
If only what’s ongoing would end on awakening from a bad dream.
Horrors unleashed by Biden regime and complicit dark forces are horrifyingly real.
There’s no end of them in prospect without a second US revolution to accomplish what the first one failed to address when everything changed but stayed the same under new management.
If genocidist Bill Gates had dictatorial powers he likely craves, refuseniks unwilling to self-inflict harm through kill shots — and oppose masks that don’t protect and risk respiratory harm — would be criminalized.
Calling for punishing them, he wants truth and full disclosure about all things flu/covid banned by digital censorship, along with medical surveillance, simulated bioterrorism attacks he likely wants rehearsed ahead of launching the real things for greater mass-extermination than already.
Separately, the American Medical Association (AMA) promoter of medical tyranny in support of mandatory kill shots filed an amicus brief on Thursday with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the draconian Biden regime mandate from hell.
The brief falsely called seasonal flu — deceptively called covid — a major public health threat, a bald-faced Big Lie.
It backs mandatory kill shots for everyone.
It lied claiming they’ll contain infections and transmission of the viral illness.
It lied saying kill shots will protect the jabbed and unjabbed alike.
It lied claiming they’re essential to protect US workers.
It lied saying they’re safe and effective.
It lied claiming that the vast majority of individuals with flu/covid are unjabbed.
The amicus brief was infested with beginning to end bald-faced Big Lies by an agency hostile to its stated mission of protecting health.
Along with US/Western dark forces, their anti-public health handmaidens, Pharma profiteer-pushers of toxic kill shots and MSM co-conspirators, the AMA is a mortal enemy of protecting and preserving what’s too precious to lose.
It supports policies intended to destroy health with unparalleled genocide in mind.
Flu/covid is easily treated and cured.
Yet the AMA opposes known safe and effective protocols for protection against contraction of flu/covid, along with obliterating outbreaks when occur in a few days.
When taken as directed, jabs irreversibly harm health.
The AMA supports kill shots with that objective in mind.
The pandemic it cited doesn’t exist — except for jabbed individuals.
It wants the health of young kids destroyed by mandatory kill shots.
It also wants US public health wrecked by mandating them for all doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff.
Numerous young/highly conditioned professional athletes in the US/West and elsewhere either collapsed and died from kill shots or became seriously ill and disabled.
Despite numbers continuing to rise, US/Western MSM suppressed what should be headline news.
Most athletes who perished or became seriously ill were diagnosed with heart-related issues.
What’s been unheard of in athletes and other young people pre-2020 is now at epidemic levels worldwide.
Numbers of young kids likely to die or fall seriously ill when mass-jabbing is fully underway should chill parents and others to denounce the practice.
Kill shots are designed to cause maximum destruction of public health.
Shunning them is crucial to protecting it.
November 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | AMA, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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The Welsh Liberal Democrats continue their campaign against introduction of Covid Passes, calling attention to the fact that not even those in government who are pushing the controversial certificates are able to properly justify them.
On its site, the party noted that the Welsh government has admitted to not having any empirical evidence that introducing Covid passes helped stem the tide of coronavirus transmission in places of mass gatherings of people.
Naturally, the government response to a question on this subject didn’t put the evaluation of the effectiveness of Covid passes in quite so many words, but the opposition interpreted them to mean just that.
The scheme was launched on October 11, and a month later, the Liberal Democrats are quoting a reply they got to their letter about this issue sent to Health Minister Eluned Morgan by party leader Jane Dodd.
In it, Morgan says that too little time had elapsed since the rollout of Covid passes to be able to assess their effectiveness, but that there was “positive feedback” from stakeholders and users of the passes. And it seems the positive feedback has to do with subjective feelings, rather than, as the Liberal Democrats put it, hard evidence.
Covid pass, Morgan writes, has given those holding it “the confidence to attend venues and events, knowing everyone else is either fully vaccinated or has had a very recent negative test result.”
Commenting on this response, Dodd noted that laws with such a strong impact on people’s civil liberties must be justified by strong evidence. She also noted that her party was not opposed to efforts to curb Covid and associated harm, but insists that action taken to this end “must be proportional and based on an evidence-based strategy that has a clear outcome.”
Dodd went on to cite a leaked UK government document that showed Covid passes might even be harmful in terms of producing more infections as more people are gathering in smaller spaces – possibly under a false sense of security.
And even though Morgan cited positive feedback from “stakeholders,” the businesses affected by Covid passes continue to feel increased burden from the scheme, while not receiving financial aid to help them cope.
Lastly, Dodd urged the government to state a precise date when this policy, which she said was “introduced without sufficient evidence,” will come to an end.
November 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson was temporarily suspended from YouTube for allegedly spreading “harmful misinformation” after he published a video discussing injuries related to Covid-19 vaccination.
Johnson accused YouTube of “censoring the truth” on Friday evening after his roundtable discussion video, which featured “stories from doctors, scientists and the vaccine injured,” was taken off the platform and led to his temporary suspension.
In the video, the Republican senator listed statistics relating to alleged vaccine side-effect victims, while his guests made comments questioning the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines in preventing death.
“Why won’t they let the vaccine injured tell their stories and medical experts give a second opinion?” Johnson questioned in a statement. “Why can’t we discuss the harmful effects of mandates?
“Apparently, the Biden administration and federal health agencies must not be questioned,” he said.
In its own statement, YouTube cited policies on reducing “the risk of real-world harm” and “preventing the spread of harmful misinformation” as the reason behind Johnson’s suspension.
It is the second time that the senator has been suspended by the platform, and his account could be permanently removed if he receives further sanctions within the next 90 days.
Since May 2020, YouTube has enforced a lengthy ‘Covid-19 medical misinformation policy’, which prohibits users from questioning the effectiveness of vaccines or claiming that they can “cause death, infertility, miscarriage, autism, or contraction of other infectious diseases.”
In August, YouTube temporarily suspended Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for questioning the effectiveness of face masks, while in the same month, Sky News Australia was suspended for allegedly violating Covid-19 rules.
In January, YouTube even suspended the sitting president of the United States after it accused Donald Trump of violating policies which prohibit the incitement of violence.
November 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Evelyn Hockstein
A US federal appeals court has again ruled against President Joe Biden’s national vaccine mandate for companies with 100 or more workers, shredding the policy as “staggeringly overbroad” and an abuse of “extraordinary power.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stark rebuke to Biden’s vaccine requirement for larger American companies in a ruling on Friday, stating that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) – the federal agency tapped to enforce the mandate – was not created to “make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.”
