Energy bill authorises “reasonable force” to install smart meters that allow authorities to turn customers’ energy on and off
BY DAVID CRAIG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 7, 2023
You probably know that a massive Energy Bill is being rushed through Parliament by our fake ‘Conservative’ Government in the first two days of our parliamentarians’ return from their generous summer break. The Bill is 446 pages long and written in dense, largely-incomprehensible-to-any-normal-person legalise. Moreover, many clauses in the Energy Bill make reference to other pieces of previous legislation. So, to fully understand the Bill, you would have to read at least a thousand pages of dense legalistic gobbledegook. Given that our MPs have just passed the Bill with a mere nine voting against it, one must assume that they have spent their summer holidays diligently reading through the Bill and other relevant legislation in order to fully understand what they were voting for.
Here’s the full title of the Bill:
‘A Bill to make provision about energy production and security and the regulation of the energy market, including provision about the licensing of carbon dioxide transport and storage; about commercial arrangements for industrial carbon capture and storage and for hydrogen production; about new technology, including low-carbon heat schemes and hydrogen grid trials; about the Independent System Operator and Planner; about gas and electricity industry codes; about heat networks; about energy smart appliances and load control; about the energy performance of premises; about the resilience of the core fuel sector; about offshore energy production, including environmental protection, licensing and decommissioning; about the civil nuclear sector, including the Civil Nuclear Constabulary; and for connected purposes’
As you’ll see, this legislative monster covers an awful lot of areas – energy production, regulation of the energy market, CO2 transport and storage, carbon capture, hydrogen production, low-carbon heat schemes, hydrogen grid trials, heat networks, smart appliances, load control, energy performance of industrial and residential premises, offshore energy production and the civil nuclear sector. We must be considered fortunate in Britain to have MPs who have such a strong work ethic and such a deep understanding of all these disparate issues to be able to vote for the new Energy Bill knowing exactly what they are voting for.
Life is too short for any normal person to read and to try to understand this massive abomination of almost impenetrable legalise. But here are some choice titbits which I think I understand.
The Bill explains what a ‘Smart Meter’ is:
“Energy smart appliance” means an appliance which is capable of adjusting the immediate or future flow of electricity into or out of itself or another appliance in response to a load control signal; and includes any software or other systems which enable or facilitate the adjustment to be made in response to the signal.
So it seems that the conspiracy theorists were right yet again – a key purpose of ‘Smart Meters’ is not only to measure power usage but also to allow energy providers to control how much energy we are allowed to consume using “a load control signal”.
Moreover, authorities will be allowed to use “reasonable force” to enter any homes or premises to ensure we have the approved ‘Smart Meters’ installed:
Requiring persons to supply evidence of their compliance to enforcement authorities; conferring powers of entry, including by reasonable force.
All electricity and gas meters have dates by which they should be replaced. From what I have read the Bill gives representatives from energy companies the power to enter any home, with police protection if required, to replace traditional meters at the end of their lives with smart meters. Again, “reasonable force” may be used.
The Bill gives the Government the power to force us to have energy assessments for any premises:
The Secretary of State may make regulations for any of these purposes: (a) enabling or requiring the energy usage or energy efficiency of premises to be assessed, certified and publicised;
We can be fined up to £15,000 or face one year in prison for failing to meet any future energy performance levels any government imposes:
Energy performance regulations may provide for the imposition of civil penalties by enforcement authorities in relation to cases falling within subsection (1)(b), (c) or (d); but the regulations may not provide for a civil penalty that exceeds £15,000.
Under the totally misleading title of ‘Energy Savings Opportunity Schemes’, authorities can force any person or company to make energy savings using the threat of criminalisation for failure to comply:
The Secretary of State may by regulations (“ESOS regulations”) make provision for the establishment and operation of one or more energy savings opportunity schemes. An “energy savings opportunity scheme” is a scheme under which obligations 30 are imposed on undertakings to which the scheme applies for one or more of the ESOS purposes.
I could go on. But I imagine you get the picture by now. This ‘Energy Bill’ creates the means by which some puffed-up public-sector mini-dictator could gain powers to control us in ways most people would find completely unacceptable. Yet our useless MPs passed the Bill with a massive majority and the Lords are set to do the same.
