of Indian Export Organizations has also been pressing government leaders to extend the alternative currency method beyond Russian markets.

“While the Russia-Ukraine war is a setback to our exports in the short run, we are looking to increase our exports to Russia once the rupee payment mechanism gets operationalised,” FIEO noted.

While India has been benefitting from the discounted Russian crude, it also wants to maintain good ties with Moscow to avoid pushing Russia closer to China and potentially Pakistan, India’s biggest rivals in Asia.

Pakistan is also now asking the Russian Trade Ministry to introduce a currency swap arrangement to strengthen economic ties between the two countries.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

Obama and Bush to present seminars about tackling online “misinformation”

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 14, 2022

Former US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are to hold conferences encouraging more online censorship.

According to Axios, the conferences by the two former presidents will “highlight rising threats from authoritarianism and disinformation — and how to combat them globally and at home.”

On November 16, the George W. Bush Institute will hold a conference called “The Struggle for Freedom.” The conference will address revitalizing democracy globally. The conference’s third panel is titled “Emerging Technology and the Future of Freedom.”

The conference will be attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of .

Bush’s conference only subtly hints at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Obama’s conference, the Democracy Forum, more broadly states disinformation will be a topic.

The first panel of the conference is titled “Tackling Disinformation, Protecting Democracy.” Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, a platform that claims to be “the friendly place where everyone builds the web, is listed among the key speakers.”

The second panel is titled “Lightning Talk: Dismantling Hate in the Digital Age.” One of the key speakers is Vidhya Ramalingam, CEO of Moonshot, a company dedicated to developing tech solutions to “expose threats, disrupt malicious actors and protect vulnerable audiences online.”

Obama has been a vocal supporter of content moderation and has called “disinformation” a threat to democracy.

“Solving the disinformation problem won’t cure all that ails our democracies or tears at the fabric of our world, but it can help tamp down divisions and let us rebuild the trust and solidarity needed to make our democracy stronger,” Obama said at an event at Stanford University earlier this year.

Despite most Republicans calling for less censorship, Bush has encouraged content moderation.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 7 Comments

Did Federal Censors Swing the 2020 Election?

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 14, 2022

Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.

In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.

Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”

CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.

Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.

Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).

Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate.  New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”

But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.

In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”

Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was  ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”

The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”

How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.

The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US aid to Ukraine ‘invested’ in crypto FTX scheme

Free West Media | November 14, 2022

The sudden collapse of a crypto exchange linked to the Democratic Party in the US, has revealed that FTX presently suffers from $10-$50 billion in liabilities and virtually no assets. And among those liabilities, are “investments” made by Ukraine’s leadership clique.

The company FTX, in its bankruptcy filing appears to have held tens-of-billions in American “military aid” to Ukraine. Instead of using the alleged funds to fight Russia, the money was ‘invested’ in the FTX Ponzi scheme.

From the bankruptcy filing it is clear that this money has now disappeared.

“Instead of using US military aid to fight Russia, Ukraine ‘invested’ part or all of it, into FTX, and right now, it looks like all the money’s gone,” said Hal Turner, a well-known American radio host.

The crypto money from unsuspecting clients was also used to fund the Democratic Party in the United States. More evidence has surfaced suggesting that the funds may have been stolen.

The CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was one of the top donors to the Democrats, with only George Soros outperforming his largesse. Recently, he also shared a podium with inveterate globalists Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

According to Turner, it seems that Ukraine was receiving money from the US, and then sent it to FTX, and FTX sent it to the same Democrats, who had originally voted to send it to Ukraine.  “At this hour, it appears to some observers to be pure, criminal, money-laundering, and a criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws,” said Turner.

Reuters exclusively reported that the founder and CEO FTX transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to the trading company Alameda Research, which is run by his girlfriend Caroline Ellison.

Sam Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a family of academics. Born and raised to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in California, he is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the current dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, is a former Wall Street trader and the director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics.

He was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes in the 2021–2022 election cycle with total donations of $39,8 million, only behind Soros. Of this, $27 million was given to Protect our Future PAC, bankrolled by Bankman-Fried.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are currently looking into whether FTX.com mishandled customer funds. Bankman-Fried is also being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of securities rules.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | 2 Comments

More bad news: new US coordination center in Stuttgart for Ukraine operations a landmark on the way to WWIII

By Gilbert Doctorow | November 13, 2022

Earlier today I received an email from my good friend Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Francis A. Boyle regarding the creation in Stuttgart of a new U.S. coordination center for war operations in Ukraine headed by a 3-star general. The news item seems to have been sidelined this past week by Western mainstream coverage of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson and entry of Ukrainian forces into that city. However, judging by Boyle’s interpretation, there is every reason to put a spotlight on this issue and to seek the broadest possible discussion in Alternative News electronic and print media.

I offer the following quote from Boyle’s email with his permission:

The story below is a pure cover story by the Pentagon. You do not need a 3 Star General and a Staff of 300 to keep tabs on U.S. Weapons in Ukraine. This is a War Command to wage war against Russia. The last time I dealt personally with a 3 Star General was  when I lectured at West Point on “Nuclear Deterrence” in their Senior Conference on that subject in front of, among others, the 3 Star General in Charge of War Operations at the Pentagon. The Pentagon puts a 3 Stars  General in Charge of War Operations—not Inventory. And you do not need a Headquarters Staff of 300 to do an Audit. It’s a War Headquarters Staff. We are going to war against Russia unless the American People can figure out some way to stop it!

Francis A. Boyle

Professor of Law

STUTTGART, Germany — A three-star general will lead a new Army headquarters in Germany that will include about 300 U.S. service members responsible for coordinating security assistance for Ukraine, a senior U.S. military official said this week.

I refer those unfamiliar with Francis Boyle to his brief biography in the University of Illinois website.

