New York gun control law requires social media checks
Samizdat | July 2, 2022
New York has adopted a sweeping gun control law aiming to ban firearms from a number of “sensitive areas,” including Times Square, also requiring social media checks for gun permit applicants to ensure their “character and conduct.”
The Democrat-sponsored bill advanced through the New York legislature during a special session on Friday, with Governor Kathy Hochul signing it soon after.
“This to me is the embodiment of what it means to be an American,” Hochul said of the law soon after it passed the state Senate, adding she would sign it “in honor of our Fourth of July weekend.”
The law bans guns from a long list of “sensitive areas” around the Empire State, such as popular tourist sites in New York City, as well as schools, libraries, universities, government buildings, playgrounds and parks, public transit and stadiums. Residents will also no longer be allowed to carry firearms into private businesses unless the owners post clear signage stating it is permitted.
A more controversial measure in the bill requires those looking to obtain a gun permit to send the government “a list of former and current social media accounts… from the past three years” in order to confirm the “applicant’s character and conduct.” Additionally, they will be made to submit at least four “character references” who can “attest to the applicant’s good moral character.”
The bill was passed during a special legislative session called after the US Supreme Court shot down a century-old gun control law in New York last week. While the provision forced permit-seekers to demonstrate that they required a gun for self-defense, the court concluded that it violated the 14th Amendment “by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.”
Though Democratic supporters have said it will help “make New Yorkers safe,” the new legislation has faced intense criticism from Republicans and gun advocates, with the executive director of the New York State Firearms Association, Aaron Dorr, blasting it as “the kind of bill that the Gestapo would be proud of.”
“This will never survive a court challenge,” he added.
GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin – who won the party’s nomination for an upcoming governor’s race earlier this week – was also highly critical, arguing the law would only make residents less safe.
“Only under one party Democrat rule can criminals run amuck armed with illegal guns, while law abiding New Yorkers are stripped of their right to safely and securely carry a firearm solely for self-defense,” Zeldin said.
Debate over gun control has been rekindled by a spate of mass shootings in recent months – including a rampage in Buffalo, New York which left 10 dead in May – prompting new legislation across a number of states and on the national level. Late last week, President Joe Biden signed a major bipartisan gun bill into law, aiming to limit access to firearms from those considered dangerous, the most significant legislation of its kind to clear Congress in nearly 30 years.
Twitter ‘Silenced’ Physicians Who Posted Truthful Information About COVID, Lawsuit Alleges
By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | June 30, 2022
Three physicians are suing Twitter, alleging the company violated its own terms of service and community standards when it suspended their accounts for posting “truthful statements regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment.”
Drs. Robert Malone, Peter McCullough and Bryan Tyson on Monday filed the lawsuit in Superior Court in California, San Francisco County.
The complaint alleges Twitter breached the terms of its contract when it permanently suspended the plaintiffs’ accounts, silenced their voices and failed to provide them with “verified” badges.
Plaintiffs allege Twitter’s actions were a substantial factor in causing them harm, and are asking the judge to order Twitter to reactivate their accounts.
All three doctors are represented by attorneys Bryan M. Garrie and Matthew P. Tyson (no relation to the plaintiff, Bryan Tyson).
Matthew Tyson on May 12, sent a letter to the directors and managing agents of Twitter requesting the company reinstate the accounts of five physicians, including the plaintiffs, and provide them with “verified” badges. Twitter failed to respond.
In the letter, Matthew Tyson acknowledged Twitter is a “private company” and its terms state it can “suspend user accounts for any or no reason.”
“However, Twitter also implemented specific community standards to limit COVID-19 misinformation on the platform, and Twitter was bound to follow those terms,” he added.
According to the complaint, Twitter’s content-moderation terms included removal procedures for ineffective treatments and false diagnostic criteria, and measures for “labeling” information as “misleading.”
Twitter has a “five-strike policy” as part of its COVID-19 misinformation guidelines and community standards.
Twitter’s website states:
“The consequences for violating our COVID-19 misleading information policy depend on the severity and type of the violation and the account’s history of previous violations. In instances where accounts repeatedly violate this policy, we will use a strike system to determine if further enforcement actions should be applied.”
Strike 1 is “no account-level action.” Strike 2 results in a 12-hour account lock. Strike 3 results in another 12-hour account lock. Strike 4 results in a seven-day account lock and five or more strikes lead to permanent suspension.
Plaintiffs claim they relied on Twitter to employ and enforce its terms in good faith and it was foreseeable to Twitter that plaintiffs would rely on the terms the company is obligated to follow.
