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Critics Slam JAMA Study Claiming 52 U.S. Doctors Spread COVID ‘Misinformation’

By Monica Dutcher | The Defender | August 18, 2023

Critics of a study published this week in JAMA concluding 52 doctors from across the U.S., propagated “COVID-19 misinformation about vaccines, treatments, and masks on large social media and other online platforms” called the study nothing more than “propaganda.”

“Ultimately, misinformation is just a weaponized term meaning nothing,” said Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH. “People who use it are often completely ignorant of science and truth.

Prasad and others pointed to several flaws in the study, including the researchers’ definition of “misinformation,” the reported percentage of those with post-COVID-19 condition, or “long COVID” and the false claim that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine alone led to deaths — as deaths also have been linked to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.

The CDC as the arbiter of COVID truths

The University of Massachusetts researchers who produced the study defined misinformation as “assertions unsupported by or contradicting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] guidance on COVID-19 prevention and treatment during the period assessed or contradicting the existing state of scientific evidence for any topics not covered by the CDC.”

But in an Aug. 16 Substack article, Prasad — a hematologist-oncologist and professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco — challenged the notion of using the CDC as the litmus test for pandemic-related information.

CDC “made many errors,” Prasad wrote, citing a paper he published in March, documenting 25 statistical or numerical errors made by the CDC that he said raised questions about the agency’s “real or perceived systematic bias.”

It’s also well documented that the agency constantly changed its mask guidance and published conflicting information about vaccine effectiveness.

Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies medical misinformation, told USA Today, “The guidance kept on changing … Communication around the vaccine was horrible.”

Dr. Jeff Barke, an Orange County, California, primary care physician and founding member of America’s Frontline Doctors, called the CDC “a captured agency,” saying “it makes no sense whatsoever to recommend this toxic product [COVID-19 vaccines] to children.”

The CDC never came out with early treatment guidelines, Barke said. It was always about vaccines and masks. Barke recalled prescribing ivermectin to his patients and the pharmacists not filling it, asking him for the “diagnostic code” in order to proceed.

Barke told The Defender :

“The pharmacy never asks for a diagnostic code if you prescribe OxyContin for a patient. So it’s OK for a doctor to prescribe a Schedule II narcotic — no questions asked — but I can’t prescribe a product that has a proven safety record of 50 or 60 years.”

Barke is a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit to stop a California law that subjects the state’s doctors to discipline, including the suspension of their medical licenses, for sharing “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.

What exactly is ‘misinformation’? 

The study’s authors identified four categories of “misinformation”:

  • Claiming vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective.
  • Promoting unapproved medications for prevention or treatment.
  • Disputing mask-wearing effectiveness.
  • “Other misinformation,” to include conspiracy theories and the virus’s origins.

The authors reviewed COVID-19-related posts from doctors on the social media platforms Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, Parler and YouTube between January 2021 and December 2022.

The researchers initially focused their Twitter review on America’s Frontline Doctors’ profile because of the organization’s “volume of COVID-19 misinformation in its tweets” and “large following.”

Physicians who followed America’s Frontline Doctors’ Twitter page were targeted on Twitter and other platforms.

Using the search terms “COVID,” “vaccine,” “doctor,” “physician,” “ineffective,” “pharmaceutical,” “ivermectin,” “hydroxychloroquine” and others, the authors of the study identified 52 doctors — 50 licensed and two unlicensed — who used social media to spread COVID-19 “misinformation.”

Results showed most of the 52 physicians (76.9%) who posted “misinformation” did so in more than one of the four categories identified. The majority posted vaccine “misinformation.”

Dr. Meryl Nass — who on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its individual members, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution — called the JAMA study “a piece of propaganda.”

Nass said:

“There is no science. They [the authors] are trying to make it look like they’re doing something quantitative when they’re not. There was a lot known about the ineffectiveness of the vaccines at the time they were working on this paper.”

Unpacking the misinformation in the misinformation study 

The University of Massachusetts researchers said doctors’ claims that myocarditis was common in children who received the vaccine and that the risks of myocarditis outweighed the risk of vaccination were “unfounded.”

But myocarditis “does outweigh the benefits of vaccinations for some ages — in men — and some doses,” said Prasad, citing an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The paper, which focused on booster mandates at American universities, concluded the mandates were unethical because they could result in greater health risks, like booster-associated myocarditis, than benefits to healthy young adults.

Several other studies have shown either myocarditis deaths across all age groups, or elevated myocardial injury after vaccination.