“The Mandate is staggeringly overbroad,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt said, noting that it does not take into account the diversity of workplaces across the country, nor the fact that Covid-19 “is more dangerous to some employees than to other employees.” As an example, he compared a hypothetical 28-year-old truck driver who works in isolation to a “62-year-old prison janitor” employed in more cramped conditions.
“One constant remains – the Mandate fails almost completely to address, or even respond to, much of this reality and common sense.”
The Biden administration initially announced the requirement in September, with OSHA following up earlier this month with an emergency order to enforce the mandate. The agency will require all workers at firms with more than 100 employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by early next year, or else test for the virus regularly and wear masks at all times while working.
The appeals court issued its first stay on November 6 after a litany of plaintiffs – including a number of companies and several US states – challenged the move, conducting an expedited judicial review. Friday’s ruling reaffirmed the pause, telling OSHA to “take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.” Despite the first stay, the White House has continued to urge businesses to follow the vaccine dictate and effectively ignore the ruling, potentially setting up a battle in the Supreme Court.
While OSHA does have the power to issue what’s known as an “emergency temporary standard,” or ETS, the judge observed that only a single standard has survived legal scrutiny since the agency was founded in the 1970s.
“The reason for the rarity of this form of emergency action is simple,” Engelhardt went on, adding that courts and OSHA itself have agreed “for generations” that such orders constitute “extraordinary power” which must be “delicately exercised, and only in those emergency situations which require it.”
“The Mandate at issue here is anything but a ‘delicate exercise’ of this ‘extraordinary power.’”
November 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Joe Biden, United States |
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Economist Ernst Wolff believes that a hidden alliance of political and corporate leaders is exploiting the pandemic with the aim of crashing national economies and introducing a global digital currency.
How is it that more than 190 governments from all over the world ended up dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in almost exactly the same manner, with lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination cards now being commonplace everywhere? The answer may lie in the Young Global Leaders school, which was established and managed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, and that many of today’s prominent political and business leaders passed through on their way to the top.
The German economist, journalist, and author Ernst Wolff has revealed some facts about Schwab’s “Young Global Leaders” school that are relevant for understanding world events during the pandemic in a video from the German Corona Committee podcast. While Wolff is mainly known as a critic of the globalist financial system, recently he has focused on bringing to light what he sees as the hidden agenda behind the anti-Covid measures being enacted around the world.
Mysterious Beginnings
The story begins with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is an NGO founded by Klaus Schwab, a German economist and mechanical engineer, in Switzerland in 1971, when he was only 32. The WEF is best-known to the public for the annual conferences it holds in Davos, Switzerland each January that aim to bring together political and business leaders from around the world to discuss the problems of the day. Today, it is one of the most important networks in the world for the globalist power elite, being funded by approximately a thousand multinational corporations.
The WEF, which was originally called the European Management Forum until 1987, succeeded in bringing together 440 executives from 31 nations already at its very first meeting in February 1971, which as Wolff points out was an unexpected achievement for someone like Schwab, who had very little international or professional experience prior to this. Wolff believes the reason may be due to the contacts Schwab made during his university education, including studying with no less a person than former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Wolff also points out that while Schwab was there, the Harvard Business School had been in the process of planning a management forum of their own, and it is possible that Harvard ended up delegating the task of organizing it to him.
The Forum initially only brought together people from the economic field, but before long, it began attracting politicians, prominent figures from the media (including from the BBC and CNN), and even celebrities.
Schwab’s Young Global Leaders: Incubator of the Great Reset?
In 1992 Schwab established a parallel institution, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow school, which was re-established as Young Global Leaders in 2004. Attendees at the school must apply for admission and are then subjected to a rigorous selection process. Members of the school’s very first class in 1992 already included many who went on to become important liberal political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Tony Blair. There are currently about 1,300 graduates of this school, and the list of alumni includes several names of those who went on to become leaders of the health institutions of their respective nations. Four of them are former and current health ministers for Germany, including Jens Spahn, who has been Federal Minister of Health since 2018. Philipp Rösler, who was Minister of Health from 2009 until 2011, was appointed the WEF’s Managing Director by Schwab in 2014.
Other notable names on the school’s roster are Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand whose stringent lockdown measures have been praised by global health authorities; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; Sebastian Kurz, who was until recently the Chancellor of Austria; Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary; Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission; and Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the German Greens who was the party’s first candidate for Chancellor in this year’s federal election, and who is still in the running to be Merkel’s successor. We also find California Governor Gavin Newsom on the list, who was selected for the class of 2005, as well as former presidential candidate and current US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg, who is a very recent alumnus, having been selected for the class of 2019. All of these politicians who were in office during the past two years have favored harsh responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and which also happened to considerably increase their respective governments’ power.
Wolff believes that the people behind the WEF and the Global Leaders school are the ones who really determine who will become political leaders, although he stresses that he doesn’t believe that Schwab himself is the one making these decisions but is merely a facilitator. He further points out that the school’s alumni include not only Americans and Europeans, but also people from Asia, Africa, and South America, indicating that its reach is truly worldwide.
In 2012, Schwab and the WEF founded yet another institution, the “Global Shapers Community,” which brings together those identified by them as having leadership potential from around the world who are under 30. Approximately 10,000 participants have passed through this program to date, and they regularly hold meetings in 400 cities. Wolff believes that it is yet another proving ground where future political leaders are being selected, vetted, and groomed before being positioned in the world’s political apparatus.
Wolff points out that very few graduates of the Global Leaders school list it on their CVs. He says that he has only seen it listed on one: namely, that of the German economist Richard Werner, who is a known critic of the establishment. Wolff suggests that the school seems to like to include even critics of the system among its ranks, as another name among its graduates is Gregor Hackmack, the German chief of Change.org, who was in its 2010 class. Wolff believes this is because the organization wants to present itself as being fair and balanced, although it also wants to ensure that its critics are controlled opposition.
Another thing that the Global Leaders graduates have in common is that most of them have very sparse CVs apart from their participation in the program prior to being elevated to positions of power, which may indicate that it is their connection to Schwab’s institutions that is the decisive factor in launching their careers. This is most evident when the school’s alumni are publicly questioned about issues that they have not been instructed to talk about in advance, and their struggles to come up with answers are often quite evident. Wolff contends that their roles are only to act as mouthpieces for the talking points that those in the shadows behind them want discussed in public debate.