If there really was a ‘climate crisis’ caused by humans burning fossil fuels and threatening the existence of the human race as the BBC and others of its ilk repeatedly claim, then you might be able to argue that some of the measures in the Bill could be justified. But given that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels have little to no influence on the Earth’s temperatures, that Britain only contributes less than 1% of world CO2 output and that developing countries like India and China each increase their CO2 output by more each year than Britain’s total CO2 emissions, we are creating a totalitarian regime which will intrude on people’s lives, restrict people’s freedoms, wreck the British economy and immiserate our country to fix a problem which doesn’t even exist and, if it did, would not be solved by our action anyway.
And if you fear this horror will lead to an intrusive, oppressive police state under the Tories, imagine how this will be used and abused by Ed Miliband and the climate fanatics in the next Labour Government.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt Says The Organization Isn’t Pressuring X Advertisers
Despite telling advertisers to pause spending
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 7, 2023
In an interview this week on CNBC’s show Squawk Box, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), steered a conversation toward alleging that criticism of the ADL’s social media censorship efforts were being driven by “white supremacist” factions.
The ADL recently met with Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino. It apparently ignited the fuse for a fast-spreading hashtag campaign: “ban the ADL.” According to Greenblatt, the culprit for this viral trend was not those that were tired of the ADL trying to censor online speech but were none other than the “white supremacists” pervading across the online platform.
The spotlight of this segment also fell on the alleged deflation of advertisement revenue on Musk’s platform, X. Musk suggested this was due to the ADL pushing for advertisers to reconsider their commercial placements. Greenblatt asserted, “we are not out there publicly or privately talking to advertisers, they will make the decisions they want to.”
Greenblatt also said that he would challenge Musk “to find a single advertiser on whom we put any pressure, because we’re simply not doing that.”
However, the ADL did call for a pause in ad spending on X following its acquisition in November.
“We did call for a pause back in November after the acquisition. And then since then, since that initial statement, what we are doing is engaging with the management of the company trying to help them make it better,” Greenblatt said of X.
“I understand they have a big business problem. I mean, Elon tweeted something I didn’t know, that the advertising revenues down 60 percent. But look, brands are big boys and girls, they will make their own decisions.”
Greenblatt also presented his stance on the divisive issue of social media censorship. His disbelief in cancel culture was clear, preferring the term “council culture.” In his words: “So someone makes a mistake you help them fix it. So what we’ve tried to do over the years with Twitter, with YouTube, with Facebook and all those platforms, with Reddit, with Discord I can go on and on is to work with them to make those platforms better.”
The EU’s best weapon against free speech isn’t working
The EU has just realized that it can’t rule the internet with an iron fist by throwing around the ‘Kremlin propaganda’ label
EC President Ursula von der Leyen speaks to the press after a meeting with Joe Biden in the White House on March 10, 2023 in Washington, DC. © Alex Wong/Getty Images
By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 7, 2023
The European Commission has concluded in a new report that despite making pinky-promises to “mitigate the reach and influence of Kremlin-sponsored disinformation,” large social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook were “unsuccessful” in doing so. What a shocker that this research by oversight advocates has ended up advocating in favor of more oversight. Russia just happens to be the most convenient scapegoat.
Using the same kind of smear tactics that the bloc has used previously – like when it included Russia alongside Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in previous security and threat reports – this time it involved conflating “pro-Kremlin” social media accounts with those that it considers to be “Kremlin-aligned” or “Kremlin-backed.” In other words, mere disagreement with the Western narrative is enough to land anyone in the “pro-Kremlin” camp and to be considered worthy of content moderation or banning by the EU. And now they’re frustrated that social media platforms have dropped the ball on carrying out that censorship.