The researchers also flagged any posts discussing pre-pandemic studies that definitively concluded masks do not prevent the spread of respiratory viral infections. And they deemed as misinformation any post that undermined the role of masks in slowing the spread of the infection and that pointed to rising cases in areas with mask mandates.

But a plethora of studies on mask ineffectiveness emerged during the time the Massachusetts team was conducting its research on physicians and “misinformation.”

There were also reports on “The Foegen effect” — the idea that deep re-inhalation of droplets and virions caught on facemasks might make COVID-19 infection more likely or more severe. German physician Dr. Zacharias Fögen introduced the concept in a study that concluded: “mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.”

“The totality of the evidence to date shows no benefit from community mask wearing,” said Prasad, who pointed to Cochrane’s multiple analyses.

According to the JAMA study, doctors who said the COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing COVID-19 spread or that the virus originated in a lab in China were propagators of misinformation.

Yet plenty of data show the vaccines did not prevent transmission, and scientists even testified to evidence that COVID-19 could have resulted from controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In the wake of the pandemic, multiple organizations have published guidelines on “medical misinformation” — including YouTube and the American Medical Association (AMA).

Last June, the AMA adopted a new policy to limit medical disinformation, including ensuring that medical licensing boards can take disciplinary action against health professionals who spread health-related disinformation.

In California, however, a judge ruled in January that the state does not have the power to penalize doctors who spread “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

“COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus,” the judge decided.

Monica Dutcher is a Maryland-based senior reporter for The Defender.

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.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Can You Overdose on Ivermectin? Dr. Pierre Kory’s Answer Will Shock You

The Vigilant Fox | Vigilant News | August 17, 2023

“Of all the harmful misinformation spread over the past couple of years, one of the most disturbing false narratives was targeted at the Nobel-Prize-winning, human medicine ivermectin,” expressed filmmaker Mikki Willis in his ground-breaking documentary titled, Ivermectin: The Truth.

Ivermectin is “one of the safest and most effective medicines of this era. A medicine that, according to the numerous top scientists I’ve interviewed … could have ended the pandemic before it began.”

But Ivermectin is “horse dewormer,” the media said. “It could put you in a coma.” “It can kill you,” pundits warned.

But is this actually true?

Popular podcaster Greg Hunter, AKA USA Watchdog, asked Dr. Pierre Kory, one of the world’s leading experts on Ivermectin, straight-up, “Can I OD (overdose) on Ivermectin if I get two or three times the [standard] dose. Can I kill myself?”

Dr. Kory’s answer blew Greg Hunter’s mind.

“Let me answer scientifically. So there is a world-famous toxicologist named Jacques Descotes, and he’s French. And two years ago, he was commissioned to do a scoping review of the entire data on the safety of Ivermectin in its history. And his conclusion after doing this comprehensive review is that he does not believe that there has been one single case of anyone dying from an Ivermectin overdose.”

Prof. Jacques Descotes: Image – Academica.edu

“Oh, Lord,” reacted Greg Hunter. “How many pills have been given worldwide? I heard 4 billion, but it must be more than that.”

“Over 4 billion,” Dr. Kory confirmed. “Now, people have died where the deaths were reported as caused by Ivermectin. But when he [Prof. Jacques Descotes] reviewed those cases, he didn’t think those arguments [were] credible.”

Let’s dive deeper into Prof. Descotes’ analysis.

But first, a quick look at his impressive credentials. “Pr. Jacques Descotes, MD, PharmD, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Claude Bernard University of Lyon (France), [is] a world-known toxicologist with a 40-year track [record] as an independent consultant for the pharmaceutical industry as well as an advisor to regulatory bodies worldwide,” BusinessWire wrote.

In March 2021, he conducted a review of Ivermectin’s safety profile based on over 350 articles – plus accessible web sources. Here are his conclusions:

“Ivermectin has been administered orally to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world in the past three decades. The assessment of reported adverse events temporally associated with Ivermectin exposure shows that Ivermectin-induced adverse effects have so far been infrequent and usually mild to moderate.

“It is noteworthy that no deaths have seemingly ever been reported after an accidental or suicidal overdose of Ivermectin. No greater toxicity of Ivermectin has been substantiated in elderly people despite repeated assertions that an ageing blood-brain barrier might lead to increased Ivermectin toxicity level. The positive clinical experience accumulated with Ivermectin administration led many medical experts to break away from early adamant contra-indications in pregnant women. Finally, several national pharmacovigilance networks around the world released information and opinions to ascertain Ivermectin safety in human subjects. So far, there are no critical safety limitations to Ivermectin prescription in current indications.