Schwab’s Yes Men in Action
Given the growing discontent with the anti-Covid measures put into practice by the school’s graduates who are now national leaders, Wolff believes it is possible that these people were selected due to their willingness to do whatever they are told, and that they are being set up to fail so that the subsequent backlash can be exploited to justify the creation of a new global form of government. Indeed, Wolff notes that politicians with unique personalities and strong, original views have become rare, and that the distinguishing character of the national leaders of the past 30 years has been their meekness and adherence to a strict globalist line dictated from above. This has been especially evident in most countries’ response to the pandemic, where politicians who knew nothing about viruses two years ago suddenly proclaimed that Covid was a severe health crisis that justified locking people up in their homes, shutting down their businesses, and wrecking entire economies.
Determining exactly how the school operates is difficult, but Wolff has managed to learn something about it. In the school’s early years, it involved the members of each class meeting several times over the course of a year, including a ten-day “executive training” session at the Harvard Business School. Wolff believes that, through meeting their classmates and becoming part of a wider network, the graduates then establish contacts who they rely on in their later careers. Today, the school’s program includes courses offered over the course of five years at irregular intervals, which in some cases may overlap with the beginnings of some of its participants’ political or professional careers – meaning they will be making regular visits to Davos. Emmanuel Macron and Peter Buttigieg, for example, were selected for the school less than five years ago, which means it is possible they have been regularly attending Young Global Leaders-related programs while in political office and may in fact still be attending them today.
A Worldwide Network of Wealth & Influence
Graduates from the Young Global Leaders school, and Global Leaders for Tomorrow before them, find themselves very well-situated given that they then have access to the WEF’s network of contacts. The WEF’s current Board of Trustees includes such luminaries as Christine Lagarde, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and current President of the European Central Bank; Queen Rania of Jordan, who has been ranked by Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world; and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest investment management corporation internationally and which handles approximately $9 trillion annually. By tracing the connections between the school’s graduates, Wolff claims that you can see that they continue to rely on each other for support for their initiatives long after they participated in the Global Leaders programs.
Wolff believes that many elite universities play a role in the process determined by the WEF, and that they should no longer be seen as operating outside of the fields of politics and economics. He cites the example of the Harvard Business School, which receives millions of dollars from donors each year, as well as the Harvard School of Public Health, which was renamed the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health after it received $350 million from the Hong Kong-born billionaire Gerald Chan. The same is true of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which became the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health after media mogul Michael Bloomberg donated $1.8 billion to the school in 2018.
Wolff states that the WEF’s influence goes far beyond those who have passed through the Global Leaders and Global Shapers programs, however, as the number of people who participate in the annual Davos conferences is much larger than many suspect; he mentions being informed that approximately 1,500 private jets bring attendees to the event each year, overloading Switzerland’s airports.
The Alliance of Big Business & Government
The main goal of the WEF’s activities, Wolff believes, is to facilitate and further high-level cooperation between big business and national governments, something which we are already seeing take place. Viviane Fischer, another participant in the Corona Committee podcast, points out that the British-based company Serco processes migrants for the British government and also manages prisons around the world, among its many other activities. The pharmaceutical industry’s international reach is also considerable: Wolff mentions that Global Leaders alumnus Bill Gates, for example, had long been doing business with Pfizer, one of the main producers of the controversial mRNA anti-Covid vaccines, through his Foundation’s public health initiatives in Africa since long before the pandemic began. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gates has become one of the foremost champions of lockdowns and the Covid vaccines since they became available, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that his Foundation had made approximately $200 billion in “social benefits” from distributing vaccines before the pandemic had even begun. One can only imagine what its vaccine profits are today.
Digital technology, which is now all-pervasive, is also playing a prominent role in the elite’s global designs. Wolff highlights that BlackRock, run by Global Leaders alumnus Larry Fink, is presently the largest advisor to the world’s central banks and has been collecting data on the world financial system for more than 30 years now, and undoubtedly has a greater understanding of how the system works than the central banks themselves.
One of the goals of the current policies being pursued by many governments, Wolff believes, is to destroy the businesses of small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs so that multinational corporations based in the United States and China can monopolize business everywhere. Amazon, which was led until recently by Global Leaders alumnus Jeff Bezos, in particular has made enormous profits as a result of the lockdown measures that have devastated the middle class.
Wolff contends that the ultimate goal of this domination by large platforms is to see the introduction of digital bank currency. Just in the past few months, China’s International Finance Forum, which is similar to the WEF, proposed the introduction of the digital yuan, which could in turn be internationalized by the Diem blockchain-based currency network. Interestingly, Diem is the successor to Libra, a cryptocurrency that was first announced by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, indicating that a global currency that will transcend the power of either the dollar or the yuan, and managed through the cooperation of Chinese, European, and American business networks, is currently being discussed. The International Finance Forum’s supervisory board includes such names as the WEF’s Christine Lagarde; Jean-Claude Trichet, the former President of the European Central Bank; and Horst Köhler, the former Head of the International Monetary Fund.
Wolff further explains that the lockdowns and subsequent bailouts that were seen around the world over the past two years left many nations on the verge of bankruptcy. In order to avoid an economic catastrophe, the governments of the world resorted to drawing on 650 billion special drawing rights, or SDRs, which are supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets managed by the International Monetary Fund. When these eventually come due, it will leave these same governments in dire straits, which is why it may be that the introduction of digital currency has become a sudden priority – and this may have been the hidden purpose of the lockdowns all along.
Wolff says that two European countries are already prepared to begin using digital currency: Sweden and Switzerland. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sweden has had virtually no lockdown restrictions due to the pandemic, and Switzerland has taken only very light measures. Wolff believes that the reason for this may be that the two countries did not need to crash their economies through lockdown measures because they were already prepared to begin using digital currency before the pandemic began. He contends that a new round of lockdowns may be being prepared that will finish off the world’s economies for good, leading to massive unemployment and in turn the introduction of Universal Basic Income and the use of a digital currency managed by a central bank. This currency might be restricted, both in terms of what individuals can spend it on as well as in the time frame that one has to spend it in.
Further, Wolff indicates that the inflation currently being seen around the world is an inevitable consequence of the fact that national governments, after taking loans from the central banks, have introduced approximately $20 trillion into the global economy in less than two years. Whereas previous bailouts were directed into the markets, this latest round has gone to ordinary people, and as a result, this is driving up the prices of products that ordinary people spend their money on, such as food.