“Platforms rarely reviewed and removed more than 50 percent of the clearly violative content we flagged in repeated tests,” the report said. What kind of content would that be, exactly? It’s hard to tell, because their examples conflate the legitimately debatable with the patently absurd, and suggest that both warrant censorship. They cite, for example, content that accuses Ukraine of being run by Nazis – which is a legitimate concern, given that the Western press has reported extensively on the powerful role played by neo-Nazis in Ukraine, which are “aggressively trying to impose their agenda on Ukrainian society, including by using force against those with opposite political and cultural views,” according to a publication by the Washington-based Freedom House prior to the conflict, adding that “they are a real physical threat to left-wing, feminist, liberal, and LGBT activists, human rights defenders, as well as ethnic and religious minorities” in Ukraine. The Council of Europe had made similar observations.
There’s also the fact that the West trained the neo-Nazi Azov battalion to fight Russians, and that Reuters reported way back in 2018 that then-president Petro Poroshenko “would risk major repercussions” should he take action against neo-Nazis.
That kind of does sound like there’s a neo-Nazi issue that’s at the very least worthy of highlighting and debating. Yet the EU dismisses any such suggestion as Russian disinformation.
The report also takes issue with accounts “denying war crimes,” using events in Bucha as an example. I’m sorry, but was there a war crimes tribunal that we missed? We’re talking here about events taking place in the immediate fog of war. Attempting to sort through facts, realities, and manipulations is precisely the kind of thing with which social media is meant to assist. Everyone by this point knows that it’s about having access to as much raw data as possible. We expect to see a chaotic mess online – not a curated Encyclopedia Britannica set or the evening news. What makes Brussels think it is entitled to a monopoly on that process?
The report places these examples of inconvenient debates alongside a blatantly ridiculous example of sh*tposting whereby someone made up the name of a fake media outlet and announced that Ukraine was sending a radioactive cloud towards Europe. Look, if anyone is so dumb as to believe something like that, then it certainly isn’t the EU that’s going to save them from their own stupidity. Not for long, anyway. Just let them spend their entire next week digging a fallout shelter while their neighbors have a good laugh.
In a line that just begs to be read repeatedly out of sheer incredulity that someone could be so tone-deaf, the report notes that so-called Kremlin disinfo efforts are “designed to foment political and social instability among its adversaries by stoking ethnic conflict, promoting isolationism, and distracting public attention away from Ukraine and onto domestic affairs.” How dare the people of Europe insist that their leaders focus on the considerable problems faced by their own country and citizens, which have long been exacerbated by misguided national and EU-level policies, rather than riveting their attention to Ukraine! Indeed, if it wasn’t for those meddling Russians, Europe would be a utopia of sunshine and rainbows, everyone holding hands and singing Kumbaya, with nothing else for citizens to concern themselves with besides what’s happening in Ukraine.
The EU laments that “the Kremlin and its proxies captured growing audiences with highly produced propaganda content, and steered users to unregulated online spaces, where democratic norms have eroded and hate and lies could spread with impunity.” They have it all backwards. People wanting to engage in debate and discussion of topics and viewpoints that the EU — in all its arrogance as the self-appointed arbiter of truth — is keen to censor, have been driven to other platforms specifically because they support free speech in all its glory and imperfection.
“Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe,” according to the report, adding that “the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.” In other words, Elon Musk, who considers himself a “free speech absolutist,” came along and bought Twitter, leveled the playing field by opening up debate and reducing censorship, and what ended up happening is that people flooded to the platform as a refreshing alternative to the curated and censored Western establishment narrative that they’re spoon-fed elsewhere.
So what’s the EU going to do about it now? Well, mandatory compliance with its Digital Services Act is now in effect as of last month. This means that, theoretically, all the major social media platforms are obligated to work with the EU’s handpicked “civil society” actors to moderate and censor content – no doubt in alignment with the EU’s narrative. Musk should play along and take notes about the kind of censorship requests that are made of him by Brussels. Then he should publish them on Twitter in the interest of radical transparency and the kind of uncompromising defense of democracy to which the EU is constantly paying lip service as a pretext for its crackdowns on our fundamental freedoms.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
Lead author of Cochrane mask review responds to Fauci’s dismissal of evidence
BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | SEPTEMBER 4, 2023
Former chief medical advisor to the US President Anthony Fauci, was questioned over the weekend by CNN reporter Michael Smerconish, about face masks being able to curb the spread of covid-19.
“There’s no doubt that masks work,” said Fauci.
