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YouTube flags Tulsi Gabbard’s criticism of “military industrial complex” as “inappropriate,” “offensive”

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | March 15, 2022

An interview for Fox News’ “Ingraham Angle,” featuring former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, was censored for being potentially “offensive” and “inappropriate” to some audiences.

In the interview, Ingraham asked Gabbard, “Congresswoman, why are we talking about no-fly zones instead of the fact that for the first time we have President Zelensky stepping back from his earlier NATO wishes and even demands?”

Gabbard expressed her frustration with the fact that allegedly no one was discussing a statement Ukraine’s President Zelensky made, about being “… open to the fact of saying, ‘Hey, yeah, maybe we’ll set this NATO membership thing aside,’ and he’s willing to talk with Putin directly to negotiate.”

Gabbard suggested that the West was interfering with attempts to settle the conflict because, “it’s good for the military industrial complex” and it allowed Western leaders to “have this proxy war with Russia, something that Hillary Clinton laid out just recently.”

Gabbard strongly condemned the war, saying: “This war machine, this power elite in Washington, want to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan, turn into killing fields where this long-term insurgency is supported. And they bleed out and cripple, kill as many Russians as possible for who knows how long, and they’re really showing their real aim in the fact that they’re not taking action right now to end this conflict.”

YouTube flagged the video, putting up a filter that said, “the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

March 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

DHS increases efforts to identify “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” on social media

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | March 14, 2022

Last Spring, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas ordered an internal review to identify how to best detect, prevent, and respond to threats related to domestic violent extremism within the department.

A component of this was based on online activity. “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult,” the unclassified initial report stated.

The report (obtained here) said that extremists, “exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials that contribute to radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

One of the recommendations is to increase “efforts to better identify and evaluate mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) with a homeland security nexus, including false or misleading conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms that endorse violence.”

While not directly stated, it was inferred that the DHS was in some way monitoring online activity. Obviously, some privacy and free speech concerns were raised.

And now, this month, the DHS has released a report with the findings of the review.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

“Every day, the more than 250,000 dedicated public servants at DHS work to ensure the safety and security of communities across our country. To ensure we are able to continue executing our critical mission with honor and integrity, we will not tolerate hateful acts or violent extremist activity within our Department,” said Mayorkas.

“The findings of this internal review highlight key steps that our Department will continue to take with urgency to better prevent, detect, and respond to potential internal threats related to domestic violent extremism, and protect the integrity of our mission.”

The report stated its previous report had highlighted that topics such as allegations of fraud in the 2020 election and “conspiracy theories” around Covid-19 would be worth focusing on, adding that the initial report last Spring said that these topics “will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] [sic] to try to engage in violence this year.”

Much of the focus of the DHS has been internal. Among the recommendations is the creation of a department-wide system for investigating and reporting cases related to internal domestic violent extremism.

The report states that the DHS should, when vetting personnel, “explore expanding the use of publicly available information, including social media… to identify or investigate potential violent extremist activity within the DHS workforce.”

It adds, “Studies and pilots have suggested that certain online activity may represent behavior of potential concern to national security and could be useful in assessing an individual’s trustworthiness, judgment, or reliability.”

The document further adds that the “DHS must continue to examine the use of social media and other PAEI [Publicly Available Electronic Information], including within the scope of personnel security vetting, to enhance the Department’s security posture in preventing and detecting violent extremist activity.”

The report also pays lip service to civil liberties, adding that it’s “critical that any study or implementation of social media monitoring is pursued deliberately to protect the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of all individuals,” – but doesn’t say how this can be achieved.

The department has already started implementing the recommendations, including updating its employees’ training modules.

March 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

New Spanish Study Finds That Masking in Schools Does Nothing

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | March 14, 2022

Before ‘The Science’ flipped in the spring of 2020, the consensus among Western epidemiologists was that community masking doesn’t affect the spread of respiratory pathogens like influenza. As Jonathan Van Tam said on April 3rd 2020, “there is no evidence” to support the general wearing of face masks.

Although masks might block large droplets in close-contact settings like hospitals, and thereby slightly lower the risk of transmission, they can’t block airborne particles – which simply go through/around them, and then remain aloft for minutes or even hours.

As a result, large indoor setting like supermarkets, transit stations or classrooms soon fill up with airborne particles – even if everyone’s wearing a mask.

A new Spanish study strongly supports the pre-Covid conventional wisdom that masks don’t stop transmission of respiratory pathogens. The study uses quite a powerful design, which makes its results all the more convincing.

Ermengol Coma and colleagues analysed data on a large cohort of Spanish children aged three to eleven, whom they followed for the first term of the school year from September to December of 2021. During this period, there was a mask mandate in place for children in primary school (aged six and up) but not for those in pre-school (aged three to five).

Hence the researchers compared outcomes between children aged five (who were not subject to the mandate) and those aged six (who were subject to the mandate).

This constitutes a relatively well-controlled comparison, given that the two groups differ by only one year in age. In other words, since six-year olds are only one year older than five-year olds, you wouldn’t expect the rate of transmission to differ much between them for reasons other than the mask mandate.

The researchers estimated the incidence of Covid, the secondary attack rate and the R number separately for the two groups. If mask mandates work, you’d expect all these quantities to be higher among the five-year olds. However, the researchers found no statistically significant differences between the two groups.