Democracy Has Been Cancelled
The ultimate conclusion one must draw from all of this, according to Wolff, is that democracy as we knew it has been silently cancelled, and that although the appearance of democratic processes is being maintained in our countries, the fact is that an examination of how governance around the world works today shows that an elite of super-wealthy and powerful individuals effectively control everything that goes on in politics, as has been especially evident in relation to the pandemic response.
The best way to combat their designs, Wolff says, is simply to educate people about what is happening, and for them to realize that the narrative of the “super-dangerous virus” is a lie that has been designed to manipulate them into accepting things that run contrary to their own interests. If even 10% of ordinary citizens become aware of this and decide to take action, it could thwart the elite’s plans and perhaps open a window for ordinary citizens to take back control over their own destinies.
November 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Timeless or most popular | WEF |
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The New York Times has obtained ‘privileged communications’ of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, raising suspicions that an FBI source might have leaked the newspaper confidential data obtained during recent raids.
FBI agents raided the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe last Saturday as part of an investigation into the acquisition of a diary purportedly written by President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley. On Thursday, less than a week after the raid, the New York Times published an article claiming to have obtained “internal documents” from Project Veritas’ attorney.
The article sparked outrage among conservatives, who accused the FBI of leaking private communications from the organization to the newspaper.
“The FBI raided Project Veritas on a pretext and is now leaking their privileged communications to the New York Times. This is a scandal,” tweeted lawyer and Human Events co-publisher Will Chamberlain, who called for the article’s co-author, Adam Goldman, to be “subpoenaed tomorrow and forced to reveal his criminal source.”
Chamberlain also raised further legal concerns, noting that Project Veritas “is currently in litigation with the New York Times” over a separate issue, which would make any leaks to the newspaper an even bigger scandal.
“This isn’t journalism, this is straight up theft,” he concluded.
Attorney Harmeet Dhillon – who is currently representing Project Veritas and O’Keefe – also accused the New York Times of publishing a “private, privileged correspondence” which “they have no legal right to possess,” while political commentator and lawyer Mike Cernovich wrote, “This is not a grey area. It’s black letter criminal felonies committed by the FBI and the New York Times.”
A federal court ordered the US Justice Department to stop extracting information from O’Keefe’s devices on Thursday.
The FBI took two of O’Keefe’s phones during its raid on his home and the Project Veritas founder said his devices contained confidential material, including information relating to his journalistic sources.
“This is an attack on the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” said O’Keefe this week, adding, “I’ve heard ‘the process is the punishment.’ I didn’t really understand what that meant until this weekend.”
O’Keefe said he “wouldn’t wish” the situation “on any journalist.”
November 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | FBI, New York Times, United States |
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Two Lowell Graded School parents demanding their second-grade daughter be taught in the classroom without a mask were warned by a state trooper Thursday, Nov. 4 to take her home or risk arrest for trespass or loss of custody of their child.
The live Facebook video was recorded by the girl’s father, Andre “Mike” Desautels. In March, a Vermont judge sided with Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan and ordered Desautels to require his employees to wear masks.
As the video opens, Desautels explains he and wife Amy have a note from a doctor exempting his daughter from wearing a mask. However, the parents have been told that a doctor’s note isn’t enough and that the school needs to see a formal medical diagnosis in order to develop a 504 plan. Such plans are intended to ensure that a child who has a disability identified under the law and is attending an elementary or secondary educational institution receives the necessary accommodations.
“We did not agree to this as she did not need any special accommodations from anyone,” Amy Desautels explained via social media. “We had provided the doctor’s note which is what was stated on the NCSU guidelines for what they required and it did not specify what needed to be on the note.”
As seen on the video, Vermont State Trooper Andrew Jensen talked briefly with the couple, took a phone call, and then returned and then politely but firmly gave them three options.
“Your options are: Take your child, go home, fight this through the courts, through your lawyer, whatever,” Jensen said. “Option B: We escort your child out here, you refuse to take her home, and you refuse to leave. Therefore we place both of you under arrest for trespassing. Option C: you leave, but leave your child here, we contact DCF, possibly placing her in state custody for abandonment.”
“I cannot believe that you guys would get involved, especially because we have done everything required with our paperwork. And you’re going by what he (Castle) is telling you,” Desautels responded. He also said a child in Walden – another Northeast Kingdom town – is attending mask-free.
The school has the right to make the rules,” Jensen said.
“But we’re following the rules,” Desautels said.
“But not exactly,” Jensen said.
Given those options, the couple elected to take their child home that day.
* * * * * *
Earlier in the day, Castle answered Vermont Daily Chronicle questions about school policies on masking.
Chronicle: What are the options for parents who do not want their children to wear masks in school?
Castle: “A parent may obtain an exemption to having their child wear a mask if they have a certified diagnosis from a physician of a medical reason for not wearing a mask or from a physician or mental health provider for a psychological reason. The school would need to review the medical information within a formal IEP or 504 process to determine if the accommodation is necessary to ensure the child is able to access their education.”
Chronicle: Please describe the reasoning behind removing a child from school for not wearing a mask.
Castle: “Schools that have established a mask requirement are doing so to mitigate the transmission of COVID-19 in the interest of public health for students and staff. Allowing staff or students without a legitimate exemption to not wear a mask would result in many individuals opting out and thus increasing the risk of transmission. A student’s non-compliance with a mask requirement is considered unsafe and in violation of school procedures.”
November 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Human rights, United States, Vermont |
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This article defines a more effective public health strategy for the current COVID pandemic.
The core issue is that there is a huge array of reactions to both COVID infections and vaccines based on diverse biology, genetics and medical conditions of individuals. Missing from current policy is recognition and support of personalized medical methods.
First, medical history tells us the wisdom of making the medicine fit the person. This is the cornerstone of what is called personalized or individualized medicine. Good physicians also find the combination of drugs to best address an illness or disease. This contrasts with mass use of off-the-shelf, one-size-fits all drugs. Proposed here is an approach to tailor or fine tune medical solutions to individual biologic and genetic characteristics, and personal medical needs and circumstances.
As an example of how trying to get the public to accept a mass medicine is the case of seasonal flu vaccines. A large fraction of the public does not take them. During the 2019-2020 season, 63.8 percent of children between six months and 17 years got a flu shot. Among adults, just 48.4 percent of people got flu shots.