“Different studies give different percentages of advantage of wearing it, but there’s no doubt that the weight of the studies … indicate the benefit of wearing masks,” he added.
Smerconish brought up the 2023 Cochrane review which found no evidence that physical interventions like face masks could stop viral transmission in the community and cited my interview with lead author of the study Tom Jefferson who confirmed, “There is just no evidence that they [masks] make any difference. Full stop.”
Fauci replied,“Yeah but there are other studies,” stressing that masks work on an individual basis.
“When you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong…but when you talk about an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show there is an advantage,” said Fauci.
Professor Tom Jefferson, who says he is committed to updating the Cochrane review as new evidence emerges, has responded to Fauci’s comments.
“So, Fauci is saying that masks work for individuals but not at a population level? That simply doesn’t make sense,” said Jefferson.
“And he says there are ‘other studies’…but what studies? He doesn’t name them so I cannot interpret his remarks without knowing what he is referring to,” he added.
Jefferson explains that the entire point of the Cochrane review was to systematically sift through all the available randomised data on physical interventions such as masks and determine what was useful and what was not.
Since 2011, the Cochrane review only included randomised trials to minimise bias from confounders.
“It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,” said Jefferson. “Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence.”
“Once we excluded such low-quality studies from the review, we concluded there was no evidence that masks reduced transmission,” he added.
The problem with Fauci is that his story has changed.
Initially, Fauci said that masks were ineffective and unnecessary. In March 2020, Fauci told 60 minutes, “Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.”
But only a few weeks later, he did a U-turn and began recommending widespread use of face masks.
Fauci defended his U-turn saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind.”
Jefferson retorted, “What facts changed? There were no randomised studies, no new evidence to justify his flip-flop. That’s simply not true.”
Since then, Fauci has remained adamant that face masks not only stop people from infecting others, but they also protect the wearer.
Fauci advocated for the use of cloth masks, and even encouraged double-masking in the absence of evidence.
“You put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it would be more effective,” Fauci told NBC news.
“What Fauci doesn’t understand is that cloth and surgical masks cannot stop viruses because viruses are too small and they still get through,” said Jefferson.
He laments that public figures have tried to undermine the Cochrane review, despite it representing the gold standard of evidence.
Columnist Zeynep Tufekci wrote an article in the New York Times titled, “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work,” claiming that Cochrane’s mask study had misled the public.
Cochrane’s editor in chief, Karla Soares-Weiser capitulated to pressure and “apologised” for the wording in the plain language summary of the review because it “was open to misinterpretation” and may have led to “inaccurate and misleading” claims.
And former CDC director Rochelle Walensky misled Congress after claiming the Cochrane review had been “retracted” which was patently false.
As it stands, the Cochrane review will continue to be the subject of attacks because it presents a major roadblock for implementing masking policies. Jefferson says he doesn’t know what motivates people to ignore the facts.
“Could it be part of this whole agenda to control people’s behaviour? Perhaps,” he speculated.
“What I do know,” said Jefferson, “is that Fauci was in a position to run a trial, he could have randomised two regions to wear masks or not. But he didn’t and that’s unforgivable.”
Fauci, who served as the federal government’s top infectious disease specialist for nearly 40 years, stepped down in Dec 2022 and is now a professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Medicine, in the Division of Infectious Diseases.
Spiegel schoolmarm demands that Germans “act responsibly” and “get their masks back out”…
… so that she doesn’t feel uncomfortable being the only “oddball” wearing a face diaper in public
Veronika Hackenbroch wants you to mask so she doesn’t feel weird
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | September 6, 2023
We’ve encountered Head Girl Science Fan Veronika Hackenbroch here at the plague chronicle once before. She’s a medical writer for Spiegel who defended lockdowns until the very end and is still fighting a halfhearted rearguard action to keep Corona alive. Her latest is a diatribe demanding that Germans “Get their masks back out” because “Covid infections are rising again. If you’re smart, you’ll wear a mask, even if the government doesn’t make you.”
