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Comply or Die: The Only Truly Compliant Person in a Police State Is a Dead One

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | April 20, 2021

Americans aren’t dying at the hands of police because of racism.

For that matter, George Floyd didn’t die because he was black and the cop who killed him is white.

Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, died because America is being overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

These warrior cops may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us and they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution. As retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis warns, “The system is corrupt. Police really are oppressing not only the black community, but also the whites. They’re an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.”

Now, not all cops are guns for hire, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the populace.

However, the unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that the good cops—the ones who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—are increasingly being outnumbered by those who believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens.

It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

Indeed, if you ask police and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with law enforcement, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings during encounters with the police.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, it doesn’t matter if a cop is in the wrong, it doesn’t matter if you’re being treated with less than the respect you deserve: if you want to emerge from a police encounter with your life and body intact, then you’d better comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.

In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”

This is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.

This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

Warrior cops—trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—are definitely not making us or themselves any safer.

This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat has all but guaranteed that unarmed Americans will keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

Consider just some of the scenarios in which unarmed Americans have been shot and killed by police:

Killed for taking public transit.

Killed for standing in a “shooting stance.”

Killed for holding a cell phone.

Killed for displaying air fresheners from a rearview mirror.

Killed for behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat.

Killed for opening the front door.

Killed for being a child in a car pursued by police.

Killed for approaching police with a metal spoon.

Killed for holding a tree branch.

Killed for crawling around naked.

Killed for hunching over.

Killed because a police officer accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his taser.

Killed for wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey.

Killed for telling police you lawfully own a firearm.

Killed for leaving anywhere at all when a police officer pulls up.

Killed for driving while deaf.

Killed for shopping at Walmart.

Killed for being homeless.

Killed for brandishing a shoehorn.

Killed for playing in a park.

Killed for having your car break down on the road.

Killed for being in your own apartment.

Killed for staying up late.

Killed for holding a garden hose.

This is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.

Making matters worse, when these officers, who have long since ceased to be peace officers, violate their oaths by bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—they are rarely given more than a slap on the hands before resuming their patrols.

Much of the “credit” for shielding these rogue cops goes to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, police contracts that “provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse,” state and federal laws that allow police to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing, and rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats.

It’s happening all across the country.

This is how perverse justice in America has become.

If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and your property, you should be, because as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Ugly Truth About COVID

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 17, 2021

Nick Hudson, an actuary and private equity investor, co-founded Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics (PANDA) in response to the many threats to civil rights and freedoms that have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic response. While media and public health institutions have engaged in a campaign of smoke and mirrors — one that is perpetuating paralyzing fear, needlessly, to this day — data and facts don’t lie.

Hudson and his team at PANDA, which include a data analyst, economist, medical doctors, big data analyst and public health experts, are using live data1 and open science to empower the public to exercise freedom of choice and preserve free societies.2

Hudson spoke at the inaugural BizNews Investment Conference in March 2021, and his keynote address is above. He explains the ugly truth about COVID-19, which is that the world is being crippled by fear due to a false narrative. Anyone who challenges that narrative is being labeled as a lunatic, a menace or a danger to society, which is furthering the repression and unjustified fear.

Bringing COVID-19 Truth to Light

George Washington famously said, “Truth will ultimately prevail where there are plans taken to bring it to light.”3 With that in mind, Hudson saw the “seeds of a great tragedy” being planted with the false COVID-19 narrative, and has made it a mission to get the truth out. So, what is the reality about the pandemic? According to Hudson:4

  • A virus that presents high risk to few and negligible risk to most hit some regions
  • Few are susceptible to severe disease
  • There are several available treatments
  • Asymptomatic people are not major drivers of disease
  • Lockdowns and mask mandates haven’t worked and instead caused great harm
  • The vulnerable were hurt instead of helped

The misinformation has been spewed from the beginning, including by World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a March 3, 2020, media briefing, he stated, “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”5

But according to Hudson, the 3.4% represents case fatality rate (CFR), which is the number of deaths from COVID-19 divided by the number of cases of COVID-19, while the 1% is infection fatality rate (IFR), or the number of deaths divided by all infected individuals.

“By conflating these two separate points (CFR and IFR),” Hudson said, “Tedros was effectively lying.” Quantitative scientist John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, calculated the IFR for COVID-19 in a review of 61 seroprevalence studies, which was a median of 0.23%, and 0.05% in people younger than 70.6

Based on this, the IFR for COVID-19 is lower than that of the flu. And wouldn’t you know it, in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial published March 26, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and colleagues wrote that “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.”7

The media have suppressed this fact, Hudson noted, along with the fact that there’s a 1,000 times difference in mortality among those younger than 19 and those older than 70 — something that should have been taken into account in the pandemic response.

Is COVID-19 Really a ‘Novel Virus’?

Further inflaming widespread fear is the idea that COVID-19 is a “novel virus,” which makes it sound like it’s something humans have never encountered before. But is it really? According to Hudson:

“The reality is that the coronavirus is a very close relative, not even a separate subspecies, a very close relative of the 2003 SARS virus. There are seven related coronaviruses known to cause disease in humans, probably many others, and four of them are in general circulation.

Annual, global circulation. So the naming of this disease is terribly inconsistent. This is really a rose by any name, SARS. A variant of SARS. It’s not novel.”

One study even found that 81% of people not exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, were still able to mount an immune response against it, which “suggests at least some built-in immune protection from SARS-CoV-2 …”8

Nonetheless, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 pandemic, stated that “a majority of the world’s population is susceptible to infection from this virus.”9 This is the first of two key elements that, Hudson said, lead to “homosapienophobia” — the idea that everyone is dangerous until proven healthy.

The idea of universal susceptibility to COVID-19 is nonsense, Hudson noted, as was demonstrated early on with the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Among the 3,711 passengers and crew onboard the Diamond Princess, 712 (19.2%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and of these 46.5% were asymptomatic at the time of testing. Of those showing symptoms, only 9.7% required intensive care and 1.3% (nine) died.10

PANDA data also showed that, starting in February 2021, there was not universal susceptibility to the virus. Their data showed cumulative COVID-19 deaths per million people. In Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, the population fatality rate was 112 per million compared to 710 per million in Europe and the Americas.

As for Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, Hudson said, “the population fatality rate there almost isn’t an epidemic. In a typical year, they’d have 10,000 deaths per million from all causes.”