Why is this? Because it is common knowledge that their efficacy rate is relatively low. On average, people who get the flu shot are between 40 and 60 percent less likely to catch the virus than unvaccinated individuals. The truth is that the annual flu vaccine does not fit every individual. Even though there is little medical evidence that taking a flu vaccine poses significant health risks. But people know that the flu infection fatality rate is relatively low.
Many individuals make a sensible risk/benefit analysis, concluding that there are insufficient benefits. Others, especially older people with serious medical conditions and possibly weak immune systems get annual flu shots. The public health system has allowed a personalized approach to seasonal flu vaccines.
And it turns out, based on government data, that low risk is also the case for the current COVID pandemic. For the vast majority of people getting coronavirus infection either means no symptoms or only mild ones not much different than the flu or a very bad cold, and which pass in relatively few days. Here is the reported truth about low coronavirus death risks for healthy people:
“CDC showed that 94 percent of the reported deaths had multiple comorbidities, thereby reducing the CDC’s numbers attributed strictly to COVID-19 to about 35,000 for all age groups.”
This stands in contrast to the widely reported total of over 730,000 COVID related deaths. What this shows is the huge variations in how people respond to COVID infections because of their innate differences.
What COVID infected people do get is natural immunity to this virus that abundant medical research and clinical studies have shown is better than vaccine immunity. The latter declines in about six months, whereas natural immunity lasts longer and better defends against new variants.
Combination Of Medicines
Besides making the medicine fit the patient is established clinical wisdom for using a combination of drugs. And often, in this pandemic, some doctors use a combination that includes more than several generic medicines and, especially in hospitals, government approved drugs. Also widely used are vitamins and supplements. The eminent Dr. Peter McCollough has been the leading proponent of using individualized combinations to treat and prevent COVID infection disease. All this is an alternative to the strategy of mass vaccination for everyone.
Today, anyone without too much effort can find a host of combination protocols to treat and prevent COVID.
The Missed Opportunity Discussed Early In The Pandemic
Between the early 2020 months of the pandemic and the roll out of mass vaccination in late 2020 there was interest in applying the personalized medicine approach to managing the pandemic.
Consider what the Mayo Center for Individualized Medicine said for the COVID-19 response. The document detailed a number of initiatives Mayo was pursuing to address the pandemic by obtaining medical data that could lead to personalized pandemic solutions. This is what Mayo wanted to do:
“When COVID-19 spread across the U.S. in March 2020, the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine urgently responded to accelerate research, development, translation and implementation of novel tests, lifesaving treatments and diagnostics. Now, collaborative teams of scientists are continuing to unravel the mysteries of the novel virus, including using advanced genetic sequencing technologies to investigate how the virus can infiltrate a person’s immune system and wreak havoc on organs, tissue and blood vessels, leaving some patients with long-term effects.”
A September 2020 article had the intriguing title “How to use precision medicine to personalize COVID-19 treatment according to the patient’s genes.” Here are excerpts:
“In recent years, a gene-centric approach to precision medicine has been promoted as the future of medicine. It underlies the massive effort funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to collect over a million DNA samples under the “All of Us” initiative that began in 2015.
But the imagined future did not include COVID-19. In the rush to find a COVID-19 vaccine and effective therapies, precision medicine has been insignificant. Why is this? And what are its potential contributions?
If precision medicine is the future of medicine, then its application to pandemics generally, and COVID-19 in particular, may yet prove to be highly significant. But its role so far has been limited. Precision medicine must consider more than just genetics. It requires an integrative “omic” approach that must collect information from multiple sources – beyond just genes – and at scales ranging from molecules to society.
The situation becomes yet more complicated for infectious diseases. Viruses and bacteria have their own genomes that interact in complex ways with the cells in the people they infect. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 underlying COVID-19 has been extensively sequenced. Its mutations are identified and traced worldwide, helping epidemiologists understand the spread of the virus. However, the interactions between SARS-CoV-2 RNA and human DNA, and the effect on people of the virus’s mutations, remain unknown.”
… there is an opportunity to begin gathering the kinds of data that would allow for a more comprehensive precision medicine approach – one that is fully aware of the complex interactions between genomes and social behavior.
The NIH has said: “The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has announced a significant increase in the COVID-19 data available in its precision medicine database, adding survey responses from more than 37,000 additional participants, and virus-related diagnosis and treatment data from the nearly 215,000 participant electronic health records (EHRs) that are currently available.”
The specialty germane to a personalized pandemic strategy is called pharmacogenomics. It is the study of the role of the genome in drug response. It combines pharmacology and genomics to discover how the genetic makeup of an individual affects their response to drugs, including vaccines.
It deals with the influence of acquired and inherited genetic variation on drug response in patients by correlating genetic factors of an individual with drug or vaccine absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination. It deals with the effects of multiple genes on drug and vaccine response.
The central goal of pharmacogenomics is to develop rational means to optimize drug therapy, including vaccination, with respect to the patients’ genotype, to ensure maximum efficiency with minimal adverse effects.
By using pharmacogenomics, the goal is that pharmaceutical drug treatments, including vaccination, can replace or at least complement what is dubbed as the “one-drug-fits-all” approach. Pharmacogenomics also attempts to eliminate the trial-and-error method of prescribing, allowing physicians to take into consideration their patient’s genes, the functionality of these genes, and how this may affect the efficacy of the patient’s current or future treatments (and where applicable, provide an explanation for the failure of past treatments).
An August 2020 journal article was titled “Pharmacogenomics of COVID-19 therapies.” Here are its optimistic views and findings:
“Pharmacogenomics may allow individualization of these drugs thereby improving efficacy and safety. … Pharmacogenomics may help clinicians to choose proper first-line agents and initial dosing that would be most likely achieve adequate drug exposure among critically ill patients; those who cannot afford a failure of ineffective therapy. It is also important to minimize the risks of toxicity because COVID-19 particularly affects those with comorbidities on other drug therapies.
We found evidence that several genetic variants may alter the pharmacokinetics of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, ribavirin, lopinavir/ritonavir and possibly tocilizumab, which hypothetically may affect clinical response and toxicity in the treatment of COVID-19. … These data support the collection of DNA samples for pharmacogenomic studies of the hundreds of currently ongoing clinical trials of COVID-19 therapies.