I also want to point out that no severe adverse event has been reported in dozens of completed or ongoing studies involving thousands of participants worldwide to evaluate the efficacy of Ivermectin against COVID-19.”

Astonishing. So what would it take to overdose on Ivermectin?

“In order to overdose from Ivermectin, you have to take either a hundred or a thousand times the standard dose,” declared Dr. Kory.

“And there have been accidental poisonings where people have taken large amounts. But you know what happens every time? When they take these massive amounts of Ivermectin, it tends to affect them neurologically. They’ll get confused. They might be stumbling — uncoordinated. They go to the hospital, and there’s no treatment required. But within days, the patients return to normal. So, there’s been no life-ending injuries. No deaths reported with Ivermectin. So, that shows you why it’s one of the safest drugs in history, even at massive overdoses.

Greg Hunter’s full interview with Dr. Pierre Kory is available to watch.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Medical Board Chief who wanted Doctors delicensed for ‘misinformation’ in bed with PR firm tied to CDC, Pfizer, Moderna

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 18, 2023

The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.

In late 2021, Baron publicly pushed for doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19 and the vaccines to lose their license and certification. Baron said then that “putting out flagrant misinformation is unethical and dangerous during a pandemic.”

Weber, the world’s second-largest PR firm, has branded its team as “misinformation and disinformation” experts and says it provides clients with services to help manage any perceived threats posed by spreaders of such information.

The firm has organized conference panels on “medical misinformation” in which Baron participated.

Last year, Baron partnered with Weber Shandwick to propose a South by Southwest (SXSW) panel titled “When Doctors Prescribe Misinformation.” The proposal was subsequently accepted and the panel took place at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 13.

According to Thacker, “Weber Shandwick’s panel featuring Dr. Baron has been widely promoted by the PR firm’s employees,” including Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Healthcare Communications, Strategy & Planning for Weber Shandwick, who in a LinkedIn post, wrote she “can’t think of a more important topic right now.”

The CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) in September 2020 awarded Weber a $50 million contract “to promote the vaccination of children, pregnant women and those at risk for flu and increase the general acceptance and use of vaccines,” according to the PR firm’s website.

Under the contract, Weber employees were embedded in the NCIRD to “communicate the risks and recommended actions for outbreaks and convey vaccine recommendations to healthcare providers,” according to Thacker.

Medicine has always been ‘in bed with Big Pharma’

Several doctors have faced disciplinary action by state medical boards for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” One of them is internist and biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of Children Health Defense’s scientific advisory committee.

Nass on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure, which suspended her license in January 2022.

The board’s suspension arose from its adoption of a position statement promulgated by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) threatening physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.

In 2021, ABIM and FSMB collaborated to create the statement used to discipline Nass.

Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements, primarily related to demonstrating competence in one’s field of specialization, including completing a residency, being certified by the residency director, and paying for and passing the board examinations.

Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements. She explained:

“You complete a medical residency in your field of specialization. Your residency director certifies your competence and moral character, and you must pay for and pass your board examination to demonstrate your command of your specialty.

“When you’ve paid them for board certification and successfully completed all the requirements, how can they change the rules 20 or 50 years later and say, ‘we’re going to decertify you now because we don’t like your viewpoint?’

“There was nothing in any documentation from the Board of Internal Medicine about misinformation, or any other standards that the board can impose apart from competency to practice when it issued certifications.”

Dr. Richard Eggleston, a retired ophthalmologist in Clarkston, Washington, also faces disciplinary action — by the Washington Medical Commission — arising from articles he published in a local newspaper in 2021, questioning the official narrative and medical advice related to COVID-19.

Doctors aren’t being targeted exclusively for spreading “misinformation” — some, like Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton, an integrative physician, were targeted for their less-than-100% support for COVID-19 vaccines.

Last month, the Massachusetts medical board revoked Sutton’s medical license, claiming she improperly exempted eight children from required school vaccinations. This came a year after California also revoked Sutton’s medical license.

Sutton told The Defender, “The voice of medicine today is determined by the marketing wisdom of Madison Avenue, not by what is sound information from scientific research.”

Sutton said the whole practice of medicine rests on sharing and providing information necessary for informed decisions and consent. When specialty boards issue vague accusations, they engage in “harassment,” and an “egregious overreach of power” and are obstructing the practice of medicine.

A California law aimed at punishing doctors for providing “misinformation” to their patients is now in “legal limbo” following conflicting rulings in state courts earlier this year, which could affect Sutton’s and other California doctors’ cases going through the courts.

This trail of evidence demonstrates medical boards are not simply acting on their own authority but in collusion with state governments, federal agencies and private companies.

