132 Canadian doctors have died suddenly or unexpectedly since COVID-19 vaccine rollout (Part 1/2)
By Dr. William Makis MD | COVID Intel | February 18, 2023
In 2021, Canadian doctors were mandated to be fully COVID-19 vaccinated, in order to keep their jobs. Very few escaped these mandates. No exemptions given.
Since the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020, a total of 132 actively practicing Canadian doctors under age 70 have died suddenly or unexpectedly.
Canadian physician mortality in 2022 was 53% higher than 2019, based on the largest database of its kind assembled diligently by our team (a total of 2250 doctor deaths documented, spanning the years 2019-2023). This data is solid.
I have sent a third letter to the Canadian Medical Association (“CMA”) about these sudden deaths. To date, CMA has refused to respond. CMA fully supported unscientific and unethical COVID-19 vaccine mandates that were forced on their own physician members. Now this Ottawa-based bureaucracy ignores the damage done.
2022/23 Sudden and unexpected Canadian doctor deaths:
ADL report advocates for deplatforming at website infrastructure level
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2023
A new report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said pressuring online platforms and other internet services to remove those it deems to be far-right extremists is effective in limiting their reach. The report was authored by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society Belfer fellow Megan Squire.
In preparing the report, Squire analyzed four deplatformed websites, including forum website The Donald, website The Daily Stormer, forum 8chan, and political commentator Nick Fuentes.
Squire compared the individuals and sites’ popularity before and after they were deplatformed, saying the objective is limiting the spread of hateful ideology, not cutting traffic. And according to Squire, deplatforming is an effective way of achieving that goal.
“Deplatforming websites—removing infrastructure services they need to operate such as website hosting—can reduce the spread and reach of extremism and hate online,” she wrote.
Deplatforming also financially affects content creators in other ways. For instance, Fuentes was removed from YouTube and forced to incur the cost of hosting his content on his website. On YouTube, he hosted the content for free and was able to monetize the content. Currently, “he has to run all of that infrastructure himself. He has to find the developers, he has to maintain the website, he has to pay for all that bandwidth,” Squire said.
However, the content creators in Squire’s report have survived even after deplatforming. Others have disappeared.
Squire notes that while deplatforming “works,” the creators of these websites and platforms often “bounce back because there is someone out there that will replatform them.”
Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and security company, last year acknowledged in its Q3 2022 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its departure from its neutral position, including the recent blocking of the Kiwi Farms online forum, has resulted in significant negative feedback and a loss of potential customers.
The company has recognized that taking actions against its customers, including banning them from using its products, may cause harm to its brand and reputation. Publicly traded companies such as Cloudflare are obligated to file quarterly reports, which include a section on risk factors.
Banning Seymour Hersh’s “Offensive” Ideas
Subverting America’s Democracy—Now!
BY RON UNZ • FEBRUARY 17, 2023
In an unprecedented step, Youtube has severely restricted as “inappropriate or offensive” Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster Nord Stream Pipelines interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize more than a half-century ago in 1970 as the fiercely independent reporter who uncovered America’s My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. During his following decades at the New York Times and the New Yorker he broke some of the biggest stories in journalistic history, including the domestic spying activities of the CIA, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of the Iraq War, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, while being honored with two National Magazine Awards, five George Polk Awards, and numerous other accolades.
Hersh’s long career arguably ranks him as the most renowned living American journalist, and indeed Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University described him as such in a recent interview.
Then late last week, Hersh dropped a bombshell as big as anything in his career, revealing on his Substack platform the exact details of how the Biden Administration had secretly destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, an attack on $30 billion of vital European energy infrastructure that constituted an act of war against Germany, one of our closest NATO allies.
- How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Seymour Hersh • Substack • February 8, 2023 • 5,200 Words
As I discussed in my own column, despite Hersh’s stellar career and the massive implications of his remarkable story, almost all our mainstream media outlets boycotted it, ensuring that it received minimal attention.
- Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words
Hersh said he wanted his story to stand on its own, and was only willing to do a very limited number of interviews, with the first of these being with a small radio podcaster:
He soon followed this up with a half-hour appearance on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, a leading left-liberal news program broadcast on more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide, many of them PBS and NPR affiliates.
During that interview, Hersh responded to criticisms and explained that Ukraine’s war with Russia was going far worse than reported by the American media. According to Hersh and some of his government sources, the American attack on the pipelines may have been a disastrous mistake that could result in the collapse of NATO once most Europeans became aware of what had happened.
