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Biden’s Bloated IRS Will Skewer Taxpayers

By James Bovard | FFF | January 5, 2023

The Internal Revenue Service is perhaps the ultimate sacred cow in Washington. It is the “goose that lays the golden eggs” for the city’s power and prestige, delivering trillions of dollars to politicians to work miracles (or at least get reelected). When criticism erupted over the 87,000 new revenooers to be hired thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Washington’s Defenders of Correct Thinking rushed to the ramparts.

The media goes to bat for the IRS

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, in an article headlined “Another Republican Lie is Born,” caterwauled that Republicans’ anti-IRS rhetoric is one of the “hallmarks of authoritarianism” and justified Biden’s condemnation of Republicans for “semi-fascism.” Post columnist Joe Davidson fretted that “attacks on the IRS” are part of Republican efforts “delegitimatizing government.” Another Post article warned that Republicans are “putting federal workers in danger” by “repeating baseless claims” about the IRS. A Post purported humor columnist did a piece headlined, “Farewell, Mother I am off to join the IRS army!” sneering at baseless fears about Biden weaponizing IRS agents.

“Baseless?” At the time the Inflation Reduction Act passed, the IRS was advertising for “special agents” who must “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary” during “execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.” The IRS had recently made massive purchases of new firearms and ammunition. The job notice declared: “No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) observed, “The IRS has never pointed a gun at a billionaire or his employees, so why does the IRS need 87,000 new agents, AR-15s, and 5 million rounds of ammunition? They’re not gunning for billionaires or their bank accounts.”

Shock brigades of Fact Checkers rushed to rescue the IRS’s reputation. Reuters announced that it is “false” that the IRS “is hiring 87,000 new armed IRS agents” because only a couple thousand IRS agents carry firearms. Similarly, an Associated Press “fact-checking” report derided as “false” the allegation that “all new employees that the IRS intends to hire … will be required to carry a firearm and use deadly force if necessary.” Since not all IRS new hires will be heavily armed, it is “misleading” to pretend that any danger exists.

Controversy also swirled about a film clip of an IRS recruiting program on college campuses. A clip from Utah shows students putting on flak jackets and readying toy guns and handcuffs for “taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles.” “First they came for the tulip bulbs….”

Associated Press Fact Checkers complained that the video is “being misrepresented to falsely claim it shows a new force of IRS special agents being trained as part of agency expansion efforts.” But it is a recruiting video for college students that shows how they will be trained and use their power as IRS agents.

Since not all IRS employees will be carrying Glocks or AR-15s, Americans should presume that every IRS employee is a well-meaning civil servant waiting to assist people tormented by convoluted IRS instruction booklets. And it won’t matter if the new hires abuse their power. An IRS “enforcement operation” won’t count as a raid unless agents shoot at least three people. And then it still won’t matter because anyone who is gunned down will be labeled a suspected tax scofflaw. Regardless, Americans should presume that the IRS is actually less aggressive than a Girl Scout cookie-selling campaign.

There were plenty of “Iron Fist Bellwethers” last year when Biden first announced plans to vastly expand the IRS. The Washington Post reported that “the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency.” Slate reported, “Biden wants to fund a massive upgrade to the American welfare state by making the IRS great at audits again.” And there aren’t that many billionaires to go around to finance all the schemes that Team Biden favors.

While Fact Checkers zealously squelch nitwit comments from random dudes on Facebook, they are ignoring far bigger howlers from the White House. On August 19, the White House promised that “No one making under $400,000 per year will pay a penny more in taxes” thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. Team Biden effectively insists that “those who have nothing (or at least no income) to hide have nothing to fear.” According to Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), “If you’re not cheating on your taxes, you have nothing to worry about.” But the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that “between 78% and 90% of the estimated additional $200 billion the IRS will collect [over the next decade] will come from small businesses making less than $200,000 annually,” the New York Post reported.

Biden and his media allies pretend that the federal tax code is as lucid as the Ten Commandments and that depravity and/or iniquity are the only reasons people underpay taxes. But Americans are confounded by the four million words in the tax code and by the IRS’s failure to answer more than 90 percent of phone calls from taxpayers. Did the IRS need an $80 billion bribe to answer the phones? Actually, only 4 percent of the new $80 billion in funding will be devoted to customer service while 58 percent will go to turbo-charge enforcement.