To that I can add, that his ‘political science’ studies for the Masters and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard were primarily in Russian/Soviet affairs, and that in his time at Harvard he worked under many of the same professors as did I. In this sense, Boyle is a well qualified Russia expert, even if his primary listing at Illinois is as defender of human rights.  He is also particularly noteworthy this year for his efforts to promote among several key Congressmen the articles of impeachment against President Biden that he has drafted; the charges – waging undeclared war on Russia in violation of the Constitution. So far that has gained little traction, but when the new Congress with Republican majority takes its seats in 2023 the prospects of finding sponsors may be significantly improved.

Notwithstanding the worrisome or alarming news above, I close this essay with a glimmer of hope that the world has not yet gone completely mad.  From my volunteer translator in Germany, I have learned about the start of what should be a nationwide “Ami Go Home” movement in the Federal Republic. It will begin with mass demonstrations in the East German city of Leipzig on 26 November. The protests are inspired by the thinking of Oskar Lafonteine, a German politician who held leading positions in the SPD and later in Die Linke: namely the notion that it is high time for the United States occupation forces to leave Germany so that the country may recover its sovereignty. Those new to German politics may more easily identify Lafonteine as the husband of the eloquent Opposition member of the Bundestag Sahra Wagenknecht. It behooves me to add that per the advice of my translator when he forwarded to me news about the ‘Ami Go Home’ demonstration that the actual organizers are not on the German Left but, on the contrary, on the Hard Right. This interpretation has been reconfirmed by a well informed reader living in Berlin. Call this yet another ‘impersonation’ or imposter phenomenon if you will. We are living through interesting times.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Is the Anglo-Russian Fisheries Agreement about to end?

By Drago Bosnic | November 14, 2022

During the early (First) Cold War era, particularly the 1950-1970 timeframe, Soviet diplomacy tried easing tensions with the political West. This greatly contributed to the development of Anglo-Soviet relations in many areas, despite the overall geopolitical rivalry. It was at this time that a number of agreements were inked between Moscow and London, including the 1956 Fisheries Agreement, which is still in effect. It was signed in Moscow on May 25, 1956 by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov and the UK Ambassador to the USSR William Hayter. On August 31, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ratified the agreement.

The document contained only three articles. Article 1 read: “The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics agrees to grant fishing vessels assigned to the ports of the United Kingdom the right to fish in the waters of the Barents Sea along the coast of the Kola Peninsula between the meridians 36° and 37° 50′ E. along the mainland east of Cape Kanin Nos between meridians 43° 17′ and 51° E, as well as along the coast of Kolguev Island, outside three nautical miles from the low tide line both on the mainland and on the islands; these vessels are also granted the right to navigate and anchor freely in these waters.”

Additionally, the Protocol to Article 1 of the Agreement stated: “The permission given by the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to fishing vessels assigned to the ports of the United Kingdom to fish, sail freely and anchor in the waters specified in Article I of the Agreement, shall not be regarded as granting to such fishing vessels the right to fish, navigate and anchor in prohibited zones which may be established by the competent Soviet authorities within the waters covered by the Agreement.”

In turn, Article 2 stated: “When fishing vessels of the United Kingdom enter Soviet ports and protected waters in case of emergency, these vessels will be guided by the rules established by the competent Soviet authorities.”

The Fisheries Agreement was signed for a period of five years and entered into force on the date of the exchange of instruments of ratification, which took place at the end of 1956 in London. It was automatically renewed every five years and is still valid, since neither party announced its withdrawal. As per a special clause, Moscow or London are obligated to declare this no later than one year before the expiration of the specified term of the Agreement.

It should be noted that the UK was a fairly large player in the international fishing industry at the time, particularly in the cod and haddock fisheries. Obviously, having concluded the agreement with the Soviet Union, the UK intended to expand its fishing industry to the Soviet part of the Barents Sea. At the same time, it should be noted that the 1956 Fisheries Agreement did not affect the rights of Soviet fishing vessels in UK waters.

In this regard, on September 30, 1964 Moscow and London exchanged notes on the issue of Soviet fishing vessels’ presence and floating bases within the fishing borders. As per these notes, Soviet fishing vessels and floating bases were allowed to anchor, sail, transship fish and carry out other work that is auxiliary to fishing operations within the zone between 3 and 12 miles from the baseline, from which UK territorial waters are measured around the Shetland Islands north of a line drawn west from Ash Ness Lighthouse and a line drawn east from the southern tip of Bressay Point.

Over the years, the so-called “Khrushchev euphoria” resulting from possible closer cooperation with the political West, particularly the UK, was starting to die down, and Moscow then fully realized that UK ships, extracting a significant part of the marine life resources available in the Barents Sea, seriously undermined Russian reserves. However, for some reason, the USSR (later the Russian Federation) showed no intention of ending the 1956 Fisheries Agreement. Although there might be serious reasons for this that were never made public, the fact is that the UK continues to fish freely and virtually unchecked in the waters of the Barents Sea.

And yet, the economic consequences fade in comparison to possible security challenges for Russia, as foreign vessels fishing in the area of the Barents Sea could easily be working for UK intelligence services, collecting and passing sensitive information which could undermine the Russian military in the area. Given the current extremely tense relations between Moscow and London, this is completely unacceptable for Russia, as the UK is one of the most adamant supporters of the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev. As Russian fishermen have long had little interest in fishing off the UK coast, Moscow will likely need to reassess the benefits of the agreement for itself, especially as waters around the Arctic are of prime strategic importance.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Energy Experts

Tony Heller | November 4, 2022

World leaders have been taking energy advice from people like Michael Mann and Greta Thunberg, who have no experience or expertise related to energy. Simultaneously, governments have been refusing to listen to the people who provide the world’s energy.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | 20 Comments