What’s more, they found a strong positive association between measures of transmission and age across all the age-groups in their sample. In other words, transmission was higher among older age-groups, despite the fact that these groups were subject to the mask mandate, whereas the younger ones weren’t.

Ermengol Coma and colleagues’ findings suggest that mask mandates do essentially nothing to reduce the spread of Covid. And given that masks plausibly impede both learning and social interaction, on top of being uncomfortable, there’s no good reason for children to wear them. Indeed, the fact that they were ever made to is a scandal.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

A Pandemic is Not a War

By Steve Templeton | March 11, 2022

A number of people have said it, but — and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president. This is a war. This is a war. A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.

-Donald Trump, Former President of the United States

We are at war. All the action of the government and of Parliament must now be turned toward the fight against the epidemic, day and night. Nothing can divert us.

-Emmanuel Macron, President of France

This war – because it is a real war – has been going on for a month, it started after European neighbors, and for this reason, it could take longer to reach the peak of its expression.

-Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of Portugal

We are at war with a virus – and not winning it.

-Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General

We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.

-Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The president said this is a war. I agree with that. This is a war. Then let’s act that way, and let’s act that way now.

-Andrew Cuomo, Former Governor of New York

You get the picture. Leaders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic really wanted us to think of ourselves as combatants possessing a civic duty to fight an insidious, unseen enemy. They wanted us to think that victory was possible. They wanted us to understand that there would be casualties, and collateral damage, and to steel ourselves for the inevitable enactment of broad and unfocused policies that would keep us safe, no matter the cost.

This isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. Politicians love to use war as a metaphor for just about every collective enterprise: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer. They understand that war provides an incomparable motivation for people to make sacrifices for the greater good of their countries, and when they want to harness some of that motivation, they pull out all the metaphorical stops.

Leaders have been searching for a “moral equivalent of war” for a very long time. The idea was introduced by psychologist and philosopher William James in a speech at Stanford in 1906 that has been credited for inspiring the creation of national projects such as the Peace Corps and Americorps, both organizations aspiring to “enlist” young people into meaningful, non-military service to their country:

I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

People are willing to do things during a war that they wouldn’t be willing to do during peacetime. During World War II, it was impossible that German bombers would reach the middle of the United States, yet citizens in the U.S. Midwest practiced blackouts to demonstrate their commitment to defeating an enemy they had in common with people far away. People that actually had to sit in the dark at night to be safe.

This was what leaders using war metaphors were asking from their citizens at the start of the pandemic:

The war metaphor also shows the need for everyone to mobilize and do their part on the home front. For many Americans, that means taking social distancing orders and hand washing recommendations seriously. For businesses, that means shifting resources toward stopping the outbreak, whether in terms of supplies or manpower.

However, it wasn’t just social distancing and handwashing—leaders were asking for cooperation for a complete lockdown, a complete suspension of normal life for a short, yet vague and undefined period of time. There was no thought to how this would actually stop a highly contagious virus, or how people would be expected to return to normal life when the virus hadn’t completely disappeared. There wasn’t a desire to mobilize the engines of democracy for war. Instead, there was a mandate to shut them down. Economic production wasn’t maximized, it was minimized.

I was skeptical of the ability of shutdowns to do much good from the beginning, and was very much afraid that panic and overreaction would have serious consequences. I didn’t use war metaphors because it never occurred to me that they would be in any way helpful. Yet when I advocated trying to minimize collateral damage by allowing people who were less vulnerable to severe disease to resume their lives, others criticized that I was for “surrendering to the virus”. The use of war metaphors wasn’t just limited to leaders, but had quickly spread to the broader population.

Some international leaders tried to resist the temptation to use war metaphors, but ultimately failed. After telling the Canadian House of Commons that the pandemic wasn’t a war, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn’t resist: “The front line is everywhere. In our homes, in our hospitals and care centers, in our grocery stores and pharmacies, at our truck stops & gas stations. And the people who work in these places are our modern-day heroes.” Trudeau later also couldn’t resist using extreme measures normally reserved for wartime to quell a protest led by the very truck stop heroes he had once glorified.

War metaphors have their uses, as explained by sociologist Eunice Castro Seixas:

Indeed, the findings of this study show how, within the context of Covid-19, war metaphors were important in: preparing the population for hard times; showing compassion, concern and empathy; persuading the citizens to change their behavior, ensuring their acceptance of extraordinary rules, sacrifices; boosting national sentiments and resilience, and also in constructing enemies and shifting responsibility.

“Constructing enemies and shifting responsibility” would play an important role later on in the pandemic, when extreme and damaging measures didn’t work and politicians resorted to blaming their own citizens for failing to cooperate with damaging and unsustainable measures.

Some academics, like anthropologist Saiba Varma, warned that:

Analogising (sic) the pandemic to a war also creates consent for extraordinary security measures, because they are done for public health. Globally, coronavirus curfews are being used to mete out violence against marginalised (sic) people. From the history of emergencies, we know that exceptional violence can become permanent.