IRS a law unto itself

Biden is acquiring a new army of IRS enforcers at the same time the agency obliterates unlucky taxpayers with deluges of penalties —which have increased tenfold since the 1950s. Sen. David Pryor (D-AR) complained that the IRS used penalties “as a weapon, as a whip over the innocent and the guilty taxpayer’s head, and as a point of leverage.” IRS enforcement policies have been travesties of due process for longer than Joe Biden has been in Washington.

IRS bureaucrats don’t even need to file a criminal charge before snaring citizens’ life savings. Consider IRS depredations under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which required banks to file a federal report for any cash transaction exceeding $10,000. The IRS “enforced” the law by presuming that anyone who deposited slightly less than $10,000 was a criminal. The IRS seized a quarter billion dollars because it disapproved of how businesses and individuals structured their bank deposits and withdrawals.

Between 2005 and 2012, the number of IRS seizures rose more than fivefold, but the vast majority of victims were never criminally prosecuted for structuring offenses. IRS criminal investigators simply looked at banking records and then confiscated hundreds of accounts. Most of the victims were “legal businesses such as jewelry stores, restaurant owners, gas station owners, scrap metal dealers, and others.” The IRS targeted businesses with legal sources of income, according to a 2017 Inspector General report, “to engage in ‘quick hits,’ where property was more quickly seized … rather than pursuing cases with other criminal activity (such as drug trafficking and money laundering), which are more time-consuming.” The IG found no evidence in 91 percent of the seizure cases that the money came from illegal activities. The IG noted, “Interviews with the property owners were conducted after the seizure to determine the reason for the pattern of banking transactions and if the property owner had knowledge of the banking law and had intent to structure.”

The IRS is menacing in part because federal courts have been shamelessly docile. As David Burnham, author of A Law Unto Itself: The I.R.S. and the Abuse of Power, noted, “Over and over again, federal judges have found ways either to ignore or actually to legitimize the growing reach of the tax collectors,” a “pattern of judicial tenderness … partly the product of the natural sympathy that those in power always feel toward the tax collectors.”

In U.S. Tax Court, IRS determinations of what citizens owe are “presumed correct,” with taxpayers bearing the burden to prove the feds wrong. Corporations with hefty legal departments routinely defeat the IRS in court, but few citizens can afford to fight a federal agency that appears to hold all the cards. Tax expert Daniel Pilla estimates that the “IRS’s audit results are incorrect between 60 and 90 percent of the time.”

The Supreme Court will soon hear the case of Romanian-American businessman Alexandru Bittner, who voluntarily notified the IRS that he was late filing reports on his foreign bank accounts (he was unaware of his duty to file). The IRS hit him with $2.72 million in fines, penalties, and interest — even though at least one federal court believed he should owe only $50,000. The difference between $2.72 million and $50,000 is a dramatic gauge of the arbitrary power that the IRS possesses over Americans.

The IRS agenda

The power to tax has long conferred the power to destroy political opponents. But in the glorious era of President Joe Biden, all previous cases of government abuse of power are being expunged, at least by the media and Biden supporters. The stunning political bias of Obama’s IRS vanished into the Memory Hole, never to be seen again (at least by respectable media outlets). But in 2014, a report by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee concluded that the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who masterminded the blockade of conservative nonprofit applications, “believed the political participation of tax-exempt organizations harmed Democratic candidates, she believed something needed to be done, and she directed action from her unit at the IRS.”

The Inflation Reduction Act will pay for new IRS computer systems. It has received billions of dollars from Congress to fix its computers since the 1980s, but the system is still a total mess (relying in part on 1960s-era computer technologies that are no longer widely taught in computer science classes).

How bad is the IRS information management system? An Inspector General report revealed that the IRS had destroyed 30 million tax information returns in 2021 without processing them because it was overwhelmed by the accumulating paper. Bloomberg News noted, “The IRS explained the documents were destroyed because the agency’s ‘antiquated’ information technology systems could no longer handle them.” Texas CPA Brian Streig groused, “To see the IRS just destroy these [returns] is almost like the IRS admitting they don’t really care.” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) denounced the document destruction as a “scandal” and lamented that “all the American people see at the IRS is incompetence and catastrophe.” Pascrell called for Biden to fire IRS chief Charles Rettig.

