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Scientists find most PCR test results don’t indicate infectious virus, question test’s status as “Gold Standard”

By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics •  June 20, 2021

How often do we hear that the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test is the “gold standard” for detecting COVID-19 infection and thus for controlling and containing a COVID-19 epidemic? To question the accuracy of this test is supposedly part of the “misinformation” sceptics spread, which Ofcom, being guided by biased, Big Tech-funded, activist organisation Full Fact, aims to suppress.

In reality, serious questions about the proper use of PCR tests, particularly in mass screening programmes, have been asked since the technique was invented in 1985 and predate the Covid pandemic.

Since early 2020, there have been concerns that defining a “case” of COVID-19 merely in terms of a positive PCR test – with no consideration of clinical symptoms or the cycle threshold (Ct) of the test, which indicates the viral load of the patient – debases the concept of a clinical case and exaggerates the prevalence of the disease, fuelling alarm.

The issue was raised by Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina and colleagues in the Lancet in February 2021, where they concluded that the cycle thresholds in reported test data were such that only a quarter to a half of positive PCR tests were likely to indicate the presence of infectious COVID-19. The rest, they argued, were detecting post-infectious viral particles, meaning relying on PCR testing was overstating the number of infectious cases of COVID-19 by a factor of between two and four.

This conclusion has now been underlined in a research letter in the Journal of Infection by seven scientists from the Universities of Münster and Essen. After analysing the test results from a large laboratory in Münster that amounted to 80% of all Covid PCR tests in the Münster region during March to November 2020, they found that “more than half of individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been infectious”. They thus conclude: “RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence.”

They also note that asymptomatic positives have higher average Ct values than symptomatic positives, meaning lower viral load and so less likely to be infectious.

Asymptomatic individuals with positive RT-PCR test results have higher Ct values and a lower probability of being infectious than symptomatic individuals with positive results.

This isn’t to say that PCR tests are of no use in diagnosing COVID-19. PCR amplifies tiny amounts of genetic material until it can be detected, and can certainly be used to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2. However, some doubt the validity of the PCR test protocols for COVID-19 and so question whether it is even detecting a real virus. However, since a large proportion of samples are currently being genetically sequenced to determine which variant they are, there can be no serious doubt that a real virus with known genetic structure is being detected in the tests.

When viral incidence is low or declining, that’s when the PCR test becomes much less reliable and tends greatly to overstate the prevalence of the disease (by two to four times, according to Michael Mina) and misdiagnoses people as being sick or infectious. When levels are surging and there is more infectious virus around it is much more likely to be accurate, at least in terms of indicating infectiousness, though questions about the proper use of the term “case” where no or mild symptoms are present remain.

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

UK govt gave contract to IT firm that is ‘openly plotting’ to turn vaccine passports into a national ID card

RT | June 21, 2021

The British government has been accused of aiming to covertly implement a national ID programme, after it partnered with a company that has advocated turning vaccine passports into a multi-purpose document.

Entrust, an IT firm that bills itself as a “global leader in identities, payments, and data protection,” was awarded a contract by the Department of Health and Social Care last month to work on the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine certificate system. The company was given £250,000 ($346,000) to provide cloud-computing services for the government’s Covid-status certification scheme, iNews reported. The contract is due to expire in March 2022, but the government has the option of extending it for an additional year.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock stated last month that proof of vaccination will be “necessary” for international travel, and in recent weeks reports have emerged claiming that the UK government may require the document of people attending sporting events or other large gatherings.

Judging from Entrust’s own stance on the issue, it’s possible that the government may have even more ambitious plans for the digital certificate. In a February blog post published on the company’s website, Jann Markey, Entrust’s product marketing director, argued that the advent of the vaccine passports could be used as an opportunity to roll out a national ID as part of “the infrastructure of the new normal.”

“Consider a national ID strategy: With the infrastructure and investment necessary to ensure a viable vaccine passport, why not redeploy this effort into a national citizen ID programme that can be used for multiple purposes including the secure delivery of government services, secure cross-border travel, and documentation of vaccination,” the blog, which explores vaccine passports in the “post-pandemic world,” states.

Notably, the US-based company has already helped Albania, Ghana and Malaysia deploy national ID systems, iNews said.

Entrust’s partnership with the UK government has already raised alarm among civil liberties organisations and lawmakers.

Tory MP David Davis, a member of the anti-lockdown Covid Recovery Group, demanded an explanation from the government. He told iNews that it was “extraordinary” that the health department could ink deals with such companies without first getting permission from Parliament, adding that it was particularly worrying that a contract could be given to a firm “with this sinister attitude to surveillance of citizens.”

Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith echoed similar displeasure, claiming that the contract contradicts the “stated position of the government” and should be nixed.

Big Brother Watch, a privacy and civil liberties group, said the Entrust contract represents an attempt by the government to issue ID cards “by the backdoor.”

“The fact that the government has done a deal with Entrust, a company which is openly plotting a route from vaccine passports to digital identity cards, only underlines what a serious threat Covid passes would be to our civil liberties and our privacy,” the organisation’s head of research, Jake Hurfurt, warned.