“There’s no one who is a ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ expert whose opinion does not align with the government and with the corporations,” Thacker told The Defender. “That’s what makes them an ‘expert.’”

“What’s always been true is that medicine has been in bed with Big Pharma,” he added. “It’s now becoming a lot more transparent. These relationships are much more transparent.”

‘A very political attempt to shut down people from having alternative viewpoints’

According to Thacker, Baron began his “crusade for the biopharmaceutical industry” in September 2021. In a post for ABIM’s blog, Baron said, “I want to state unequivocally that ABIM can and does take action, independent of state licensing boards, to remove certification from physicians for unprofessional and unethical behavior.”

For Thacker, Baron’s concern about “misinformation” was first triggered when physicians spoke out against COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy and side effects. “These are the same concerns held by Weber Shandwick, who Pfizer and Moderna are paying big buck[s] to promote their vaccines,” he said.

“Baron’s relationship with Weber Shandwick was not disclosed” by JAMA, Thacker said, “nor in an accompanying viewpoint Baron wrote for JAMA.”

After an inquiry by Thacker, JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, said, “We initiated our internal investigation earlier this week, in accordance with our standard processes for allegations of non-disclosure of conflicts.”

“It is notable that Baron has done his best to mislead the public and other physicians about what he is doing,” Nass said. “He claims the ABIM is trying to ‘protect the legitimacy of medical expertise’ rather than censoring viewpoints it does not like.”

Nass said Baron “conjures up examples of what the board might censure.” She pointed to a Feb. 23, 2023, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article Baron co-authored with attorney Carl J. Coleman, which stated:

“When a licensed physician insists that viruses don’t cause disease or that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people or connect them to cell towers, professional bodies must be able to take action in support of fact and evidence based practice.”

“Yet this is a fabrication,” Nass said, adding:

“Instead, Dr. Baron, who earns about $1.2 million yearly from the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation, has decertified Drs. Peter McCullough, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory — all highly celebrated, published and esteemed doctors in their fields.

“None of them have uttered any mumbo-jumbo about cell towers, magnetism or a non-viral etiology for COVID-19. All have had their board certifications revoked for the viewpoints they expressed — viewpoints that are supported by a preponderance of the medical literature.”

In a January 2022 article for Health Affairs, Coleman wrote, “Licensing boards are state agencies subject to the First Amendment, and as such they are limited in their ability to penalize physicians based on the content of their speech.”

Yet, a 2022 NEJM article co-authored by Baron argued that while “Differences of opinion in medicine are necessary for progress … there are some opinions that have been so thoroughly repudiated by existing evidence as to be considered definitively wrong.”

‘All this money is sloshing around now for misinformation research’

According to Thacker, “PR firms are now moving into the ‘disinformation’ space after decades of deceit on behalf of multiple industries,” with Weber Shandwick having “expanded into the disinformation space in late 2021,” promoting tactics that help “brands combat misinformation and disinformation that may implicate them.”

Speaking to Thacker, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said, “The ABIM is clearly part of this ‘medical misinformation’ push, which is orchestrated by pharmaceutical companies and their PR allies” and which serves “the interests of Big Pharma.”

Remarking on the presence of a “medical misinformation” panel at SXSW, long known as a music, film and technology festival, Thacker told The Defender, “Anyone and everyone is getting involved in ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”

“Baron has given a TED Talk, for instance. Why is TED Talks involved in this?” he asked.

In 2019 Baron delivered a talk at TEDx Chicago titled, “Please Don’t Confuse Your Google Search with My Medical Degree.”

For Thacker, the answer relates to financial interests. “All this money is sloshing around now for ‘misinformation’ research. Anyone can hop up and down saying ‘I’m an expert on misinformation and disinformation, get me a grant, get me on a panel,’” he said.

Weber embedded staffers within the CDC while representing Pfizer, Moderna

Thacker wrote that prior to discovering Baron’s ties to Weber Shandwick, he had confirmed the PR firm’s ties to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna.

These ties did not prevent the CDC from awarding the $50 million contract to Weber Shandwick in September 2020 to push vaccines. The Daily Mail subsequently reported Thacker’s findings.

Medical Marketing and Media reported “Weber’s duties include providing 10 on-site health communications staffers, seven health comms specialists, two health research specialists and one social media specialist” to NCIRD, as well as “generating story ideas, distributing articles and conducting outreach to news, media and entertainment organizations.”

In October 2020, a blog post by Stacy Montejo, senior vice president at Weber Shandwick, disclosed that Pfizer is one of the firm’s clients. A month later, with Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine awaiting Emergency Use Authorization, the company hired Weber Shandwick to handle the vaccine’s publicity, according to PR Week.