It was obvious that working class and poor individuals would be disproportionally harmed by draconian COVID measures, and that the wealthy, or Zoom class might actually benefit:

We have, for example, already witnessed how people in already quite privileged positions are the ones who have the ability to work from home, which means that they also have more potential to act according to health recommendations, while others run the risk of being dismissed from their work or of their businesses going bankrupt. Then, there are those in positions identified as socially important functions that cannot choose to avoid risks, particularly in the care sector, where the risk of infection is the largest and shortages of protective equipment exist. Last, not everyone has the resources that are required to participate in pandemic self-governance (knowledge of how and when to shop, having people who can help you, the hospital closest to you having enough respirators, etc.).

The authors to the above article, Katarina Nygren and Anna Olofsson, also commented on the criticism of “lax” pandemic response measures in Sweden, noting how the pandemic response in Sweden was vastly different from that of most other countries in Europe because it emphasized personal responsibility rather than relying on government coercion:

Thus, the Swedish strategy to manage Covid-19 has been largely based on the responsibility of the citizens who receive daily information and instructions for individually targeted self-protection techniques by the Public Health Agency of Sweden’s website and press conferences held by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, and other representatives of the government. They continue to underline the importance of all citizens playing their part to stop the virus from spreading and avoiding the enhancement of law enforcement’s restrictions on citizens’ rights as long as possible.

With recommendations rather than prohibitions, the individual becomes the unit of decision making towards whom claims of liability are directed if he or she does not manage to act ethically according to social expectations. This kind of governing of conduct, which has been characteristic of the Swedish risk management strategy during the pandemic thus far, targets the self-regulating individual in terms of not only trust but also solidarity. This type of governing was explicitly made by the prime minister in his speech to the nation on the 22nd of March (speeches that are extremely rare in Sweden) in which he particularly emphasized individual responsibility not only for the sake of personal safety but for the sake of others.

The Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, used precisely zero wartime metaphors in his March 22, 2020 speech to the nation about the COVID pandemic and the response of the Swedish government. Within the next few months, the Swedish response was, rather predictably, viciously attacked by other leaders and media outlets for its failure to conform to the rest of the reflexive lockdown-mandating world. Yet the Swedish strategy has overall not resulted in much higher deaths, currently 57th in COVID deaths per million inhabitants, well below many of its critics.

There were only a few other notable exceptions in the metaphorical blitzkrieg of war imagery by world leaders in their early pandemic speeches. Another was German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who said of the pandemic, “It is not a war. It is a test of our humanity!” The reluctance of a German leader to use a war metaphor for something that is clearly not a war is both understandable and admirable.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was contemptuous of lockdowns and refused to use war imagery in his speeches, making it quite clear that pandemic deaths had no easy collective solution, only hard choices: “Stop whining. How long are you going to keep crying about it? How much longer will you stay at home and close everything? No one can stand it anymore. We regret the deaths, again, but we need a solution.” Not surprisingly, he was widely condemned for these comments.

Interestingly, much of the analysis and criticism of the use of war metaphors for the early pandemic response came from left-leaning outlets, like Vox, CNN, and The Guardian, where journalist Marina Hyde wrote:

As the news gets more horrifyingly real each day – and somehow, at the same time, more unmanageably unreal – I’m not sure who this register of battle and victory and defeat truly aids. We don’t really require a metaphor to throw the horror of viral death into sharper relief: you have to think it’s bad enough already. Plague is a standalone horseman of the apocalypse – he doesn’t need to catch a ride with war. Equally, it’s probably unnecessary to rank something we keep being informed is virtually a war with things in the past that were literally wars.

An article in Vox warned of the consequences of too much power in the wrong hands:

A war metaphor can also have dark consequences. “If we look at history, during times of war, it’s often been the case that war is accompanied by abuses of medicine and the suspension of widespread ethical norms,” Keranen said, citing Nazi use of medicine or other public health trials that have been conducted on prisoners and war resistors over the years. “Especially now, we need to be on guard for this with the clinical trials and other product development that we’re undergoing, so that in our haste to ‘fight’ the disease with a military metaphor, we’re not giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles.”

“Giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles” is arguably exactly what happened in many western nations, yet hard-hitting and often accurate criticism from left-leaning media outlets speaking out against the pandemic as a war view had all but gone silent sometime after November 3rd, 2020. Coincidently, the conflation of a pandemic public health response with a military one has all but been erased by an actual war when Russia invaded Ukraine. An actual war tends to bring perspective back to places where it has been lost rather quickly.

With two full years of hindsight, it’s clear that lockdowns were a disaster and that mandated measures caused more harm than benefit, yet this has not prevented leaders from declaring victory, crediting their own brave and resolute leadership for saving millions of lives and routing the viral enemy. However, SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a real enemy—it doesn’t have an intention other than to exist and spread, and it won’t agree to an armistice. Instead, we will have to live with the virus forever in an endemic state, and skip the victory parades.

There’s no evidence that calling the pandemic what it truly was—a global natural disaster, admitting our limitations for “defeating” it, and calling on people to stay calm and avoid acting in irrational fear, would’ve resulted in a worse outcome. It’s more likely that the collateral damage of broad and unfocused responses would have been avoided in a pandemic-as-disaster scenario. There would be no need to view leaders as military commanders or experts as heroes or high priests of absolute truth. Rather, the humble and rational response that Sweden’s leaders enacted and the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration proposed will be remembered as the least damaging among many others that resulted in failure and defeat on the metaphorical battlefields of public health.