Democracy Now! has 1.3 million subscribers on its large Youtube channel, and immediately released Hersh’s important interview on that platform. Within hours the segment was approaching 250,000 views on its way to a likely total of many millions, becoming one of the channel’s most popular videos. I naturally linked it in several comments on our website.
But the same day it was released, Youtube suddenly censored Hersh’s Democracy Now! appearance, claiming that it represented “a violation of community standards” and was “offensive”:
As a result, Hersh’s Democracy Now! segment can no longer be viewed anywhere except on the Youtube site itself, and then only after clicking through two layers of warnings. The obvious intent was to drastically reduce Hersh’s potential audience and this will surely succeed. I assume that these restrictions have been combined with the most severe sort of shadow-banning. So a segment that would have probably been seen by many millions will only get a small fraction of that total.
Such Youtube censorship of a top mainstream journalist on a leading mainstream channel seems completely unprecedented, a massive escalation of the previous measures directed against the political fringe. The move was probably driven by concerns of how Youtube had earlier allowed the views of other important public figures to circumvent the blockade of media gatekeepers:
Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, had spent many years making exactly these same points and blaming America and NATO for the simmering Ukraine crisis, but his warnings had been totally ignored by our political leadership and media. His hour-long lecture explaining these unpleasant realities had quietly sat on Youtube for six years, attracting relatively little attention, but then suddenly exploded in popularity…as the conflict unfolded
Mearsheimer’s lengthy explanation of the origins of the Ukraine war has now accumulated 28 million views, quite possibly more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
Mearsheimer’s other Ukraine interviews and lectures accumulated many millions of additional views, and as a direct consequence of his suddenly enormous Internet presence, the once-boycotted academic was invited to contribute lengthy expositions of his views to such extremely establishmentarian outlets as the Economist and Foreign Affairs, and selected to participate in prestigious public forums such as Canada’s Munk debate and Europe’s Holberg Debate. As a result, probably tens of millions worldwide became exposed to a perspective previously excluded from the Western mainstream media.
In another example, Jeffrey Sachs has expressed very similar concerns about the Ukraine war and over the last few months a couple of his interviews on Democracy Now! have accumulated well over 4 million views, while a different interview with geopolitical scholar Alfred McCoy had reached nearly 2 million more:
When Sachs suggested on Bloomberg TV that the American government had probably been responsible for the pipeline attacks, he was quickly yanked off the air, but his clip went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating several million views.
Meanwhile, the clips of President Biden and other top American national security officials promising to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines and then crowing about the mysterious explosions that destroyed them have also became ubiquitious on the Internet.
Hersh’s work and record were widely promoted on Twitter.
Tucker Carlson had covered the pipeline attacks from the very beginning and immediately discussed Hersh’s remarkable reporting.
Similarly, Max Blumenthal and Aron Mate did the same on the Grayzone:
But the audiences of both these shows are already overwhelmingly hostile to the Biden Administration, so these segments would be far less threatening than Hersh’s own lengthy interview with Amy Goodman on a program often watched by Biden supporters. Other than that practical consideration, I see no reason why Hersh’s interview would have been censored.
The problem faced by our political establishment is that their current position on the Ukraine war has drawn increasing opposition from individuals with the highest public stature and credibility, not only top journalists and academics like Hersh, Mearsheimer, and Sachs, but also top national security experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor and Ray McGovern.
Our failed current Ukraine war policy against Russia has only been maintained by one of the tightest information blockades in modern American history, with 99% of the mainstream media and a large majority of the alternative media tolerating no dissenting voices. But the disastrous potential flaws in our strategy become immediately become apparent once they are mentioned and a critical mass of leading figures has now begun to do so, with their views increasingly reaching the public. So a regime of unprecedented censorship may now be imposed to prevent the American people from hearing both sides of the story.
Hence a factual interview of one of our most renowned journalists by a leading media outlet has been stamped “offensive” and heavily suppressed.
Such restrictions are hardly unknown to me. Just days after I published my first April 2020 article pointing to strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was result of a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), our entire website was banned by Facebook with all our pages deranked by Google.