The IRS also sought to cover up the fact that it had failed to process tens of millions of tax returns in 2020 and 2021, continually misleading Congress and the media about the size of the backlog. Citizens faced harsh penalties for not filing their 1040 on time, but the IRS faced no penalty for making false statements about millions of tax returns it had failed to process.

The Inflation Reduction Act should have been named the Boarhawging Taxpayers Again Act. The Internal Revenue Service has perennially been the authoritarian means to paternalistic ends. Since politicians worship revenue above all other gods, don’t expect the Biden administration or Congress to stand up for average Americans unfairly caught in the revenue crosshairs.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

China invests millions in oil production in Afghanistan

Free West Media | January 9, 2023

While Western governments are trying to ignore or isolate the Taliban regime, which was able to take power in Afghanistan in August 2021, an Afghan-Chinese deal worth millions was concluded. China wants to develop an extensive oil field in Afghanistan. The Afghan mining minister and Chinese representatives signed a corresponding agreement in Kabul.

Accordingly, oil deposits are to be developed in three northern provinces in the Amu Darya Basin. The Chinese company CAPEIC plans to invest 150 million US dollars as a first move. The joint project aims to create around 3,000 jobs. The Taliban government will initially receive a 20 percent share of the profits. It is the largest planned economic project since they came to power.

Afghanistan has large deposits of raw materials that have hardly been tapped in the past four decades due to the ongoing military conflict. According to estimates, the total value could amount to one trillion dollars (around 940 billion euros) and more.

So far, however, the infrastructure such as roads, rails and sufficient power capacity has been missing to exploit the deposits on a large scale.

Afghanistan’s landlocked location and rugged landscape make mining and export difficult. However, the cooperation project with the Chinese should give Afghanistan access to the Chinese Silk Road transport network, which is intended to promote economic integration between China and the rest of the Eurasian-African landmass.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Canada Purchases 88 F-35 Fighter Jets in $14.2Bln Deal With Lockheed Martin

Samizdat – 09.01.2023

The Canadian government has inked a C$19 billion (US$14.2 billion) deal with Lockheed Martin to acquire a fleet of 88 F-35 fighter jets, Minister of Defense Anita Anand said on Monday.

“Today, I am announcing that Canada is acquiring a new fleet of 88 state of the art F 35 fighter jets through an agreement that we have finalized with the United States government and Lockheed Martin with Pratt and Whitney. This investment is estimated at $19 billion, making it the largest investment in our Royal Canadian Air Force in 30 years,” Anand said during a news conference.

Canada will acquire the aircraft in tranches and the first tranche will include 16 jets, the second in 2026 will include four jets, the third in 2027 will include six jets and the fourth in 2028 will also include six jets.

The rest of the fleet should be delivered by the end of 2032 just in time for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) phase out of its fleet of CF-18 jets, Anand added.

The defense minister noted that there is no clause in the agreement holding Lockheed Martin accountable for failing in the delivery schedule.

Canada has also acquired more CF-18 units from Australia to supplement RCAF’s fleet in the interim period, Anand said, adding that those are also being upgraded under the so-called Hornet extension project.

“These two initiatives will help extend the life of our CF-18 fleet to 2032 and will allow for a gradual transition from the CF-18 to the F 35,” Anand added.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | | Leave a comment

Unidentified drone bypasses US security at Ain al-Assad base

The Cradle | January 9, 2023

According to Iraqi media reports, US defense systems at the Ain al-Assad military base in Iraq’s western Anbar province brought down an unidentified drone that was able to bypass the facility’s security and reach “inaccessible” areas of the base.

An anonymous military source was quoted by Iraq’s Al-Maalouma news agency as saying that on 8 January, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) managed to make its way through all of the base’s security rings and enter areas that are “off-limits,” before finally being shut down “with electronic systems.”

The US army is usually able to target any ‘suspicious’ aircraft before it makes its way to the first security ring, the source stated.

“The drone reached very important parts of the Ain al-Assad base, and this was the first time that this happens … The American military has not released the details of the incident because the drone passed through the missile defense systems of the Ain al-Assad base and threatened the dormitories and sanatoriums of the soldiers,” it added.

The Iraqi news agency said that it was unclear whether or not the drone was on a surveillance mission, or if it was carrying any explosives. No explosions, damages, or casualties were reported. An investigation into the incident has reportedly been opened, the agency added without elaborating further.