Fear Mongering Over Asymptomatic Spread

The second element that enables the doctrine of “everyone being a danger” to continue is the idea of asymptomatic spread driving disease. “I was absolutely aghast to find out the poor quality of the science” behind it, Hudson said.

One of the seminal papers involved one woman who reportedly infected 16 colleagues while she was asymptomatic.11 The study was widely used to suggest that asymptomatic spread was occurring, but controversy later ensued over whether the woman was actually asymptomatic when the others were infected or if she was symptomatic and being treated for flu-like symptoms at the time.12

In June 2020, Kerkhove also made it very clear that people who have COVID-19 without any symptoms “rarely” transmit the disease to others. But in a dramatic about-face, WHO then backtracked on the statement just one day later. June 9, 2020, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s emergencies program, quickly backpedaled Van Kerkhove’s statement, saying the remarks were “misinterpreted or maybe we didn’t use the most elegant words to explain that.”13

“It’s utter, utter nonsense,” Hudson said, adding that Fauci also stated in January 2020, “asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person.”14

A JAMA Network Open study later found, in December 2020, that asymptomatic transmission is not a primary driver of infection within households.15 A study in Nature Communications also found “there was no evidence of transmission from asymptomatic positive persons to traced close contacts.”16

Lockdown Madness

The myth of widespread asymptomatic spread is what was used to justify worldwide lockdowns of healthy people. “Bruce Aylward will go down in history as a criminal of immense stature,” Hudson said, referring to Aylward’s role as the head of a WHO team that visited Wuhan, China, and concluded lockdowns were working to stop COVID-19 spread.17

“He takes a delegation to China, spends a few days, then comes back and says everyone should follow China’s response, the doctrine of universal susceptibility,” Hudson said. Yet, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic official guidelines for pandemic response plans recommend against large-scale quarantine of the healthy.

In fact, WHO wrote that during an influenza pandemic, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening and border closure are “not recommended in any circumstance.”18

Likewise, in 2021 a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation found no significant benefits on COVID-19 case growth in regions using more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closure orders (i.e., lockdowns).19

Data compiled by PANDA also found no relationship between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths per million people. The disease followed a trajectory of linear decline regardless of whether or not lockdowns were imposed.

What isn’t a lie, however, is that lockdowns cause a great deal of harm. Infant mortality, poverty, starvation and joblessness are on the rise, as are delays in medical treatment and diagnosis, psychological disorders among youth, suicide and deaths of despair.

Education has been disrupted for an estimated 1.6 billion children, Hudson said, and a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults revealed that 1 in 6 Americans started therapy for the first time during 2020. Nearly half (45%) of the survey respondents confirmed that the COVID-19 pandemic was the driving reason that triggered them to seek a therapist’s help.20 According to Hudson:

“Perhaps the hardest thing for me to swallow about all of this is in undergraduate epidemiology, it is a well-known finding that when you are confronted with a disease with sharp edge graduation, as you are with coronavirus, measures to generally suppress the spread of the disease have the effect, reliably, of shifting the disease burden onto the vulnerable, who we should be protecting. They worsen coronavirus mortality.”

Mask Rhetoric Is Misleading

It’s been touted that face masks are essential to stopping the spread of COVID-19 and could save 130,000 lives in the U.S. alone.21 But in 2019, the World Health Organization analyzed 10 randomized controlled trials and concluded, “there was no evidence that facemasks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”22

Only one randomized controlled trial has been conducted on mask usage and COVID-19 transmission, and it found masks did not statistically significantly reduce the incidence of infection.23

You may remember that in the early days of the pandemic, face masks were not recommended for the general public. In February 2020, Christine Francis, a consultant for infection prevention and control at WHO headquarters, was featured in a video, holding up a disposable face mask.

She said, “Medical masks like this one cannot protect against the new coronavirus when used alone … WHO only recommends the use of masks in specific cases.”24 As of March 31, 2020, WHO was still advising against the use of face masks for people without symptoms, stating that there is “no evidence” that such mask usage prevents COVID-19 transmission.25

But by June 2020, the rhetoric had changed. Citing “evolving evidence,” WHO reversed their recommendation and began advising governments to encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult.26 Yet that same day, June 5, 2020, WHO published an announcement stating:27

“At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a similar about-face on mask usage, citing a study of two hair dressers in Missouri, who were reportedly symptomatic with COVID-19 and styled 139 clients’ hair.

None of the clients tested positive for COVID-19, which the CDC suggested was because they and the stylists wore masks.28 Hudson believes, however, that the customers were probably young and not susceptible to the virus in the first place.

Another study published in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases stated, “We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”29

PANDA data also showed no differences in transmission in states with mask mandates and those without. Still, health officials are now advising you should double or triple up on masks to make them work better.

Vaccines Being Sold as a Ticket to Freedom

People who stand to make countless billions out of COVID-19 vaccines are now selling them as a ticket to freedom, Hudson states:

“How convenient that we now have a logic that tells us that we need to vaccinate 7.8 billion people for a disease that has a mean survival rate of 99.95% for people under the age of 70. The profiteering here is naked. It is transparent.”

It’s a sad situation when teenagers, who aren’t at high risk, are lining up for vaccines just to get their freedoms back, he adds. When you add in all the other inconsistencies and lies — PCR tests that are not capable of diagnosing infectiousness, inflated death numbers, restrictions on travel, media propaganda and arbitrary rules, like the CDC’s recent change in physical distancing in classrooms from 6 feet to 3 feet30 — it’s as though we’re living in an Orwellian reality.

With looming vaccine passports, the loss of personal liberties is at an unprecedented level, while people are generally “enslaved by fear” — fear of infection or reinfection, “long COVID,” resurgence and mutant variants. “The underpinnings of our civilization are under threat,” Hudson noted, and we have a choice. “We’ve been pushed up against a precipice, will we be pushed off or will we push back?”

He urges people to support the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for “focused protection” and finding a middle ground between locking down an entire economy and just “letting it rip.” As of April 4, 2021, the declaration has collected 41,890 signatures from medical practitioners and over 13,796 signatures from medical and public health scientists.31

In addition, the declaration is open for public signatures and has collected 764,089 from concerned citizens around the world. The website allows you to read and sign the declaration, answers many frequently asked questions, shares the science behind the recommendations and explains how the declaration was written.