To make this argument, Hackenbroch must first surumount a considerable hurdle, namely that the venerated Covid prophet Christian Drosten has been increasingly noncommittal about masking, at one point even saying he won’t mask in unmasked company because he “doesn’t want to be Dr. Strange.” For someone like Hackenbroch, whose entire worldview is shaped by the opinions of arbitrary Science Authorities, this is no small thing, but she can take some comfort in the fact that the French Health Minister is still a committed fan of face diapers who believes that “masking must become commonplace.” There’s also the fact that nasal spray vaccine enthusiast Akiko Iwasaki “currently travels wearing an FFP2 mask.”
There are people who spend thousands acquiring handbags sported by their favourite film stars, and there is Veronika Hackenbroch, who does whatever the Yale virus luminary Iwasaki does.
Only after urging her readers to imitate the personal eccentricities of assorted Covid celebrities does Hackenbroch bother to address the scientific evidence:
Masks, especially FFP2 masks, can significantly reduce the risk of infection. In a California study, the risk of corona infection was 66 percent lower in study participants who wore a medical mask for two weeks than in people without masks. For FFP2 mask wearers, the figure was as high as about 83 percent.
Masks are even better than for self-protection when it comes to protecting the community: if everyone wears a correctly fitted FFP2 mask, including those who are unknowingly infected and already contagious, the risk of infection drops into the per thousand range even in close contact, according to a study by the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen.
The California study finds that respirators lower the odds of infection by 83%, a clearly impossible statistic contradicted by many other studies, natural experiments and also by publicly available case data. The Max Planck study merely looks at the mechanics of masking – things like “respiratory particle size distribution” and “exhalation flow physics” – to predict how well masking ought to work. Its insane results that FFP2 masks can reduce the risk of infection nearly to zero are replicated nowhere in the real world, and seem to be in tension with the California study Hackenbroch cited just a few sentences earlier.
Then things really go off the rails:
That mask-wearing permanently weakens the immune system due to the lack of contact with pathogens (“immunodeficiency”) is a myth. It is not true that you have to be sick regularly to have healthy immune defence. You don’t have to train your immune system like a muscle. On the contrary, several viral infections only increase the susceptibility to further infections.
The adaptive immune system is a real thing, and in the absence of regular exposure to constantly evolving pathogens, adaptive immunity loses its ability to respond to new infections. Or does Hackenbroch not think that regular Covid vaccination is necessary, because “you don’t have to train your immune system”?
As with fellow Covid harpy Christina Berndt, of course, Hackenbroch’s primary concern is that if not enough people mask, she won’t feel comfortable masking. She concedes that “now is the time to make masks compulsory again,” but she does hope that more will “act responsibly” so she doesn’t have to worry about passersby thinking she’s “an oddball.” It’s a remarkably petty concern on behalf of a measure that Hackenbroch believes so strongly will protect her from a virus she continues to insist is quite dangerous.
On the one hand, it is amusing to watch the Hackenbrochs of the world stomp their feet and demand that all of society bend to their eccentric preferences. For the early years of the pandemic, they rode a massive wave of propaganda-induced virus panic and helped shape the hygiene hysteria of millions. Now their ranks have been reduced to a few isolated ninnies whose opinions, thankfully, very few care about. That they themselves don’t seem to have noticed this shift is an occasion for low comedy. On the other hand, sporadic local mask mandates are returning, and this thing won’t be fully over until every last one of these mask nags is shamed into silence. Masking is deeply irrational, it has no demonstrable purpose, it seems to have addictive properties for some people, and if done frequently enough it threatens merely to increase public hygiene anxiety and set off another self-reinforcing virus panic spiral.