According to the complaint, a “truthful tweet regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment” would not violate Twitter’s terms of service, community standards, content moderation policies or misinformation guidelines.
“None of these physicians posted false or misleading information, nor did they receive five strikes before suspension,” Matthew Tyson stated in his letter to Twitter.
“It’s no accident that Twitter violated its own COVID-19 misinformation guidelines and suspended the accounts of Drs. Zelenko, Malone, Fareed, Tyson and McCullough,” he wrote.
The letter stated:
“Twitter received express and implied threats from government officials to censor certain viewpoints and speakers, lest Twitter face the amendment or revocation of Section 230, or antitrust enforcement. This was a financial decision for Twitter.
“For the sake of profits, it chose to abandon its role as a neutral internet service provider and instead openly and intentionally collude with government to silence lawful speech.”
In an email to The Defender, lead attorney Garrie and co-counsel Matthew Tyson said:
“In this political climate, honesty is a rare commodity, and concerns over new and experimental vaccines and drug therapies and the safety and effectiveness of alternative outpatient treatments should be the subject of full and transparent public debate.
“Drs. Malone, Tyson and McCullough are highly qualified and credentialed physicians and scientists who posted truthful information on Twitter that contradicted the mainstream narrative regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis, and treatment.
“They shared fact-based information which furthered an important public interest as people around the world try to decide how to treat themselves and their loved ones for COVID-19. Twitter silenced them.
“Our clients seek to hold Twitter liable not as a Section 230 publisher, but as a counterparty to a contract, as a promisor who has breached the very terms it put in place to moderate tweets. We will hold Twitter accountable in court and prove the truth of our clients’ statements for the world to see.”
Twitter refused to verify physicians’ accounts
In addition to being suspended from Twitter, the company refused to verify the plaintiffs’ accounts even though the accounts met Twitter’s criteria for verification.
To be verified, an account must be “notable and active.”
Twitter defines a notable account to include “activists, organizers, and other influential individuals,” including “prominently recognized individuals.”
According to the complaint, Malone is an “internationally recognized scientist and physician” who completed a fellowship at Harvard Medical School as a global clinical research scholar and was scientifically trained at the University of California and Salk Institute Molecular Biology and Virology laboratories.
Malone is the “original inventor of mRNA vaccination technology, DNA vaccination and multiple non-viral DNA and RNA/mRNA platform delivery technologies,” and has “roughly 100 scientific publications, which have been cited more than 12,000 times.”
He holds an “outstanding” impact factor rating on Google Scholar and sits as a non-voting member on the National Institutes of Health [Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines] committee, which is tasked with managing clinical research for a variety of drug and antibody treatments for COVID-19.
The complaint states Malone used his Twitter account to post truthful statements regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment. He received no strikes for his content and he did not violate Twitter’s rules, yet his account was permanently suspended.
McCullough, according to the complaint, is a highly accomplished physician who is the founder and current president of the Cardiorenal Society of America.
He has been “published more than 1,000 times, made presentations on the advancement of medicine across the world and has been an invited lecturer at the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency.”
McCullough has also served on the editorial boards of multiple specialty journals and was a member or chair of data safety monitoring boards of 24 randomized clinical trials.
He was a “leader in the medical response to COVID-19, has more than 30 peer-reviewed publications on the infection, and has commented and testified extensively on COVID19 treatment, including before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,” the lawsuit states.
McCullough’s account was suspended, but Twitter allowed him to create a new account that is followed by more than 480,000 people. Yet, he is still unable to receive a “verified” badge.
In a June 28 tweet, McCullough said “trouble is on the horizon for the “common carrier” whose only role is to provide a platform for communications operations,” referring to the lawsuit.
Tyson is a licensed physician with15 years of hospital and emergency medicine experience. He practices with Dr. George Fareed, who also was suspended from Twitter for posting what he claimed was truthful COVID-19 information.
Tyson and Fareed have “gained international recognition for providing successful early treatment to more than 10,000 COVID-19 patients, with zero patient deaths when treatment was started within 7 days,” the complaint states.
Tyson testified in various proceedings about early treatment protocols and co-authored a book about COVID-19.
He also ran as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for California’s 25th Congressional District, yet was not deemed a “notable figure of public interest” regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment, which prohibited him from obtaining a “verified” badge on Twitter.
Tyson says he posted only truthful statements about COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment with his account, and none of his tweets were classified as a “strike” or violated Twitter’s terms of service.