Steve Templeton, PhD. is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Road to Manzanar: The Story of an American Internment Camp

Truthstream Media | March 8, 2022

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PomZQC5_Ch0

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Actual Science is the alternative to the Pan Doctrine

By Toby Rogers | March 12, 2022

As I described in my last article, the California Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee have embraced the Pan Doctrine that is junk-science-eugenic-fascism with the added twist that they want everyone to be chronically ill in order to enrich their largest donors. This particular political machine works right up until the point at which the entire society collapses — which is fast approaching.

So what’s the alternative to the Pan Doctrine?

Actual Science.

What are the elements of actual science in connection with our current debate? These are the principles that came to mind for me but I imagine you’ll be able to add many more:

1. Nullius in verba which means “take nobody’s word for it.” Secondary sources are not a valid epistemology. One must read original source documents. Examine data and evidence. Draw your own conclusions. Think for yourself. Escape information bubbles and transcend dogma. Morality and ethics are vital. Skepticism, disinterestedness, transparency, and rigorous debate are the hallmarks of good science. Reductionism, censorship, and conflicts of interest are fatal to good science.

2. Civil engineers, not vaccines, produced the large gains in life expectancy over the 20th century. About 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among U.S. children occurred before the introduction of mass vaccination campaigns (Guyer et al. 2000). The large gains in life expectancy over the twentieth century were mostly the result of the construction of water and sewer systems, improvements in food safety, hand washing, improvements in housing, and reduced overcrowding in U.S. cities.

3. The best vaccine safety data set in the world shows that all vaccines on the U.S. childhood schedule produce more harms than benefits. The data show that only a few live attenuated vaccines produce more benefits than harms (oral polio, measles by itself, and tuberculosis) in regions where these viruses are endemic. None of those vaccines are available in the U.S. However, all live virus vaccines eventually revert to virulence and cause outbreaks of the disease that they are trying to protect against. The harms from coronavirus shots far exceed any benefits.

4. The human immune system is wondrous, more sophisticated than any man-made product, and not well understood by so-called “experts”. When our bodies need extra support, nature has given us a wide array of tools for treating disease. Community, a sense of connection, and meaning are key to health too. Allopathic medicine has a role to play in emergency treatment but over the long run the largest gains in health often come from lifestyle changes. Toxicants play a huge role in disease but they are poorly studied because government is captured by industry.

5. Science, technology, class, health, sex, wealth, and power are interwoven. From medieval witch trials through today, the wisest healers are often persecuted and the most effective treatments are often suppressed. Pure objectivity is impossible because the observer is always part of the world that is being observed. Science is always changing. Institutions exist to reproduce themselves. The purpose of the pharmaceutical industry is to enrich shareholders. It is essential to take personal responsibility for one’s own health.

Those are my initial thoughts.

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The Global Digital ID Prison

 • 03/12/2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Do you get the feeling digital id is being hyped by every government, corporation, financial institution and globalist-connected NGO as “the way of the future”? Well, you’re right! But why is this being pushed so hard right now. Don’t miss this important edition of The Corbett Report podcast where James lays out the digital ID agenda and how it serves as the linchpin of the entire global enslavement grid.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

SHOW NOTES:
WEF 20 | Accenture: Digital Identity

Digital ID Wallet – Thales

Canadian Bankers Association Promotes Digital IDs And Refers To WEF #TheRayzorsEdge

EUROPEAN DIGITAL IDENTITY – message by President Von Der Leyen

Digital iD™ – a simpler way to verify

Digital identity – weighing the risks of misuse and missed use | Dakota Gruener | TEDxMarrakesh

id2020.org

Who Is Bill Gates?

Bill Gates at the Financial Inclusion Forum, December 1, 2015

March 2020: Known Traveller Digital Identity Specifications Guidance

Nov 2020: A billion people have no legal identity – but a new app plans to change that

Jan 2021: How digital identity can improve lives in a post-COVID-19

2022: Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries

You Are Being Programmed to Accept the Global ID Control Grid

UN SDGs – The 17 Goals

Episode 357 – Language is a Weapon

Episode 261 – International Law?

World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab on the Fourth Industrial Revolution

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

$1.5 trillion federal spending bill allocates $2.6 billion to programs that fight “disinformation” and “hate”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | March 11, 2022

The huge $1.5 trillion US federal spending bill, that’s expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden today, allocates over $2.6 billion to “Democracy Programs” and requires these programs to combat “the misuse of social media to spread disinformation or incite hate.”

This requirement is buried deep into the 2,741 page bill on page 1,408 and is part of the “Title VII General Provisions” of the “Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2022.”

The bill states: “Democracy programs supported with funds appropriated by this Act… should, as appropriate… include… efforts to combat weaponized technology, including the misuse of social media to spread disinformation or incite hate.”

While this is the main requirement in the bill related to disinformation, there’s also another reference to disinformation on page 1,848 that states:

“Funds appropriated by this title under the heading “Economic Support Fund” may be transferred to, and merged with, funds available under the heading “Diplomatic Programs” for activities related to public engagement, messaging, and countering disinformation.”