Back-to-School Adderall Shortage – #NewWorldNextWeek
Corbett • 09/01/2023
Welcome to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4
Story #1: ADHD Drug Market Already Stretched Thin, Now Facing Back-To-School Supply Strain
The Looting Conspiracy
https://www.corbettreport.com/the-looting-conspiracy/
What the Back-to-School Adderall Shortage Really Tells Us
https://fee.org/articles/what-the-back-to-school-adderall-shortage-really-tells-us/
Finding Mental Health – #SolutionsWatch
https://www.corbettreport.com/solutionswatch-mentalhealth/
Massive Teen Hordes Swarm Two California Malls – Beatings, Gunfire, Stabbing Ensue
Story #2: Pink Slime Returns – Viral TikTok Video Exposes Disturbing Production Of Sliced Ham
A New ‘Miracle’ Weight-Loss Drug Really Works — Raising Huge Questions
Corbett Report Radio 085 – Breitbart, Stratfor, and Food World Order
https://www.corbettreport.com/corbett-report-radio-085-breitbart-stratfor-and-food-world-order/
“Pink Slime”
https://mediamonarchy.com/tag/pink-slime/
ABC Reaches Settlement In Pink Slime Case (Jun. 28, 2017)
https://mediamonarchy.com/20170628morningmonarchy/
Story #3: San Francisco Bakery Refusing to Serve Police Officers Over “No Guns Allowed” Policy
Of Gay Wedding Cakes and Woke Restaurants
https://www.corbettreport.com/of-gay-wedding-cakes-and-woke-restaurants/
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The Global War on Thought Crime
By David James | Brownstone Institute | September 4, 2023
Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.
In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.
In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”
One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning.
The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people.
The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm.
Determining a writer’s intent is extremely problematic because we cannot get into another person’s mind; we can only speculate on the basis of their behaviour. That is largely why in literary criticism there is a notion called the Intentional Fallacy, which says that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the intention of the author, nor is it possible to know definitively what that intention is from the work. The meanings derived from Shakespeare’s works, for example, are so multifarious that many of them cannot possibly have been in the Bard’s mind when he wrote the plays 400 years ago.
How do we know, for example, that there is no irony, double meaning, pretence or other artifice in a social media post or article? My former supervisor, a world expert on irony, used to walk around the university campus wearing a T-shirt saying: “How do you know I am being ironic?” The point was that you can never know what is actually in a person’s mind, which is why intent is so difficult to prove in a court of law.
That is the first problem. The second one is that, if the creation of meaning is the target of the proposed law – to proscribe meanings considered unacceptable by the authorities – how do we know what meaning the recipients will get? A literary theory, broadly under the umbrella term ‘deconstructionism,’ claims that there are as many meanings from a text as there are readers and that “the author is dead.”
While this is an exaggeration, it is indisputable that different readers get different meanings from the same texts. Some people reading this article, for example, might be persuaded while others might consider it evidence of a sinister agenda. As a career journalist I have always been shocked at the variability of reader’s responses to even the most simple of articles. Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from positive to intense hostility.
To state the obvious, we all think for ourselves and inevitably form different views, and see different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronising and infantilising, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. That is simply wrong.
Governments often make incorrect claims, and made many during Covid.
In Australia the authorities said lockdowns would only last a few weeks to “flatten the curve.” In the event they were imposed for over a year and there never was a “curve.” According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020 and 2021 had the lowest levels of deaths from respiratory illness since records have been kept.
Governments will not apply the same standards to themselves, though, because governments always intend well (that comment may or may not be intended to be ironic; I leave it up to the reader to decide).
There is reason to think these laws will fail to achieve the desired result. The censorship regimes have a quantitative bias. They operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of social media and other types of “information” is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities.
But what is at issue is meaning, not the amount of messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative, especially ad hominem attacks like accusing anyone asking questions of being a conspiracy theorist, eventually become meaningless.
By contrast just one well-researched and well-argued post or article can permanently persuade readers to an anti-government view because it is more meaningful. I can recall reading pieces about Covid, including on Brownstone, that led inexorably to the conclusion that the authorities were lying and that something was very wrong. As a consequence the voluminous, mass media coverage supporting the government line just appeared to be meaningless noise. It was only of interest in exposing how the authorities were trying to manipulate the “narrative” – a debased word was once mainly used in a literary context – to cover their malfeasance.
In their push to cancel unapproved content, out-of-control governments are seeking to penalise what George Orwell called “thought crimes.” But they will never be able to truly stop people thinking for themselves, nor will they ever definitively know either the writer’s intent or what meaning people will ultimately derive. It is bad law, and it will eventually fail because it is, in itself, predicated on disinformation.