Like Malone’s, Tyson’s and Fareed’s accounts were permanently suspended.
“In a nutshell, these are five [physicians] of the most knowledgeable and helpful voices in the world regarding COVID-19 treatment,” Matthew Tyson wrote in his letter. “Disturbingly, Twitter silenced all of them.”
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
South Korea, Poster Child for Containment Strategy, Now Has Same Excess Mortality as Sweden
BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 30, 2022
Until recently, South Korea was the poster child for the ‘contain and vaccinate’ strategy, having kept infections to a minimum until completing its vaccine rollout.
In November of last year, former ‘Zero Covid’ proponent Devi Sridhar argued, “It is never too late to learn lessons from countries such as South Korea, which pursued maximum suppression, and succeeded.” And in a super-viral tweet, Vincent Rajkumar (a professor at the Mayo Clinic) proclaimed, “South Korea followed the textbook principles of epidemiology. Kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated. This is success.”
All that was true until February of this year, when the country saw its first major outbreak. This outbreak, as I noted previously, led to a large spike in excess mortality; by March’s end, the number of weekly deaths was almost 70% higher than normal.
Owing to this spike, South Korea now has the same excess mortality as Sweden – which took a famously relaxed approach to dealing with Covid. Note: the chart below is based on weekly deaths, rather than age-standardised mortality rates, so it overstates excess mortality in both countries.
Incidentally, you wouldn’t know this from looking at the official Covid death rates. As the chart below indicates, the number of ‘confirmed’ Covid deaths per million people is much higher in Sweden, presumably due to differences in testing or diagnosis. Which illustrates the importance of tracking excess mortality.
So, the country that did least to contain Covid has ended up with the same death toll as one of the countries that did most. What’s more, the majority of Sweden’s infections occurred before the vaccine rollout, whereas the vast majority of South Korea’s occurred after. Which suggests the benefits of containing the virus until after the vaccine rollout have been overstated.
Of course, South Korea didn’t do terribly. By containing the virus using border controls and contact tracing, they avoided really draconian lockdowns, and saw a comparatively mild downturn. Yet the measures they took still constitute a major infringement on civil liberties. As the Guardian notes, “Koreans’ movements were so finely and publicly tracked that secret love affairs and even hidden sexualities were brought to light.”
Anyone who cares about civil liberties will now have to ask whether South Korea’s strategy was worth it, given that Sweden ended up with the same death toll.
Trudeau government extends ban on unvaccinated foreigners
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | June 29, 2022
The Trudeau government just announced they would be extending the ban on unvaccinated foreigners until September 30 (the start of flu season).
“Today, the Government of Canada announced it is extending current border measures for travellers entering Canada. Requirements for travellers arriving to Canada are expected to remain in effect until at least September 30, 2022,” a Public Health Agency of Canada news release reads.
It should be noted that while unvaccinated Canadians can (at least in the short term) board a plane to travel abroad, the ban on the unvaccinated remains on both sides of the Canada-US border, an apparent unspoken agreement by both countries to not budge on the unvaccinated travel ban until the other does.
Moreover, the latest announcement states that unvaccinated Canadians will still be forced to quarantine for 14 days upon their return to Canada.
Additionally, the government says that the ArriveCan app — which has led to delays so bad it has become an international embarrassment — will remain in place.
As for good news, mandatory random COVID tests at airports are now paused — but only for the vaccinated. This is Transport Minister Omar Alghabra’s half-hearted attempt to keep Canada’s airports “strong, efficient, and resilient” after being disgraced by former NHL player Ryan Whitney.
“In addition, the pause of mandatory random testing will continue at all airports until mid-July for travellers who qualify as fully vaccinated… Mandatory random testing continues at land border points of entry, with no changes. Travellers who do not qualify as fully vaccinated, unless exempt, will continue to test on Day 1 and Day 8 of their 14-day quarantine,” the news release reads.
Guardian Pushes for Return of Masks, Mass Testing and Quarantine
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 28 2022
Here we go again. It’s the middle of summer and the leading opinion piece in the Guardian today calls for the return of restrictions in response to rising infections and hospitalisations. In a piece introduced with, “a few small changes would make a big difference to millions of vulnerable people”, journalist Frances Ryan writes:
If you’re reading this in the U.K., odds are that by now you’ve had coronavirus: seven in 10 of us have watched the dreaded red line appear. You may have been stuck in bed with it twice or even three times by now; by April 2022, England alone had recorded almost 900,000 reinfections. When the public asked to “return to normal”, I’m not sure a regular hacking cough was what they had in mind.