Such relationships have continued to the present. In June, Moderna announced a new communications strategy “to further educate the world about Moderna’s mRNA technology and its promise to transform the future of human health.”

The effort is led by Laura Schoen, “who is sometimes titled president of global healthcare at Weber Shandwick, and other times chief healthcare officer at IPG DXTRA, Weber Shandwick’s parent company,” Thacker wrote.

Lucy Rieck, a Weber Shandwick employee, previously publicly tweeted support for a panel Moderna proposed for this year’s SXSW, titled “COVID, Monkeypox, Disease X, What’s Next?” That proposal does not appear to have been accepted for presentation.

Conflicts of interest between Weber Shandwick, the CDC and NCIRD, and Pfizer and Moderna do not appear to have been disclosed.

In October 2022, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sent a letter to the CDC inquiring about its relationship with Weber Shandwick and requesting “information regarding the nature of Weber’s work for the NCIRD.” It’s unclear whether the CDC complied with the request.

Todd S. Richardson, one of the attorneys representing Eggleston, told The Defender “While it is certainly understandable that governmental agencies will hire PR firms to help them get their message out … it becomes of real concern to me when those agencies, or people working within the agencies, try to silence those who disagree.”

According to Thacker, the web of relationships between Weber Shandwick doesn’t just extend to Big Pharma companies, the CDC and its agencies, or to doctors such as Baron. Academics such as Brown University’s Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a key figure in the “misinformation research” space, have participated in some of the firm’s events.

Wardle, a professor of the practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University who has no scientific or medical credentials, participated in an online meeting organized by Weber Shandwick in October 2020 to discuss “election misinformation.”

Subsequently, Wardle played a key advisory role in the Biden administration, federal agencies, social media platforms and Ivy League institutions as they sought to censor content that ran counter to the government’s COVID-19 narrative.

According to Thacker, she “helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups … with funding from Google” and later sent Twitter a report aimed at countering the “growing threat of disinformation to trust in COVID-19 vaccines.”

Thacker said the biopharmaceutical industry is “the smartest at putting out disinformation. What other industry has bought off the medical community and the science community?” he asked. “They bought off the researchers, the government, the academic journals.”

Thacker said he believes much of what is labeled “misinformation” in medicine and academic research “is really just corporate PR,” and that “Congress needs to take a harder look at funding for ‘misinformation research.’“

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

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.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

No Justice for Trump

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute For Political Economy | August 18, 2023

The four indictments against Trump are ridiculous in their charges. There is no legal basis in law for any of the indictments. Moreover, many of the indictments are violations of Constitutionally protected civil liberties. All the indictments amount to is an assertion that to charge Democrats with fraud in an election is a felony. It is OK to charge Republicans with fraud.

Charges of electoral fraud have accompanied every election cycle in US history whether at the local, state, or national level. Many believe today that John F. Kennedy got to the White House because the Democrat machine in Chicago counted the graveyards. George W. Bush’s election was disputed and had to be settled by the Supreme Court. Never before has it been a crime to dispute an election.

What explains the criminalization of Trump’s dispute of the election? I will suggest a number of reasons. One is that the Democrats know that they cannot win against Trump, and polls show that Biden is so unpopular even with Democrats that they cannot again steal the election. So the Democrats decided to misuse city, county, and federal prosecutors to tie up Trump with four criminal indictments of multiple charges in order (1) hopefully to discredit him in the public eye, and (2) tie him up in court proceedings and trials so that he cannot campaign. Maybe all the stress will kill an old man. Clearly if the Democrats thought they could win, they would not bring shame on themselves and their party and on government in the United States with obviously politically-inspired indictments of the leading candidate for President. Clearly the people do not believe the indictments. A political party that cared about the country would not split the country in half by weaponizing law. But the corrupt Democrats and their Ruling Establishment backers only care about power. America now has an entire political party totally devoid of integrity. Power uber alles is the Democrats only principle.

Another is the incompetence of the prosecutors. Jack Smith is so totally incompetent that he has had to admit mistakes in his filings and has been repeatedly over-ruled by the federal judges overseeing his two phony indictments. In other words, Jack Smith is so thoroughly incompetent that he is unqualified to be a para-legal in a small town. No self-respecting and competent attorney would bring such false charges, especially against an American President.

The two black prosecutors, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, are quota law school grads and quota hires. Once law schools reduced their admission requirements, they had to lower their standards, because if the quota admissions didn’t pass, the law schools would be accused of racism and of creating false hopes. The result is a lower level of competence of all graduates, black and white, male and female.