A health department spokesperson insisted that the NHS app used to certify vaccination status will not be used as a national ID system, describing the scheme as a “simple and secure means” to allow for international travel. Entrust declined to comment when contacted by iNews.

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

America’s Soup-Brained President Says The US Never Interferes In Other Countries’ Elections

By Caitlin Johnstone | June 17, 2021

During an astonishingly sycophantic press conference after the Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin, President Biden posited an entirely hypothetical scenario about what the world would think of the United States if it were interfering in foreign elections and everybody knew it.

When AP’s Jonathan Lemire asked the president of the most powerful government in the world what “consequences” he’d threatened the Russian leader with should the Kremlin interfere in US elections going forward, Biden meandered his way through one of his signature not-quite-lucid word salads, and then said the following:

“Let’s get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”

The fact that the entire press corps did not erupt in side-splitting laughter at this ridiculous utterance is in itself proof that western news media is pure propaganda. The United States has directly interfered in scores of foreign elections since it began its ascent to global domination at the end of the second World War, to say nothing of all the coups, color revolutions, proxy conflicts and regime change military invasions it has also participated in during that time. The US openly interfered in Russia’s elections in the nineties, and literally just tried to stage a coup in Bolivia by interfering in its democratic process. The US is far and away the single most egregious offender in the world on this front, which is largely why it is perceived around the world as a greater threat to democracy than any other government.

This is not a secret, internationally or in the United States. Anyone who has done any learning about the US government’s actual behavior on the world stage knows this. Hell, a former CIA director openly joked about it on Fox News a few years ago.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham unsurprisingly introduced former CIA Director James Woolsey as “an old friend” in a 2018 interview about Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 alleged members of a Russian troll farm, in which Woolsey unsurprisingly talked about how dangerous Russian “disinformation” is and Ingraham unsurprisingly said that everyone should actually be afraid of China. What was a bit surprising, though, was what happened at the end of the interview.

“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Ingraham asked in response to Woolsey’s Russia remarks.

“Oh, probably,” Woolsey said with a grin. “But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians we CIA-”

“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”

Woolsey smiled and said said “Well…”, followed by a joking incoherent mumble, adding, “Only for a very good cause.”

And then they both laughed.

The fact that not one person in the press pool questioned or criticized Biden’s outrageous remarks tells you everything you need to know about the western media and what its real function is. This is further illustrated by the rest of the behavior of these odious propagandists during the summit, which was illustrated quite well by the glowing praise of Democratic Party insider Andrea Chalupa on Twitter:

“The winners of #GenevaSummit2021 are the White House press corp,” Chalupa said. “Excellent questions confronting Putin and challenging Biden on holding a summit with a ruthless dictator. And they literally held their ground when shoved by Putin’s security and propagandists.”

That actually says it all. Western reporters are forbidden by their oligarchic owners from ever confronting power in any meaningful way; the closest they’re ever allowed to get to punching up is challenging the leaders of CIA-targeted governments, and demanding to know why their own officials aren’t being more hawkish and aggressive toward those leaders.

As RT’s Murad Gazdiev pointed out, “ABC, NBC, BBC, CNN, and many other Western outlets were invited for Putin’s press conference. No Russian media was invited to Biden’s press conference.” The whole thing was a navel-gazing, masturbatory cold war propaganda orgy where western “journalists” made up fantasies about their soup-brained leader staring down Putin, where they yelled nonsense about Alexei Navalny at the Russian president and then fangirled at Biden’s response.

Real journalists go to Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. Western propagandists ask Putin why he’s such a doodoo dumb dumb poopy head and then dream about Pulitzers all night.

Western news media exists to funnel propaganda into the minds of the public. It is controlled by plutocrats who work in alliance with opaque government agencies to weave narratives about why the US government needs to do the things it had already planned on doing anyway. This gets more obvious by the day.

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Palestine denounces UN for whitewashing Israeli crimes against Palestinian children

Press TV – June 21, 2021

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has criticized the United Nations for leaving Israel off the annual blacklist of parties responsible for grave violations against children, saying ignoring the regime’s crimes would guarantee impunity for the child-killing entity.

“The UN’s non-inclusion of the Zionist regime in the blacklist of governments and groups violating children’s rights in armed conflicts is a move in favor of the killer and in support of the criminals of the Zionist army and its terrorist settlers, and it would guarantee their escape from punishment,” the ministry said in a statement, Palestine’s Wafa news agency reported.

It said the UN action puts its reports at risk of “invalidity” and “dishonesty”, as well as skepticism about the principles on which the UN is based.

In a recent report, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on the Israeli authorities to reduce army operations against children and guarantee punishment in all cases where children are killed, but he decided not to blacklist the regime for violating children’s rights in occupied Palestine.

While blaming the Israeli military for most of the major child abuses in 2020 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem al-Quds, and the Gaza Strip, Guterres merely called on the Israeli regime to investigate cases in which it used weapons. It also called for an end to the administrative detention of children and for prevention of any ill-treatment during detention or attempts to recruit children.

In the report, however, the UN secretary general blacklisted Ansarullah movement, which is defending Yemen against six years of Saudi-led military aggression on the impoverished country, while refusing to include Saudi Arabia for the war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.