Almost 900,000 reinfections? How will 1.6% of the population have coped with getting another cold?
Ryan continues:
It is an odd situation. Last week, Covid infections were reported to have soared by 43%, while hospitalisation from the virus rose by 23%. An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.K. tested positive over those seven days. Two million of us now have long Covid, with about two in five of those – or 826,000 people – having symptoms for at least a year.
What Ryan fails to mention is that Long Covid studies frequently find small to negligible numbers of additional symptoms compared to a control group, meaning the quoted figure is unlikely to be an accurate picture of the real impact of COVID-19.
Ryan again:
Back in February, Johnson said the Government had created a plan to start “living with Covid”, but what it really did was form a plan to catch and spread Covid. After all coronavirus prevention measures were dropped on April 1st – from the legal obligation to isolate if you had Covid, to the end of most free testing – the public were left wide open to mass infection. Even hospitals were told by ministers to ditch mask mandates, though some worried trusts have defied the rules and kept them. That all precautions were pulled back just when most people’s vaccine immunity was beginning to fade, and the virus was evolving to be more transmissible, gives a hint at how little logic ministers applied.
Since Ryan accepts that vaccine protection wanes, she evidently intends restrictions, sorry, precautions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, the plummeting of the infection fatality rate makes no difference to her argument, as “excessive focus” has been placed on deaths, she says.
One of the biggest problems facing Britain’s attempts to quell the virus is that this Government doesn’t really want to. There is hope – the number of people dying from Covid has reduced since its peak – but excessive focus on this has long hidden the fact that loss of life has never been the only thing that matters: how many people are infected with the virus matters too. A strategy that lets the virus rip through the population increases the risk we all face, be it from surges, new dangerous variants, or in developing long Covid. Fundamentally, it means accepting a reality where it is deemed normal for many of us to be (possibly severely) sick, from a virus whose long-term effects – and the effects of repeated reinfection – we still know little about.
Once again, the plight of the vulnerable is deployed to justify indefinite restrictions on everyone – a logic which would destroy most freedoms given the opportunity, as we have seen in the last two and a half years.
There will be few greater casualties though than the 3.7 million clinically extremely vulnerable people, especially the 500,000 who are immunocompromised and can’t get much or any benefit from a booster jab. Trying to avoid the virus in a country that has forgone all safety measures means risking your life when you pop to the shops. Ministers who are content for repeated coronavirus infection to just become part of British life are content for isolation to be part of clinically vulnerable people’s.
What does Ryan propose? The reinstatement of free lateral flow tests – as though there isn’t an economic crisis on, and we haven’t spent enough over-testing ourselves for colds; the return of the legal requirement to isolate for those with a positive test – a measure extremely disruptive to education, employment, health care and everything else; and financial help such as sick pay for those isolating – more magical money. Plus more of the vaccines she has acknowledged don’t work for long.
And, inevitably, masks: “Wearing masks in busy and enclosed spaces again is the right thing to do; just under half of Britons (48%) reported wearing a face covering when outside their home last month, down from about 95% during the January Omicron wave.”
From a sceptical point of view, it’s depressing that nearly half of people still say they’re wearing a mask – though since far fewer than half the people I see out and about are actually wearing a mask, this poll probably reveals more about the biases of polls (and what people say to them) than the reality on the ground.
Then Ryan lays it on thick:
Unless we wish to sign up to getting repeatedly sick for the foreseeable future, and to the risk of long-term disability from long Covid, we are going to have to bring back low-effort protective measures to curb it. A recent public health campaign in Ireland, which encourages people to think of clinically vulnerable people in their daily interactions, shows how easy it is to do things differently.
Former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam recently said the rise in infections was nothing to worry about and that even he had stopped wearing his face mask. But will he think again now, if respectable opinion starts to shift in the direction Frances Ryan and others would like?
Let’s hope this is just an anomalous op-ed and not the start of a trend. After all, if this is what they’re saying in June, what will they be saying in December?
France to Extend Vaccine Passport Entry Requirement Until March 2023
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 29 2022
France is planning to extend its vaccine passport scheme obliging travellers to present proof of vaccination, proof of recovery or negative test results upon arrival at the borders of France until at least the end of March 2023. Schengen Visa News has more.
