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Media outlets campaign to get Facebook to censor climate “misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 6, 2021

A series of articles have been appearing lately in Big Media, piling pressure on Facebook to step up censorship of what’s considered to be “climate misinformation” on the giant platform.

These reports published by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Verge – all citing and giving a lot of space to a study into climate-related content on Facebook produced by several fairly obscure advocacy groups – came shortly after Big Tech declared “climate misinformation” and “climate denial” to be its next censorship target.

One of these groups, “The Real Facebook Oversight Board,” announced on Twitter that it is publishing a quarterly report that documents “Facebook’s harms on climate change.”

The outfit, which states to be a part of the the-citizens.com site (that for now has a landing page and is funded, among others, by Luminate – an offshoot of billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s organization), said it was working with “Stop Funding Heat” and “Sum of Us” to produce the report.

The Verge bases its article on the “study” published on the Stop Funding Heat website, which accuses Facebook of “fact-checking” less than 4 percent of posts for climate misinformation, that is said to have increased by as much as 77% since January, to garner between about 800,000 and 1.3 million views.

“Facebook has been told over and over, through public reports and in private meetings, that its platform is a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” Stop Funding Heat’s Sean Buchan is cited as stating.

“The Real Facebook Oversight Board” crops up again in a Guardian article dedicated to the same issue, which reveals that a majority of the 195 Facebook pages the activist groups analyzed mostly share memes ridiculing some politicians’ focus on climate change as a policy issue.

Facebook is singled out as being “among the world’s biggest purveyors of climate disinformation,” while the giant’s perceived inaction in censoring content skeptical of climate change is seen as harmful to the “the battle” led by the elites who gathered in Glasgow for UN’s COP26 summit.

The BBC also covered the topic of the allegedly rampant climate misinformation on Facebook, choosing to cite a study which said only 8% of the 7,000 posts they consider misleading were labeled as misinformation.

November 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

The U.S. Moral Superiority Complex Is Accelerating Its Decline

By Laura Ruggeri | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 4, 2021

Soon after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and Deep State insider, remarked “The reversals in Afghanistan are confounding for a Biden national security team that has rarely known personal failure (…) These are America’s best and brightest, who came to the messy endgame of the Afghanistan war with spotless résumés.

Though his criticism of the national security team is understandably guarded, anyone taking a dispassionate look at the establishment liberals who are deemed America’s “best and brightest” in Washington circles would reach the conclusion that they are stronger on slogans than substance, which leads to a disconnect between ideas and implementation, and lack overseas experience: there is only one career diplomat in a senior position on the National Security Council, the director for Africa.

Their ability to display ideological cohesion at the expense of a reflexive process of dialogical thinking is remarkable but not surprising: establishment liberals do see themselves as the centre of political enlightenment. If they appear vainglorious and self-righteous it is because they are part of a power structure that produces and perpetuates these character traits. Those who entertain the possibility of failure are side-lined as bearers of bad news, the centre-stage is reserved for those who project confidence and a sense of moral superiority. As to considering opposing viewpoints, that is entirely optional.

In the same Washington Post article Ignatius observed “Failure can shatter the trust and consensus of any team, and that’s a danger now for the Biden White House. This group has been extraordinarily close and congenial during Biden’s first seven months. But you can already see the first cracks in Fortress Biden.

Are these the kind of cracks that appear when reality hits delusions, when ‘what is’ collides with ‘what ought to be’, when military logic makes a dent in the fairy tale of a benign power successfully exporting “freedom, democracy and human rights”?

Trained for hybrid warfare, Biden’s aides were suddenly dealing with a conventional military crisis and looked out of their depth. As we have seen, managing a retreat and putting a spin on it require a completely different set of skills.

There is no doubt that the optics of one of the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history damaged the reputation of the U.S. both at home and overseas and that’s why we should expect new and more aggressive initiatives to harden American soft power and tighten control of the narrative through underhand methods.

Carefully crafted narratives are crucial for the U.S. because it is selling the world a failed model of development. Trumpeting it as inclusive, gender equal, green and sustainable is like putting lipstick on a pig, it looks grotesque. Managing perceptions, denigrating alternative civilizational and economic models, and demonizing the competition is no longer working, an increasingly large segment of the world population is developing stronger antibodies to the virus of American propaganda. That’s why traditional soft-power tools — trade, legal standards, technology — are increasingly being used to coerce rather than convince.