It is well known that Alvin Bragg cannot explain how a city or state court can try a person on a federal charge, which is his only felony charge. He can’t even explain what the federal charge is.

Fani Willis has 11 charges against trump, all of which are nonsensical and false, especially her racketeering charge under the RICO law put in place to convict the Mafia. Only an incompetent idiot would equate protest of electoral fraud with racketeering. Aside from being nonsensical charges in Trump’s case, fani Willis’ charges to be valid require criminal intent. Fani Willis provides no evidence that Trump harbored criminal intent when he responded to expert evidence of electoral fraud and tried to get the matter investigated prior to Biden being declared the winner. Nowhere in her indictment does Fani Willis provide any evidence of criminal intent or any reason why she thinks criminal intent is involved.

The indictments boil down to this: It is a felony to accuse Democrats of electoral fraud.

Considering how the locations of the trials have been orchestrated, it is highly unlikely that the jury pools will contain one person who is not a Trump-hater. In other words, the Democrats know that the juries they select will convict Trump even if the evidence proves him innocent. The ground has been prepared so that indictment means conviction. The kangaroo convictions will be appealed and eventually might reach an honest court, but the process will take years, thus ensuring Biden a second term.

This is America today. It is far worse than a Banana Republic. We are now presented with four Kafkaesque, Stalinist trials of a President of the United States. If they can do this to a President, a mere citizen has no chance. The corrupt, incompetent trio of Smith, Bragg, and Willis are achieving the destruction of legal integrity and civil liberty in the United States. The result will be social disintegration.

Americans are going to very much regret that they accepted the stolen 2020 presidential election and that they acquiesced in the white liberals’ goal of placing anti-white blacks in power over them.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | 2 Comments

Pakistan arrests opposition leader in crackdown on Imran Khan’s party

Press TV – August 19, 2023

Pakistani authorities have arrested opposition leader Shah Mehmood Qureshi in a widening crackdown on former prime minister Imran Khan’s party by the military-backed interim government.

Qureshi, who twice served as Pakistan’s foreign minister, was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Saturday in the capital Islamabad shortly after he denounced the newly installed caretaker government for its attempts to delay the elections which are scheduled to be held later this year.

“He was arrested from his residence by Islamabad police. We don’t have any further details yet,” a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

In recent months, Pakistani authorities have made widespread arrests targeting Khan’s PTI party in an attempt to crush his grassroots support, causing nationwide anger against the country’s powerful military, which most people believe is behind the crackdown.

According to several independent surveys, the PTI will win a landslide victory in the next elections if the party is allowed to run a political campaign without restrictions.

PTI spokesman Zulfi Bukhari condemned Qureshi’s arrest on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, saying the vice chairman of the party was “arrested for doing a press conference and re-affirming PTI stance against all tyranny and pre-poll rigging that is going on currently in Pakistan.”

“PTI Vice Chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi has been illegally arrested once again,” the PTI said in social media post on X.

Qureshi was also arrested on May 11 and released on June 6.

In the meantime, Khan, 70, is currently serving a three-year jail term.

Khan was arrested earlier this month and taken to jail after a court found him guilty in one of the more than dozens of cases he has faced.

The former prime minister has maintained that some 200 cases against him are politically motivated to keep him out of power. He says the country’s powerful military is behind these cases.

The three-year jail sentence issued by a lower court disqualifies him from taking part in elections.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

US Guantanamo judge dismisses ‘confession’ obtained by torture

Press TV – August 19, 2023

A US military judge has rejected a “confession” coerced out of a young Guantanamo Bay captive through torture following the September 11, 2001 highly suspicious terror attacks in Washington and New York that led to military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The judge in the military tribunals held for captives still held in the Cuba-based US Guantanamo Bay military prison and torture facility ruled that the “confession” obtained from Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of masterminding the 2000 bombing attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors, was tainted by years of abuse and torture inflicted on him at the hands of the CIA and FBI intelligence agents and operatives.

“Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” wrote the judge, Col. Lanny Acosta, in handing down his ruling.

“However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.” Acosta further emphasized.

Attorneys for both Nashiri and five other suspects — accused of involvement in the September 11 attacks and held captive and tortured for decades without trial or legal representation — have struggled for over 10 years now in the Guantanamo military court to exclude evidence against them that was coerced through torture.

The six were captured separately after the 2001 attacks and shuttled through CIA-run “black sites” in numerous US-allied countries across the globe, such as Thailand and Poland, where they were subjected to intense torture techniques, including waterboarding, physical beatings and sleep deprivation.