He also blacklisted the Syrian army for allegedly violating children’s rights.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said it closely follows the UN’s report on the rights of children in armed conflicts, which is to be published by Guterres soon.

The ministry said the Palestinian government expects the UN secretary general to blacklist the Israeli regime and its army and settlers as parties that gravely violate the rights of children in armed conflicts.

It added that a failure to comply with international law and its institutions and principles amounts to encouraging Israel to continue its organized terrorism and inviting the regime to continue its deliberate crimes, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Hamas angered by UN

Earlier, Palestinian resistance group Hamas also expressed anger at the UN’s failure to blacklist Israel, saying the UN green-lighted Israel’s crimes against Palestinian children.

In a statement on Saturday, Hamas blamed Guterres for the non-inclusion, pointing to the Israeli massacre of 66 Palestinian children in the regime’s latest war on the Gaza Strip as well as the killing of innocent Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank as clear examples of the atrocities Israel commits against Palestinian children.

Hamas said the report lacks an impartial and transparent investigation into Israeli crimes, demanding that Guterres correct his mistake and add the name of “the occupation state” to its blacklist.

Meanwhile, the permanent representative of Palestine to the UN said the UN Security Council will hold a session next Thursday to follow up the implementation of Resolution 2334 on Israeli settlements.

The meeting will follow up on the ongoing Israeli violations, including the demolition of homes and the displacement of citizens in Jerusalem al-Quds, Ambassador Riyad Mansour told official Voice of Palestine radio on Saturday.

Mansour added the meeting comes as part of Palestine’s diplomatic efforts to achieve a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and “provide international protection to our people.”

Issued in 2016, Resolution 2334 reaffirmed that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity and constituted a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Germany bans Hamas flag, citing rise in anti-Semitism

MEMO | June 21, 2021

Germany has agreed to ban the flag of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, citing a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents following Israel’s recent assault on the Gaza Strip.

According to a report by the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, the plan to ban the flag of the group which was voted into government in free elections in 2006, was initially proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union party (CDU).

After first opposing the ban due to constitutional concerns, its coalition partner – the centre-left Social Democratic Party – finally gave its backing to the decision.

Thorsten Frei, the deputy parliamentary spokesman for the CDU, is reported to have stated: “We do not want the flags of terrorist organizations to be waved on German soil.” He called the ban a “clear signal to our Jewish citizens.”

The move comes after Germany’s Central Council of Jews called for increased protection of the country’s Jewish community and the cracking down on pro-Palestinian protestors last month, particularly following pro-Palestinian protests across Europe which many said were anti-Semitic.

The ban on Hamas’ flag comes over a year after Berlin banned the political wing of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah and its activities. Months after that ban, it was revealed that the United States pressured the German government into enacting it.

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Fear Is Contagious and Used to Control You

fear contagious

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | June 18, 2021

Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake. As reported by The Telegraph, May 14, 2021:1

“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behavior during the COVID pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian.’ Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s COVID-19 response.

SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from COVID-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’

Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.’”

Psychological Warfare Is Real

The Telegraph quotes several of the SPI-B members, all of whom are also quoted in the newly released book, “A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” written by Laura Dodsworth:2

“One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: ‘In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.

The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared’ …

One warned that ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise … We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in’ …

Another member of SPI-B said they were ‘stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology’ during the pandemic, and that ‘psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them.’

Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: ‘If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become. If we’re being really honest, do I fear that government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.’”

The Manufacture of Fear

For nearly a year and a half, governments around the world, with few exceptions, have fed their citizens a steady diet of frightening news. For months on end, you couldn’t turn on the television without facing a tickertape detailing the number of hospitalizations and deaths.

Even when it became clear that people weren’t really dying in excessive numbers, the mainstream media fed us continuous updates on the growing number of “cases,” without ever putting such figures into context or explaining that the vast majority were false positives.

Information that would have balanced out the bad news — such as recovery rates and just how many so-called “cases” actually weren’t, because they never had a single symptom — were censored and suppressed.

They also refused to put any of the data into context, such as reviewing whether the death toll actually differed significantly from previous years. Instead, each new case was treated as an emergency and a sign of catastrophic doom.

Don’t Be Confused — Contradiction Is a Warfare Tactic

Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which, by the way, was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused. According to Dodsworth, giving out contradictory recommendations and vague instructions is being done intentionally, to keep you psychologically vulnerable.

“When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging. Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government,” she said in a May 20, 2021, interview on the Planet Normal podcast.3

An example provided by Dodsworth are the pandemic measures implemented over Christmas 2020:

“Family Christmases were on, then off, then back on, then off again. You have got someone tightening the screw, then loosening the screw, then tightening it again. It’s like a torture scenario.”

But that’s not all. As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, by layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, they are easily manipulated. I have no doubt driving people into a state where logic and reason no longer registers is the whole point behind much of the conflicting information we’re given.

The Fear Factory

In her book, Dodsworth details a number of branches of the British government that are using psychological warfare methods in their interaction with the public. In addition to the SPI-B, there’s the:4

•Behavioral Insights team, the so-called “nudge unit,” a semi-independent government body that applies “behavioral insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver positive results for people and communities.”5 This team also advises foreign nations.

•Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which is part of the U.K.’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, advises front groups disguised as public “grassroots” organizations on how to “covertly engineer the thoughts of people.”

•Rapid Response Unit, launched in 2018, operates across the British Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s office (colloquially known as “Number 10” as in the physical address, 10 Downing Street in London) to “counter misinformation and disinformation.” They also work with the National Security Communications Team during crises to ensure “official information” gets maximum visibility.6

•Counter Disinformation Cell, which is part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Both monitor social media and combat “fake news” about science in general and COVID-19 in particular, with “fake news” being anything that contradicts the World Health Organization’s guidance.7

•Government Communications Headquarters (QCHQ), an intelligence and security organization that provides information to the U.K. government and the armed forces. According to Dodsworth, QCHQ personnel, and even members of the 77th Brigade, have been enlisted as so-called sockpuppets and trolls to combat anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown messaging on social media.

According to Dodsworth, there are many others. In her book, she claims at least 10 different government departments in the U.K. are working with “behavioral insights teams” to manipulate the public.

We’re Just Seeing It Now

Importantly, government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, for myriad PR purposes, and while the pandemic may be winding down, Dodsworth warns that more and more behavioral scientists are being hired:8

“It’s growing and growing. Right now, I feel we are in a maelstrom of nudge,” she says. “In the past, there have been calls to consult the public on the use of behavioral psychology, and those calls have come from the behavioral scientists themselves. And yet it hasn’t happened. We haven’t yet been consulted on the use of subconscious techniques which effectively strip away our choices …

I fervently hope this book [‘The State of Fear’] is actually going to inspire a much-needed conversation about the use of fear, not just in the epidemic, but the way we use behavioral psychology overall.

It’s not just a genie that has been let out the bottle. It’s like we’ve unleashed a Hydra and you can keep chopping its head off, but they keep employing more of these behavioral scientists throughout different government departments. It’s very much how the Government now does business. It’s the business of fear …

I think ultimately people don’t want to be manipulated. People don’t enjoy being hoodwinked and they don’t want to live in a state of fear. We maybe need to be a bit bolder about standing up more quickly when something is not right.”

Full article

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Delete that Tweet! Twitter Censors Journalism

Intellectual conformity leads nowhere good

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 14, 2021

Two weeks ago, I blogged about a magazine article titled The Drug that Cracked Covid. It describes the bizarre reaction, on the part of health bureaucrats and journalists, to the news that Ivermectin is a pandemic game-changer.

On the one hand we have ICU doctors who’ve been toiling in the trenches, battling COVID for over a year. Based on firsthand experience and a mountain of research, they know this cheap, generic drug is highly effective. On the other hand, we have health bureaucrats who’ve never treated a single COVID patient, who haven’t worked a single shift in ICU during this pandemic, insisting Ivermectin should not be used as a COVID medicine.

But there’s a further component to this madness: Big Tech censorship. Tom Nelson lives in Minnesota and has a Masters of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He’s been an independent blogger since 2005, when he began commenting on the extinction status of a particular species of woodpecker. These days, he’s an active participant in the online climate debate.

Having joined Twitter in 2008, Nelson is now followed by 28.7 thousand people. But two weeks ago, he did something that put his Twitter account at risk – he talked about my blog post. Twitter says that quoting my summary and linking to my post violates its rules concerning “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”

Twitter, he was further advised, requires “the removal of content that may pose a risk to people’s health, including content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.”

So an experienced journalist (moi, here in Canada), blogs about an article written by another experienced journalist (Michael Capuzzo, in the US). When Nelson tells the world about our work, Twitter locks his account – preventing him from tweeting, retweeting, or liking other people’s messages until he deletes the dangerous, forbidden, not-to-be-tolerated tweet.

But deletion wasn’t enough. Only after Nelson took this step, did a 12-hour countdown begin. In other words, Nelson spent 12+ hours in Twitter’s penalty box for tweeting about the work of professional journalists.

The next day Nelson quoted from, and linked to, the magazine article itself.

That resulted in a near immediate second suspension. In order to continue talking to his audience of more than 28 thousand people, Nelson was required to delete that tweet, as well – and to spend seven days in Twitter’s penalty box.

This is insane. Twitter has no business censoring journalists. It has no business taking sides in any debate about how best to treat any disease. But it is doing so. Ever more aggressively. And with absolute impunity.

In Nelson’s words: “I’m incredibly angry about this. I believe Twitter censorship of the Ivermectin discussion has already cost people their lives.”

June 20, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Brett Weinstein streams with Odysee after YouTube suspension

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 20, 2021

Are YouTube – and those behind it – actually confident that once a channel is banned there and on similar tech giant-controlled places – it actually disappears from the web?

If so, how short-sighted they must be. These days – not thanks to YouTube’s own dismal policies and the seemingly general trend towards perilous centralization of the internet – alternatives like Odysee, LBRY’s blockchain file-sharing and payment network website, are emerging as viable alternatives.

One of the shows that have been driven off YouTube is biology professor Bret Weinstein and co-host Heather Heying’s DarkHorse Podcast. But a tweet from LBRY announced this saying that the hosts will now be broadcasting exclusively on Odysee. And that you, the listener… can always #FollowTheSilence.