The “Economic Support Fund” heading makes $6.47 million available until September 30, 2024 while the “Diplomatic Programs” heading makes $125 million available until September 30, 2024 with the provisions that up to $15 million “may be transferred to, and merged with, funds available under the heading “‘Capital Investment Fund”’ for cybersecurity and related information technology investments” and that the funds “shall be made available, as appropriate, to enhance the capacity of the Department of State to identify the assets of Russian and other oligarchs related to the situation in Ukraine, and to coordinate with the Department of the Treasury in seizing or freezing such assets.”

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The way the final text of this massive spending bill was released in the middle of the night, hours before a final vote, has been criticized by numerous US politicians.

The final text of the bill was published just before 3 am Eastern Standard Time (EST) on Wednesday morning and the final vote for the bill in the US House of Representatives was set for 1:30 pm EST on Wednesday, giving representatives less than 11 hours to read the final text before voting.

A day later, the final vote for the bill in the US Senate was held, giving Senators around 24 hours to read the nearly 3,000 pages in the bill.

“Literally in the DARK OF NIGHT, the Democrat controlled Rules Committee met at 1:30 am – 2:30 am and passed the HORRENDOUS $1.5 TRILLION Omnibus bill,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted. “They did NOT tell anyone or announce this debate on the bill until after midnight! We woke up to 2,741 pages and we vote today!”

Senator Rand Paul added: “Do you think there is a single person in the U.S. who believes that Congress is filled with speed readers capable of digesting thousands of pages in a matter of hours? The 2741-page omnibus with a $1.5 trillion price tag that was released in the middle of the night is a perfect example of why Congress needs time to read the bills.”

This isn’t the first time a huge spending bill has been used to push new online rules. In December 2020, a controversial copyright reform that proposed up to 10 years in prison for “unauthorized streaming” was buried 2,540 pages deep in the 5,593 page “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021.” Despite its huge length, this bill passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump within six days.

The addition of requirements to fight online disinformation in this federal spending bill is the latest of many examples of the federal government targeting online speech. The Biden White House has admitted that it flags content for Facebook to censor and proposed that If you’re banned for “misinformation” on one platform, you should be banned from ALL platforms. Members of Congress have also threatened to hold Big Tech companies “accountable” if they don’t censor misinformation.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

RT America’s Demise is a Loss for Free Speech and Diversity of Information

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | March 12, 2022

The United States government is busy banning and sanctioning virtually all things Russian. Meanwhile, big money media and social media are nearly uniformly proclaiming anti-Russia sentiment and working hard to limit Americans’ exposure of contrary information.

In this context, it is little surprise that last week RT America, with its connection to the government of Russia, ceased broadcasting. The silencing of the news organization arises from a Russia scare relentlessly fueled in America and several other countries in recent years that reached its highest manic level in the last few weeks.

The departure of RT America from television is a loss for free speech and diversity of information. And that loss comes within a larger scary progression in America — continual increasing of the muting of voices challenging narratives, such as the coronavirus scare of the last two years and the ascendant Russia scare, that are used to expand government power.

RT America has been a go-to place for news and commentary different from what is found at cable television stations such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Flipping the channel to RT, one would likely find a different topic being discussed than at those other stations, or the same topic being discussed but with the inclusion of different perspectives or additional important information. RT America thus helped Americans become more knowledgeable about what was happening in the world and helped them overcome tunnel vision approaches often presented elsewhere.

A big step in the suppression of RT America came in 2017 when the United States government required it to register as a foreign agent with the US Department of Justice. Writing then at Consortium News, investigative reporter Robert Parry explained the apparent chilling motive of silencing alternative views and controlling information that was behind imposing this requirement:

The U.S. government’s real beef with RT seems to be that it allows on air some Americans who have been blacklisted from the mainstream media – including highly credentialed former U.S. intelligence analysts and well-informed American journalists – because they have challenged various Official Narratives.

In other words, Americans are not supposed to hear the other side of the story on important international conflicts, such as the proxy war in Syria or the civil war in Ukraine or Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. Only the State Department’s versions of those events are permitted even when those versions are themselves propagandistic if not outright false.

Five years later, the hammer came down with full force on RT America.

Goodbye, RT America. Americans will be worse off without you.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

ESG Scoring Drives Companies Into Sustainable Development, Aka Technocracy

By Patrick Wood | Technocracy News | March 3, 2022

ESG stands for “Environmental, Social, Corporate Governance” and has been likened to a globalized Social Credit Scoring system for business. If you have a high ESG score, it will be easy to qualify for credit, to get the best deals with vendors and to participate in the global supply chain.

Alas, if you don’t have a high ESG score, you won’t be in business long unless you change your behavior and knuckle under to its demands.

So, how is ESG determined and who sets the rules and guidelines?

First, ESG has nothing to do with the physical aspects of a company, like capital, cash flow or profit. Rather, it concerns intangible factors such as how closely you, your vendors and customers adhere to Sustainable Development and climate change policies.

According to Forbes,

“The story of ESG investing began in January 2004 when former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote to over 50 CEOs of major financial institutions, inviting them to participate in a joint initiative under the auspices of the UN Global Compact and with the support of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Swiss Government. The goal of the initiative was to find ways to integrate ESG into capital markets.”

One year later (2005), an environmental policy wonk, Ivo Knoepfel, wrote a a major paper, Who Cares Wins: Connecting Financial Markets to a Changing World. This 58 page report contained “recommendations by the financial industry to better integrate environmental, social and governance issues in analysis, asset management and securities brokerage.”