Five days after an illegal US drone strike on 3 January 2020 killed Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) chief, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Tehran responded by showering the Ain al-Assad military base with a barrage of missiles.

The US military denied any casualties, but the Pentagon reported that over 100 US military personnel suffered traumatic brain injuries following the strike. The facility also sustained heavy material damages.

Unbeknownst to many, however, Iran responded to Soleimani’s killing with more than just an attack on Ain al-Assad. In 2021, an anonymous, high-ranking security official within the Resistance Axis told The Cradle that two senior officers, one in the US army and another in the Israeli army, were killed in a resistance operation in Iraq’s Erbil – which was carried out to avenge the illegal assassination.

Lt. Col. James C. Willis, who was involved in the Soleimani assassination and was killed in Erbil, was reported by the Pentagon – in a blatant coverup – to have died “in a non-combat incident at Qatar’s Al-Udeid base.” The Israeli, Col. Sharon Asman, was also killed in the operation and was reported to have suffered from heart failure.

Since Iran’s missile attack on Ain al-Assad, the facility has come under attack several times. Other US bases in Iraq have also been struck, and this year, attacks against US bases in Syria are increasing in frequency and intensity.

On 5 January 2020, Lebanese resistance leader, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed: “The response to the blood of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis will be the expulsion of all US forces from the region.”

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , | Leave a comment

Maidan Massacre Study Accepted and Then Rejected by Journal

BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 9, 2023

Professor Ivan Katchanovski, as you may recall, is the Ukrainian-Canadian academic who’s done all the work on Maidan massacre. Briefly, he argues that the massacre of police and protestors on the Maidan Square in February of 2014 was a false flag operation carried out by the Ukrainian far-right.

To date, Katchanovski has published one paper on the massacre in an academic journal and another in an academic book. He has also presented his work at academic conferences. However, the professor’s latest and most detailed study remains unpublished.

This was about to change, Katchanovski thought in November, when it was accepted for publication at an academic journal. Indeed, the paper was accepted “after minor revision” – which means the reviewers didn’t recommend any fundamental changes.

Katchanovski received this message on November 2nd. The image has been cropped.

Yet about ten days later, Katchanovski received an email from the journal informing him that the paper had been rejected – without any further peer review.

Needless to say, this is highly irregular. Once a paper has been accepted, that’s it; there’s no final stage of submission where it can be rejected after having already been accepted.

In fact, the editor was very complimentary. Upon accepting the paper for publication, he (or she) said, “There is no doubt that this paper is exceptional in many ways.” He went on to describe “the evidence” as “solid”, adding that “on this” there is “consensus among the two reviewers”. In other words, both reviewers and the editor found the empirical part convincing.

We know the initial acceptance wasn’t a clerical error. The editor explicitly stated in his message of November 2nd that “I would rather side with referee 2 and suggest that the article is acceptable for publication”, pending some minor changes.

As Katchanovski noted in a Twitter thread, he tried to appeal the decision by soliciting support from a “world-famous scholar”, who described the paper as “very important, rigorous and substantial”. But his efforts were unsuccessful.

Remarkably, the editor then wrote to the journal demanding to know why the paper had been rejected “despite the review and editorial decision in support of publication”. He noted that it was “excellent according to both reviewers”. This suggests that other members of the journal’s editorial board overruled his prior decision.

Katchanovski’s studies are already available for free online, and have been read thousands of times. The only benefit of publishing them in a journal (aside from small improvements thanks to peer reviewers) is to give the papers ‘legitimacy’. Until they’re published in a journal, critics can dismiss them as ‘not peer reviewed’ (even though many of the claims are based on publicly available videos).

What’s absurd about this incident is that the paper did pass peer review; it just got rejected anyway.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

White House Lobbied Facebook to Censor Tucker Carlson Over Skepticism Towards COVID-19 Vaccine

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 9, 2023

Internal communications obtained by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry show that the White House lobbied Facebook to censor Tucker Carlson and others for expressing skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine.

White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty wrote an email to an unnamed Facebook employee on April 14, 2021 complaining about posts that were negative towards the vaccine appearing prominently on Facebook.

“Since we’ve been on the phone – the top post about vaccines today is [T]ucker Carlson saying they don’t work. Yesterday it was Tomi Lehren [sic] saying she won’t take one,” the email stated.