Or if you’re actually into listening to your media content – DarkHorse is (still) available as a downloadable/streaming audio file on any app perusing Apple Podcasts directory – or better yet – via the Podcast Index.

With the actual online availability of it unscathed, in an apparent age of rampant and largely inexplicable – at least in any terms a democratic society might choose to easily explain itself for censoring reach and content in the 21st century – out of the way, let’s delve into what DarkHorse podcast is.

Weinstein and Heying are both biology PhDs, and their knack seems to be viewing the world around them through an evolutionary lens.

What drove Weinstein, a historical Bernie Sanders supporter, and Heying, his wife, to launch the DarkHorse podcast was their own “revolutionary” lens – when dozens of Weinstein’s Evergreen State College students came to his classroom in 2017 to ask that he resign.

It was the “new reality” forming in the wake of the 2016 US election when the college demanded that Weinstein resign for not observing something called “Days of Absence,” during which white students and faculty were asked to stay home.

“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” Weinstein later told the House Oversight Committee.

Ousted from academia, Weinstein was hoping his voice might still be allowed on platforms like YouTube. But that was only until he brought up the highly weaponized Covid treatments like the politically weaponized Ivermectin in one of the videos, Matt Taibbi writes.

June 20, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Chinese drillers announce two MASSIVE oil & gas discoveries in Northwest China

RT | June 20, 2021

China has discovered a pair of new deposits containing roughly two billion tons of shale oil and gas, according to the state-controlled energy giant China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

One of the wells was discovered in the Fuman oilfield – a major region for crude oil production in the Tarim Basin, in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It reportedly contains a billion tons of super-deep oil and gas.

With a drilling depth of nearly 27,900 feet (8,500 meters) and a test oil column reaching 1,640 feet (550 meters), the reservoir set new records for the basin’s deepest oil production and highest oil column, and marks the largest discovery of oil in the area in a decade. It is expected to produce four million tons of oil and 49.4 billion cubic feet (1.4 billion cubic meters) of natural gas annually before 2025.

The oilfield is one of the world’s most difficult areas to drill, as most of the reserves are around 26,000 feet (8,000 meters) below the surface of the Earth. After it was discovered in 2015, annual output in the area grew from some 30,000 tons to 1.52 million tons in 2020, with an estimated production of about two million tons since the beginning of 2021.

Another deposit, in the Ordos Basin, also in the northwest, reportedly contains an estimated billion tons of shale oil, according to CNPC making it the biggest shale oil field in the country.

Discovered by Changqing Oilfield Co, a CNPC subsidiary, it is one of several major discoveries in the past three years. Two years ago, the firm discovered 359 million tons of shale oil in the Qingcheng region, in the northwestern Gansu Province.

Changqing has managed to significantly extend the range of its exploration over the past few years and its latest billion-ton discovery will be an important milestone in China’s oil-gas exploration history.

June 20, 2021 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality”

By CJ Hopkins | The Consent Factory | June 20, 2021

The ultimate goal of every totalitarian system is to establish complete control over society and every individual within it in order to achieve ideological uniformity and eliminate any and all deviation from it. This goal can never be achieved, of course, but it is the raison d’être of all totalitarian systems, regardless of what forms they take and ideologies they espouse. You can dress totalitarianism up in Hugo Boss-designed Nazi uniforms, Mao suits, or medical-looking face masks, its core desire remains the same: to remake the world in its paranoid image … to replace reality with its own “reality.”

We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.

There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.

During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.

This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new “reality.” It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new “reality.” It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go. The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.

And this is what has been so incredibly frustrating for those of us opposing the roll-out of the “New Normal,” whether debunking the official Covid-19 narrative, or “Russiagate,” or the “Storming of the US Capitol,” or any other element of the new official ideology. (And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivaled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.)

Anyway, what has been so incredibly frustrating is that many of us have been operating under the illusion that we are engaged in a rational argument over facts (e.g., the facts of Russiagate, Literal-Hitlergate, 9/11, Saddam’s WMDs, Douma, the January 6 “insurrection,” the official Covid narrative, etc.) This is not at all what is happening. Facts mean absolutely nothing to the adherents of totalitarian systems.

You can show the New Normals the facts all you like. You can show them the fake photos of people dead in the streets in China in March of 2020. You can show them the fake projected death rates. You can explain how the fake PCR tests work, how healthy people were deemed medical “cases.” You can show them all the studies on the ineffectiveness of masks. You can explain the fake “hospitalization” and “death” figures, send them articles about the unused “emergency hospitals,” the unremarkable age-and-population-adjusted death rates, cite the survival rates for people under 70, the dangers and pointlessness of “vaccinating” children. None of this will make the slightest difference.

Or, if you’ve bought the Covid-19 narrative, but haven’t completely abandoned your critical faculties, you can do what Glenn Greenwald has been doing recently. You can demonstrate how the corporate media have intentionally lied, again and again, to whip up mass hysteria over “domestic terrorism.” You can show people videos of the “violent domestic terrorists” calmly walking into the Capitol Building in single file, like a high-school tour group, having been let in by members of Capitol Security. You can debunk the infamous “fire-extinguisher murder” of Brian Sicknik that never really happened. You can point out that the belief that a few hundred unarmed people running around in the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” or an “attempted coup,” or “domestic terrorism,” is delusional to the point of being literally insane. This will also not make the slightest difference.

