Ottawa announces police checkpoints for Canada Day
TCS WIRE | June 24, 2022
The City of Ottawa has announced several restrictions for Canada Day, including a motor vehicle control zone with police checkpoints to ban protesters’ vehicles.
“Getting around downtown on Canada Day will be more complicated than usual this year,” a City of Ottawa news release reads.
Unsurprisingly, the motor vehicle control zone only applies to roads leading to or surrounding Parliament Hill — an apparent attempt by City officials to prevent another Freedom Convoy incident, even if they don’t state so outright.
As per the news release, the motor vehicle control zone will be in place from June 29 to July 4 and will affect travel within the city in several ways.
Firstly, all vehicles belonging to people taking part in any form of demonstration, event, protest, or rally are outright banned from going near Parliament Hill, while local and business traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit will be permitted to move through the control zone freely.
Moreover, those who do not comply with the protester vehicle ban will face ticketing, and “barricades, heavy equipment, or police officers and vehicles will be at various access points surrounding the control zone, to filter lawful traffic onto those streets.”
It isn’t clear how a demonstrator’s vehicle will be distinguished from someone just looking to go to a shop, other than obvious freedom signs.
Signage will also be posted in the motor vehicle control zone that prohibits street parking and stopping.
Additionally, while authorities plan to lift the control zone on July 4, they say they have no problem extending the control zone “should conditions warrant it.”
As for July 1, the City says there will be additional restrictions:
“Some roads within the control zone will be closed to all traffic from 12:01 am on July 1 until 2 am on July 2. There are also some pedestrian and bicycle restrictions.”
Before this latest announcement, the Canadian Press reported, “An Ottawa police officer says this Canada Day will be “unprecedented and unique” with a never-before-seen security posture as the main events take place off Parliament Hill, and protests are planned throughout the day.”
“Police are aware of the demonstrations and are “planning accordingly,” said the officer.”
We now know what those plans entail.
Canada Heritage also announced that they would not allow Canadians to participate in the annual Canada Day celebration at Parliament Hill due to construction after two years of cancelling it due to COVID.
They added that the Canada Day party, which usually sees thousands flock to Ottawa, is being moved to the LeBreton Flats approximately 1.5km Westwards.
As for the planned demonstrations, there are several protests against the remaining COVID mandates planned for Canada Day, which are expected to be attended by many Freedom Convoy protesters from February.
Additionally, this is the same day CAF veteran James Topp will complete his cross-country march to the capital city.
Journalist Andy Lee has also stated she plans to host a campout on Parliament Hill despite the ban and has given police a heads up.
French Elections, Round 2: What Actually Happened?
Resisting the Intellectual Illiteratti | June 24, 2022
As has been reported abundantly by the French and international media, Sunday’s results — with Macron’s party and coalition losing its absolute majority — were indeed momentous and have the potential to restore a balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government. (The French courts, as I’ve mentioned before, are almost a lost cause when it comes to performing the duties of judicial review, and in my view there is no point in including the judiciary in the French checks and balances model anymore).
But I think caution is still called for too. There is no reason to assume that immediate reversals or changes to the worst laws of the recent past will be forthcoming or are guaranteed at any point. Just as we have seen in the US in recent congressional votes of generational-defining importance, ideological or partisan differences don’t usually make much, if any, difference when the result is ordained in advance by the executive and consent is manufactured dutifully by the media.
I think it’s also important to recall that while it is true that it has the last word in the lawmaking process, the lower house in France, L’Assemblée Nationale, needs only a relative majority for a bill to become law. Except for amendments to the constitution, where an absolute majority of members is required to be present, there is no minimum number of deputés that have to be in attendance for a bill to be voted on. If only 5 members happen to be in the lower chamber when a vote is held and 3 vote in favor, the proposed legislation passes.
I mention these facts not to be a killjoy but rather to draw attention to the fact that throughout the coronavirus delirium (which continues, albeit in muted fashion, in France), the French Parliament first voted, in early 2020, with an overwhelming majority and across partisan lines, to declare a state of emergency and confer dictatorial powers to the president. For the following two years, every time the parliament had an opportunity to revoke or limit those powers by, for instance, ending the state of emergency, it not only didn’t do so, but actually went on to codify the worst of the totalitarian covid restrictions, for example, ushering in legalized discrimination with health passes and later, vax passes.