Related Reading:
Moldova’s “football plot” highlights ridiculousness of anti-Russia hysteria
By Ahmed Adel | February 17, 2023
By accusing Moscow of planning a coup d’état in Moldova, President Maia Sandu is trying to divert public attention from the economic crisis in the country whilst also ingratiating herself with the anti-Russia West. In fact, her accusations reached such ridiculous levels that supporters of football club Partizan Belgrade were implicated in the supposed plot to overthrow the current government and install a pro-Russian regime.
Sandu said that Russia is allegedly planning to use foreign saboteurs to topple her country’s leadership, stop its accession to the European Union and use it in the conflict against Ukraine.
“The plan included sabotage and militarily trained people disguised as civilians to carry out violent actions, attacks on government buildings and taking hostages,” she told reporters on February 13.
She added, without providing the evidence, that citizens of Russia, Montenegro, Belarus and Serbia would be among those entering Moldova to try to spark protests in an attempt to “change the legitimate government to an illegitimate government, controlled by the Russian Federation to stop the EU integration process.”
Fans of Serbian football club Partizan Belgrade were banned from travelling to watch their team play Sheriff Tiraspol on February 16 in the first leg of their Europa Conference League knockout play-off tie. In fact, the game was played behind closed doors due to the supposed fears of the coup.
The match had been relocated to the Moldovan capital of Chisinau from Tiraspol, the capital of the self-declared independent country of Transnistria, which is internationally recognised as part of Moldova but is overwhelmingly Russian and Ukrainian in its ethnic makeup. It is more than likely that Sandu reached ridiculous levels of accusations, even to the point of banning football fans, because the supporters of Partizan Belgrade and Sheriff Tiraspol were likely to make pro-Russian statements – something she did not want to be broadcasted to international audiences.
Sandu’s statement is also connected with the economic crisis in Moldova. The country is not experiencing economic growth and is not receiving cheap gas and oil from Russia. Effectively, Sandu is scaring the Moldovan people by making them believe that war is on their doorstep. This serves to distract them from their economic hardships.
It is recalled that at the beginning of her political career, Sandu talked about economic growth, fighting crime, and reducing corruption. However, the level of corruption has increased, inflation is hovering at about 30% and the country is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Rather than deal with these issues, the Moldovan president is trying to please the West by implicating Russia in another scheme. This will not only further deteriorate Chisinau’s relations with Russia, but justify a tightening of domestic and foreign policy against dissidents. Sandu in this way demonstrates that she is useful for Washington and Brussels as she is stamping out pro-Russian sentiment in an authoritarian manner.
Moldova has long lost its constitutionally “ensured” neutral status and now depends on the Americans and Europeans as she sees the future of her country in NATO. Moldova’s parliament approved pro-Western Prime Minister Dorin Recean and his proposed Cabinet in a confidence vote on February 16.
Sixty-two MPs, all from the Sandu-founded Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), voted in favour of appointing the new Cabinet. PAS holds 63 out of 101 seats in the Moldovan parliament, and therefore comfortably passed the new cabinet, especially as the parliamentary opposition did not vote. In this way, Moldova is now firmly in the Western bloc despite constitutionally being neutral and not even being a member of NATO or the EU.
It is recalled that Sandu previously stated that attacks are being prepared in Moldova with the aim of overthrowing the constitutional order of the country. At the time, she called on the parliament to expand the powers of the security services.
Previously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when addressing the European Council, said that the Ukrainian intelligence services had intercepted Russia’s plan to overthrow the democratic order in Moldova and that the Ukrainian side informed the Moldovan leadership about it. In this light, Sandu asked Moldova’s parliament to adopt draconian draft laws to equip its Intelligence and Security Service, and the prosecutor’s office, “with the necessary tools to combat more effectively the risks” to the country’s security.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed Sandu’s claims on February 14 as “absolutely unfounded and unsubstantiated.”
“They are built in the spirit of classical techniques that are often used by the United States, other Western countries and Ukraine,” Zakharova said. “First, accusations are made with reference to purportedly classified intelligence information that cannot be verified, and then they are used to justify their own illegal actions.”
In this way, Sandu is making extremely desperate, but also humiliating justifications to introduce authoritarian laws to stamp out Russophilia in Moldova. To achieve this, she is also bulldozing Moldova’s neutral status, and it is all coming at a major economic cost.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Logically Unsound
Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023
Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to
- monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
- “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
- outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.
Picture credit: UK Column News
Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.
No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.
HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.
Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.
Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:
- Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
- HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
- HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
- The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.
Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.
It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.
Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.
For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.
All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.
Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.
By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:
“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.
Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base. Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.
For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.
The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?
For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.
The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.
Call to action:
- Please share this article with friends, family and colleagues
- If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for HART’s free regular bulletin here.
- Please read the Big Brother Watch Ministry of Truth report;
- Get active:
- If you have been affected by any of the ‘black ops’ outfits listed above, consider complaining, e.g. to the International Fact-Checking Network: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/complaints-policy
- Consider complaining about Logically.ai’s activities to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
- Write to Logically.ai’s shareholders, which include
- Vitruvian Partners
- Amazon Alexa Fund
- XTX Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of XTC Markets, a leading global algorithmic trading firm, and the
- Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance), managed by Mercia Asset Management PLC.
- The British Business Bank.
These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.
US State Department funds UK think tank that aids in censorship of Americans
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 16, 2023
The US State Department funds UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organization that partners with platforms to flag misinformation and disinformation. The organization has been accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation.
In September 2021, the State Department awarded ISD a grant to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK and Europe after it won the US-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that has been accused of demonetizing conservative news websites by putting them on a blacklist used by advertisers, the Daily Caller reported.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded the ISD to research Russian disinformation tactics on Wikipedia. However, the department insisted that it does not engage in content moderation on social media.
ISD has several partnerships with social media platforms on content moderation decisions. The organization is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on how to respond to misinformation.
ISD is also part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, whose members are tasked with improving the platform’s enforcement of its guidelines and can flag more content than other users. Google said that it “prioritizes flags from Trusted Flaggers.”
The organization also has partnerships with Google to counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe. It also partners with Amazon’s Audible, Facebook, and Microsoft.
ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism. However, it has also been targeting what it deems misinformation and hate.
Ireland’s protests – will Varadkar go full Trudeau?
By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | February 15, 2023
Since Russia began its special military operation in Ukraine almost a year ago, one of the key features of the collective West’s response, alongside sanctions and the expulsion of Russian diplomats, has been the accommodation of refugees fleeing the conflict, with millions of Ukrainians being housed across Europe since last February, including 70,000+ in the 26-County Irish State.
The first question that springs to mind regarding this approach however, is that if it is being done out of genuine concern for those fleeing conflict in Ukraine, then why was it not implemented in 2014 when that war first began?
In April of that year, following five months of Western-instigated violence in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU-trade deal in order to pursue closer ties with neighbouring Russia, the ethnic Russian Donbass region in the east of the country would break away to form the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, their residents having little choice lest they face genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the anti-Russian neo-Nazi elements which composed the new Western-backed Kiev government.
A war on both Republics would follow, involving neo-Nazi paramilitaries such as Azov Battalion and Right Sector, which despite efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully via the federalisation solution offered by the Minsk Accords, would ultimately result in 14,000 deaths over the space of 8 years.
Despite this slaughter, no mainstream campaign existed in Ireland during the same period intended to expel Ukrainian diplomats or to welcome those fleeing conflict in the Donbass.
Likewise, no similar campaign has existed for those fleeing other conflicts such as that in Yemen, classed as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by the United Nations, with a paltry 70 Yemenis being granted access to social services in the 26 Counties in the past year, in comparison to 72,609 Ukrainians in the same period following Russia’s intervention.
It must also me asked that if Leinster House genuinely cared about the plight of refugees fleeing conflict, then why contribute to the conflicts that created those refugees in the first place by allowing US warplanes to land in Shannon Airport over the past 20 years?
Since the Russian operation began in Ukraine last February, talks of the 26 County State joining an EU army have increased amongst establishment voices also, with the stated aim of such an alliance being to ‘act in complementarity’ with NATO, the coalition having been a key contributor to the refugee crisis over the past two decades by laying waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
With these facts established, it can safely be concluded that Leinster House’s ‘concern’ for refugees has little to do with helping those fleeing war, and much like the wider West’s support of Ukrainian ‘freedom fighters’ being a cover to use Ukraine as a proxy to tie Russia down in an Afghan-style military quagmire.
Further, the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition is using emotive media coverage of the Ukrainian conflict as a means to swell the labour market and to keep wages stagnant on behalf of the corporate class.
Indeed, protests related to the effects of such a move would arise in late November, when upwards of 300 migrants were suddenly moved into a disused office block in East Wall, a working-class area of inner-city Dublin.