I could go on, and I’m sure I will as the “New Normal” ideology becomes our new “reality” over the course of the next several years. My point, at the moment, is … this isn’t an argument. The global-capitalist ruling classes, government leaders, the corporate media, and the New Normal masses they have instrumentalized are not debating with us. They know the facts. They know the facts contradict their narratives. They do not care. They do not have to. Because this isn’t about facts. It’s about power.

I’m not saying that facts don’t matter. Of course they matter. They matter to us. I’m saying, let’s recognize what this is. It isn’t a debate or a search for the truth. The New Normals are disassembling one “reality” and replacing it with a new “reality.” (Yes, I know that reality exists in some fundamental ontological sense, but that isn’t the “reality” I’m talking about here, so please do not send me angry emails railing against Foucault and postmodernism.)

The pressure to conform to the new “reality” is already intense and it’s going to get worse as vaccination passes, public mask-wearing, periodic lockdowns, etc., become normalized. Those who don’t conform will be systematically demonized, socially and/or professionally ostracized, segregated, and otherwise punished. Our opinions will be censored. We will be “canceled,” deplatformed, demonitized, and otherwise silenced. Our views will be labeled “potentially harmful.” We will be accused of spreading “misinformation,” of being “far-right extremists,” “racists,” “anti-Semites,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-global-capitalist violent domestic terrorists,” or just garden variety “sexual harassers,” or whatever they believe will damage us the most.

This will happen in both the public and personal spheres. Not just governments, the media, and corporations, but your colleagues, friends, and family will do this. Strangers in shops and restaurants will do this. Most of them will not do it consciously. They will do it because your non-conformity represents an existential threat to them … a negation of their new “reality” and a reminder of the reality they surrendered in order to remain a “normal” person and avoid the punishments described above.

This is nothing new, of course. It is how “reality” is manufactured, not only in totalitarian systems, but in every organized social system. Those in power instrumentalize the masses to enforce conformity with their official ideology. Totalitarianism is just its most extreme and most dangerously paranoid and fanatical form.

So, sure, keep posting and sharing the facts, assuming you can get them past the censors, but let’s not kid ourselves about what we’re up against. We’re not going to wake the New Normals up with facts. If we could, we would have done so already. This is not a civilized debate about facts. This is a fight. Act accordingly.

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June 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Georgia Secretary of State Finally Admits 2020 Election Foul Play in Atlanta

Sputnik – 19.06.2021

The US state of Georgia’s top electoral official has acknowledged voting irregularities in the state capital — seven months after the presidential election.

Revelations this week have prompted Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to order a new audit of tens of thousands of ballots collected from drop-boxes in Fulton County — which covers 90 percent of the state capital Atlanta and whose one million inhabitants represent a tenth of the state’s population.

Joe Biden was declared the winner of the state’s 16 Electoral College votes by a wafer-thin margin of some 12,000. Donald Trump claimed that systematic ballot-rigging in six states under the cover of massively-expanded postal voting had robbed him of rightful victory.

In one of the newly-discovered incidents, more than 100 batches of absentee ballot papers — each at least 100 votes — were sent to be scanned through vote-counting machines in Fulton County, but their tracking numbers were never recorded in hand-written logs of counted batches, raising the prospect that they were not tallied.

Some 25 more batches were scanned twice, while many batch control sheets do not bear a tick in the box declaring they came from a secure container — potentially meaning they could have been tampered with.

Crucially, five batches counted in a row suspiciously showed the same tally of 392 votes for Biden, 96 Trump and 3 for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen. State officials have admitted that tally of almost 2,500 votes is a statistical impossibility.

Trump Trumpets Triumph

​“This is very big news. People are starting to see the light. Great for America!” Trump said in a brief statement on Thursday in response to Raffensperger’s tweets.

​While Raffensperger still denies that ballot fraud swung the election for Biden, he called for Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron to be fired.

“I have continued to call on the elections director to be removed from his position, and the leadership of Fulton County has continued to fail to act”, Raffensperger told Just the News on Wednesday.

Barron was previously fired by the county’s Board of Registration and Elections in February, but was reinstated the next month by county commissioners

The audit could have wider implications than undermining Biden’s legitimacy as president. The November elections also saw Democrat candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock newly-elected as the state’s two senators in a controversial run-off against the Republicans. Their election handed the Democrats 50 of the 100 Senate seats — an effective majority, as Vice President Kamala Harris holds the tie-breaking vote.

Along with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Raffensperger publicly denied Trump’s claims of ballot-rigging in the November 2020 election — gaining the approval of liberal mainstream media.

Raffens-Purger

On Friday, Raffensperger announced that more than 100,000 people would be removed from the electoral rolls across the state – some 18,000 of those people were deceased, while the remainder had either informed authorities they had moved out of the state or had official mail returned from their listed addresses.

“These people don’t live in Georgia any more. Then you have 18,000 people who passed”, he told Atlanta’s Channel 2. “So they are not going to be voting anymore. You need to have accurate voter rolls and proper list maintenance. It also helps your county election directors”.

But civil rights organisations in the state said they feared the move was a voter purge.