PANDA also published a protocol for reopening society “to provide a road map out of the damaging cycle of lockdowns.”32 Hudson quoted Nelson Mandela, who stated courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. We all need to strive for courage and support awareness campaigns aimed at stopping the harmful narrative, relieving fear and protecting future freedom.

Sources and References

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Fauci, smoking gun evidence, pandemic fraud; memo to Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan

By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | April 20, 2021

Recently, in a Committee hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan and Anthony Fauci crossed swords. [0]

Jordan was demanding to know, from Fauci, when the unconstitutional COVID restrictions would end. Fauci, the notorious flip-flopper, had no answers.

There is, however, a momentous issue on which Fauci has given answers. In the process, he exposed an astonishing fraud that completely changes the picture of COVID-19.

Congressman Jordan, follow this trail.

Summary: Fauci readily admitted that, if the PCR test for the virus is done improperly, the results are meaningless and must be thrown out. What he failed to say—and he knows this—is that the test, since the beginning, HAS BEEN DONE IMPROPERLY.

Takeaway: Millions of people have been falsely told they’re infected with the virus; millions of COVID case numbers are false. These false numbers have been used to declare and extend lockdowns.

If what I’m writing here is true, Congressman, would that interest you? Would that spur you to take action?

Before I lay out the details of the case, I recommend you speak with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He knows the PCR test has been performed incorrectly. In December, he and his public health department issued an order to remedy that staggering problem. [1] [1a]

All right, here we go. Buckle up.

July 17, 2020, podcast, “This Week In Virology” (titled: “TWiV 641: COVID-19 with Dr. Anthony Fauci”) [2]: Tony Fauci makes a point of saying the PCR COVID test is useless and misleading when the test is run at “35 cycles or higher.” A positive result, indicating infection, cannot be accepted or believed.

Here, in techno-speak, is an excerpt from Fauci’s key quote (the question being asked of Fauci starts at the 3m50s mark; Fauci answers beginning at the 4m40s mark) [2]: “… If you get [perform the test at] a cycle threshold of 35 or more… the chances of it being replication-competent [aka accurate] are miniscule… you almost never can culture virus [detect a true positive result] from a 37 threshold cycle… even 36…”

Each “cycle” of the test is a quantum leap in amplification and magnification of the test specimen taken from the patient.

Too many cycles, and the test will turn up all sorts of irrelevant material that will be wrongly interpreted as relevant.

That’s called a false positive.

What Fauci failed to say on the video—AND WHAT HE OBVIOUSLY KNEW—is: the FDA, which authorizes the test for public use, recommends the test should be run up to 40 cycles. Not 35.

Therefore, all labs in the US, following the FDA guideline, are knowingly or unknowingly participating in fraud. Fraud on a monstrous level, because…

Millions of Americans are being told they are infected with the virus on the basis of a false positive result, and…

The total number of COVID cases in America—which is based on the test—is a gross falsity.

The lockdowns and other restraining measures are based on these fraudulent case numbers.

Let me back up and run that by you again. Fauci says the test is useless when it’s run at 35 cycles or higher. The FDA says run the test up to 40 cycles, in order to determine whether the virus is there. This is the crime in a nutshell.

“Hello, America, you’ve been tricked, lied to, conned, and taken for a devastating ride. On the basis of fake science, the country was locked down.”

All right, here are two chunks of evidence for what I’ve written above. First, we have a CDC quote on the FDA website, in a document titled: “CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel For Emergency Use Only” [3] [3a] [3b].

Note: this document is marked, “Effective: 12/01/2020.” That means, even though the virus is being referred to by its older name (2019-nCoV instead SARS-CoV-2), the document is still relevant as of Dec 2020. “For Emergency Use Only” refers to the fact that the FDA has certified the PCR test under a traditional category called “Emergency Use Authorization.”

Here’s the CDC quote on the FDA website: see pdf page 38 (doc page 37): “… a specimen is considered positive for 2019-nCoV [virus] if all 2019-nCoV marker (N1, N2) cycle threshold growth curves cross the threshold line within 40.00 cycles ([less than] 40.00 Ct).”

Naturally, testing labs reading this guideline would conclude, “Well, to see if the virus is there in a patient, we should run the test all the way to 40 cycles. That’s the official advice.”

Then we have a New York Times article (August 29/updated September 17) headlined: “Your coronavirus test is positive. Maybe it shouldn’t be.” [4] Here are money quotes:

“Most tests set the limit at 40 [cycles]. A few at 37.”

“Set the limit” would usually mean, “We’re going to look all the way to 40 cycles, to see if the virus is there.”

The Times : “This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients.”

Boom. That’s the capper, the grand finale. Labs don’t or won’t reveal their collusion in this crime.

Get the picture?

I hope so.

FAUCI HAS BEEN AWARE OF THIS ENORMOUS FRAUD, AND HE HAS DONE NOTHING TO STOP IT.

If a lawyer won’t go to court with all this, or if a judge won’t pay attention and see the light, they should be stripped of their jobs and sent to the Arctic to sell snow.

Finally, Congressman Jordan, what I’m reporting here only goes partway down the COVID rabbit hole. The hole is much deeper. But this is enough for now.

I urge you to use this information and help restore freedom to the American people.

Note: I hope readers will forward this article to Congressman Jim Jordan’s press secretary, Russell Dye: russell[dot]dye[at]mail[dot]house[dot]gov

SOURCES:

[0] https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1382724306036256774

[1] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/08/florida-forces-labs-to-report-number-of-pcr-test-cycles/

[1a] https://www.flhealthsource.gov/files/Laboratory-Reporting-CT-Values-12032020.pdf

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE

[3] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

[3a] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 06, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 12/01/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210102171026/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

[3b] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 05, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 07/13/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20200715004004/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

[4] nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The War on Pubs is Being Waged by Puritans Against Joy

By Sean Walsh | Lockdown Sceptics | April 19, 2021

Hugh Osmond and Sacha Lord are back in court this week to argue that the Government’s refusal to reopen indoor hospitality is inconsistent with the opening up of “non-essential” retail. I wish them luck, I really do. But I fear that they are battling not against SAGE evidence but against the miserable assumptions on which that “evidence” is based.

Why has this Government gone to war on pubs when the hospitality industry was last year responsible for fewer that 3% of Covid infections? It’s tempting to conclude that the SAGE types are not worried that pubs are possible vectors of transmission, but that they are concerned that hospitality venues are potential theatres of dissent. Or, worse, that they are places where people have the temerity to enjoy themselves.

Heaven forfend.