One of the biggest success stories in the field of pharmacogenomics was for a drug used to treat another, highly lethal, infectious disease: abacavir for HIV. … In an acute illness such as COVID-19, pharmacogenetics would only be useful if the genetic test results were already available (i.e., pre-emptive pharmacogenetic testing) or rapidly available (i.e., point-of-care genetic testing). …
In the face of unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, collaborative efforts among the medical communities are more important than ever to improve the efficacy of these treatments and ensure safety. Some large national COVID-19 trials are evaluating pharmacogenomics, which will inform the role of pharmacogenomics markers for future clinical use.”
A July 2020 NPR show was titled “Research On Personalized Medicine May Help COVID-19 Treatments.” This was deemed newsworthy:
The nationwide All of Us Research Program aims to tailor medical treatments of all kinds, including treatments that may be developed for the new coronavirus. So far more than 271,000 people nationwide have signed up to share data with the initiative. All of Us started under President Barack Obama in 2018 [sic] and involves institutions across the country.
“This is an exciting opportunity for our participants to have a direct impact on COVID-19 research, watching how their participation in this historic effort is truly making a difference,” said Dr. Elizabeth Burnside. “This focused initiative could be especially important for members of communities that are often underrepresented in health research and who may question the overall and personal benefit of research participation.”
In sum, there was legitimate medical interest early in the pandemic to use personalized medicine, in which drugs and drug combinations are optimized for individuals or certain population demographics. The central goal is minimization of drug and vaccine toxicities and adverse reactions and deaths.
But one thing is now clear. The personalized approach to managing the COVID pandemic has not been aggressively pursued by public health agencies. They have placed their resources and hopes with mass vaccination, both encouraged, coerced and increasingly mandated. The hope that we can vaccinate ourselves out of this pandemic has lost credibility.
In contrast, an alternative personalized approach, used by hundreds of physicians, based on generic medicines, vitamins and supplements have been more blocked than supported by the public health establishment as detailed in Pandemic Blunder.
Proposed New Public Health Strategy
Part One: Individuals decide either on their own or with the advice of their personal physician to be vaccinated for COVID. And to accept what government officials have decided are the best COVID medical solutions for outpatients and inpatients.
Part Two: Individuals choose a preferred medical professional who, on the basis of their education, training, experience and successful clinical results, offers alternatives to vaccination and government promoted medical solutions for outpatients and inpatients. The medical professional uses the patient’s medical history, conditions, needs and unique personal biologic and genetic circumstances to reach the best personalized medical solution.
The new public health strategy is, therefore, twofold. Widely available vaccination becomes focused or finely tuned to meet the desires and needs of part of the population. Along with use of the second part there is no sacrifice of true public health protection in the pandemic.
Part Two of the strategy directly addresses the widespread resistance to COVID vaccination by some Americans.
This is a rational perspective consistent with the belief in medical freedom. If one believes that there are some certain medical benefits of COVID vaccines, then traditional medical practice supports use of them on an individual therapeutic basis. This is a free personal decision, perhaps in consultation with their physician to accept that COVID vaccine risks are outweighed by its benefits.
Risks and benefits may be based on personal research of available medical information on vaccines. Or on information from government agencies, often without advice from their doctor.
Not to be ignored is increasing negative information on COVID vaccines reaching the public. One recent example from a published medical research article is that “cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic.”
From this same study: within “eight days post-inoculation (where day zero is the day of inoculation), sixty percent of all post-inoculation deaths are reported in VAERS.” This study concluded: “It is unclear why this mass inoculation for all groups is being done, being allowed, and being promoted.”
In seeking to implement the wisdom of fit the medicine to the person, requires accepting the science that no two people, medically, genetically and biologically speaking, are exactly the same; this cannot be disputed. This is why using pharmacogenomics has a role to play. Looking at average statistical vaccine outcomes ignores and disrespects individual biologics, medical conditions, concerns and needs. This is an overselling of vaccines.
Americans have always wanted to see themselves as unique individuals. This translates to medical actions. Mass vaccination for everyone ignores and devalues this traditional belief by Americans.
There are also legitimate concerns that giving informed consent to a shot has not been based on a full, easily understood presentation of data on risks for different kinds of people with various medical histories.
Those who are resisting vaccination have a right to question that government agencies have not strictly followed medical science, data and experience. For example, a vast literature concludes that stay-at-home mandates, lockdowns and masking have not been effective in controlling pandemic impacts.
And there is now considerable evidence that those who are vaccinated can get breakthrough infections and spread the virus. “We have data now through the first week of August from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, showing that… over 60 percent of seniors over the age of 65 in the hospital with Covid have been vaccinated,” noted the esteemed Dr. Peter McCullough recently.
This erodes the credibility of public health agencies and their medical authority and destroys public trust in federal agencies implementing pandemic policies.
The Fallacy Of Only One Medical Solution
If the government would let some part of the public choose personalized treatment to deal with COVID infection and another part to choose vaccination (and other government actions) why is that not an acceptable public health policy? The two-part strategy will become increasingly important as the government promotes or mandates regular booster shots over months or years.
Choice is rational if, indeed, there are personalized treatment options other than vaccination that can be obtained from some medical professionals. Indeed, there is now a vast medical literature on treatment protocols not only to cure but also to prevent COVID infection. They are being used very successfully by hundreds of American physicians.
And some information reaching the public like the very successful use of the generic ivermectin in India and Indonesia reinforces the inclination of some people to seek alternative medical solutions. Also, that 100 to 200 members of Congress have used this generic.
Moreover, now there is also a vast medical literature, increasingly known to the public, supporting the strong effectiveness of natural immunity obtained through previous COVID infection. It is a rational personal decision to conclude that one’s natural immunity is sufficient medical protection without taking on any vaccine risks. They have the right to seek a medical professional that agrees with that medical reality.
The only conceivable “loser” for this approach would be vaccine makers having a smaller market.
Physicians should have the freedom to advise their patients to either use a generic medicine treatment protocol or help document their natural immunity (with valid testing) to allow patients to embrace personalized medical action rather than be vaccinated.
In this two-part policy approach, of promoting a choice between personalized medical protection versus mass vaccination, the entire population could be fully protected without sacrificing medical freedom and without various forms of vaccine mandates. Public health does not require total public acceptance of one medical solution.
This strategy is consistent with what many physicians said early in the pandemic. Namely that vaccination should be targeted on those with the highest risks of serious COVID impacts, not the entire population. It is widely known by the public and accepted by the medical establishment that this pandemic does not pose a serious threat of either illness or death for people below the age of about 70, unless they have serious comorbidities or serious illnesses. Infection fatality rates for most of the public do not argue for vaccination.