“We already have lawyers on standby, I am on standby, just in case we have to file litigation”, said Gerald Griggs of the Atlanta NAACP. “So we are going to be watching this, and we will respond if we believe voters have been disenfranchised”.

The NAACP has already launched a legal challenge to the Georgia state legislature’s new law requiring voters to produce photo identification — which was passed in reaction to the perceived irregularities in last year’s elections.

“The thinly-veiled attempt to roll back the progress we have made to empower Georgians — to use their voices in the democratic process — creates an arbitrary law that does not improve voter confidence, secure election integrity nor increase access to the ballot box”, leader Reverend James Woodall said in March.

June 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

How Deadly is COVID? Real Science vs Media Hype

By Chris Lonsdale | 21st Century Wire | June 19, 2021

I tend to be very curious about the world. I always have been. It’s probably what brought me to Asia in the first place. I get especially curious when things don’t make sense, in which case I find myself drawn into exploring what might be really going on. So, in early 2020 when the panic about COVID-19 started to spread around the world, like most other people I accepted the logic that we needed to “flatten the curve” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed.

After all, nobody really had enough information to know what was going on, or how serious this new disease might be. And reports from front-line medical staff about the symptoms being experienced by COVID-19 patients made for gruesome reading. At the beginning it made sense to be very careful.

But, as the months went on, it became increasingly difficult to match what was being reported in the media with what we could observe using our own senses. I knew of no-one who had died of COVID-19. No-one who had even gotten sick with COVID-19. There certainly weren’t any dead bodies piling up in the streets. This now makes sense because mortality data for Hong Kong, and other Asian countries where I also spend time, show that 2020 was a very normal year as far as overall mortality levels were concerned.

Globally it was a little different. Most of the people I connect with around the world also didn’t know anyone who had died of COVID. One neighbor knew someone (in Russia) who got very sick but then recovered. One person I follow on Twitter, who is in his 70’s, was put into intensive care for several weeks and a few other people I follow on twitter had a family member who got very sick or died. Clearly there was an issue, but the data coming in about the scope and severity did not mesh with what we were being told through the media.

Importantly, the predictive models coming out of Imperial College in the UK assumed that almost no-one was immune to COVID-19, that it was both incredibly infectious and very deadly for everybody, and that millions would die.

We must remember, of course, that the author of the Imperial College report, Neil Fergusson, has a history of extreme overestimations. In 2005 as just one example, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

Never mind Fergusson’s “checkered history”, immediately after the Fergusson models were published the media around the world began screaming that something like the “black death” was about to crush us, and that deaths from COVID-19 were mounting up at a terrifying rate. We were told that we had to be afraid …. Very afraid.

Counting COVID Deaths

While clearly something was going on, and there were people dying, more and more thoughtful and highly skilled people around the world began to wonder about the disconnect between the media hype and the reality on the ground. The big question was, how serious and deadly was this pandemic really?

About that time, I was reminded of a basic tenet of scientific research, which came in the form of an admonition that we should be wary of the distinction between “DYING OF” COVID-19, and “DYING WITH” COVID-19. This basically refers to the fact that one should NEVER equate correlation with causality.

You may have noticed that we are being reminded of this fact every day now, as the COVID vaccines get rolled out and there are many adverse reactions. We are told that, just because someone gets paralyzed, or has painful rashes over their entire body, or dies from blood clots within hours or days of being jabbed with the experimental “vaccines”, we absolutely should not assume that these “vaccines” actually CAUSED the injury or death. This is true. And for each of the deaths, an autopsy should be performed to identify the actual cause.

Yet, for some strange reason, this very same basic premise was, and is, totally ignored when it comes to COVID-19. From Day 1 of the pandemic, every death apparently associated with COVID-19 in some way was counted and reported as a death CAUSED BY COVID-19.

For instance, at a press conference given by the Director of the Illinois Department of Health in April 2020, when asked about the definition of a COVID-19 death, the answer was: “It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. ” You can view the original news story here.

This same situation is mostly true around the world because every country is following guidelines coming from the WHO (World Health Organization). For example, the recommended death reporting form for COVID-19 from the WHO is structured in such a way that, if COVID-19 is written on the form even if there are other factors,  then COVID-19 must be listed as the underlying cause of death.

The WHO guidelines state: “… in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case ….. A death due to COVID-19 may not be attributed to another disease (e.g. cancer).”

The WHO guidelines for death reporting involving COVID-19 can be found here.

Problems surrounding the sudden revision of death certificate protocols have been discussed by medical professionals throughout 2020, but this topic is treated as verboten in mainstream media and politics.

In practice this means that when people who were already on their deathbed die, they will be marked as a COVID-19 death based on an assumption (i.e. “probable” COVID-19) or a PCR test. So, unless there’s an autopsy, the public record shows COVID-19 as the cause of death.

When it comes to using the PCR test to determine cause of death, CDC (US Centers for Disease Control) guidance states: “The detection of viral RNA (i.e. PCR test) cannot demonstrate the presence of an infectious virus, or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent of clinical symptoms.” (Source: https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download)

In other words: we simply cannot use a PCR test to determine that a death was caused by COVID-19, and yet this is what has been done routinely over the last 16 months.