And while it is true that the entirety of the far-left and far-right minorities in the lower house proclaimed themselves opposed to the post-lockdown measures such as health and vax passes, when it was time to put their money where their mouths were, most did not even bother to show up to vote. On two of the most important votes held over the last year, concerning a law that would require the use of health and vax passes for access to transport and places of leisure and culture, as well as to hospitals and retirement homes, Macron’s ruling party’s presence was so weak in the lower house that had every member of the far-left and right oppositions actually made the trip to vote (or voted by proxy), the bills would not have passed. One wonders if the exemptions they enjoyed, as members of Parliament, from the coercive, live-ruining measures that are health and vax passes had anything to do with their being largely absent from the votes.
Either way, the fact that these totalitarian policies didn’t have to become law, that they could have been torpedoed last year, even while the president’s party held an absolute majority in the lower house, doesn’t inspire confidence that they will be done away with now that the balance of power has shifted.
That said, the composition of the recently elected lower house will create many opportunities for the now much larger opposition parties to stop Macron in his tracks. I won’t get into the numbers too much except to say that Macron’s coalition party (which is made up of four centrist parties) is 44 seats shy of the absolute majority necessary to govern unfettered and, having only a relative minority, will need to wheel and deal and seriously compromise in order to get anything it puts foward passed.
At the same time, both Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) won enough seats to significantly expand their power and influence. However, of the two, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally emerged as the clear winner and most powerful single party opposition group. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed chose to form a coalition with three other left-leaning parties in the hopes of acquiring an absolute or relative majority, and while their Nupes coalition won the most seats after the president’s own coalition, it was not enough to secure any majority positions or allow Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party to surpass Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in seats.
On the upside, both far right and far left, having surged in numbers, are now able to call for a motion of censure of Macron’s government, which can lead to a no-confidence vote — a measure Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed promptly resorted to yesterday.
In the case of Marine Le Pen’s far right Rassemblement National, however, having surpassed the critical threshold of 80 seats, her group can now request positions on various important committees, as well as have bills sent to the constitutional court for judicial review. This is a milestone and historic achievement for her much maligned party.
In the case of Mélenchon, as mentioned above, his France Unbowed successfully formed an all-left and left-leaning coalition, which includes the socialist, environmentalist and communist parties. While this coalition won the most seats after Macron’s own coalition, it is believed to be a tenuous alliance in which the individual groups will not see eye to eye on a range of issues. The hope is, however, they will remain united on the most important ones.
The funny thing in all this is that Mélenchon, elected to the lower house in 2017, did not stand for re-election this year in his Marseille district, a seat he would have won handily. It seemed that he bet the house on his coalition pulling off a landslide victory, in which case their numerical superiority in the lower house would force the president to appoint him as Prime Minister. Sadly for Mélenchon (and us), he lost his wager and will now have to direct the operations of his party and coalition from outside the halls of the Assemblé Nationale.
The upshot of all this is that Macron is looking at a Parliament that may not pass any of his upcoming reforms into laws — and he has a pack of the vile things he’d like to ram through. In the short term, the future will not be easy for the impatient monarch. His government is already facing a motion of censure on the 5th of July (introduced Monday by Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed party), and three of his cabinet ministers who were in the running for parliamentary seats lost their bids. According to convention, their unsuccessful attempt to get elected to the lower house while working in the president’s cabinet as ministers will require them to resign from their positions, leaving Macron scrambling to appoint replacements. He will have to do this while also meeting with the leaders of the opposition parties, whom he hopes to begin negotiating with, ahead of the upcoming parliamentary session.
Macron is also under great pressure from the EU in Brussels to continue the EU-wide project of neoliberal reforms. Until now, the French president has had a free hand in pushing through some of the most politically, socially and economically destructive and divisive policies ever seen in modern France, the last two years of totalitarian public health policies and the continued dismantling of France’s public health service being the prime examples. Will he be able to continue? It seems the answer is: yes, but perhaps not so easily.
Macron does have one card left he can play, however; though it’s a risky one: he can dissolve the Assemblée Nationale. Yes, you read that correctly. The constitution of the 5th Republic gives the French president the power to dissolve the lower house and call new elections (which have to be organized within 60 days) if he deems the parliamentary configuration to be an impediment to effective lawmaking. (Can you imagine Biden — or better, Trump — announcing to the house of representatives, after one-too-many government shutdowns, “That’s it — You’re all fired. Everyone out of the capital! We’re gonna have new elections, and we’re gonna get it right this time!”)
Not surprisingly, though, such an un-democratic move is not popular and the last time it was used, by Jacques Chirac in 1997, it blew up in the president’s face when the new vote results were worse than the first time around and forced him to appoint a socialist (and formidable political rival) as Prime Minister. That said, the chattering classes are predicting Macron will indeed resort to this measure at some point in the future. But when?