After the Afghanistan disaster former French ambassador to Israel, UN and U.S. Gérard Araud shared his dismay on Twitter: “The absence of self-examination in the West is seen elsewhere with disbelief. Wars waged by the West have recently cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians for no result and we still lecture the world about values. Do you have any idea about how we are seen abroad?

If even allies are growing tired of America’s preaching, guess how it is going down in the rest of the world.

At the end of August, when U.S. allies were weighing what the shambolic, badly-coordinated retreat means for Western power and influence, Biden delivered a speech in which he explained “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

His statement signalled the intention to extricate the U.S. army from a war that had exhausted itself, politically, militarily and epistemically, but didn’t suggest that the U.S. will renounce its imperialistic ambitions. In the last twenty years there have been tectonic shifts: cyber, biological, information, cognitive and economic warfare are changing the way wars are being fought. Putting boots on the ground is no longer the best nor the only option to subjugate an adversary.

The reconfiguration of the geopolitical landscape and rapidly changing power relations also required a reassessment of priorities. Now that all eyes are on the Asia-Pacific region the question is whether Biden’s team is the best fit for the challenges U.S. power is facing.

Biden’s closest aides never learned the fundamentals of realpolitik, they hold the belief that liberal values are universally valid and the use of force (rebranded “humanitarian interventionism”) morally motivated. They never doubted that the Western model would conquer the world because they grew up at the end of the Cold War, a time that was indeed characterized by a “unipolar moment”. This period is well and truly over and the Western liberal order in its present form is a fraying system.

While the U.S. allocated resources to the destruction and destabilization of sovereign countries, and ignored the widening income gap at home, their main competitor, China, lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty and kept building state-of-the-art infrastructure at home and abroad, that is projects that make a tangible difference in people’s livelihoods. No wonder concealing the truth has become a matter of national security.

Democrats openly admit their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley to police political discourse and silence the bearers of inconvenient truths. They effectively sowed the seeds for a future where everything and everyone can be(come) a national-security threat. Glenn Greenwald revealed that Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. They explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not start censoring more. Pulling the plug on dissenting opinions and de-platforming people who challenge the dominant discourse makes a mockery of free speech, one of the rights that the U.S. claims to be defending when it selectively condemns alleged violations of human rights in other countries. Increasing censorship is also an indication that control of the narrative both at home and overseas has become vital for the U.S.

The conviction that “for America, our interests are our values and our values are our interests’’, one of the tenets of NeoCons, has been revamped by the liberal Left to aggressively promote a different kind of values and causes. A sort of symbolic capital that would allow the U.S. to maintain dominance as rights defender while its own constitutional rights are being eroded at home. Moral grandstanding can only compound the hypocrisy, but that is not stopping liberal totalitarians who are trading off freedom of speech for a child’s right to gender self-identification or for a binding gender or race quota on corporate boards.

History shows that declining empires tend to produce incompetent, self-delusional and divisive leaders who unwittingly accelerate the inevitable fall. That’s exactly what seems to be happening now. Not only the radical liberalism embraced by the Biden administration and Western elite has already antagonized millions of Americans leading to social and political polarization, it is also antagonizing foreign leaders, including the leaders of allied countries such as Hungary and Turkey who are being labelled as ‘authoritarian’. As the U.S. system of alliances is becoming increasingly fragile, dogmatic progressives in the current administration look more and more like Aesop’s donkey in a pottery shop, or a bull in a China shop, if you prefer.

The current National Security Council (NSC) is staffed with advisers who are the product of the kind of groupthink that has long been dominant in Anglo-American universities, those madrassas of the liberal Left where debate is stifled by ideological purges. The opinions and worldviews that are shaped and reinforced in these echo chambers are disseminated and amplified by the media and other industries. Countless careers depend on exporting simulacra of freedom, democracy and human rights, not only because these “experts” have internalized a conviction that these immaterial goods possess an intrinsic moral value, but also because the U.S. has little else to offer the world and leverage on, unless you count assured mutual destruction as leverage.

A case in point is The Summit for Democracy that Biden will convene in virtual mode on December 9–10, 2021, while a second meeting will take place a year later. The plan is to bring together over 100 leaders from selected governments (some of the choices have already stirred controversy among democracy advocates) plus various NGOs, activists (regime change actors) and corporations to “rally the nations of the world in defence of democracy globally” and “push back authoritarianism’s advance”, “address and fight corruption”, “advance respect for human rights”.