Following the arrival of the captives at the Guantanamo military prison, some of them, including Nashiri were again subjected to intense interrogation and torture by FBI agents in early 2007 and other instances.

The judge’s decision comes as obtaining confession from prisoners through torture remains a major violation of international law.

The US military has accused Nashiri of being an al-Qaeda recruiter that plotted various attacks on American interests in the Arabian Peninsula.

US forces captured Nashiri in 2002 and transferred him to the Guantanamo prison in 2006 after he remained for four years in the custody of CIA interrogators and repeatedly tortured.

In September 2011, he was charged by a US military commission on nine counts related to his alleged involvement in planning al-Qaeda attacks.

His military trial showcased by the very entity that captured and tortured him has repeatedly faced delays, due to insistence by his assigned military lawyers that he suffered repeated torture while under detention of the CIA spy agency collaborating with US military forces occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Western calls for Ukraine peace talks a ‘tactical ploy’ – Moscow

RT | August 19, 2023

The US and its allies do not want the Ukraine conflict to end and their purported peace initiatives are merely attempts to buy Kiev time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview published on Saturday.

Geopolitical issues need to be discussed “not with [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters,” Lavrov said earlier this year. Negotiating directly with the Americans would make sense, he told the magazine International Affairs when asked about the idea.

“The problem, however, is that the United States has no intention of ending the conflict,” Lavrov explained, noting that “their officially declared objective is to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia.”

Prospects for negotiations between Russia and the West “are non-existent at this stage,” Lavrov said, while Kiev “Western sponsors are constantly pushing them to up the ante.”

Insisting on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s so-called ‘peace formula’ at meetings in Copenhagen and Jeddah – to which Russia was not invited – “hardly demonstrates an intention by the West to negotiate with Russia,” Lavrov said. Moscow has dismissed Zelensky’s ten-point list of demands as an unacceptable ultimatum unrelated to reality.

Russia has repeatedly tried to negotiate, from the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements to the “drastic attempt to convey our concerns to Western capitals” in December 2021, Lavrov noted. The West “arrogantly rejected” Moscow’s initiative and ramped up deliveries of weapons and ammunition to Kiev instead.

“We regard the Westerners’ hypocritical calls for talks as a tactical ploy to buy time once again giving the exhausted Ukrainian troops a respite and the opportunity to regroup, and to send in more weapons and ammunition,” Lavrov said, adding that “this is the path of war, not a peaceful settlement process.”

Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, admitted last December that the 2015 Franco-German proposal in Minsk was “an attempt to give Ukraine time” to build up its military. This was then confirmed by former French President Francois Hollande.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Lost Cause Is in the Air

By William Schryver – imetatronink – August 18, 2023

Back in February, I wrote what was and will likely remain the longest blog post I have authored. (I solemnly promise not to do such a thing again.)

Among other things, I observed:

“… the milieu of the past several weeks, during which time we have observed a pronounced rhetorical revolution in the popular western narratives regarding the NATO/Russia war in Ukraine.

“Lost cause is in the air. Many who have privately known this to be the case for some time have finally been sufficiently emboldened to publicly embrace the obvious — albeit reluctantly, and often with a good measure of rationalization and lingering misinformation in tow.”

Of course, at that point in time, the pivotal Battle of Bakhmut had not reached its inevitable conclusion, and the dream of a decisively triumphant Ukrainian march to Crimea was still cherished fondly by those partial to that cause.

As per usual, my sense of the trajectory of events anticipated something that would still take some time to be realized in full.

In any case, lost cause is now acrid in the late summer air of August 2023 — cordite, sulphur, and putrefied flesh.

Chagrined accounts of Ukrainian slaughter and woe are now rippling through the mainstream western media, and spilling off the lips of the “credentialed commentariat”.

It has become the pitiless massacre many of us predicted all those months ago.

And, of course, it never had a chance to be anything else.

What were they thinking?!

How did the Imperial Masters of War ever persuade themselves that their money, weapons, several thousand mercenaries, and a large fraction of the male population of Ukraine could defeat Russia in a high-intensity industrial land war on its borders?!

Did they really believe NATO armaments, training, intelligence, surveillance, planning, command, and impotent economic sanctions would be sufficient to defeat a resurgent Russia in 2022 and beyond?

I think they almost certainly did. Hubris and its attendant delusions are staples of end-of-empire epochs.

Of course, they’re going to try to spin this major geostrategic defeat such that its true realities, causes, and consequences are obscured. Already they’ve been working overtime to subtly dismiss the obvious conclusion that Russia is simply too strong and capable to defeat militarily.