The Lockdown Sanhedrin, the SAGE clerisy, is itself infected with the virus of puritanism. It’s impossible to look at Chris Whitty without concluding that other people’s enjoyment presents itself to him as a sort of personal Kryptonite. Boris’s self-announced “libertarianism” seems to amount to little more than the thesis that he gets to do what he wants and the rest of us can go hang. But I think it goes deeper than that – the Government and in particular its advisers are in thrall to a metaphysics of joylessness.

At the start of this crisis, the Government decided that it was qualified to make a distinction between those activities which are essential and those which are not. The latter were consequently eliminated from the list of what was permitted. To put it another way, it took upon itself the right to decide what counts as work, and what counts as mere “play”.

But it is not clear that any such distinction exists, and if it does then it does not follow that we should prioritise work over play, even in a pandemic. Aristotle claimed that the “first principle of activity is leisure”: that we work in order to play; that play is a more valuable activity than work because it is something that is done for its own sake. The vulgar utilitarianism which has shaped SAGE’s pandemic response is a crude sanitisation of our understanding of the human soul. Not every worthwhile thing that we do as human persons can be reduced to the requirements of a Downing St data slide.

Pubs matter for reasons that go further than the economics of the hospitality sector, important though those are. They matter because they are playgrounds for adults. They are important because they remind us that not everything has to be geared to the puritanical assumption that we work only to get up and repeat the same day.

And they matter because they have their own internal social grammar, one which has been handed down from generation to generation. The pub has its own set of protocols (the “round”) and its own systems of internal conflict resolution (“let’s take this outside”).

It is in the pub that people can whisper conspiracy against a Government narrative. And conspiracies always require that the like-minded are allowed to gather. It is over a drink that the millionaire and the pauper can come together and compare notes.

Johnson is currently offering us a sinister inversion of what a pub is, one in which you are tracked, traced, audited, judged, and humiliated. The “road map”, in this industry at least, is one that leads you not into “normal” but into a “Twin Peaks” version of it.

This Government needs to be careful. I am not persuaded that it has gone to war against us. But it’s starting to give that impression. Why? Because if you were given carte blanche to construct a police state this is how you’d do it: you would stamp on the enjoyment of the great unwashed and confiscate all mechanisms of dissent. The Government’s war on pubs is ticking both those boxes.

Sean Walsh is a writer and former university teacher.

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Project Veritas Founder Sues Twitter After He Was Banned Amid Ongoing ‘Expose CNN’ Series

By Alexandra Kashirina – Sputnik – 20.04.2021

Earlier, Twitter permanently suspended the account of Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, as the watchdog continues to release its “Expose CNN” series, including the broadcaster’s director saying that the channel was using “propaganda”.

James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, filed a defamation lawsuit against Twitter on Monday, denying platform accusations that he used false pages, considered in Twitter rules as a way to “artificially amplify or disrupt conversations.”

“This defamation action arises from Twitter’s false and defamatory April 15, 2021, statement concerning Twitter’s decision to ban Plaintiff James O’Keefe, an investigative journalist followed by over 926,000 Twitter users as of the time he was banned.”

“Twitter’s false claim that Mr. O’Keefe used ‘fake accounts’ on Twitter has caused Mr. O’Keefe damage and, unless retracted, will continue to cause him damage,” the lawsuit reads.

According to the lawsuit, “Twitter made such claims with knowledge of their falsity in order to distract and detract from Project Veritas’s CNN release of the same day.”

Last week, Twitter banned O’Keefe’s page after accusing O’Keefe of using “fake accounts.”

The ban came shortly after the release of a third Project Veritas revelation which included an interview with CNN technical director Charles Chester recorded clandestinely on a hidden camera. Chester claimed that the broadcaster was aiming to prevent former US President Donald Trump from being re-elected by focusing on negative news about him.

“Look what we did, we [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out…I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that,” Chester appeared to say during a secretly recorded conversation with a Project Veritas journalist.

Chester also claimed that CNN was only covering US President Joe Biden in a favorable light and asserted that the network had assisted BLM the movement by concealing crimes committed by people of color.

The non-profit conservative outlet Project Veritas was founded in 2010 by O’Keefe and includes a group of journalists who focus on publishing investigative reports on officials they claim are liberal as well as various organizations, including big tech companies.

Project Veritas and the social media accounts of several of its employees have faced a number of bans regarding their reporting about Facebook, Twitter, Google and Pinterest.

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Zero mainstream coverage today of the foiled, U.S. backed plot to assassinate Belarus president Lukashenko

By Gilbert Doctorow | April 19, 2021

In his last book “War with Russia?” my friend and colleague Steve Cohen wrote about the flagrant censorship of news being carried on by The New York Times in support of its Russia-bashing editorial policies. Said Cohen, the newspaper’s century old slogan of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been turned into “All the News that Fits” when it comes to coverage of Russia.

But the problem goes far deeper than the professional malpractice of one leading newspaper in America. The censorship of news carried by mainstream media by U.S. authorities covers not only the domestic press but also the mainstream of Allied countries. News blackouts are imposed when something ugly arises implicating the United States in violation of international norms of state behavior for which the State Department has no ready explanation or white wash.

This very situation seems to have arisen over the weekend, when news broke in Moscow over the arrest of two conspirators plotting a coup d’état in Minsk, to be carried out by the Belarus armed forces tentatively during the 9 May parade celebrating victory over fascist Germany in the Second World War.

Other leading English-speaking papers such as The Guardian and The Financial Times have front page reports on Alexei Navalny’s near death condition in a prison camp but not a word about Belarus. Ditto the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Le Figaro. Curious, n’est-ce pas? Warum?  Let’s look into the story in its full dimension.

Last night’s News of the Week program hosted by Dimitry Kiselyov, Russia’s top manager of state news programming, began with a 20 minute report on the extraordinary arrest of two conspirators plotting armed rebellion entailing the murder of Lukashenko and his family, abolition of the post of President, installation of a Committee of Concord such as previously had been headed by the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

But these were not empty allegations. The arrests followed on a meeting by the two conspirators with Belarus military officers held in a downtown Moscow restaurant which was filmed from start to finish by the Russian state security agency, the FSB. Lengthy segments of recordings from their meeting and discussion of their treasonous plans were aired on the Kiselyov program. Moreover, the accused are not some unknown pawns such as the British presented to the world press when they released their accusations against Russia over the Skripal poisoning. No, one of the two arrested was the former press secretary of Lukashenko, a person who would have had all the contacts necessary to organize such a rebellion. The other plotter has dual US-Belarus citizenship and was well known as a fighter against Lukashenko’s rule.