“This is exactly why I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like – if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with [T]ucker Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then… I’m not sure it’s reduction!” Flaherty added.

This is clearly related to the Biden White House’s frustration that Facebook wasn’t rigging its algorithm enough to ensure that such posts were censored from being seen by a large enough majority of Facebook users.

The Facebook staffer responded to the email by assuring Flaherty that the company was “running this down,” meaning acquiescing to the censorship demand.

The communication was unearthed in response to a lawsuit filed by Landry and Missouri’s AG Eric Schmitt seeking to determine whether the Biden administration coerced social media networks to censor content related to the 2020 presidential election and COVID-19.

The files once again prove that Big Tech censorship was carried out at the behest of the government, meaning it was a direct violation of the First Amendment.

As part of discovery, other communications also show Flaherty expressing his frustration with Facebook for not censoring on a broad enough scale.

“Really couldn’t care less about products unless they’ve having measurable impact,” Flaherty raged.

“I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters in the now-folded ‘lockdown,’” he added.

The White House demanded “assurances” that Facebook wasn’t going to dilute its censorship policies.

Flaherty also warned Google that such concerns were shared by “the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH [White House],” and demanded that the company, which owns YouTube, get a “handle on vaccine hesitancy generally” and resolve to work “toward making the problem better.”

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Sweden to Nearly Double Annual Number of Military Conscripts

Samizdat – 09.01.2023

The Swedish government has decided to nearly double its annual number of military recruits to 10,000 to boost the country’s defense capabilities amid the Ukrainian conflict, Americain news agency reported on Monday.

In March 2017, Sweden resumed compulsory military conscription, which was abolished in 2010, citing the deteriorating security situation in the region.

As part of the plan to increase the number of conscripts, the government will ask the emergency agency to prepare training for young people who do not want to undergo military training, the report said, citing Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, adding that in the event of a military conflict, the conscripts will be asked to serve in municipal emergency services.

“The experiences from Ukraine paint a very clear picture, as emergency services face severe pressure in their work to protect civilians. Considering the security situation, this is an urgent measure to strengthen total defense capabilities,” Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told reporters.

On May 18, three months after Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. Their accession protocols have already been ratified by all NATO members except Hungary and Turkey.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

China’s normalization overtures rejected as US opts for another Taiwan escalation

By Drago Bosnic | January 9, 2023

For decades, many geopolitical experts have been claiming the United States is in constant need of geopolitical adversaries. The view was challenged by those claiming that all the US wants is the spread of “peace, prosperity, democracy, freedom, human rights,” etc. And yet, the belligerent thalassocracy is consistent in its rejection of mutually beneficial relations with other global powers.

USSR/Russia essentially dismantled its own superpower status in an attempt to establish normal ties with the political West and focus almost exclusively on economic cooperation and integration. The political West responded with an unrelenting eastward expansion and effective destabilization and encirclement of Russia’s core regions in the west of the country. Despite Moscow’s patience, the results of this are now seen in Ukraine, where the Eurasian giant is forced to fight the same ultra-radicals it had to fight eight decades ago.

A somewhat similar scenario seems to be playing out in the increasingly contested Asia-Pacific geopolitical theater, where the US and (most of) its regional vassals are taking aim at China. Despite Beijing’s attempts at rapprochement with Washington DC and its numerous satellites, this seems to be futile. The belligerent thalassocracy keeps insisting on not just meddling in China’s internal affairs, but is also engaging in repeated violations of Beijing’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is especially true concerning the South China Sea, as well as the Asian giant’s breakaway island province of Taiwan, which is being pushed ever closer to an armed conflict with (mainland) China. Beijing is certainly capable of winning if the ongoing dispute ever turns hot, but it’s still trying to avoid such a scenario.

In line with its attempts at detente with the US, the last major (geo)political move China made at the end of 2022 was the appointment of a new foreign minister. On December 30, its ambassador to the US, Qin Gang, was appointed as the Foreign Minister of China, taking the diplomatic helm from Wang Yi. Major Western media outlets noted that the move could indicate Beijing’s “softening” stance toward America. Indeed, this could be considered one of the biggest recent developments out of Beijing and it could have impacted the future of US-China relations, as Qin Gang tried his best to keep ties between the two superpowers as friendly as possible during his relatively short, seventeen months-long tenure in Washington DC.