I’ve noted the recurring talking point that the repulse of Ukraine’s offensive is being attributed to Russia’s supposedly archaic employment of “minefields and trenches” in a complex array of static defense lines.

Somehow they neglect to mention the overwhelming dominance of Russian artillery, its dizzying array of battlefield attack drones, its air superiority, its first-rate motorized infantry maneuver, and its relentless long-range precision missile strikes on rear-area logistical targets.

The simple fact of the matter is that, not only was defeating Russia beyond the capacity of the Mother of All Proxy Armies NATO built in Ukraine, it would likewise defy the never-yet-demonstrated and effectively fictitious American “mastery” of what the Pentagon has fancifully termed “combined-arms operations”.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the damn fools aren’t still stupid enough to try.

Either way, as I wrote in my previous post:

Matters have reached the point where the imperial masters will be forced to choose between a humiliating disengagement and abandonment of Ukraine to its fate — or otherwise blunder into a calamitous direct military intervention.

I continue to be convinced they won’t go there. And for the sake of the bereaved mothers, widowed wives, and fatherless children of the young American men who would be compelled to act out the catastrophe, I sure hope I’m right.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

West has shown its ‘true Russophobic face’ – Lavrov

RT | August 18, 2023

Washington and Brussels have openly unleashed a hybrid war against everything Russian, dropping their masks after decades of pretending to be civilized and adequate international partners, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with International Affairs, published on Saturday.

“Many of our former partners have been concealing their Russophobic nature under the veil of hypocrisy, but have now shown their true face in all its glory,” he said. “However, there is also the flip side of the coin here, since the Global Majority saw the true face of those who went as far as [to] aspire to a monopoly in defining the so-called universal values.”

“Today’s West is steered by people like Josep Borrell who divide the world into a blooming ‘garden’ and ‘the jungle,’ where the latter clearly applies to most of humanity,” Lavrov added.

The West has spent decades cynically transforming neighboring Ukraine into a “hostile military bulwark against Russia by nurturing an entire generation of politicians ready to declare war on our shared past, culture and everything Russian,” according to Lavrov.

Western capitals even openly admitted that reaching a peaceful settlement in Ukraine was never part of their plan, and that the Minsk agreements were originally designed to “buy some time to prepare a military scenario and deliver weapons to Kiev.”

“I think that the essential thing we must understand in this regard is that the West wants to do away with our country as a serious geopolitical rival,” the top Russian diplomat said “They have not hesitated to use subversive methods and perform acts of sabotage, as was the case with the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea.”

Lavrov also accused Washington and its allies of using all possible coercive means to prevent Russia’s partners from engaging in economic and other kinds of cooperation, while also “making outrageous efforts to disconnect Russia from international cooperation mechanisms in culture, education, research, and sports.”

One thing that the West fails to understand, according to Lavrov, is that “Russia will use all means to defend its people and its vital interests,” and thus would be better for the opponents to realize that “confrontation with Russia is futile and switch to more civilized” means for achieving a balance of interests.

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Anglo-American War on Russia – Part Nine (Preparing a Nuclear Attack)

Tales of the American Empire | August 17, 2023

The United States spent over a trillion dollars the past two decades to prepare for a surprise nuclear strike on Russia. The United States withdrew from major arms control treaties and built newer and more accurate nuclear missiles. It built missile bases in Poland and Romania and hundreds of new submarines and destroyers to launch cruise missiles or long-range anti-missile missiles.The United States Army and Navy developed, tested, and deployed mobile missile launchers to Europe while Generals insist they have the right to deploy such systems on Russia’s borders, to include inside Ukraine and Finland. This was barely reported in America’s corporate media, which spews constant propaganda about Russian threats to prepare the public for nuclear war.

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Related Tale: “All Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal”;    • All Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal  

“America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia”; Washington’s Blog; December 29, 2016; https://archive.ph/TR1qG

“Navy Unveils Truck-Mounted SM-6 Missile Launcher in European Test”; Joseph Trevithick; The War Zone; September 14, 2022; https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone…

“Army Fires Tomahawk Missile From Its New Typhon Battery In Major Milestone”; Joseph Trevithick; The War Zone; July 3, 2023; https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone…

“Dr. Strangelove”; movie clip of a psychopathic American General advocating a massive nuclear attack on Russia;    • Dr. Strangelove (1964) – General Turg…  

“Putin’s Warning”; plea to reporters at the 2016 International Economic Forum to tell the truth;    • Putin’s Warning: FULL SPEECH  

Related Tales: “The Anglo-American War on Russia”;    • The Anglo-American War on Russia  

August 19, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Video | , | Leave a comment