The two were turned over to the Belarus KGB for interrogation in Minsk.  Surely further information about the links of the plotters to Ukraine, to Poland and to the United States will come out in the next few days.

What we have here is “very likely” (to use current Anglo-American political jargon) involvement of the United States in yet another regime change operation. The revolution from below in Belarus led by Tikhanovskaya with support from Poland and Lithuania failed. The anti-Lukashenko street demonstrations led to nothing. And now Plan B, a putsch from above, was being organized to achieve the objective of removing Lukashenko both politically and physically. We have not seen such openly murderous plans with “likely” U.S. backing since John Kennedy’s days when the assassination of Fidel Castro was the hot game in D.C.

On the same “very likely” logic, I permit myself to take this all back to the door of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Policy designate Victoria Nuland. The links to Warsaw and Kiev that appear present are all in line with what she was doing to precipitate the Maidan in 2013 and violent overthrow of the sitting President in Kiev amidst attempts to murder him as he made his escape to Russian territory in February 2014.

From all of the foregoing, it looks as though U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s pledge several weeks ago that the US would no longer pursue “orange revolutions” was either an out and out lie or made without his knowing that control of foreign policy no longer is in his hands, but is being carried out by his nominal subordinate, Mme Nuland. No wonder that the U.S. has ordered “stop the presses” on this story until it can put together some plausible response.

In the meantime, the same news program delivered the Kremlin’s response to the Czech action over the weekend to expel 18 diplomats from the Russian embassy in Prague over allegations that Russia was involved in blowing up an arms depot near the capital back in 2014, an event which previously the Czech authorities had blamed on the owners-managers of the depot. Per the Kremlin, these new and absurd Czech charges of Russia’s nefarious activities were agreed with Washington to direct attention away from the pending story about U.S. involvement in plans to murder the Belarus head of state.

Are we headed to World War III?  If the war machinery today were like what existed in August 1914, the answer would be unquestionably yes. It is our good fortune that until someone on either side of the East-West divide pushes the Red Button, there are ways back from the abyss. However, we are still heading in the wrong direction, towards the abyss, and the United States is the prime mover.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | 1 Comment

NYT ‘bounties’ non-story shows US/UK media has got so used to blaming Russia, it’s now doing it out of habit

By Paul Robinson | RT | April 20, 2021

As holes predictably appear in claims that Russia paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers, questions arise as to why such erroneous stories keep appearing in the American press. Domestic US politics provide part of the answer.

“A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories.” So ran a headline in the New York Times in August 2016. If it were only a Russian phenomenon, the world would be a much better place. Alas, the Times is far from immune from spreading “false stories” itself. From Walter Duranty’s reporting from the Soviet Union, through Judith Miller’s articles on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, up to its coverage of accusations that US President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government, The New York Times has had its fair share of “fake news” experiences.

“A little tiny bit flat footed,” was how the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described the newspaper when the Mueller investigation failed to find Trump guilty of collusion. “I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?” added Baquet.

You have to feel a bit for him. He really believed in collusion. In his eyes, it did “look a certain way.” It was rather embarrassing when he turned out to be completely wrong.

The New York Times’ iffy relationship with reality is back in the news today. US presidential spokesperson Jen Psaki admitted that the US intelligence community was not at all convinced by accusations first aired in the Times that the Russian government had paid bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers. Rather, it had only “low to moderate confidence” that the story was true. Psaki explained:

“The reason that they have low to moderate confidence in this judgment is in part because it relies on detainee reporting, and due to the challenging environment and also due to the challenging operating environment in Afghanistan. So it’s challenging to gather this intelligence and this data.”

The accusation against Russia appeared in The New York Times in June last year. The Times then followed up with additional stories on the same topic. “Afghan Contractor Handed Out Russian Cash to Kill Americans, Official Say,”claimed the headline of a second article. “How Russia Built a Channel to the Taliban, Once an Enemy,” read the headline of a third.

Commentators soon pointed out problems. While the CIA had moderate faith in the claim, the National Security Agency didn’t. In any case, the primary sources of information were Afghan prisoners who hadn’t themselves been involved in the alleged transaction. Their claims needed to be treated with a fair degree of caution.

Others pointed out that the story didn’t make any sense from a Russian point of view. The Russian government values the stability of Afghanistan, and had consistently supported both the Afghan government and the US military presence there. There was no obvious motive for killing Americans.

Furthermore, it’s not as if the Taliban needed to be incentivised to fight America. They were already killing as many Americans as they were able to. Paying them to do what they were doing already would have been odd, to say the least.

Now, Ms. Psaki admits what people have long since suspected: that the accusation against Russia is not well-founded. But anyone with any sense realized that from the get-go. Why, then, did The New York Times report it?

The Times’ explanation is that the story was true. It didn’t say that the accusation was accurate; it merely reported the accusation. In an article on Thursday, Times reporter Charlie Savage notes that the newspaper had stated that the CIA had only “medium” confidence in the story and the NSA had “low” confidence. It had also reported that the Afghan prisoners who recounted the story hadn’t actually been present when the alleged meetings with Russians took place. In other words, The New York Times’ reporting was accurate. 

Maybe so, but that begs a question – why report a story that makes an extremely explosive allegation if you’re not at all confident that the accusation is true? Isn’t there some responsibility to hold off from repeating libelous claims until such time as you can substantiate them?

Apparently not. It seems as if the Times wanted to believe the story. It “looked a certain way,” to use Dean Baquet’s phrase. Which in turn begs another question. Why did it look that way to the Times?

The obvious answer is that it fitted the political needs of the moment. For the real target of the Russian bounty story was never Russia but Trump. Its purpose was to show that the president had in some way betrayed America’s soldiers by continuing to talk to Russia even though he had evidence that the Russians were killing Americans.

The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, thus remarked, “The administration’s disturbing silence and inaction endanger the lives of our troops and our coalition partners.”Meanwhile, then presidential candidate and now president, Joe Biden, responded to the story by saying that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale. It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way. It’s a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas.”

Russia, in other words, was merely a pawn in an internal American political struggle. Sadly, though, this is far from an isolated incident. Furthermore, the Democratic Party and its backers in the USA have now become so habituated to spreading dubious stories about Russia that they seem to be unable to stop, even though the original political motivation has vanished. The Russian bounty wasn’t the first “false story” to appear, and it won’t be the last.

Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is the author of the Irrussianality blog.

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 1 Comment

WaPo-Style Fake News Russia Bashing

By Stephen Lendman | April 20, 2021

Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post provides propaganda services for Washington’s intelligence community.

Like other establishment media, the broadsheet is militantly hostile toward nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to US interests.

Relentless Putin bashing reflects his model leadership and prominence on the world stage — in stark contrast to pygmy US and other Western counterparts.

According to neocon WaPo editors, UN Charter-breaching Biden regime sanctions on Russia weren’t tough enough.

Imposed for invented reasons as part of longstanding US Russia bashing, WaPo claimed “punches were pulled (sic).”

International investors can still buy Russian bonds unobstructed, the broadsheet complained, adding:

Russian energy and mineral enterprises weren’t sanctioned.

A typical litany of Big Lies followed.

WaPo falsely accused Moscow of paying bounties to kill US forces in Afghanistan — citing no evidence because there is none.

Defying reality, the broadsheet falsely claimed that Russia “sponsored… attacks that seriously injured US officials in Moscow, Havana and China” — again no evidence cited.

Fake news accusations of Russian “aggression” persist — how hegemon USA and its partners operate.

The Russian Federation never attacked or threatened other nations.

Under Putin, the Kremlin prioritizes peace, stability, cooperative relations with other countries, and compliance with international law – worlds apart from how the US and its imperial partners in high crimes operate.

In response to years of US-orchestrated Kiev aggression against Donbass, WaPO falsely accused Moscow of US-led high crimes of war and against humanity.

Calling for more illegal sanctions on Russia, perhaps its editors won’t be satisfied unless US hardliners launch WW III.

Separately, WaPo ignored US war on humanity at home and abroad while falsely accusing Russia of “crush(ing) opposition” elements.

Falsely accusing China of spying on and repressing Uyghur Muslins, WaPo defied reality by claiming Russia operates the same way against targeted individuals.

It lied claiming Putin amassed billions of dollars of hidden wealth.

It lied saying he heaps “extravagances” on political allies.

It lied accusing him of poisoning political nobody Navalny.

It lied claiming he persecutes protesters and activists.

It lied accusing democratic Russia of being authoritarian, calling Putin a dictator.

Compared to low approval ratings for US leaders and Congress, nearly two-thirds of Russians approve of Putin’s leadership.

According to Statista Research on February 25, “65 percent of Russians approved of activities of Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

Biden’s approval rating hovers around 50, almost entirely from undemocratic Dem support.

Mind-manipulated Americans don’t understand how badly they’re harmed by US policymakers until they’re bitten hard on their backsides.

Even then, it takes multiple abusive practices for them to realize that dominant US hardliners are their enemies, not allies.

State-sponsored repression and other forms of abuse are longstanding US practices, notably against its most vulnerable people, as well as against targeted individuals of the wrong race, ethnicity, and/or nationality.

In stark contrast to long ago US/Western abandonment of international law, Russia scrupulously abides by its principles.

On all things related to truth and full-disclosure, the US, its hegemonic partners and press agent media stick exclusively to the fabricated official narrative.

On all things related to nations from from US control, both right wings of its war party target them for regime change — wars by hot and/or other means their favored strategies.

On issues mattering most, the US and its hegemonic partners consistently breach the rule of law, operating by their own rules exclusively.

Instead of straight talk, US-led Western officials and their press agent media feature managed news misinformation and disinformation exclusively — truth and full disclosure nowhere in sight.

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

Moderna “Vaccine” Wreaks Havoc in BC and Local Doctor Blows Whistle

Sixth Sense | April 17, 2021

@DRutter: INVITE https://odysee.com/$/invite/@DRutter:9

https://odysee.com/@DRutter:9/moderna-vaccine-wreaks-havoc-on-lytton:7

Please listen to and share this powerful front-line testimony. Dr. Charles Hoffe of Lytton, British Columbia tells how the Moderna “vaccine” has decimated the health of his small town, after they had no trouble naturally fending off Covid last year. Now, many residents can’t sleep, their nerves burn with pain, their muscles won’t move properly, and their condition is worsening by the week. He lists his many concerns with these experimental products, and talks about how government officials have already sought to silence him. The interview was uploaded by Laura-Lynn Thompson.

Frontline Workers Testimonies & VAERs Reports 26 MAR 2021 – [PDF DOC]
https://odysee.com/@SixthSense-Truth-Search-Labs:0/informed-consent-matters:7

Polyethylene glycol as a cause of anaphylaxis [ingredient in COVID injections!] – PDF DOC
https://odysee.com/@SixthSense-Truth-Search-Labs:0/s13223-016-0172-7:f

Evidence for a Connection between COVID-19 and Exposure to Radiofrequency Radiation from Wireless Telecommunications [PDF DOC]
https://odysee.com/@SixthSense-Truth-Search-Labs:0/Rubik-Brown-COVID-19-and-RFR-SUBMITTED:f

COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease – PDF DOC
https://odysee.com/@SixthSense-Truth-Search-Labs:0/covid19-rna-based-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-prion-disease-1503(2):b

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment

The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick’s Death. And They Just Got Caught.

Nancy Pelosi at a congressional tribute to the late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who lies in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 3, 2021. (Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald | April 19, 2021

It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible. Just watch a part of what they did and how:

As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.

Articles on this Substack, Feb. 16, 2021 and Mar. 5, 2021

Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as “Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.

For the crime of trying to determine the factual truth of what happened, my character was constantly impugned by these propagandistic worms, as was anyone else’s who tried to tell the truth about Sicknick’s tragic death. Because one of the first people to highlight the journalistic truth here was former Trump official Darren Beattie of Revolver News and one of the few people on television willing to host doubts about the official story was Tucker Carlson, any doubts about the false Sicknick story — no matter how well-grounded in truth, facts, reason and evidence — were cast as fascism and white supremacy, and those raising questions smeared as “truthers”: the usual dreary liberal insults for trying to coerce people into submitting to their lies:

Because the truth usually prevails, at least ultimately, their lies, yet again, all came crashing down on their heads on Monday. The District of Columbia’s chief medical examiner earlier this morning issued his official ruling in the Sicknick case, and it was so definitive that The Washington Post — one of the media outlets that had pushed the multiple falsehoods — did not even bother to try to mask or mitigate the stark conclusion it revealed:

The first line tells much of the story: “Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled.” Using understatement, the paper added: “The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.”