In the first days of January, the new Chinese FM grabbed the headlines of Western media by posting tweets that he’s “deeply impressed” by the American people, while pledging to push US-China ties towards a more positive relationship. “I want to pay sincere thanks to the people of the United States for the strong support and assistance given to me and the Chinese Embassy during this period,” Qin tweeted on January 2, adding: “I have been deeply impressed by so many hard-working, friendly and talented American people that I met,” further saying he had “made many friends across the US.” He promised to “support the growth of China-US relations” in his capacity as the new Chinese FM.

And yet, China’s overtures have been shunned by the US. On January 4, barely two days after Gang’s words, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) announced it will be sending a delegation to Taipei this week for additional trade talks with the government of the breakaway island province. Washington DC and Taipei held formal trade talks last year and agreed to have more such meetings after the first round was held in New York in November. Although there are no official relations between the US and Taiwan, as even Washington DC officially considers the island as part of China, the American delegation is led by Terry McCartin, the assistant US trade representative for China affairs.

This means the move is carried out by President Biden’s Executive Office, giving the effort a formal diplomatic status, usually reserved for state-level contacts, which is highly unlikely to be appreciated in Beijing. In addition, the USTR stated that the meetings would be attended by officials from several other US government agencies. According to The South China Morning Post, Yang Jen-ni, Taipei’s deputy trade representative, will lead the Taiwanese delegations, which will also include officials from other departments. This clearly implies that the meeting will include more than just trade talks, further antagonizing China and its attempts at rapprochement.

Beijing views high-level contacts between Washington DC and Taipei as a direct violation of the One-China policy, to which, as previously mentioned, the US still officially adheres. This also includes trade talks, which have been almost exclusively aimed against China in recent years. Beijing views the trade talks as another US attempt to hurt China’s standing in the Asia-Pacific region. The USTR has dubbed the trade talks the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade and said that “they are intended to develop concrete ways to deepen the economic and trade relationship.”

A major point of the talks is Taiwan’s position as the world’s largest producer of advanced semiconductors. The US is aiming to push Taiwan-based companies to move facilities to America, while sanctioning China’s microchip industry, marking a hostile shift in US trade policy toward the Asian giant. Additionally, speaking of hostility, on January 5, only a day after the controversial trade talks were announced, Washington DC further insulted Beijing by ordering the US Navy 7th Fleet’s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon to pass through the Taiwan Strait as part of “its commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.” This was the latest sign that the US is clearly rejecting China’s peace initiatives.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

These Doctors Pushed Masking, Covid Lockdowns on Twitter. Turns Out, They Don’t Exist

By Matthew Kupfer • The Standard • December 13, 2022

Last month, Dr. Robert Honeyman lost their sister to Covid. They wrote about it on Twitter and received dozens of condolences, over 4,000 retweets and 43,000 likes.

Exactly one month later, on Dec. 12, Honeyman wrote that another tragedy had befallen their family.

“Sad to announce that my husband has entered a coma after being in hospital with Covid. The doctor is unsure if he will come out,” they tweeted. “This year has been the toughest of my life losing my sister to this virus. This is the first time in my life I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel.”

Again, the condolences and well-wishes rolled in. But there was a problem: Honeyman wasn’t real.

The transgender “Doctor of Sociology and Feminist studies” with a “keen interest in poetry” who used they/them pronouns was, in fact, a stock photo described on DepositPhotos, a royalty-free image site, as “Smiling happy, handsome latino man outside—headshot portrait.”

Their supposedly comatose husband, Dr. Patrick C. Honeyman, was also fake. His Twitter photo had been stolen from an insurance professional in Wayne, Indiana.

The stock photo used as Dr. Robert Honeyman’s avatar on Twitter. (Screenshot)

The photograph used as Dr. Patrick C. Honeyman’s avatar on Twitter. (Screenshot)

The two fake doctors, whose accounts urged extreme caution about Covid-19, were part of a network of at least four fake accounts that touted their ties to the LGBTQ+ community, vocally advocated for mask-wearing and social distancing, and dished out criticism to those they felt were not taking the pandemic seriously.

The Honeymans could not be reached for comment, as they do not exist. At publication time, Robert Honeyman’s account was no longer active.