For us, the main concern remains that of the state of emergency (under which we have been living for two and a half years), which allows Macron to act like a dictator and close businesses, confine people to their homes, impose curfews, force the population to wear facemasks, and make the restitution of these once unconditional rights (to work, to assemble, move and breath freely, etc.) contingent on the injection of experimental drugs that no one needs and only a fraction of the population actually wants.
Though many of its most oppressive measures have been (temporarily) lifted, the state of emergency is still in effect and will remain in effect until July 31 of this year. One of the biggest casualties of the president’s irrational, totalitarian covid policies has been the healthcare workers, 15 thousand of whom (doctors, nurses, orderlies) as well as hundreds of gendarmes, remain suspended from their jobs, without pay, having been deprived of their right to work last September 15th because they refused to take an experimental medicine that, by the government’s own admission, does not prevent transmission of a disease deemed to be a major threat to public health.
Despite the bleak situation, there may be cause for some hope. As mentioned earlier, Macron’s ability to govern by decree is set to end at the end of next month, with the lapsing of the state of emergency. In order to extend it and make possible the return in the fall of vax passes, lockdowns, curfews, travel restrictions, business closures, mask mandates and all the other totalitarian horrors that serve no public health benefit in relation to upper respiratory viruses that spread like the common cold (and therefore can’t be stopped from spreading), but which the leaders of Europe desperately want to retain and make permanent, Macron will need to get a new covid law passed by the parliament before the end of July.
The French president was in fact supposed to present said covid bill at a ministerial meeting today (the first step in the legislative process before the bill reaches parliamentary committees and debates), but had to cancel the meeting because of the aforementioned resignations of three of his ministers. This delay will presumably push the start of the legislative process for this bill back another week. But next week Macron will be out of France on a NATO-related trip, so perhaps it will get pushed back an additional week. When it is eventually presented to the parliament, the bill will need to be debated and put to a vote by the newly elected lower house — and that’s where the rubber should meet the road.
It will indeed be the first and most important test of the new assembly, and one which will no doubt come with an unprecedented amount of pressure and propaganda from Macron and the media. Will the opposition parties finally say no to the president dictator and all his lies and send this disgraceful piece of legislation into the garbage where it belongs? Or will the new Assemblée play ball as the last useless lot did? L’espoir fait vivre, as they say over here.
Postscript:
Europe is slowly transitioning into a bio-security and surveillance state. Tomorrow, the EU parliament is expected to rubber stamp the EU commission’s decision to extend the use of the EU Digital Covid Pass for another year for all travel to and within Europe.
This will mean that, until the end of June 2023, in order to board a plane, train or boat into or within Europe, you will need to show either a negative PCR or antigen tests 24 hours before traveling, a certificate of proof of recovery from covid (which may be valid for 3 months), or proof of experimental injection.
The law reads like a Pfizer press release, and is just as fraudulent and circular in its reasoning. This digital covid certificate measure, we are told, is necessary to ensure the free and safe movement of Europeans within Europe, a right that is guaranteed by the European Union’s various treaties and conventions…but which was illegally taken away two years ago by the European Union.
There are protection rackets that are more sophisticated than this…I don’t understand how Europeans will submit to this for another year. It’s an ominous sign.
@diedsuddenly Dies Suddenly
By Andrew Anglin | Daily Stormer | June 24, 2022
Twitter’s @diedsuddenly has suddenly died. Without warning, I woke up and it was dead for no reason.
All this account was doing was reposting news articles about people who have suddenly died for no reason. As far as I saw, he was not even saying “the vaccine” at all, he was just documenting this developing issue of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” (SADS). The phenomenon is also called “Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome,” as it relates to a cardiac event. The word “arrhythmia” means what it sounds like – lacking in a rhythm, and is typically used in connection to cardiac phenomena involving an irregular heart beat. I don’t think the term is appropriate, as we are usually talking about cardiac arrest or a heart attack in someone without any form of heart disease. A better name would be “Spontaneous Unexplained Deadly Heart Failure Syndrome” (SUDHFDS), but Sudden Adult Death Syndrome is fine. They seem to be using “Arrhythmic” interchangeably with “Adult” for the purposes of confusing the issue, but it does show that these deaths are believed to be related to heart failure.
It’s not a conspiracy theory or tabloid hysteria that SADS is happening. The fact-checkers themselves are admitting it is happening at an increasing rate and simply claiming without evidence that it is not related to the vaccine. Snopes’ argument was simply that young people have been recorded as having had spontaneous unexplained heart failure before the vaccine was distributed, so it can’t be the vaccine.