FBI and DOJ Are Sued For Concealing Biden Administration Censorship Pressure
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 4, 2023
America First Legal (AFL) has taken legal action against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). AFL alleges that these federal agencies are unlawfully withholding records that may reveal the Biden administration’s manipulation of the 2022 midterm elections through censorship initiatives.
Last year, journalist Matt Taibbi, in his investigative series “The Twitter Files” unearthed communication between the FBI’s National Election Command Post (NECP) and its San Francisco Field Office. The NECP had reportedly flagged 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation” right before the November 2022 elections and had asked for coordination with Twitter for subsequent actions.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
Further evidence coming from litigation between Missouri and the Biden administration disclosed that the FBI had run a continuous operations center to root out “disinformation” and “misinformation.” During a deposition, FBI agent Elvis Chan conceded that the agency had indeed prompted social media platforms to engage in content suppression, which he acknowledged led to de facto censorship.
Responding to these unsettling revelations, AFL sought to unearth further details through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made in late December 2022. However, their quest hit a legal roadblock when the FBI labeled the request as “overly broad” in February 2023. An appeal yielded no relief, with the DOJ upholding the FBI’s original denial on August 23, 2023.
The lawsuit filed last week by AFL aims to challenge the murky policies of the FBI and the DOJ, which they claim are concealing critical information under the guise of combating disinformation. In essence, AFL is advocating for the public’s right to scrutinize how labels like “misinformation” or “disinformation” might be weaponized to disrupt the democratic process.
Reed D. Rubinstein, Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations at AFL emphasized the gravity of these allegations.
“Mr. Chan’s deposition contains significant evidence that the Biden government’s political censorship operation was fully engaged to blind the American people in advance of the 2022 midterm elections. Given that AFL is seeking documents directly related to his testimony, there is strong reason to believe that the FBI and DOJ are illegally stonewalling to protect their election interference means and methods. Three times now, in 2016, 2020, and 2022, the Deep State has put its thumb directly on the scale to influence our elections and aid Democrat party candidates — the American people have a right to know what else the FBI has waiting for 2024,” said Rubinstein.
Nonstop Media Bias From Russiagate to the Biden-Crime-Family Coverup
By Victor Davis Hanson | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 4, 2023
Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.
The president further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.
Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.
Had journalists just been honest and independent, then-candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election.
The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.
Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.
Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.
They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe — variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.
They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.
They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.
Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the president of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter US policy to suit his payers.
Those two crimes — bribery and treason — are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.
In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.
But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.
So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?
Answer — only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection — and thus becomes expendable.
Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.
From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”
When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?
Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his leftwing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?
Not at all.
Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”
The country then wasted another year.
The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Andrew Vindman had caught Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens — given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent — to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.
On that accusation Trump was impeached.
Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.
Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.
And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and California Rep. Adam Schiff.
The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Biden, who had likely committed them.
Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.
The FBI later admitted it had verified the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop.
The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.
Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.
The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.
No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.
Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.
For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.
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From the Archives
How the occupied mentality syndrome works
Saudi Arabia on the American chessboard – Part 3
By B. J. Sabri | American Herald Tribune | June 27, 2016
Read part 2: “The occupied mentality Syndrome“
Previously I argued whether Saudi Arabia’s repeated involvements in U.S. interventions and wars stem from free national will or in response to a specific condition. For starters, in Saudi Arabia there is no national will. In Saudi Arabia, the national will is the will of the Al Saud clan. Still, when a major Arab state allies itself with a superpower that committed unspeakable crimes against humanity in almost every Arab country, then something is wrong. This fact alone should compel us to examine the U.S.-Saudi relation for one exceptional reason. As a result of the U.S.-Saudi wars, hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia have lost their lives. Millions became displaced in their own homelands. And millions more rendered refugees.
Attributing the Saudi policies to the bonds of “partnership” with the U.S. is frivolous. There are no bonds between these two thugs except those of business, military deals, secret plots, and wars. Proving this point, bonds such as these have no space for the American and Saudi peoples to share significant cultural or societal exchanges. If partnership is not the reason for the Saudi contribution to the U.S. strategy of empire and imperialism, then another reason must exist.
This leads to three possibilities. … continue
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