Though this initiative is mainly a way to strengthen ideological cohesion among allies by appealing to “common values” and conjuring up yet another global threat, namely “authoritarianism”, it effectively divides the international community into two Cold War-style blocks, friends and foes. On one side countries that earned a seal of approval for toeing the line and therefore deserve to be labelled “democratic”; on the other side a basket of deplorables that refuse to recognize the superiority of the U.S. model of governance and civilizing mission. Basically, the politically correct version of neocolonialism.

The Summit for Democracy will take place against the backdrop of AUKUS, the new Anglo-Saxon alliance that effectively joins NATO to the Asia-Pacific through Britain. What is clearly intended as an alliance against China severely damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and jeopardizes international efforts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

On one hand the U.S. is flexing its military muscle, on the other hand it is flexing the ideological muscle that, in the intentions of the Summit organizers, will provide the impetus to renew and strengthen the liberal international order that has served U.S. interests since the end of WW2.

The Summit for Democracy may have a higher profile convener than similar events held in the past but its premise sounds just as tone-deaf and over-ambitious. Take for example The Copenhagen Summit for Democracy that was organized in May by the “Alliance of Democracies”, a foundation set up by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2017. Its objective was to create a Copenhagen Charter, modelled on the Atlantic Charter, having a Clause 5 similar to NATO’s Article 5, whereby “a state coming under economic attack or facing arbitrary detentions of its citizens due to its democratic or human rights stance could ask for unified support including retaliatory measures of fellow democracies.” This and other creative proposals included in the Copenhagen Charter will likely be rehashed at the Summit to be opened by Biden in December.

Rasmussen too can boast a spotless resume as cheerleader for U.S. global leadership, and that might explain why he seems trapped in a time warp and blind to the actual state of that leadership. If the reader needs further confirmation of Rasmussen’s complicated relationship with reality, here is an excerpt from an article titled ‘The Right Lessons From Afghanistan’ that he wrote for Foreign Affairs a few weeks after the Afghanistan fiasco, “The world should not draw the wrong lessons from Afghanistan. This fiasco was far from inevitable. It would also compound the folly if the world’s developed democracies stopped supporting the quest for freedom and democracy in authoritarian states and war-torn countries. That includes Afghanistan, where the United States and its partners should lend their support to the ongoing resistance efforts to oppose the Taliban.” We all know what happened to those “resistance efforts”, but Rasmussen won’t let reality get in the way of his illusions.

It is unlikely the Summit for Democracy will achieve the unspoken objective of creating an Alliance of Democracies that could bypass the UN Security Council. But it is undeniable that international law has long been under attack and is incrementally replaced with the Atlanticist concept of a “rules-based international system”, which does not have any specific rules but allows the West to violate international law under the pretext of advancing liberal ideals and exporting democracy.

It’s expected that USAID will be called to play a major role at the summit. USAID under Samantha Powers has a seat in the NSC and has been tasked with the mission to “modernize democracy assistance across the board”. This includes “supporting governments to strengthen their cybersecurity, counter disinformation and helping democratic actors defend themselves against digital surveillance, censorship, and repression.” In typical Orwellian doublespeak the U.S. is seeking help by claiming to help. With a military budget already stretched over the limit, enlisting foreign actors (both state and non-state) to do its bidding in the information and cognitive warfare becomes imperative.

NED, USAID, USAGM, “philanthropic” organizations like Open Society Foundations and the Omidyar Network have long been grooming and bankrolling journalists, activists, politicians, various types of influencers and community leaders. Their job is to paint a negative picture of China, Russia and any country resisting U.S. diktats. In Africa, just to mention one of many examples, “independent” journalists are paid to investigate Chinese companies that are involved in mining, construction, energy, infrastructure, loans and environment and portray them as causing harm to communities, environment and workers.

At the beginning of October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new partnership with the OECD in Paris: the overt goal was to combat corruption and promote “high-quality” infrastructure. But the partnership is part of a broader effort to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The U.S. has also appealed to the G7 and QUAD to provide the financial muscle for its Build Back Better World initiative (BW3), a rehash of Trump’s Blue Dot Network. Since the U.S. and its partners cannot respond to BRI symmetrically — they are unable to match China dollar for dollar, project for project — they are relying on virtue-signalling both as a marketing and bullying tactic. According to this initiative, infrastructure building in developing countries should comply with a certification scheme and lending rules set by the U.S. and its partners, rules that are cloaked in the familiar jargon of social and environmental sustainability, gender equality, and anti-corruption.