The fake doctors were uncovered by Joshua Gutterman Tranen, a self-described “gay writer” pursuing a master’s of fine arts at Bennington College. He saw Robert Honeyman’s tweet about their husband being in a coma, noticed people he followed also followed them, and thought that they might be part of the LGBTQ+ academic community.

But after 10 minutes of googling, Gutterman Tranen concluded that Robert Honeyman’s photo was a stock image and their biography stretched boundaries of believability: an academic who left no traces on academic websites and had lost two family members to Covid in late 2022, despite masking and distancing.

The character looked like “liberal Mad Libs,” Gutterman Tranen said.

“I’m a self-identified leftist, and I understand that people have a lot of different identities, but it felt concocted in the lab about how many identities and horrible experiences can we put on one person,” he said.

The Standard ran Dr. Robert Honeyman’s Twitter photo through a Google reverse image search and found that it was a widely available stock photo. (Screenshot)

It is unclear who created the two doctors, but their bios and personas signpost identities meant to appeal to a certain type of Twitter denizen: liberal, pro-diversity and concerned about Covid. Or meant to provoke the opposite of that type of person.

Both doctors present themselves as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Robert displayed the trans and Ukrainian flags in their Twitter name. Patrick had a rainbow flag in his bio.

Robert wrote openly about suffering from MPX, an infectious disease that caused San Francisco to declare a state of emergency earlier this year and had largely spread among men who have sex with men. “Don’t believe what the media have been sharing. […] it’s a horrible disease that has had me bed ridden,” they tweeted in July. They also claimed to have been the victim of a transphobic attack in October. […]

All four accounts urged caution about Covid. They also amplified the voices of other Twitter users calling on the public to mask, vaccinate and socially distance. At times, they criticized policies that they felt undermined pandemic safety and individuals who they believed did not take Covid seriously enough.

But as Twitter users responded to Gutterman Tranen’s thread on the Honeymans, they also discovered the accounts expressing views that appeared implausible.

“Come on china! Stop protesting, I wish we had similar lockdown measures here,” Robert Honeyman wrote in a Nov. 27 tweet. … Full article

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Papantonio: Drugs, Lies, and Big Pharma

Ring of Fire – February 22, 2015

In this RT segment, Ring of Fire host Mike Papantonio discusses the deadly lies told by Big Pharma.

In the 1980’s, Bayer Corporation produced a medicine that was supposed to improve the lives of hemophiliacs. Bayer didn’t tell those hemophiliacs that their product was infected with HIV. Entire families of hemophiliacs died with AIDS as the virus spread within households. When Bayer was ordered to stop selling their drug in America, they dumped their AIDS laden product in Asia and killed Asian families. No one with Bayer management was arrested. No one who made those psychopathic quality decisions went to prison. They claimed the protection of their status as a “corporation.” That “corporate” status gave management the ability to kill people for profit and not go to prison. Mike Papantonio handled the civil case against Bayer and saw first hand that this was a rogue operation not typical of most corporations. But how do you put that rogue in prison? Who do you arrest?

Today, rogue corporations have the best of all worlds. They take advantage of the constitutional protections that were originally written for living, breathing, humans. They argue that the U.S. Supreme Court mandated 130 years ago that we must treat a “corporation” exactly like we treat a “person.” They argue that the 14th Amendment was written to protect their “corporate person status” with equal protection and due process.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Elon Musk agreed to EU’s censorship laws, France’s digital minister says

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | January 8, 2023

French digital transition minister Jean-Noel Barrot visited  owner  to discuss compliance with European censorship rules.

Barrot tweeted that he visited Musk after attending CES in Las Vegas on Saturday. The French minister claimed that Musk said Twitter would comply with EU laws.

“At Twitter headquarters, Elon Musk confirmed to me his intention to comply with European rules, and his commitments on content moderation, the fight against disinformation, and the protection of children,” he wrote in a tweet that included a photo of himself and the Twitter CEO.

Since Musk took over Twitter in late October, he has made several changes, including rolling back Covid censorship policies and laying off members of staff.

Shortly after Musk took over, European Commissioner Thierry Breton warned that the platform had to adhere to the bloc’s speech rules.

Last year, the EU passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), a regulation that will require online platforms to take down harmful content immediately and suspend users who repeatedly violate the rules.

The law will take effect in 2024.

January 8, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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