This definitive finding from the medical examiner not only rids us of the Fire Extinguisher lie but also the second theory to which these media outlets resorted once they had to face the reality that they spent weeks spreading an outright lie (needless to say, they provided no real accountability or even acknowledgement for the fact that they did spread that Fire Extinguisher tale, instead just seamlessly moving to their next evidence-free claim). They changed their story to claim that pro-Trump protesters still murdered Sicknick, not with a fire extinguisher but with bear spray, which video shows at least one protester using in his vicinity.

Clockwise: Tweet of Associated Press, Jan. 29; Tweet of NBC’s Richard Engel, Jan. 9; Tweet of the Lincoln Project’s Fred Willman, Jan. 29; Tweet of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kirstof, Jan. 9

The problem with that theory is that bear spray is not usually fatal, and the medical examiner’s findings ruled out the possibility that this is what caused his death:

In an interview with The Washington Post, Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, said the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants, which Diaz said would have caused Sicknick’s throat to quickly seize. Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries…

Diaz said Sicknick suffered two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by a clot in an artery that supplies blood to that area of the body. Diaz said he could not comment on whether Sicknick had a preexisting medical condition, citing privacy laws.

So there goes that second fairy tale. The Post did note the medical examiner’s observation regarding Sicknick’s participation in defending the Capitol that day that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.” That of course is true: just as it is true for the two pro-Trump supporters who had heart attacks that day and the other pro-Trump supporter who died from too much amphetamine in her system, having a stressful encounter as a police officer likely played a role in why someone would have two strokes the following day. But police officers are trained for stressful encounters, and that obviously is a far cry from being able to claim that any pro-Trump supporter murdered Sicknick.

I’ll have much more on this story as it unfolds. A significant amount of media accountability is warranted. But you’re seeing why there is so much resentment and so many attacks on platforms like this one that permit journalists to report and analyze facts and dissect media narratives without being constrained by liberal orthodoxies and pieties and while remaining immune from liberal pressure tactics: it’s one of the few ways that real dissent to their lies and propaganda can be aired.

The New York Times, in a now-”updated” article, Jan. 8, 2021

Truth matters. Noble lies are never justified no matter the cause, especially in journalism. But these employees of corporate media outlets have been taught the exact opposite model: that their primary obligation is to please and flatter the partisan agenda and political sensibilities of their audience even if it means lying or recklessly spreading unproven theories to do it. That is their profit model. And they have trained their audiences to want and expect this and that is why they never feel compelled to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they get caught doing this: their audiences want to be lied to — they are grateful for it — and would prefer that they not admit they did it so that their partisan interests will not be undermined.

What is most depressing about this entire spectacle is that, this time, they exploited the tragic death of a young man to achieve their tawdry goals. They never cared in the slightest about Officer Brian Sicknick. They had just spent months glorifying a protest movement whose core view is that police officers are inherently racist and abusive. He had just become their toy, to be played with and exploited in order to depict the January 6 protest as a murderous orgy carried out by savages so primitive and inhuman that they were willing to fatally bash in the skull of a helpless person or spray them with deadly gases until they choked to death on their own lung fluids. None if it was true, but that did not matter — and it still does not to them — because truth, as always, has nothing to do with their actual function. If anything, truth is an impediment to it.

April 19, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 5 Comments

“A Sign Of Progress”: How A Tiny Corporate Media Clique Inverted Reality During Brazil’s 2016 Coup

BRASIL WIRE | APRIL 17, 2021

On the fifth anniversary of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the role foreign media played in propagandising for it still warrants further investigation.

Little of international media coverage of Brazil’s 2016 coup and its centrepiece, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, has dated well. But one opinion piece in US newspaper the New York Times stands out as emblematic of the inverted reality being presented to the world, as Brazil’s first female president was facing a right-wing plot to remove her and her progressive government from office.

Written by Op-Ed contributor, the Associated Press Rio correspondent, Juliana Barbassa, it was headlined “Why Brazil’s Corruption Scandal Is a Sign of Progress”. It was published on March 15, 2016, one month before the first congressional vote to impeach Dilma Rousseff and with the campaign against her at full tilt.

At this point it was already apparent to any serious analyst that something was very wrong. Anti-Coup protests were occurring in equal frequency and numbers to the yellow and green demonstrations for Dilma’s impeachment, yet the article begins: “Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets over the weekend to protest their government and to send a message to the country’s political class: No one is untouchable. Brazil’s politicians should take that to heart. The Federal Police temporarily detained Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president, for questioning earlier this month in connection with a huge — and expanding — graft investigation. President Dilma Rousseff, Mr. da Silva’s handpicked successor, could be next.”

Media consumers who consider themselves engaged with world affairs would have no doubt seen an article like this one in the paper of record, taken it at face value, and have had no idea how wrong it was, nor how incestuous its conception.

They might consult multiple trusted sources and see this inversion of reality corroborated. They wouldn’t know that the most prominent English language reporters were meeting regularly and sharing notes. For example, on the very same day, the Guardian published an editorial calling for Rousseff to resign.

They could look at news agency Reuters, and see something broadly in line with what they had read in the NYT.

They wouldn’t know that Brian Winter, until recently the Reuters Brazil correspondent, now worked indirectly on behalf of Chevron, one of the principal lobbyists for, and beneficiaries of the coup. They wouldn’t know that both Winter and Brazil bureau chief Todd Benson had recently left Reuters following a scandal in which it was seen to have censored information that was considered favourable to Dilma and the Workers Party.

They wouldn’t know that the Reuters correspondent had got the NYT pieces’ author, Juliana Barbassa, a job at oil, agribusiness, banking and mining industry lobby Council of the Americas‘ in-house magazine Americas Quarterly, from where she became the New York Times’ Latin America and Caribbean desk editor.

They wouldn’t know that the author’s husband Chris Gaffney, was a primary source for Dave Zirin’s character assassination of Lula, Dance with the Devil, who, living in a penthouse apartment on Rio’s Botofogo bay, used the World Cup as a platform to attack the PT from a radical left standpoint.

They wouldn’t know that the Brazil bureau chief at Associated Press, Brad Brooks, was personally forbidding staff from use the word Coup/Golpe to describe what was happening in Brazil, regardless of their belief, and even on their private Facebook pages.