There are also serious problems in the PCR test which I wrote about in a recent China Daily article.

From the above we can begin to understand a major issue. Because of the way COVID-19 deaths were (and are) being reported, if we did not dig deep into the data we would have no real idea of the scale of deaths actually caused directly and only by SARS-Cov-2, as opposed to the number of deaths that would have happened anyway where COVID-19 was somehow associated with a recorded death (which does not mean that COVID-19 actually caused the death).

So, let’s dig into the data. A simple first step is to simply look at the age distribution of people dying and having COVID-19 on their death certificate.

Today the average life expectancy in the UK is around 81 years of age. Did you know that the average age of death “involving COVID-19” in the UK was 82 years of age?  In the US, 92.64% of COVID-19 linked deaths occurred in people 55 years old or older, with 80.73% being over 65. Read more here.

In Hong Kong, from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic until now, only 210 people have died with COVID-19 marked as the cause (based of course on the WHO guidelines mentioned above). The average age? 78.2 years. 28 of those deaths were in their 90’s and only 2 people just under 40 died with COVID-19 listed as the cause.  According to data provided by the Hong Kong Department of Health, no-one younger than 38 has died either OF, or WITH, COVID-19 in Hong Kong. See the official figures here.

With this new understanding we now know that while COVID-19 is clearly dangerous for certain at-risk groups – almost exclusively elderly people – the danger level of the pandemic to society as a whole is substantially less than what we have been led to believe.

It’s also very useful to look at official data such as that regularly updated at the CDC. As of June 9, 2021, the CDC report that, in total, 586,659 people have died having COVID-19 listed as a cause or contributing cause of death in the US.

You probably do not know this, because the majority of the MSM will not have put this in front of you, but late in 2020 the CDC quietly changed the information on their website to start showing how many so-called COVID-19 deaths occurred for people who had serious co-morbidities. This is no trivial change in data reporting.

Note how in the CDC’s reporting, when you scroll down you see a table showing all the co-morbidities of the people who died with COVID-19 being listed as the cause of death:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm

The note associated with that table reads: “There were co-morbidities or other conditions listed on the death certificate for as many as 95% of all COVID-19 deaths. The other 5% of death certificates in which COVID-19 was the only condition listed was likely related to a lack of detail listed about other conditions present at the time of death”.

This means that at most only 29,332 people have died in the US with COVID-19 as the only known cause. However, the entire world continues to believe that all 586,659 “COVID-19 linked” deaths in the US were CAUSED BY COVID-19, simply as a result of how data was captured and entered into the public record, and how it was publicized by the media.

The Case of the Disappearing Flu

A slightly different way of understanding all this information is the fact that COVID-19 seems to have cured the flu, heart disease, cancer and a number of other serious conditions. Data comparing flu cases around the world have shown that the flu completely disappeared worldwide since the emergence of COVID-19.

Some medical pundits are claiming the flu has disappeared because of the effectiveness of masks and social distancing. But this has yet to be proven through any peer reviewed studies, and so it is still only a working theory at this point. This theory posits that it is because of the effectiveness of coronavirus measures; lockdowns, masks and social distancing – which somehow eliminated the flu. The theory is problematic as it doesn’t explain why these same measures did not stop COVID-19. In response, those defending the disappearing flu narrative will usually claim that COVID couldn’t be stopped because it is ‘much more transmissible.’ Hence, the disappearing flu story can then be used to validate the official consensus that SARS-Cov-2 is unlike any other virus seen before, and has special abilities which allowed it to traverse the globe and penetrate populations in a matter of weeks.

While the authors of the Scientific American paper state that “the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu”, there is a much greater likelihood that influenza cases were simply being coded as COVID-19.

So, in summary, we can say that many but not all of the deaths labelled as being due to COVID-19 alone were quite likely due to other causes. Also, individuals with compromised immune systems were very vulnerable to the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is the spike protein which appears to be the toxin responsible for the COVID disease. In all of these cases, however, we cannot say how many of those deaths were actually caused BY COVID-19 alone without the autopsies that would be required to make such a judgement.

All we can say with certainty is that COVID-19 was correlated with these deaths.

The entire global media almost as a whole have ignored this distinction, along with other very important distinctions in this pandemic, and sold the story that all the deaths reported were CAUSED by COVID-19, and that we therefore had to be afraid. And, as we look around, we see the massive damage that this fear has created in our world.

Again we face the question, why was fake news spread around the world in this way by the mainstream media? Was it simply a matter of scientific illiteracy? Maybe it was simply laziness, or a lack of curiosity? Was it because “death sells”, and the more horrible the numbers the more viewers would be drawn into the drama and therefore build the ratings for the media? Or were other factors at play?

I will deal with issues such as these in future articles in this series.

In the meantime, given what the data now tells us, it is time to stop the panicking and let go of the fear.

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Author Chris Lonsdale is a psychologist, linguist, educator, entrepreneur, dialogue facilitator and corporate advisor with over thirty years experience doing business in Asia. He is the creator of the Kungfu English mobile self-learning system, author of “The Third Ear” and “How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months” (in Chinese), and his TEDx talk on Language Learning is one of the top 10 TEDx videos of all time.

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

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