A leaked draft law published by the French media Atlantico, the authenticity of which has later been confirmed by the French Ministry of Health, shows that the country is planning to set up a border scheme through which travellers over the age of 12 reaching the territory of France, Corsica and overseas territories would have to show proof they are immune [sic] to COVID-19.
The same document also foresees the extension of the SI-DEP computer files results of screening tests and Contact Covid (infected people and contact cases) until March 31st, next year.
According to the Ministry of Health, the preliminary draft bill “will be the subject of discussions, before its presentation to the Council of Ministers, with the political forces”.
The bill comes at a time when the country is experiencing an increase in the number of cases, with a total of 342,504 new cases registered in the last seven days alone and 270 deaths within the same period, data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show.
The spike in the number of cases has occurred in spite of the vaccination rates in the country. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), 80.4% of the French population are vaccinated with at least the first dose, 78.1% with the second dose, and 59.2% with a booster or additional COVID-19 vaccination dose.
The bill comes following a vote in the European Parliament last week to approve an EU Commission proposal to renew the EU Digital Covid Certificate for another year.
The EU countries which, like France, still have COVID-19 travel restrictions are Spain, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovakia.
Have none of them noticed that vaccination does not prevent infection or transmission? Why are they hobbling their economy and undermining freedom by restricting visitor entry for a policy which has not been shown to achieve any benefit at all?
German journalist in Donbass could face prison at home
Samizdat | June 29, 2022
Alina Lipp, an independent German journalist and blogger is facing a criminal probe at home over her “endorsement” of Russia’s “illegal aggressive war” against Ukraine. Lipp has told Russian media she only does what any journalist would do – document what is happening around her.
If found guilty, she could face a fine or up to three years behind bars.
On Saturday, RT DE interviewed Lipp about her professional work and the ongoing investigation.
The journalist contended that she is “doing interviews with people in Donetsk and merely translating them into German.”
“I am simply filming everything I see around,” Lipp added.
She inquired rhetorically “what is it that’s illegal in that, or dangerous?” The journalist insisted that none of her materials had been staged, and that there is no one telling her what to cover.
Lipp dismissed the German authorities’ investigation as “completely insane.”
When asked by the RT DE journalist whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was secretly commissioning her reports from Donbass, Lipp replied in the negative, adding jokingly “still not.”
The woman also lamented that a number of conspiracy theories have been spread about her.
One of those, according to Lipp, dates back to November 2021, when she sold three of her minute-long videos to “some Russian TV channel” that did not have its own correspondent on the ground. Lipp insisted that this was common practice among independent journalists who “sell their material to various buyers.”
This alone does not automatically prove that such a person takes orders from someone or “works for a Russian propaganda channel,” Lipp argued.
According to the German news website t-online, Germany’s law enforcement believes Lipp has been “constantly showing her solidarity with Russia’s war against Ukraine,” as well as fomenting a split in German society.
Her reporting was described by the authorities as “distorted, partially false.” She is also accused of spreading other outlets’ “completely fabricated” stories.
The probe was originally launched by the German public prosecutor’s office in Luneburg following multiple complaints, which have been filed since February. However, the prosecutor’s office in Gottingen, which specializes in internet hate crimes, has reportedly since taken over Lipp’s case.
According to t-online, Lipp, who was born to a German mother and a Russian father, has been living in Donetsk and Crimea since last fall. She runs a German-language news blog called ‘News from Russia,’ as well as a Telegram channel with over 174,000 followers and a video channel on PeerTube.
Since the start of the investigation, Germany’s DKV-Bank has seized the donations Lipp has received, with €1,600 ($1,679) said to be frozen from her account, according to t-online.
PayPal, too, has blocked her account, as well as that of her father, Lipp revealed in one of her earlier interviews.
Climate Lockdowns Are Here
By Patrick Macfarlane | The Libertarian Institute | June 28, 2022
In a development that has been widely broadcast for decades (to those tuned to the correct frequency), Western countries have begun implementing the next step in the government-by-emergency manual.
Indeed, once the public allows government to immolate its rights to freedom of association and freedom of movement, those rights are never again absolute.
Last week, local officials in Bordeaux, France banned outdoor events due to heat advisories, citing public “health risk.” The new regulations forbid “[c]oncerts and large public gatherings… until the end of the heat wave.” But not to worry! “Private celebrations, such as weddings, will still be allowed.” (Emphasis added).
The BBC notes that these heat advisories are the product of man-made global warming. It advises:
Climate change is causing global temperatures to rise. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, released into Earth’s atmosphere in large volumes are trapping the sun’s heat, causing the planet to warm. This has brought more extreme weather, including record-breaking high temperatures across the world.