Snopes does not address the massive increase in these deaths. We are talking about many orders of magnitude. We don’t know how many orders of magnitude, because like with deaths admittedly caused by the vaccine, both the government and media are refusing to keep track. But we see it in the news, because it is happening to famous people or their loved ones. I am not aware of a single case of a celebrity dying in their sleep for no reason. I’ve also never seen this in my personal life, ever. The closest thing to this that I’ve heard of was a hapa friend in Southeast Asia 15 years ago whose healthy 40-year-old mother got sick with dizziness and went to the hospital and died less than 48 hours later. It was extremely bizarre, but it was believed to be from a mosquito-borne virus that causes brain swelling. The Philippines also does not have great emergency care. (For the record, she was in the middle of divorcing her husband, who was a kindly old American guy in his 70s who was himself sick and on the way out. I just sort of assumed it was the wrath of God.) Regardless, there is a very, very big difference between having symptoms of serious illness and then dying than just dying completely randomly in your sleep.
Aside from fact checkers, it is getting relatively little coverage for some reason. One would think that a new disease that is just randomly killing healthy young people would be a pretty major story of interest. This could of course be caused by anything, technically. It could be caused by some unidentified radiation in the atmosphere, it could be caused by 5G, it could be caused by solar activity, it could be related to Havana Syndrome, which the US claims is the result of some kind of sonic beam weapon. There are all kinds of different possible reasons you could come up with that would cause this. But the thing that has changed in the last two years is that people took a vaccine that is confirmed to cause heart complications, including causing life-long heart conditions.
Another point of interest is the fact that so far, everyone who has suffered from this new wave of SADS has received the coronavirus vaccine. For example, the Democrat Congressman whose healthy 17-year-old daughter died in her sleep from SADS bragged about how he was forcing his children to be vaccinated.
There are others we can’t confirm got the vaccine definitively, but they are in positions where they would have been required to, or they are leftists. We’ve yet to see anyone from QAnon get hit with SADS.
Another data point is again: the media is not talking about it. They are not denying that it is happening and that it is unexplained, they are just not bothering to mention it, except to claim without evidence that it’s not the mRNA vaccine. If it wasn’t the vaccine, they would be talking about it.
Now, you have Twitter banning someone simply for compiling the deaths. That means you are banned from talking about SADS, presumably under Twitter’s policy against questioning the vaccine. By banning an account that did nothing but keep a record of SADS, Twitter is tacitly implying that they themselves believe it is caused by the vaccine.
As far as I’m able to tell, the only other possible reason that the media would refuse to proportionally address SADS or that Twitter would ban you from talking about SADS is that they don’t believe it is the vaccine, but they believe it is very easy for someone who doesn’t trust the science to mistake this phenomenon as being a result of the vaccine. That would be a pretty convoluted explanation.
We should really be pressing this issue. I have been trying to think of ways for the vaxed to start openly expressing regret, and anger at being lied to about the deadliness of the virus or the efficacy and safety of the vax. Most people probably just completely shut off if you tell them the vaccine almost certainly took decades off of their lives, and at any point, they could be feeling fine and go to bed and not wake up.
Unlike with the companies that manufactured asbestos (and really every other company of any kind), vaccine manufacturers are totally legally protected from any form of liability, so a class action lawsuit is off the table. But what I’ve been thinking is that people should start demanding that the government do an “Operation Warp Speed Part II,” where they try to find a solution to the damages caused by the vax. If people think they have hope, they are less likely to shut down and not be able to think about it. I don’t really think they have any hope, unless they happened to get shots from a placebo batch (there were a lot of placebo batches, or at least batches with something else in them – there is no other way to explain why the deaths all came from the same batches, while others had none, something that was confirmed in a VAERS database analysis).
The right-wing should be pushing the SADS issue and then demanding that the government research it and find a cure for this and other injuries and deaths happening as a result of Coronavirus Vaccine Syndrome.
Twitter hires ‘alarming number’ of ex-spies – investigation
Samizdat | June 24, 2022
Twitter is hiring “an alarming number” of ex-FBI agents and other former “feds and spies,” independent outlet MintPress News is reporting, after conducting an analysis of employment and recruitment websites.
According to the research, in recent years the company employed “dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.”
“Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace,” MintPress wrote.
It provides several examples of such appointments. FBI veteran Karen Walsh who, according to her Twitter profile, served as a special agent for 21 years, has become a director of corporate resilience at the Silicon Valley-based company. Mark Jaroszewski, Twitter director of corporate security and risk, joined the Twitter team after 20+ years at the FBI.
Central Intelligence Agency and NATO think-tank Atlantic Council have also been named by MintPress as key incubators of personnel for Twitter.
“Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media,” the outlet stressed.
RT has checked open-access social media accounts of Twitter’s top managers and also discovered some former employees of the security services among them – in addition to the ones mentioned in the MintPress investigation.