Much of the public wants and deserves the choice to use something other than a vaccine shot to protect themselves. That choice becomes operational only if the government allows and supports medical professionals to offer their patients alternatives to vaccines.
Here is the ethical and medical truth: Protecting individual health trumps protecting public health but is not antithetical to protecting public health. Overly coercive public health actions, such as vaccine mandates, are antithetical to protecting individual health for many people who fear even low probability negative reactions to vaccines.
Here is the ultimate medical truth: When all available medical science and means are fully used then the result is safely protecting public health without sacrificing medical freedom of both physicians and individuals.
The Current Strategy Has Failed
As we approach two years of dealing with this pandemic there is abundant evidence that the emphasis on mass vaccination has largely failed. The US has the highest number of COVID deaths on the planet. Even now, after wide use of the mass vaccination approach, recent 2,000 daily deaths are related to COVID infection. Every week more people are counted as COVID deaths than the 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 disaster.
Not to be ignored is the widely cited journal study titled “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.”
Breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated are mounting. Because after about six months vaccines lose much of their effectiveness, especially against variants. And fully vaccinated people can and do carry and transmit the coronavirus.
If one wants first-hand accounts of how US physicians have documented their own negative impacts of COVID vaccines as well as those of their patients, then read a number of their affidavits.
Conclusions
A new public health strategy that no longer adheres to single-minded mass vaccination can obtain broad public support. Now is the time to endorse and support personalized medicine applied to the pandemic.
Much of the public may not yet know this. But missing from the new CDC definition of vaccine as of September 1, 2021 are these key phrases: “protecting the person from that disease” and “to produce immunity.” The new vaccine definition should reduce public confidence in current COVID vaccines. In fact, these changes reflect what is now known about the limitations of these vaccines. Fully vaccinated people can still get COVID disease and really do not have long lasting effective immunity to it.
Promoting choice is a far better public health approach than wide use of authoritarian pandemic controls that have devastated lives and produced mental stress and many collateral deaths.
On that last point, CDC has now recognized mood disorders put people at high risk for severe COVID cases. Compare pre-pandemic 2019 to 2020 when there were 53 million new cases of depression globally, a 28 percent increase, as reported in The Lancet. Surely, promoting more medical choice for addressing COVID would help people stay both mentally and physically healthy.
Resistance to vaccine mandates should not be seen as unpatriotic or as creating harm for others. Supporting personalized medicine is a way to avoid negative impacts on the American economy because of rigid, inflexible vaccine mandates that compel many Americans to accept job loss that in many ways imperil public safety.
Lastly, staying alive and safe surely is the presumed goal of all people. We have more tools than vaccines to help people meet their goal. Now we need the public health establishment to let all the tools be freely chosen.
Joel S. Hirschhorn’s new book Pandemic Blunder here: amazon.com
November 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Allegations he was secretly a Russian-backed Manchurian candidate haunted former US President Donald Trump’s time in office. Now, though, long after he left the White House, the claims have gone from farce to clear falsification.
The indictment of Igor Danchenko on Thursday is the latest development in the painfully slow unravelling of the conspiracy behind the Russiagate hoax. At the same time, however, it is also a new window into the workings of the so-called ‘deep state’ forces that bought into the lies and wielded them like weapons against Trump’s presidency.
The scandal began, all accounts show, when Democratic contender Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired a private research firm, Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt on its political rival – then-Republican presidential contender Trump. Fusion GPS contracted the work out to former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
They didn’t get value for money, it seems. The subsequent Steele Dossier has since been exposed as a complete fraud – and one that wasn’t even well put together. Its damning ‘evidence’ referred to payments from the Russian consulate in Miami, despite there being no Russian consulate in Miami. Stories of secret servers, Trump staffers meeting with Moscow’s agents in Prague, and with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, secret pee-pee tapes: the list was never-ending. All have been proven false.
What’s almost worse is that US intelligence knew it all boiled down to gossip and fraud, with then-CIA Director John Brennan warning President Obama in July 2016 that the Clinton campaign was effectively fabricating a Russia-Trump conspiracy theory.
The Russiagate accusations and investigations didn’t lead anywhere in terms of proving a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin. But the smears were successful in terms of delegitimising Trump, casting him as a Russian agent throughout his presidency and preventing any rapprochement between Washington and Moscow. Russiagate undermined key American institutions and intensified confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
Probing the conspiracy theorists
The tables appear to be turning against the Russiagate hoaxers and their media enablers as new investigations explore how the greatest scandal in US history – a foreign agent in the White House – turned out to be one big deception.
FBI Director James Comey gave Congressional testimony in December 2018, explaining how he came to give credibility to the obviously fraudulent Steele Dossier. Comey managed to say he “can’t remember,” “can’t recall,” and “doesn’t know” no fewer than 245 times. It has also been revealed that the DNC never gave the FBI access to its servers, allegedly hacked by Russians, and instead outsourced the investigation to the private corporation CrowdStrike.
The president of CrowdStrike, ex-FBI official Shawn Henry, had already admitted in a testimony in December 2017 that there was no evidence of Russian hacking. This testimony was not made public until May 2020, and in the intervening time House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff continued to maintain there was evidence of Russian hacking.
The first indictment went out against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann in September 2021. Sussmann reported to the FBI that be had uncovered a secret server linking the Trump organisation to Russia’s Alfa-Bank, which was treated by the media as a smoking gun. Sussmann was indicted for lying to the FBI because he presented himself as an independent cyber expert when he peddled the false server story, when in reality he was hired by the Clinton campaign.
Danchenko and Brookings Institution
Special Council John Durham has now arrested and indicted Igor Danchenko, an analyst at the Brookings Institution. Danchenko was the primary source behind the infamous Steele Dossier ordered by Hillary Clinton. He has been indicted for lying to the FBI, as he claimed the information later featured in the dodgy dossier came from a phone call and meeting in New York with the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce’s president at the time, Sergey Millian.
Millian insists that no such conversation ever took place, either by phone or in person. The FBI investigation concluded that the phone call was made up, and Danchenko had repeatedly emailed Millian but never received a response. Danchenko’s trip to New York did not involve a meeting with Millian, and Danchenko was actually with his family at Bronx Zoo when the meeting was supposed to have taken place.