In recent weeks, the global heatwave has allegedly caused everything from wildfires to water and energy shortages. Amid “Putin’s price hike,” the warm weather has caused countries to ration energy via fuel and electricity limitations.
For instance, Breitbart reports that Ireland is planning COVID-style lockdowns in the event heat waves increase demand amid an attempted rejection of Russian energy.
Americans are not exempt. In December 2020, President Biden called climate change “a crisis” saying, “[w]e need a unified national response to climate change we need to meet the moment with the urgency it demands, as you would during any national emergency.”
In a January 2021 interview with CBS, Biden’s climate change tsar, Gina McCarthy framed her administration’s approach to this “crisis.” Her carefully-constructed word choice should be familiar to anyone who has studied the technocratic class’ COVID agenda:
This is a whole of government approach… we have to pay attention to science and facts. It’s a future that says we’re going to base our decisions based on real evidence, and that we recognize that climate change is a catastrophe.
In a perfect example of how government and the new media work together to advance a common agenda, the CBS interviewer helped Ms. McCarthy frame the issues:
People don’t often think about climate change as an opportunity. But it is an opportunity to reshape our future into a better future, economic, health-wise, our society in general. What are some of the biggest initiatives you’ve planned to move forward?
Ms. McCarthy’s responses to this prompting included predictable policy that will dramatically lower the standard of living of people everywhere. This includes a transition from fossil fuels to “clean energy,” massive government spending, government intervention in the economy, and elimination of systemic racism in a policy referred to as “climate justice.”
Whether the day’s hobgoblin be climate change, the Hitlerian Vladimir Putin, or the common cold, one thing is certain: government-by-emergency is bringing us closer to a waking dystopia.
Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at http://www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick.macfarlane@libertyweekly.net
Bobbie Anne Flower-Cox | Session 108: fiat iustitia
ATTORNEY AT LAW BOBBIE ANNE FLOWER-COX INTERVIEWED BY REINER FUELLMICH AND VIVIANE FISCHER (June 10, 2022)
Guest:
Bobbie Anne Flower-Cox – Attorney at Law, New York with focus on representing New Yorkers on
matters pertaining to over-reaching government agencies or departments.
About:
As an attorney in NY and during this year she has been in a lawsuit against Governor Kathy Hochul and the NY Dept of
Health over their illegal “isolation and quarantine camp” regulation.
This regulation allows the government to take someone out of their home, quarantine them just because they assume
they have been exposed to a disease, and they don’t even have to prove that the person really has a disease.
They can even remove just one person from a family unit!
The Corona Committee was founded on the initiative of attorney and economist Viviane Fischer and attorney Dr. Reiner Fuellmich. It is conducting a review of evidence on the Corona crisis and measures.
Learn more about the committee:
https://corona-investigative-committee.com
Anonymous tips to the Corona Committee:
https://securewhistleblower.com
Dr. Reiner Fuellmichs english Telegram channel:
https://t.me/s/ReinerFuellmichEnglish
Tor:
http://2hfjtvg32qm6kjo2esoqu3djhc6xctn2wofnkrpc4vjez47a5wei44qd.onion
Only through your donation the work of the Committee is possible:
https://corona-investigative-committee.com/donate/
The Long Arm of the Covid Saga
By Gabrielle Bauer | Brownstone Institute | June 28, 2022
With the emergency phase of the pandemic behind us, the Covid alarmists don’t have much material left to work with—but doomsaying abhors a vacuum.
Enter long Covid, the perfect object of fear because it can never be disproved. You can hold it responsible for any symptom you develop after the acute phase of the illness, whether weeks or years down the road. Tired? Long Covid. Forgot where you put your keys? Long Covid. Breathless after climbing a flight of stairs? Long Covid, no doubt. It’s an unfalsifiable diagnosis, a fearmonger’s wet dream.
If I sound flippant, it’s because the past two and a half years have left me just a tiny bit wary of the human propensity for panic. As we’ve all discovered, a panicked populace will accept—or rather, demand—any and all restrictions on basic rights and freedoms. If we allow long Covid to become the new panic button, these restrictions could stretch into an indefinite future.
For the record, I’m not suggesting that long Covid doesn’t exist. I don’t wish to dismiss the suffering of affected people. My beef isn’t with individuals, it’s with public health messaging that keeps pumping fear into an exhausted and confused populace that has lost the capacity for rational risk assessment. I’m suggesting that we put long Covid in perspective so it doesn’t become the next pretext for putting our lives on hold.