MintPress News stresses that while Twitter’s HR policy might appear logical – the company hires specialists in the areas it needs – it creates some serious problems, not only for the company, but also for the security agencies and organizations. According to former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who is quoted by MintPress, many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs.
“The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” Rowley said.
MintPress claimed that the fact that Twitter recruits largely from the US national security organizations undermines the company’s claims about its neutrality, as the US government “is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world.”
Another risk is that “the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly,” the outlet states. To prove this claim, the website analyzed a list – compiled by Twitter – of the countries allegedly conducting disinformation campaigns.
“One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these ‘former’ spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations,” MintPress explained.
Twitter adds warning messages to the tweets and accounts of the state-affiliated media of Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, thus mirroring “US hostility” towards these countries, but does not add any warnings to the pages of state-affiliated media of US and its allies, the outlet highlighted.
Ultimately, MintPress found that Twitter is not the only social media platform that’s “cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state.”
“Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress,” it said, adding that the company has also employed former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo as its head of intelligence.
TikTok, according to the outlet, has been “filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department.”
Reddit and various media, including Thomson Reuters and multiple US TV channels have also been actively employing former spies, MintPress News claims.
“One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins,” it pointed out.
The Lockdown Advocacy of Devi Sridhar
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | June 20, 2022
The Covid era gave rise not only to popular mania but also to astonishing intellectual pretension. The experts were everywhere. They had all the answers. They knew for certain that a path never tried in anyone’s lifetimes was the certain way to go in order to control a virus. And this fanatical attachment to one goal caused all other considerations to be pushed aside.
The end of the story was baked in from the start. The experts were proven to have massively exaggerated their prowess and understanding of events. On point after point, their models blew up. The epidemic would end the way they always have, through acquired immunity and endemicity. Nowhere did the methods of the vaunted experts achieve the goal; at best they delayed the end point and created tremendous destruction along the way.
Now there is a problem: how to dial it all back without admitting profound error. This is a particular problem for those who wrote books before the story was complete. And by complete I am referring especially to the tremendous waves of infections that came 20 months after lockdowns were first imposed.
A paradigmatic case is Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. During the pandemic, she became a ubiquitous presence on television for two years both in the UK and the US. Her main message was to advocate and defend lockdowns, masking, mandates, and the entire apparatus of compulsion that characterized the pandemic response in nearly every country in the world. Her message was always geared toward what is called eliminationism or zero Covid.
As a Rhodes scholar in a high prestige position, she was well positioned to be this messenger. She has a compelling way and presents well in the medium. Plus, the message she delivered was the one that earned an official stamp of approval from all mainstream media. She was also a pro at delivering an attitude of disdain toward anyone who dared question the zero Covid story.
Now she has a book out that further elaborates on her point of view. It has the right title: Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World and How to Prevent the Next One. It’s a pretentious title, presuming that she knows for certain that the pandemic was preventable and therefore she should be trusted to tell us what to do next time.
What’s striking is the contrast between the certitude of the body of the book in which she is an unapologetic defender of China-style lockdowns and the afterword, which must have been written only days before the book went to print. Here we have a very different tone, discussed toward the end of this review.
Sadly for her, the book came out just before a wave of new lockdowns came to China that wrecked the lives and liberties of hundreds of millions of people and made an enormous mess of the entire economic mission of the country. She must not have had time to revise the manuscript.
Of China, her book says:
The way China set about eliminating SARS-CoV-2 could be described as draconian. It undertook house-to-house testing and removed individuals to quarantine facilities if they tested positive (sometimes against their will); it used tracking technology to trace 99–100 per cent of those who had had contact with the infected; it locked down entire buildings so individuals could not leave their flats or have free movement; and it constructed completely new hospitals within days…
The Chinese government understood well that the virus moves when people move. So it stopped people moving internally…
The efforts to contain the spread within Wuhan were effective and focused on reducing the R number…
These measures to contain spread worked…
[China showed that] containment strategies (however draconian) could be effective at stopping this respiratory pathogen…
The evidence in February 2020 showed that containment was successful…
Within the span of three months, China had eliminated the virus fully within its borders…
This is the same message she delivered to millions day after day for two years.
We could just stop this review here, observing that none of the above turns out to be true. Currently, China faces an enormous problem. If we are to believe the data, vast swaths of China’s population still lack acquired immunity to Covid. Millions or billions need the exposure, and, as with all places in the world, the result for nearly everyone moderately healthy and not elderly will be recovery. This will happen with or without lockdowns.