They wouldn’t know that a group of young and influential Brazilian reporters, including those from AP, had been taken on all expenses paid trips to the US, for briefings at the State Department, to learn about “sustainable funding models”.

Finally, they might look for opinions from across the political spectrum.

They wouldn’t know that ostensibly leftist voices they may have followed in Brazil were funded by corporate philanthropy from Ford Foundation, Pierre Omidyar and OSF, nor that they were closer professionally and socially to this same group of corporate reporters than they were the actual Brazilian left. This promiscuity can be confirmed by reading hundreds of friendly bar-setting twitter engagements with AS/COA Americas Quarterly editor and Alvaro Uribe / FHC biographer Brian Winter, by journalists such as New Yorker’s Alex Cuadros and LA Times correspondent Vincent Bevins during Dilma’s impeachment, and in the lead up to Lula’s arrest two years later.

This appearance of consensus fed into foreign television, as US comedy writers used the NYT as their principal source. Brian Mier writes: “Even John Oliver made a joke about Dilma Rousseff and Petrobras corruption. It wasn’t based on facts, but helped his liberal US audience feel comfortable about the illegal impeachment of Brazil’s first woman President and subsequent US corporate oil grab.” Daniel Hunt adds “Don’t ever doubt the cumulative effect foreign media coverage can have on the actual political scenario inside a country like Brazil, which is uniquely fixated with how it is covered abroad. All the liberals were sharing this nonsense at the time of Rousseff’s impeachment.”

It was only after the April 2016 congressional vote, from which Jair Bolsonaro launched his 2018 presidential bid that the hand-wringing began, from a cluster of mostly US media professionals who had shown no critical analysis as the campaign against Dilma raged, from her re-election in October 2014, right through to her impeachment.

Maybe a fascist elected as president wasn’t the outcome they imagined, but with no tanks on the street, the 2016 coup was staged in the media, which late Brazilian journalist Paulo Henrique Amorim labeled, The 4th Power. Brazil is living with the deadly consequences now, and every journalist who endorsed, normalized and enabled a subversion of democracy, who went along with the narratives of right-wing regime change, holds a degree of culpability.

Not only did their often brazen propaganda actually influence opinion within Brazil’s media classes, together they created a screen of editorial cover which stunted international solidarity for Rousseff and her centre-left government in their hour of need. This was no unfortunate accident; it was an ethical and journalistic disgrace, with observers as actors.

There is no “They wouldn’t know” on the reporters’ part, and this is not hindsight. Some people were paid to be wrong.

April 19, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

What will we get for a multitrillion-dollar energy policy?

BY PETER Z. GROSSMAN – THE HILL – 04/14/21

President Biden has made no secret of his plans to spend trillions of dollars on climate policies, which in his case means substituting renewable energy (especially wind and solar) for fossil fuels.

But the question we should all be asking is: What will those trillions get us?

In reality, close to nothing. That is, the U.S. will expend enormous resources to replace one vast electric system with a different one, which will do nothing any better than the one we have now. Well, it will emit less carbon dioxide, but its effect on global temperatures will be negligible.

Moreover, there are other less costly and disruptive ways to reduce CO2 emissions besides erecting 60,000 wind turbines and 500 million solar panels, as Biden plans. Yet all that new energy technology will just provide light and heat that run our appliances and charge our electric automobiles — the same as the technology we have now.

Actually, the new technology will in many ways be worse because it will be prone to blackouts, kill endangered birds and bats, raise electric rates and deface farmlands and wilderness areas with gigantic wind turbines, newly carved access roads and thousands of miles of new high-voltage power lines strung across thousands of steel towers.

Of course, Biden and members of his administration would argue that the new system will give us the ultimate prize: life itself. Otherwise, because of climate change, we face an “existential crisis.” Or to put it bluntly: if we keep our current system, we’re all going to die — soon.

On that score, what’s several trillion dollars? Shouldn’t we spend all of our money to keep humanity alive?

Except are those really the stakes?

Forecasts of climate cataclysms have been around for many years. A recent article tracked 79 predictions of climate-related catastrophes. The first ones were made in the year of the inaugural Earth Day in 1970; some much more recently. But of those predictions, 48 have passed their prophesied date of calamity

They have all been wrong. The rest are pending but why should we believe them?

Expertise?

Many of the 48 failed forecasts were made by scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), regarded by many as the “gold standard” of scientific credibility on climate, authored several of the failed predictions.

For example, the United Nations agency announced in 2007 that if emissions had not started to fall by 2015 we would lose any chance to hold global temperatures below catastrophic levels. A few years later the deadline was extended to 2030. In the meantime, emissions have continued to rise while the rate of warming has not.

Other famously wrong predictions have been made by public figures, especially politicians. Al Gore gave the world 10 years in 2008 “to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution, lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” The way to do it? He said we needed to remake our entire energy system in those 10 years — lots of windmills and solar panels.

That date was extended to 2030 (or 2050) when, according to another politician, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

Fortunately, Gore was out of office and couldn’t spend the vast sums needed to, as he believed, save the world, and AOC was a relatively powerless new member of Congress.

Biden, on the other hand, can act and has shown he intends to. But his belief that life on Earth will vanish if we don’t act is at least as farfetched as any of the 48.

Most of the apocalyptic forecasts are based on a scenario called “Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP),” created for the IPCC, which was intended as a worst case, projecting a rise in average temperatures by about 5°C, which would be courting worldwide disaster. For some reason, RCP 8.5 became the business-as-usual scenario in much of the media, scholarship and political discourse on climate.

But it isn’t.

We are not on that pathway. Much more realistic assessments suggest that we are on track for Earth’s temperature to rise 1°C-3°C. At the higher end especially, there will be many problems for the world in the second half of this century. But extinction? It’s not plausible.

In that light, spending trillions on windmills and solar panels seems a waste of resources. In economics, we always ask what are the trade-offs. The trillions here could be used to directly help people to escape poverty. It could be used for better health care, improved educational opportunities, more research on fighting pandemics, adapting to climate change and so on.

Proponents of Biden’s energy policies claim that they will not only save life on Earth but will also have all sorts of social benefits.

But not spending trillions of dollars to have a system that does the same thing our electric system does now could have even greater social benefit.

President Biden is like a modern Don Quixote, only he’s tilting with windmills not at them. Nevertheless, like the literary Don, he’s trying to slay a dragon that seems to be mainly in his mind.

Peter Z. Grossman is the author of several books on energy including “U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure” (Cambridge 2013). 

April 19, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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