Danchenko worked for several years for Fiona Hill, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an anti-Russian hawk, and perhaps the most devastating witness against Trump in the impeachment hearings of 2019. Hill assisted in advancing Danchenko’s career and introduced him to Christopher Steele and Democratic Party operative Chuck Dolan. The latter contact is important, as Danchenko is also indicted for lying to the FBI about speaking to him.
The Brookings Institution is one of the oldest and influential think tanks in Washington, of the kind initially envisioned as an intermediary to connect politicians with academics so the decision-maker could make informed decisions. However, this world of influence has since become a billion-dollar industry due to the development of a business model in which policy gets put up for sale. The Brookings Institution is now seemingly involved in the largest political fraud in US history.
The deep state on trial?
The term ‘deep state’ can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theory of a hidden government, although in reality it merely denotes a bureaucracy that can act autonomously and pursue independent policies. Officials often, out of choice or necessity, operate to some extent independently from the elected officials they are supposed to serve.
For example, NATO’s 30 member states keep co-operating irrespective of the constant cycles of elections that rotate new defence ministers around the table. Some things happen regardless of who is in charge.
The bureaucracy can lean on everything from think tanks, intelligence agencies, and a myriad of institutions who inform the politicians and implement their decision-makers. The undemocratic bureaucracy acting under the democratic institutions can be considered a deep state – a government within a government that ensures continuity of the status quo.
When the status quo is disrupted, the deep state may act independently against the policies of the democratic institutions. Russiagate revealed that the election of Trump, with the stated intention of “getting along with Russia,” triggered the bureaucracy to act independently of democratic institutions. Intelligence agencies laundered gossip and smears by presenting them as credible; investigations were initiated on deeply flawed evidence to undermine the legitimacy of an elected representative; military leaders bragged about withholding information from the president; the media acted as soldiers in an information war by uncritically pushing bizarre narratives; and one of Washington’s major think tanks is now involved in the fabrication of the entire Russiagate scandal.
The status quo of anti-Russian policies and narratives usually enjoys bipartisan consensus and therefore goes on without criticism or fanfare. However, the mistake made by Russiagaters was to turn hysteria over Moscow into a political weapon, which one side had to defend against. Now it is coming undone; the recriminations are likely to go beyond the journalists, politicians, and imaginative analysts who backed it, and shine a light on the darkest recesses of the American state.
Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
November 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, United States |
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Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, sees this digital universe—the metaverse—as the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.
Yet while Zuckerberg’s vision for this digital frontier has been met with a certain degree of skepticism, the truth—as journalist Antonio García Martínez concludes—is that we’re already living in the metaverse.
The metaverse is, in turn, a dystopian meritocracy, where freedom is a conditional construct based on one’s worthiness and compliance.
We are almost at that stage now.
Consider that in our present virtue-signaling world where fascism disguises itself as tolerance, the only way to enjoy even a semblance of freedom is by opting to voluntarily censor yourself, comply, conform and march in lockstep with whatever prevailing views dominate.
Fail to do so—by daring to espouse “dangerous” ideas or support unpopular political movements—and you will find yourself shut out of commerce, employment, and society: Facebook will ban you, Twitter will shut you down, Instagram will de-platform you, and your employer will issue ultimatums that force you to choose between your so-called freedoms and economic survival.
This is exactly how Corporate America plans to groom us for a world in which “we the people” are unthinking, unresistant, slavishly obedient automatons in bondage to a Deep State policed by computer algorithms.
Science fiction has become fact.
Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.
We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.
Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.
This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, technological tyrants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies.
So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.
Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.
Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”
It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.
This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.
Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries.
As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.” For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street.
Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.
It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface.
As journalist Susan Fourtane explains, “Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.”
This is the metaverse, wrapped up in the siren-song of convenience and sold to us as the secret to success, entertainment and happiness.
It’s a false promise, a wicked trap to snare us, with a single objective: total control.
George Orwell understood this.
Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Metaverse is just Big Brother in disguise.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
November 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Dystopia Down Under

As if the dystopian hell Australians are dealing with wasn’t bad enough already, residents of the country’s 2nd largest state are now at risk of losing the money in their bank accounts, their homes or other property, and even their driving privileges, if they do not pay their fines from breaking any of the tyrannical government’s draconian Covid rules in a timely manner.
Since at least September, Queensland Health has employed the services of the State’s Penalties Enforcement Register (SPER) to collect a total of 3046 unpaid fines totaling around $5.2 million, which includes 2755 separate individuals and businesses who were issued citations for not following the public health dictatorship’s unjustifiable orders during Covid lockdowns.
The extreme measures are expected to be implemented in other areas of the country, which could bring in close to $100 million in total. In just New South Wales alone, there are over 56 million in unpaid Covid fines that would be subject to collection, according to 9News Australia.
Keep in mind, throughout the lengthy lockdowns, a huge number of citizens were not permitted to work or make a living in any way. Residents of Queensland could not even leave the house without being harassed by police or military officials, and if they dared stray too far from their house they were issued a ticket and a fine.
According to the latest data from Queensland Health, 18.4% of all fines are outstanding and would be subject to the extreme recovery options laid out above. Another 25% are also under investigation or pending and could potentially be sent into collections.
Just 56.4 percent of fines have been paid in full or are currently on a payment plan.
From the Brisbane Times :
SPER was undertaking “active enforcement” on another 18.4 percent of fines, worth about $1 million, which a spokesman said “may include garnishing bank accounts or wages, registering charges over property, or suspending driver licences.”
The unpaid fines are not the only big-ticket that Queensland’s public health dictators are looking to cash in on. They are also looking to chase down 5.7 million in “significantly overdue invoices” from the government’s mandatory quarantine facilities.
Unbelievably, Not only are Australian travelers forced into mandatory quarantine centers for 2 weeks upon arrival, but they are also sent a bill for their stay totaling a few thousand dollars.
In order to collect these payments, Queensland Health went outside the usual channels, calling in private debt collectors to chase down the money on 2045 invoices for hotel quarantine.
“Queenslanders rightly expect travellers will pay for their hotel quarantine stays and not leave taxpayers to foot the bill.” – Queensland Health official on agency hiring outside debt collectors.
The commission debt collectors will make from recovering the unpaid fines is not yet known.
There have been over 44,000 hotel quarantine stays that are not paid for as of right now. Only about 11% are considered eligible for collections, but many more are expected to default over the coming months.
November 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Australia, Covid-19, Human rights |
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