President Xi Jinping, however, became convinced either by virtue of his ego or his circle of sycophants that his lockdowns two and a half years ago were his greatest achievement. He was celebrated by the World Health Organization and nearly every country in the world copied his brutal methods of virus suppression. He regarded it then as evidence that the CCP was destined to rule the future, by virtue of its masterful social, economic, and now medical management of society.
So of course the CCP cannot turn back now. He has stated repeatedly that there will be no compromise of the zero Covid stance that both he and Dr. Sridhar have long advocated. He must now either continue to threaten and enact lockdowns or figure out some clever way to back away from the position without admitting past error. He may in fact figure it out at some point.
After all, nearly every other government in the world has finally figured it out. Even under the best of assumptions that lockdowns offer some contribution to mitigate the ill-effects of a pathogen, the costs far outweigh those benefits. And those costs not only include economic, educational, and nutritional ones but also costs in terms of deaths from overdoses, despair, and self-harm from the inevitable demoralization from being treated like a prisoner or lab rat.
So I did read Dr. Sridhar’s book in search of some insight as to why she could have made such a profound error. All I found was a relentless and single-minded attachment to a zero Covid agenda, or some version of it, a genuine belief that the right deployment of human force could somehow make a virus go away. It truly boggles the mind.
The rest of the narrative is utterly predictable.
Countries that locked down are good, especially New Zealand and Australia. Countries that did not are bad, especially Sweden but also the UK and the US after reopening. Countries that kept lockdowns longer are good. Countries that opened up too soon are corrupt and rejecting “the science.” The Great Barrington Declaration is bad. Ramdesivir is good while Ivermectin is bad. And so on.
Her hard-core bias extends even to a rousing defense of Rebekah Jones, the low-level data employee in Florida who wrongly accused the Governor’s office of manipulating data in a case that was later tossed out.
The book is so partisan that she sometimes lets her politics even race ahead of her epidemiological position. For example, and this probably won’t surprise you, she comes to the defense of the George Floyd protests even in the midst of lockdowns:
In late May 2020, I was asked whether protesters were wrong to take to the streets. I replied that racism is also a pandemic, and one that Black Americans feel can’t be swept under the carpet any longer. While clearly mass gatherings during a pandemic are risky, I could understand that people were willing to take this risk in order to effect change for their children and the children of their children. This is how the civil rights movement has attempted to progress racial equality over decades.
In any case, you get the point here. She has a tribe and she wants to be its messenger. Still, I struggled through the entire text to see if I could find insight. This one jumped out at me:
While WHO was at the forefront of press briefings and leading technical and normative guidance to the pandemic, the World Bank had the financial power to help governments respond with key policies, whether through building up health systems and testing, putting in place economic packages to support lockdown measures, or in acquiring and distributing vaccines.
There we go: the World Bank subsidized lockdowns. Fascinating. That I did not know. This is a serious problem that needs to be fixed. How many millions face malnutrition as a result?
So much for the body of the book.
Probably the most telling part of the book is the afterword, written January 2022. Here our author jumps in with the latest information, namely that China had not in fact eradicated the virus and now keeps locking down, which she says is due to inferior vaccines. Within a few paragraphs, she – for the first time in the book – recognizes that even the best vaccines do not stop infection and do not stop the spread..
Whoops. Is she willing to rewrite the entire book in light of this last-minute realization that lockdown eliminationism and even mass vaccination cannot achieve the goal? No. Is she willing to rethink? Perhaps a bit but not enough.
While some say we should adapt normal social relations and mixing for the foreseeable future, I struggle with this line of thought. Humans are social: we need to hug, talk, dance, sing, kiss and be around others. We’re not bears or rhinos or other solitary creatures. We like seeing each other’s faces. And we know that a sense of community and connection are vital to wellbeing too. A holistic approach to public health is vital, and this includes not just people’s mental health but also their ability to pay rent, feed their family, stay warm through the winter and have a meaningful role in society, be that going to church or being part of a glee club. For a certain period of time, altering these made sense, so that we could avoid preventable illness and deaths; allow vaccines to be created, trialled and distributed in 2020 and into 2021; allow clinicians to better understand how to treat COVID-19; and allow a better understanding of transmission and risk.
Again, very interesting, especially because the change in tone from the rest of the book is so sharp. She doesn’t come close to repudiating her entire book – and she still believes that totalitarian measures somehow make sense for a “period of time” – but she does say that she is tired and exhausted and perhaps ready for some rethinking.
“I’ve taken a step back from media work… I’ve been testing several times a week, and, while I cautiously avoid crowded spaces, and wear masks on public transport and in shops, I continue to go to the gym and to hot yoga and to see friends outside or in small groups. I’ve found a sustainable way to live alongside COVID-19 for now… You’ve heard enough from me.