The corporate collaborators, far from real people like ordinary citizens, included all the big names one might suspect: World Bank Group, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, Citigroup and others.

And just like that, ESG was born.

The report summarizes ten innocuous and subjective principles that read much like the UNs’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

U.N. Global Compact Principles

Human Rights

Principle 1: Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights within their sphere of influence; and

Principle 2: make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.

Labour

Principle 3: Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;

Principle 4: the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labour;

Principle 5: the effective abolition of child labour; and

Principle 6: eliminate discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

Environment

Principle 7: Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges;

Principle 8: undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility; and

Principle 9: encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.

Anti-Corruption

Principle 10: Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.*

Who decides ESG standards and scores? It is repeatedly stated that financial analysts are the key operatives:

    • “We invite financial institutions to expand the scope of ESG integration in research to other asset classes impacted by ESG factors, beyond equity.” Beyond equity implies a rating system for bonds, corporate debt and other financial instruments.”
    • “We encourage analysts to further advance the development of valuation methodologies to better deal with qualitative information and uncertain impacts related to ESG issues.”
    • “Financial analysts should expand their understanding and analysis of these factors to other industries.”
    • “Financial analysts should improve their understanding and integration of ESG issues in emerging markets research.”
    • “Financial analysts and investment professionals should take a leading role because they are the specialists best placed to show how ESG issues impact company and investment value.”

To put this in perspective, the financial analyst position at a large financial institution is typically an entry-level job for people just out of college. In reality, they are coached by ESG policies to act like “fact checkers” as they examine these non-tangible aspects of a company. With the stroke of a pen then can upgrade or downgrade a company according to its ESG compliance, but no two analysts would likely come to the same exact conclusion.

Nevertheless, with subjective ESG research reports in hand, senior executives then call on pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, investment funds, etc., to divest themselves of low scoring companies and reinvest in high scoring companies. If they refuse to cooperate, they are branded with a lower ESG score of their own. Lending institutions are approached to examine the ESG value of their loan portfolios. Not high enough to satisfy the “fact checkers”? Then stop loaning money to low ESG companies, or risk being downgraded yourself!

It gets worse from here. The report calls for government force to mandate disclosure:

“We also believe that regulatory frameworks requiring a minimum degree of disclosure and accountability on ESG issues would improve the availability and comparability of data, and therefore support integration in financial analysis.”

And for stock exchanges to inform rank-and-file investors and institutions alike:

“Stock exchanges, for instance, could include ESG criteria in listing particulars for companies. Both voluntary and market-friendly regulatory approaches are needed to improve disclosure. Both should be flexible enough to allow for diversity of approaches and providers, rather than relying on rigid prescriptions.”

Conclusion

ESG is a globalist scam, and having just said that, my score probably went to zero. It is designed to drive investments and company operating policies into Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy. It is also a circular design that once started, reinforces itself with every spin around the financial universe.

Next up will be ESG for individuals, which goes one step further into how you actually think about these things.

What? You own an investment in a dirty old low-ESG company? Own a gas-guzzling car? Big house? Too much grass in your front yard? Work for a low-ESG company? Post social media pictures that lampoon global warming or mask mandates? Well, that shows that you just don’t care, so boom, down goes your score. Now, try to get financing for that new car you want to buy, or get underwritten for a new life insurance or homeowner’s policy.

You get the idea.

Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.

COPYRIGHT COHERENT PUBLISHING, LLC 2016-22

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , | Leave a comment

COVID Restrictions May Be Winding Down, But Global Control Is Ramping Up

The Defender | March 10, 2022

During 24 harsh months of lockdowns, masking, mandates and segregation, the establishment media are trying to spin as “unintended” the serious and often life-threatening fallout from those policies — whether vaccine injuries, economic devastation, spiking child suicidality or the increase in babies and toddlers in need of speech therapy.

The most strenuous form of critique the media seem able to muster is to tell policymakers to apologize for “getting COVID wrong.”

Early on, Children’s Health Defense and other independent voices forcefully called out the government’s sub-rosa agenda as a deliberate, multisectoral effort spearheaded by central bankers and billionaire technocrats to ensnare the world in a global control grid — in other words, modern-day digital slavery.

Viewed from this angle, the “separate mind-boggling events” of the past two years “line up as sequential moves on a worldwide chessboard.”

Restrictive COVID policies and strange central bank maneuvers were no accident but rather the tools of a planned economic takedown of the most vibrant and independent segments of the economy, notably the small “retail, arts and entertainment, personal services, food services and hospitality businesses” that, together with other small business sectors, have “pretty much driven most economic activity throughout our known history.”

The takedown, amounting to what organizations such as Oxfam called “economic violence,” permitted the “biggest asset transfer ever.”

Even before this purposeful economic havoc, the developed world’s richest denizens were living at least 10 to 15 years longer than the world’s poorest.

When experimental injections were added in December 2020 to the mix of COVID interventions, the takedown began taking on even more gruesome dimensions.

Discussing far-reaching vaccine fraud allegedly perpetrated by Pfizer, acting in cahoots with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, former BlackRock investor Edward Dowd has said:

“I think this is the greatest crime ever committed because most of the frauds I’ve been involved with are financial frauds where money’s lost; This has killed and maimed people.”