Media Magnification
We certainly can’t count on a balanced perspective from legacy media and the experts they enlist: fear generates clicks, retweets, and ad revenue. “There’s no one who is too young and healthy to not go on and get post-acute COVID syndrome,” says New York rehabilitation therapist David Putrino in Parade magazine, doing his part to ensure everyone stays scared.
In a New York Times article titled “This is really scary: kids’ struggle with long Covid,” National Institutes of Health researcher Avindra Nath warns of the impact of long Covid on children’s development. “They’re in their formative years,” he says. “Once you start falling behind, it’s very hard because the kids lose their own self-confidence too. It’s a downward spiral.”
One can’t help contrast this solicitude with the lack of media concern about the effect of school closures and long masking on child development. Just saying.
Long Covid alarmists also compete for airspace in the Twitterverse, with professional fearmonger Eric Feigl-Ding predictably leading the charge. From his May 20 tweet: “Let this sink in. A billion people could suffer long Covid in the next 3 years.” True to form, he can’t resist inserting some chest-beating into his scare story. “The burden of long Covid will likely be much higher than anyone imagined. And yet very few care enough to mitigate transmission. And that makes me sad.”
It’s not just health professionals who spit out such tweets. Software developer Megan Ruthven exhorts us to reactivate the stop-the-spread program of 2020, this time to “prevent hospital collapse due to long Covid.” For exactly how long? According to a dude called Xabier Oxale, as long as it takes. “Let’s look at Long Covid, and then, only then, you can assure that a strain is less severe. For that, you need months, even years. As they don’t know, cautionary principle must prevail. Covid Zero!” That’s right, folks. Covid Zero is back.
Then there’s Charlos, who decries the government’s inaction in the face of long Covid, which he dubs “the greatest mass disabling event in human history.” The ampersand-loving Mx. Charis Hill, meanwhile, points the guilt screws right at you and me. “You may be personally willing to risk an infection & Long Covid & the loss in financial stability that will cause. But what if you get Covid, give it to your spouse/child/parent/sibling, & they become permanently disabled? Because of you?”
If these Tweets don’t strike terror in your heart, you have only to read the June 7 blog post by the People’s Pharmacy. “Long Covid is common and scary!” reads the headline, followed by “long Covid is nasty!” in the subhead. Further along in the article, we learn that the “brain and body both react to Covid!” Not one to give up on exclamation marks, the author warns us again that “the body is also impacted!”
It’s time to slow the spin, I say. Let’s start with some numbers.
All over the map
Studies on the prevalence of long Covid have yielded wildly discrepant results, which alone should cast doubt on the scariest numbers. Some researchers estimate that fewer than 10% of Covid infections progress to long Covid, while others peg the rate at more than half. In children and adolescents, the reported prevalence swings even more widely—between 4% and 66%, according to a review of 14 studies. To make things still more confusing, long Covid symptoms can also occur after influenza, though with less frequency.
So what and whom are we to believe? When in doubt, it never hurts to look at large, well-controlled studies, which by design carry the greatest statistical weight. A UK analysis of over 50,000 subjects, both with and without a history of Covid infection, suggests that long Covid may not live up to its cataclysmic media portrayal. In its report on the study, the UK’s Office of National Statistics states that 5% of previously infected subjects reported at least one common long Covid symptom 12 to 16 weeks later. The twist: “[The] prevalence was 3.4% in a control group of participants without a positive test for COVID-19, demonstrating the relative commonness of these symptoms in the population at any given time.”
There it is, straight from the ONS: at any point in time, more than 3% of random people on the street experience the nonspecific symptoms that characterize long Covid, such as fatigue, headaches, and poor concentration. A similar picture emerged from a controlled Danish study of pediatric long Covid, involving over 44,000 subjects and published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
A substantial minority of previously infected children reported long Covid symptoms—but so did their non-infected counterparts, at a lower rate deemed “statistically significant but not clinically relevant.” While this doesn’t disprove the existence of long Covid, it does invite skepticism about the sky-high prevalence figures reported in some studies.
Symptoms attributed to long Covid are also all over the map, from hallucinations and hair loss to menstrual changes and penile shrinkage. Allergic reactions, peeling skin, joint pain… the list goes on. But here’s the thing: we can’t conclusively pin any of these symptoms on long Covid. As a McGill University report on long Covid symptoms concedes, “Noticing something after getting sick with a virus does not automatically imply that it was caused by the virus.” In a nutshell, long Covid remains a slippery eel, adept at eluding our grasp.