These are hopeful signs. It’s possible that even Devi Sridhar might eventually come to see the error of her ways. Or perhaps like most of the exalted experts who assisted in driving the world into the greatest calamity of the modern era, she will quietly disappear from the op-ed pages and television screens and go back to her prior life as a public health professor with degrees in anthropology. At some point, too, she will get Covid and discover with millions of others that it is part of the human experience to get sick and get well and become stronger as a result.
We will wait in vain for any sort of extended literary mea culpas. Not even the pensive afterword comes close. After all, when the next great health crisis presents itself, the WHO pushes for lockdowns again, and the major media empires need some great excuse to order people back home to be glued to the screen, the expertise of these compelling pundits – now with real media experience – will need to be called upon again.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
The UK Online Safety Bill has laughable free speech and privacy “protections”
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | June 21, 2022
The UK government’s latest push to censor online speech, the 225 page Online Safety Bill, has been roundly criticized by rights groups and proponents who have branded it a “censor’s charter” and “an attack on free speech.”
UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, one of the main proponents of the bill, has pushed back against this criticism by pointing to the bill’s “duties to protect free speech.”
However, these duties and the duties for platforms to protect user privacy are so weak that they have no impact when platforms comply with the bill’s obligations to tackle “harmful” content.
The bill pays lip-service to the idea that platforms should “have regard” to the importance of “protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law” and that they should be “protecting users from a breach of any statutory provision or rule of law concerning privacy.”
But if platforms comply with these over-reaching obligations to tackle this so-called “harmful but legal” speech as outlined in the bill, they will, by default, be at odds with the idea of protecting speech rights and privacy.
The bill itself is the biggest threat to free speech and privacy in living memory and Big Tech platforms have no history of protecting either.
Provisions for privacy should not mean social media monopolists acting as a guardian of user privacy; they should be in place to protect citizens’ data from the platforms themselves.
Not only does the bill have weak free speech protections but it also disproportionately impacts small, independent media outlets, harms privacy, and creates a dystopian censorship alliance between Big Tech companies and the UK government.
You can get a full overview of all the free speech and privacy threats posed by the Online Safety Bill here.
You can see a full copy of the full Online Safety Bill here.
The bill is currently making its way through Parliament and you can track its progress here.
The UK’s shadowy “counter-disinformation unit” has shifted from Covid to war
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 23, 2022
One of the unwanted “gifts” that the pandemic has left the UK is something called “the counter-disinformation unit,” set up by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport.
The task of this unit, according to the country’s lawmakers, is to identify “misinformation” and then “work” with social media companies to make sure this content is removed.
The unit has existed for two years, at first focused on monitoring and taking down Covid-related information it disapproved of, but with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine (and the waning interest in Covid), that conflict is now the group’s focus.
However, the unit’s existence and methods have been marred with controversy, from the lack of transparency to the definition of what constitutes misinformation.
It appears all it takes for UK’s authorities to brand something as misinformation and force tech companies to censor, is that they find it to be “inappropriate.”
MP Chris Philp revealed this during a hearing, shedding some light also into what “working” with social media companies looks like.
“In some cases, ministers have engaged directly with social media firms to encourage them to remove content that is clearly inappropriate,” he is heard saying in the hearing about the proposed Online Safety Bill, the UK’s other major threat to free speech.
All that put together means the government is censoring citizens’ speech at its discretion, as had already been suggested by UK government minister Nadine Dorries.
Dorries – who is in charge of the department that had set up the “counter-disinformation unit” – was earlier this year trying to dispel the fears of those who thought that even as the pandemic handily gave way to the war, the unit had been disbanded.
That is not true, she said, adding that their work takes place “daily, and daily we work to remove that content online.” Dorries described the offending content as that which is harmful or is classed as misinformation or disinformation.
None of these terms, including “inappropriate,” win any prizes for being specific, with the work of the unit itself said to be “opaque,” which has led critics to worry it might end up simply producing censorship.
Twitter censors ads for free speech event
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | June 22, 2022
Yet another casualty of Twitter censorship, The Minds Festival of Ideas, was denied the approval to advertise their upcoming event on the Twitter platform.
The Minds Festival of ideas, a gathering devoted to the unrestricted exchange of viewpoints through a comedic lens, was seeking ad placement for its upcoming event in NYC.
The ad outlined basic details, such as the date, location, sponsor, and headshots of the speakers. The ad also provided a ticket purchasing link and a direct quote regarding the key purpose of the event. Essentially, this quote addressed the mission of Minds in a nutshell: to encourage the free exchange of ideas between individuals. The goal is to foster “productive conversation” and basically to “have a good time together.”