On March 1, shortly after a board member of German insurance company BKK ProVita expressed public alarm at the widespread killing and maiming — noting that Germany’s federal health agency was underreporting COVID vaccine injuries by a factor of 10 — the executive was summarily fired.

Prominent physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who blazed a hopeful trail with his inexpensive and successful COVID treatment protocol, bluntly characterized the toxic jabs as instruments of “premeditated first-degree murder and genocide.”

Empty words and gestures

Of late, policymakers seem to have decided it’s time for some crocodile tears — and also time to make a show of putting a few COVID restrictions on hold.

For example, consider the recent remarks by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Walensky said health officials “had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism” about the COVID shots.

For those paying attention, there can be little doubt these words and gestures are less about a policy one-eighty than about window dressing and distraction — as well as perhaps a clever move to “undercut” the momentum of the People’s Convoy currently demanding an end to all emergency measures.

As Jon Rappoport warned, “Although some governments … are lifting COVID restrictions and mandates, we should remember they still hold the power to re-impose those measures at the drop of a hat — for any reason they cook up.”

The key takeaway of the last two years, Rappoport clarified, is that governments’ COVID actions were expedient political decisions — designed to “advance tyranny” — and had “nothing to do with science or morality.”

New York City’s recent actions exemplify the duplicity of the policy rollbacks and the steady behind-the-scenes march of the control agenda. Remember — officials there willingly spent two years gutting the city’s famed restaurants, other small businesses and cultural institutions.

Now, while announcing an easing up of restrictions out of one side of his mouth, the new mayor fired almost 1,500 unvaccinated municipal workers, is insisting on continuing to mask 3- and 4-year-olds (defying widespread parental objections) and is advising businesses they “can still choose to require proof of vaccination.”

Maryland is another jurisdiction that has been indifferent to the distress caused by its policies, ignoring, for example, a leading trade group’s warning that politicians’ capricious on-again, off-again restrictions — promoted as protecting “well-being” — would permanently close four in 10 of the state’s restaurants.

In the state’s largest city, the Baltimore government is suddenly reopening some government services and lifting masking edicts. Yet at the same time, the prominent Baltimore Sun is beating the drum for joint COVID and influenza vaccine mandates.

In thinly veiled praise for coercion and segregation, the Sun argued, “employers and municipalities can certainly require flu vaccinations in order to engage in certain activities.”

Policy hypocrisy is also alive and well internationally. While the World Health Organization (WHO) issues parameters for “carefully relaxing the rules” — parameters so narrow as to be meaningless — Italy and China (the two countries that set the global precedent for lockdowns) are fining individuals who decline mandated interventions or denying them entry to workplaces, restaurants, stores, banks and post offices.

Vaccine passports and digital identities — full speed ahead

As Off-Guardian’s Kit Knightly noted on March 1, “Covid might be dying, but vaccine passports are still very much alive.”

In late February, Knightly also pointed out that the WHO, ominously, is working on an “international treaty on pandemic prevention and preparedness” that would invest the global health organization with the authority to preempt national sovereignty in the management of future pandemics and health challenges.

In a five-part series, Corey Lynn of Corey’s Digs outlined many disturbing implications of the push for vaccine passports. Falsely marketed as a “convenience,” the “passports” eventually will encompass far more than just vaccination records:

“From education to health records, finances, accounts, travel, contact info, and more, will all be linked to your QR code, along with biometrics and fingerprints, then stored on the Blockchain.”

The longer-term aim, said Lynn, is to achieve “full power and control,” down to the individual level, of spending, taxation, education, transportation, food, communications and healthcare, among other domains.

As writer Cherie Zaslawsky sees it, globalists “seek to enslave humanity worldwide in their long-dreamed-of totalitarian utopia. That’s utopia for them — as the ruling class that owns the world and everything in it — and dystopia for We the People.”

Knightly’s March 1 commentary drew readers’ attention to SMART Health Cards — “a covert federal vaccine passport” — rolled out in roughly half the country thus far, including in red states that previously had paid lip service to banning vaccine passports.

Overseen by the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI), SMART Health Cards are intended to “issue, share, and validate vaccination records bound to an individual identity” as well as store “other vital medical data.”

A late February article in Forbes boasted that more than 200 million Americans can already “download, print or store their vaccination records as a QR code.”

VCI was created by the federally funded MITRE Corporation (an MIT spin-off), which receives an estimated $2 billion a year from U.S. taxpayers to develop advanced surveillance technology, among other dubious national security pursuits.

MITRE received a $16.3 million CDC contract “to help construct an efficient game plan for the country during the health crisis,” and also spearheaded U.S. Department of Homeland Security efforts to “coordinate” responses among the nation’s mayors and governors.

Members of VCI’s public-private coalition include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, the Mayo Clinic, and the California and New York state governments, as well as “other health and tech heavyweights.” Additional organizations are contributing to the initiative as “data aggregators” and “health IT vendors.”

As an inner-circle member of VCI, New York State has been in the vanguard in building out a digital identity infrastructure intended to be interoperable (able to exchange or assemble data) “throughout the United States and abroad.”

New York’s “Digital Identity” policy, conveniently updated in July 2020, stipulates that citizens, businesses and government employees who conduct online business with the state must go through an “identity vetting” process that could involve authentication via “smart card” or “biometrics.”