Residents would begin what would go on to become weekly demonstrations over the move, citing the lack of consultation with community officials beforehand, the suitability of the office block for accommodation, and the lack of transparency on whether those who had been moved into the office block had been vetted.
Despite these protests receiving support from residents of the office block themselves, the Irish mainstream media would, in lockstep, decry them as being ‘anti-refugee protests’ and ‘organised by the far-right’, a label that would also be applied to similar protests that emerged around Dublin and other locations in response to other wildly unsuitable locations chosen by Leinster House to accommodate adult migrants, including a school in Drimnagh, like East Wall, another working-class area of Dublin.
This dismissal of ordinary working class people’s concerns as ‘far-right’ bears a stark similarity to mainstream media descriptions of last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when in response to a government mandate requiring all truck drivers re-entering from the US having to be vaccinated, a nationwide protest would begin in the second-largest country in the world.
The government of Justin Trudeau – like Leo Varadkar, another ‘Young Global leader’ of the World Economic Forum – would respond in an authoritarian fashion, freezing the bank accounts of protest organisers and attacking demonstrators with mounted Horses and teargas.
An approach, that with the head of the 26-County police force condemning the current protests and secretive police units monitoring organisers, may soon become a reality on the other side of the Atlantic.
Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.
Forensic Probe Reveals Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda Died of Poisoning, Family Says
By Igor Shapovalov – Sputnik -16.02.2023
The Government Junta of Chile was the highest organ of state power in the South American nation during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. The period was characterized by repressive policies and extensive economic transformation. It is estimated that more than 3,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands disappeared during the military rule.
New research into the remains of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has confirmed that poisoning was the cause of his death in 1973, the poet-diplomat’s nephew Rodolfo Reyes has said.
Following the court-approved exhumation of the body, international experts were called in to examine the remains of the Nobel laureate. According to Reyes, the results of the study confirmed he died not from cancer, as stated in official documents, but from poisoning.
Reyes has detailed that the final report outlined traces of the botulism agent had been found in the poet’s remains. Moreover, experts at McMaster University in Canada and the University of Copenhagen determined the bacteria had entered his body before death, thus confirming the idea of poisoning.
“We now know that there was no reason for the clostridium botulinum to have been there in his bones,” Reyes told Spanish media. “What does that mean? It means Neruda was murdered through the intervention of state agents in 1973.”
The report was released to Paola Plaza, a Chilean judge, on Wednesday; however, she has not made the findings public. It’s expected the report will be publicly released on March 7.
In Chile, Neruda is known not only as a poet but also as a diplomat and public figure. The Chilean Communist Party nominated him for president in 1970, although he later withdrew his candidacy in favor of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, who would later go on to be overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in a US-backed coup.
Neruda died on 23 September 1973, 12 days after the coup d’état that toppled the Allende government. He died at the Santa Maria Hospital in Santiago. Speculation on Neruda’s cause of death has remained a hot talking point for decades, with his body having been first exhumed under court order in 2017.
Rumble wins injunction against New York’s online censorship law
The law was deemed to be a violation of the First Amendment
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 14, 2023
A judge has blocked a New York law that attempted to regulate “hateful conduct” online.
The legislative package, signed into law last summer, was Gov. Kathy Hochul’s attempt to force the moderation of content under nebulous terms such as “hate.”
The bill required, “social media networks to provide and maintain mechanisms for reporting hateful conduct on their platform.” It defined hateful conduct broadly as, “the use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”
The law also said that platforms must have a “clear and concise policy readily available and accessible on their website and application which includes how such social media network[s] will respond and address the reports of incidents of hateful conduct on their platform[s].”
The law was challenged by the free speech video platform Rumble, alongside FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and First Amendment legal scholar Eugene Volokh, primarily on First Amendment grounds.
On Tuesday, Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. (S.D.N.Y.) blocked the law. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate,’” the court wrote.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
In an unsurprising fashion, Judge Carter ruled that the law was a violation of the First Amendment. “The First Amendment protects from state regulation speech that may be deemed ‘hateful,’” the court wrote, “and generally disfavors regulation of speech based on its content unless it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.”
The court added that the law, “chills the constitutionally protected speech of social media users,” adding “social media websites are publishers and curators of speech, and their users are engaged in speech by writing, posting, and creating content. Although the law ostensibly is aimed at social media networks, it fundamentally implicates the speech of the networks’ users by mandating a policy and mechanism by which users can complain about other users’ protected speech.”