Due to the ad’s basic nature, the public is again calling into question the ethics of Twitter censorship and what it means for the future of free speech for users on the platform.
Bill Ottman, the co-founder of Minds, confirmed that the ad denial occurred “immediately after pressing the submit button on the promotion” when he received what appeared to be a canned rejection email in his inbox. In light of Twitter’s swift response, Ottman expressed doubt that the message was written by a human at all. He further asserted his belief that Twitter provided its response based on “an account restriction or maybe some AI/ML trigger,” further describing the situation as indicative of life in “a dystopia.”
Minds followed up by posting a response to Twitter’s actions on the official Twitter page, proposing that the denial was, perhaps, just a mistake and not a calculated move by the company. These remarks were followed by a brief overview of the Minds Festival of Ideas and how it encourages the respectful exchange of beliefs and opinions among popular speakers, comedians, and influencers in today’s political circuit.
Microsoft Says Russian Media Popular in US, Ukraine Despite Efforts to Reduce Traffic
Samizdat – 23.06.2022
In a move to punish Russia for launching a military operation with a goal to “denazify and demilitarize” Ukraine, Western countries have tried their hardest to target Russian media outlets by reducing their traffic and blocking their social media channels. However, it seems the efforts have proven to be fruitless.
Content produced by sanctioned Russian media outlets Sputnik and RT is still in high demand in the United States and Ukraine despite efforts to curb viewer traffic, Microsoft said.
“Even after all efforts to reduce traffic to Sputniknews and RT.com, consumption of Russian propaganda is still higher than before the war (~60MM per month in the US, on par with the WSJ),” the company said on Wednesday.
Since January 2022, there has been a significant increase in traffic to Russian media websites in the US, according to the report. The peak of Russian media content consumption activity occurred on February 24, when it spiked 82%, Microsoft added.
Sputnik’s International News website boasts more than 40 million hits from January to May 2022. After scoring 5.3 million hits during January, Sputnik’s website exceeded 13 million views in March. Sputnik International’s US-based audience increased from 29% of its entire audience in March to 41.5% in April and 42.9% in May.
The situation in Ukraine has been similar, with the consumption of content Microsoft designated as “Russian propaganda” having grown by 216% since the last week of February, hitting a peak on March 2, the report said. It began to decline afterwards but still remains at a level higher than before the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, Microsoft noted.
On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian forces. In response to Russia’s operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow, which includes airspace closures and restrictive measures targeting numerous Russian officials and entities, news media and financial institutions.
If you don’t want to have a Covid vaccine, get a job enforcing vaccine mandates.
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | June 21, 2022
Last week the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quietly sent round a memo exempting officials from vaccine mandates. Why is this so hypocritical? Well, because the officials they were exempting from the vaccine mandate were officials hired to enforce the very same vaccine mandate.
So it seems the easiest way to get around the vaccine mandate is to get a job enforcing the vaccine mandate.
I’ve probably said vaccine mandate a few too many times now, so here is the memo itself.
The Biden administration first announced the mandates back in August 2021, stating that healthcare and nursing home staff must be COVID-19 vaccinated or lose funding. After legal challenges, different deadlines were imposed with the final deadline occurring on 21 March 2022.
Vaccine mandate deadlines encouraged/forced (take your pick) employees to get vaccinated with uptake rising from 63% to 88% in a number of months. Doctors, nurses and staff who still decided that vaccination was not for them, lost their jobs.
In February, the CMS warned state survey agencies that they must enforce all federal health and safety requirements or lose federal financial support. Although it didn’t explicitly say so, this was widely recognised as a warning to Florida and other states that had said they would not enforce vaccine mandates. Furthermore, the CMS said they would bring in outside surveyors if states did not comply with their directives.
CMS surveyors were given the role of evaluating whether healthcare workers were complying with federal vaccine mandates. They stated that staff vaccination under 100% would constitute non-compliance. However, the extremely reasonable CMS (sarcasm) said that any facility with over 80% of its staff vaccinated would be given 60 days to reach 100% without further action being taken.
Brian Harrison, state representative of Texas and former chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration, said in an interview with Newsmax “This shows that the Biden administration is truly authoritarian and these mandates never had anything to do with public health in the first place, but sadly and tragically, they had much more to do with giving the federal government more control over our lives. These mandates must end.”
Harrison thinks that after the CMS enforced the mandates on its own surveyors, they were unable to live under the same rules. “They couldn’t take it. So instead of taking down the mandate, which would have been the normal common sense solution, they just exempted their own government contractors instead of all the Americans.”
Rules for thee, not for me.
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From the Archives
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
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