Refuse totalitarian tyranny

Almost immediately after the COVID shots began being rolled out, Dr. Mike Yeadon, at one time a chief scientist and vice president at Pfizer, began protesting the push to inject children.

Yeadon also denounced vaccine passports, describing the apps as a sly vehicle for implementing “illegal, medical apartheid” and totalitarian tyranny.

In a more recent talk, Yeadon emphasized that the QR codes’ global interoperability will translate into 24/7 tracking of every person “in that moment, in that spot, down to the individual level.”

To impress upon the public the dangers of allowing a vaccine passport system to take hold, Yeadon described what it would mean to become an “out-person:”

“One example: Your VaxPass pings, instructing you to attend for your 3rd or 4th or 5th booster or variant vaccine. If you don’t, your VaxPass will expire & you’ll become an out-person, unable to access your own life.”

Fortunately, the globalists’ stark vision is becoming increasingly apparent to many members of the public, who are coming to understand, as Ron Paul said, that “authoritarian politicians will always lie to the people to protect and increase their own power.”

Mainstream media outlets also have begun openly worrying that “parents have a long memory when it comes to how their children have been treated.”

And, although it may not seem like it, governmental decisions “ARE affected by what citizens do or don’t do,” said Rappoport, arguing that it’s no time to “let up on pressure.”

The bottom line at this critical juncture is simple — rather than be lulled into complacency (or distraction) by the latest propaganda, just say no and don’t comply.

Don’t wear a mask. Don’t get tested. Don’t accept toxic jabs. And don’t download any QR codes or any other tools (no matter how “convenient”) that allow the build-out of digital tyranny.

© 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.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

EU bans search engines and social platforms from “reproducing” content from sanctioned Russian media

A wide-sweeping censorship order

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 11, 2022

They trained for this day for a long time; particularly by quashing online dissent during the two years of Covid hell, and now the big day is here: once considered an aspirational beacon of democracy, the EU is deploying some of the most egregious-to-date acts of censorship and suppression of free speech and access to information – certainly, at least, for a Western democracy.

And once considered an innovative and exciting company that brings knowledge to the people, and along the way “do no evil” – Google – and its ilk – will be there to help make it happen.

What spurred the European Commission to act this way is the war in Ukraine, and the desire to completely silence the Russian side, by preventing citizens living in EU member countries from being able to see or hear any content other than that approved and pushed by Brussels.

The question of why this is necessary – does the EU really fear people across Europe will believe Russia? Or is this being done to set a precedent that could be “useful” in so many situations down the line?

One can only speculate (until that is banned by decree, too), but what is clear is that the EU thought the price to pay by using hard censorship and authoritarian tactics and thus undermining the very tenets of the bloc is somehow the price worth paying.

And this is what the EU has done. After first banning two Russian media outlets, RT and Sputnik, from broadcasting (which RT is challenging in court), the EU has now gone to Google to make sure that any content produced by these media companies is purged from the search engine, while social media posts “reproducing” it must get deleted.

When RT and Sputnik got banned, there was some push-back from speech advocates in Europe, but those behind the decision vigorously defended it – if at times giving away how fully aware they are of the way their actions are perceived – namely, as Orwellian.

EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (who has been “on fire” these last weeks – he just proposed imposing sanctions on people labeled as spreading misinformation) told members of the European Parliament that the EU in fact “doesn’t have ministers of truth” and dismissed the Russian outlets as not being independent media (as if all media broadcasting in the EU is “independent” and not affiliated with different states.)

He went a step further, accusing them of being “Kremlin’s weapons.” At the same time, another commissioner revealed that the plan is to keep trying to “reach the Russian people and provide them with (EU’s ) information” – effectively saying that the EU hopes to do exactly what it says it is preventing Russia from doing.

There is an email submitted to the Lumen database on March 4, sent by the European Commission and containing a government removal request. Citing a previously adopted regulation to ban RT and Sputnik, the request states that the prohibition the EU intends to impose is to be “very broad and comprehensive.”

The job of internet search services like Google here is to index results with any possible content that the EU has deemed to be “misinformation and propaganda,” as well as websites throughout the world, and delist them.

“It follows from the foregoing that by virtue of the regulation, providers of internet search services must make sure that any link to the internet sites of RT and Sputnik and any content of RT and Sputnik, including short textual descriptions, visual elements, and links to corresponding websites do not appear in the search results delivered to users located in the EU,” the EU notice sent to Google reads.

Social-media-wise, the EU wants posts made by individuals who “reproduce” RT and Sputnik content to be deleted. A reference is made repeatedly to “proportionality” – i.e., between restrictive policies and people’s right to freedom of speech.

“Pursuant to the freedom of speech, media have the right to report objectively on current events and to form their opinions thereon. The freedom of speech also entails that users have the right to receive objective information on current events,” writes the EU, but then adds: “At the same time, the right to free speech can be restricted for legitimate public interests in a proportionate manner.”

At the end of the day, little of this has to do with the current war in the East of Europe. More likely it’s another instance of the authorities using a crisis to slip through dangerous policies that would in normal circumstances receive much more pushback. And once they know they can do it, there is a real danger they will keep doing it any time dissenting voices of various kinds need to be silent.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

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