What we don’t know
There’s something else we don’t know, and it’s the hottest of hot potatoes: whether situational or psychological factors could explain some long Covid symptoms. Relax, people. I’m not suggesting it’s all in the head. All I’m saying is that a symptom can spring from more than one source, and experts agree.
A Johns Hopkins expert report on the origin of long Covid symptoms allows that mental health problems can arise from “unresolved pain or fatigue, or from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after treatment in the intensive care unit.”
Along similar lines, a Globe and Mail article notes the challenge of untangling “which [post-Covid symptoms] can be attributed to long COVID and which are the result of hospitalization, since a lengthy stay can itself cause a host of physical and mental health problems.”
I repeat: I am not negating the existence of long Covid. I am not denying it can cause pain and suffering. I support research and public investment into the phenomenon. I’m simply saying that we need to drop the sky-is-falling pronouncements and replace them with more balanced and hopeful messaging.
Above all, we need to avoid turning long Covid into the new Scary Thing, the monster in the closet that leads a frightened public to demand longer and harsher restrictions on living. No level of protection is worth going through that exercise again.
Gabrielle divides her time between writing books, articles, and clinical materials for health professionals. She has received six national awards for her health journalism.
California bill 2273 would require websites and apps to verify visitors’ ID
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | June 28, 2022
California’s bill CA AB 2273, designed to enact the Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) is just one among the bills raising concerns in terms of how they might negatively affect the web going forward.
Like their counterparts in the EU, legislators in California, according to their critics, present online child safety as their only goal – and a stated desire to improve this is hard to argue with, even when arguments are valid – such as that the proposed bills may in fact do nothing to better protect children, while eroding the rights of every internet user.
Among other things, AB 2273 aims to require sites and apps to authenticate the age of all their users before allowing access. Attempts to introduce mandatory age authentication have also cropped up in other jurisdictions before, but have proven controversial, technically difficult to implement, with a high potential to compromise user data collected in this way, and intrusive to people’s privacy.
In California, the situation doesn’t look much different as critics of this bill say that authentication will require site operators and businesses to deal with personal data collection from every user, and worry about using and storing it securely.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
In addition, some kind of government-issued ID – or surrendering biometric data such as that collected through facial recognition – is necessary to prove one’s age in the first place; and this is where forcing sites and services to require this information would effectively mean the end of anonymity online.
As ever, this is a threat that is disproportionately felt by vulnerable categories of internet users such as various dissidents, contrarians, minorities, as well as whistleblowers and activists. And, the right to remain anonymous online also ties in with First Amendment protections in the US.
Anonymity is under threat considering that age authentication would be imposed on all internet users, and it also means that the way people use the internet today would change for good from the user experience point of view, with “age authentication walls” raised by websites. On top of that, the verification would have to be persistent (or require users to repeat the process each time they access a site or service), further aggravating privacy and data security concerns.
2022 is the year of US (midterm) elections, so focusing on this type of “feelgood” legislation, such as making children safe, is a way politicians are expected to pander to their constituencies, regardless of all the “unintended consequences” or even the low likelihood that the scheme could be efficiently implemented, purely from the technical point of view.
In other words, these proposals are not properly thought through or debated, and aren’t even based on particularly successful attempts to square the same circle elsewhere in the world. The AADC is said to be inspired by UK’s Children’s Code, aka, Age Appropriate Design Code, which is a set of standards.
With the California proposal, the scope of issues covered by the bill is of particular concern to its critics. Privacy and safety of children are only one direct component, with others reaching as far as content moderation and consumer protection in general.
This raises fears among those critical of the bill that broad regulation of the internet could be introduced thanks to a seemingly innocuous act, in effect giving California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) new powers that would allow it to start acting as the state’s overall internet regulator.
And the CPPA is seen as an agency that is neither interested nor competent enough to strike the right balance between a number of sensitive issues that would be covered by the new law, while at the same time getting the chance to usher in more censorship.
US federal legislation that deals with the same issue, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) kicks in when online services are aware that their users are younger than 13; with the CPPA, these services are expected to assess when it is “reasonable to expect” a child – under 18- might be accessing them.
The plan is currently for the act to become law and be enforced to enact the AADC starting July 1, 2024, but the current wording of the draft leaves it unclear who exactly, and how it would be enforced.
Critics warn that among those considered in California this year, AB 2273 is a bill of particular concern, given the possible consequences.
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From the Archives
Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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