The court highlighted the ways in which the law violated the First Amendment, saying, “the law also requires that a social media network must make a ‘policy’ available on its website which details how the network will respond to a complaint of hateful content. In other words, the law requires that social media networks devise and implement a written policy—i.e., speech.”
The other factor considered by the court was that the law “requires a social media network to endorse the state’s message about ‘hateful conduct’” – another First Amendment violation.
“Implicit in this language is that each social media network’s definition of ‘hateful conduct’ must be at least as inclusive as the definition set forth in the law itself. In other words, the social media network’s policy must define ‘hateful conduct’ as conduct which tends to ‘vilify, humiliate, or incite violence’ ‘on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.’”
The court singled out how the law would have forced free speech platforms such as Rumble “whose websites have dedicated ‘pro-free speech purpose[s],’ which likely attract users who are ‘opposed to censorship’” to “speak about hateful conduct.” This would be a form of compelled speech.
The court ruled that Rumble has, “an editorial right to keep certain information off their websites and to make decisions as to the sort of community they would like to foster on their platforms. It is well-established that a private entity has an ability to make ‘choices about whether, to what extent, and in what manner it will disseminate speech…’”
“The founding fathers would be proud today,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski tweeted. “Rumble’s legal team is next level amazing.”
Here’s why Ukraine’s Zelensky wants a long war with Russia
By Andrey Sushentsov | RT | February 15, 2023
It is unlikely that President Vladimir Zelensky expects to win militarily. But it seems that he genuinely believes that he will succeed in turning Ukraine into something like Israel – a paramilitary state living with a sense of constant military threat.
Ukraine doesn’t have the military or economic resources of its own to achieve victory, and the resources provided by the West will never be enough to inflict a final defeat on Russia. Zelensky’s calculation is likely based on the belief that by offering Ukraine as a tool for NATO to use against Russia, he will constantly mobilize Western support and thereby ensure his own survival, and that of his associates.
In the worst-case scenario, as he sees it, Zelensky is probably counting on emigrating to the West with his closest associates, where they will advocate a continued policy of Russian containment. But does he care about the interests of ordinary people in Ukraine?
The unprecedented hardships of war that the country now faces could have been significantly reduced if Zelensky had been willing to settle the crisis diplomatically. Russia has repeatedly taken diplomatic initiatives to resolve this conflict. In the first phase, for example, negotiations took place in Belarus and Turkey. However, under the influence of the US and the UK, Kiev has set a course to prolong the conflict, banking on Western military assistance to achieve its goals.
As Ukraine’s own military and economic resources have dried up, the country has become increasingly dependent on Western supplies, and has ultimately become a tool to fight Russia. Nevertheless, Kiev still has the opportunity to begin talks with Moscow.
Zelensky could take the initiative to negotiate a status quo that is still comfortable for Ukraine. Of course, as the Russian military campaign progresses, the situation will change in ways that are far from favorable to Kiev. And the solutions put forward by the Russian delegation at the beginning of the crisis will no longer be on the table. However, there is still the possibility of a sustainable peace, with reduced risks of escalation into Europe’s biggest military conflict since the Second World War and a nuclear catastrophe.
Zelensky could still claim the laurels of a peacemaker who sacrificed some of his personal ambition in the name of saving Ukrainian lives and ensuring a peaceful future for his country.
A truce would alleviate the economic difficulties of Kiev’s supporters in the West, and thus generate some gratitude. Ukraine would also save a considerable amount of its military resources. Peace would obviously limit them, as deliveries would dry up, but those resources in situ would still be at the disposal of the Ukrainian government.
Yet, Zelensky’s government acts as if it sees no value in preserving Ukrainian statehood. The administration is squandering citizens’ lives and the economic fabric of the country in the belief that this sacrifice is necessary to gain some possible, rather indefinite, advantage in the future. Instead of acting as a peacemaker, as someone who is prepared to make sacrifices to save the lives of his people, Zelensky acts like a gambler, while feeding the population military propaganda.
The unprecedented military, political and economic support Ukraine is receiving from abroad essentially covers up all of the mistakes by Zelensky’s government. A strategy which is based on the axiom “war will pay for everything”. At home, the militarist line has allowed the president to establish a political dictatorship and persecute his opponents in all spheres of state life, including religion. As a result, he has secured an unprecedented concentration of power in his hands and, for the first time in Ukrainian history, silenced all centers of opposition.
Zelensky need not worry about Ukraine’s economic well-being in the short term: the foreign economic aid being handed to the Ukrainian government will suffice. Meanwhile, Kiev is still actively betting that Russia’s $300 billion in foreign currency reserves, frozen in the West, will fall into its hands. What would amount to state-piracy would also allow it use the money as it sees fit.
As a result, Zelensky expects that even if he is defeated and loses part of his territory, he will remain in power as the military leader the West needs for the new Ukraine, which will be the main anti-Russian outpost on NATO’s eastern borders. One that will be armed to the teeth, saturated with Western economic aid and that will provide its citizens with an acceptable standard of living.
I believe that Zelensky is genuinely convinced he will succeed in turning Ukraine into something like Israel, a paramilitary state in a hostile environment, and living with a sense of constant military threat. I do not exclude the possibility that even in the worst-case scenario, where there is a complete collapse of his government, Zelensky expects to find himself and a group of his closest associates in exile in the West. Once there, they will actively advocate a continued policy of containment and defeat of Russia. History shows that this prospect has every chance of materializing.
Andrey Sushentsov is the Valdai Club program director.
Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says no to digital ID
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, said that if he were to be elected Prime Minister, he would not impose digital IDs. He made the comment on a campaign trail in Windsor, Ontario.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced its federal Digital Identity Program last August.
“And to answer your question, I will never allow the government to impose a digital ID,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre’s comment came a few days after Alberta and Saskatchewan’s premiers said that they were not interested in a federal digital ID.
“The government of Saskatchewan is not creating a Digital ID nor will we accept any requirements for the creation of a digital ID tied to healthcare funding,” said Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe.
Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith said that she fully supported what Moe said.
Transport Canada has recently announced that the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project is ongoing, contrary to earlier reports suggesting that the project has been discontinued.
The KTDI is a collaborative effort between the World Economic Forum (WEF), Accenture, INTERPOL, various government entities, and the governments of the Netherlands and Canada. The project was initiated in 2018 to create a secure and decentralized digital identity system for travelers between the Netherlands and Canada. The system utilizes cryptographic encryption and distributed ledger technology to ensure the protection of travelers’ personal information.
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On Herd Mentality
By Jeb Smith | April 14, 2026
I no longer trust “we the people,” because of the powers influencing them. Media and government schooling form their general ideas on reality and governance. Therefore, it’s not a case of the voter choosing the politicians. Instead, the system is conditioning and conforming the voter to the authorities’ desires.
In democracies, the people are kept occupied working and paying taxes, too busy to acquire information outside the approved sources. You will find they know and care far more about the next iPhone than political philosophy. Of those who hold some interest, 95% just toe the party line, holding the same opinion as the primary media source they listen to. They lack both the desire and time to expand their horizons.
Media’s purpose is to conform people’s thought to a preferred goal, which is why Republican and Democratic voters both firmly hold their parties’ general stances, reciting the same talking points. The people do not originate ideas; their thoughts are fed to them by the media so they can consume, digest, and parrot back whatever they are served. When it comes to politics, we rarely think for ourselves. We are told what to think.
Watch PBS, MSNBC and read your local newspaper for six months, and you will receive a particular view and understanding of the world. Then listen to The Mike Church Show, The Blaze, and The Daily Wire, and you will get not just another perspective but a whole different world of facts and events. The world people believe they live in can be entirely different depending on their news sources.
We enjoy seeing the enemy humiliated, which describes why those engulfed in politics love their preferred media sources; they keep returning for more like a drug addict. Networks ensure their “experts” align with the worldview they and their audience desire. The people who watch PBS, BBC, and so forth expect a specific perspective to be presented. Fox News watchers demand the same. In doing this, we both encourage and assure we are misled.
In their book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, professors Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels argue, based on substantial research, that voters do not decide the party platform and agenda. Instead, the parties control the “ideologies” of the voters. When the party the voter identifies with changes its position, the individuals also change theirs. They discovered the individual would quickly adopt the views of their group; they will ignore or change their own opinions over time to fit in with the collective they identify with. Achen and Bartels wrote “group memberships largely drove policy views, not vice versa.” … continue
Blog Roll
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