In case the competition with China in Asia, Europe and Africa does turn into open confrontation, the U.S. could use the BW3 to increase pressure on investment funds, global financial institutions and insurance companies to discriminate against projects that don’t meet standards set by the U.S. in return for concessions and sweeteners. When Western companies cannot compete fairly with Chinese ones, they can always rely on friendly officials in Washington to rewrite the rules of the game in their favour.

American policymakers seem unable to abandon a Cold War mentality that is essentially utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in the demands it places on others, and self-righteous. Some analysts believe that the source of the problem might be the force of public opinion, deemed emotional, moralistic and binary, the old “Us vs Them.”

Classical international relations theorists have long held the assumption that American public opinion has moralistic tendencies: for liberal idealists the moral foundation of public opinion, mobilized by norm entrepreneurs, opens up the possibility of positive moral action, whereas for realists, the public’s moralism is one of the main reasons why foreign policymaking should be insulated from the pressures of public opinion.

However it is myopic to conceive of public opinion and policymaking as separate entities when in fact they are both shaped by the interests of powerful elites. Public opinion doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is swayed by new and old media that are often controlled by the same interest groups and corporations that fund the think tanks and foundations influencing U.S. foreign policy.

For instance, not only was the collusion and revolving door between government and the tech industry a feature of the Obama administration, it characterizes the Biden administration as well. The transnational interests of these elite groups are usually cloaked in a progressive, inclusive, democratic rhetoric to make their narrow agenda appear big enough so that unsuspecting ordinary people may want to claim ownership and subscribe to it. Corporate interests and national interest are a tangled web no longer subjected to public scrutiny since national level democracy has been hollowed out. When the trilemma of democracy, state, and market becomes irreconcilable, global market players call the shots without democracy or state being able to control them, oversee unceasing technological innovation (including artificial intelligence) or curb the excessive financialization of the economy.

Though U.S. attempts at nation-building result in chaos and misery for local populations, Americans haven’t given up on trying to remake the world in their own distorted image by aggressively promoting their worldviews, exporting a simulacrum of democracy and politicizing human rights issues.

They reject true multilateralism by trying to dominate the international organizations that were created to further cooperation and harmonize national interests. For the corporate donors of both the Democratic and Republican Party other countries’ national interests are a relic of the past that should be done away with. And indeed national interests would hardly be compatible with a world order led by the U.S. in partnership with global stakeholders (global corporations, NGOs, think-tanks, governments, academic institutions, charities, etc.)

These global stakeholders and their political representatives effectively want to replace the modern international system of sovereign states that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Under this system, commonly referred to as Westphalian system, states exist within recognised borders, their sovereignty is recognised by others and principles of non-interference are clearly spelled out. Since this model doesn’t allow the government of one nation to impose legislation in another, the U.S. loudly promotes the idea of global governance, under which a global public-private partnership is allowed to create policy initiatives that affect people in every country as national governments implement the recommended policies. Typically this occurs via an intermediary policy distributor, such as the IMF, World Bank, WHO, but many international organizations now play a similar role.

In the Biden administration we see a dangerous convergence of the national security establishment and Silicon Valley tech giants. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both worked for WestExec, the consulting firm that Blinken cofounded with Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defence under President Obama. Google hired WestExec to help them land Department of Defense contracts. Google’s former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made personnel recommendations for appointments to the Department of Defense. Schmidt himself was appointed to lead a government panel on artificial intelligence. At least 16 foreign policy positions are occupied by CNAS alumni. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is a bipartisan think tank that receives large contributions directly from defence contractors, Big Tech, U.S. finance giants.

These donors spend considerable resources shaping the intellectual environment, academic research and symposia in order to build consensus around their agenda. The Biden administration also features dozens of officials hailing from the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank set up by John Podesta, a longtime Clintonworld staple, with George Soros’ generous contribution. The ties between Open Society Foundations (OSF) and CAP are so strong that Patrick Gaspard, the former head of OSF, was nominated president and CEO of CAP.

When government becomes the expression of global corporate interests and channels the belief system of a small, privileged elite it can be hard to tell who is leading who, who is really making policy and setting national security strategies and goals.

Biden’s national security team is the product of this corrupt system. Its members may tone down the “freedom, democracy and human rights” rhetoric if it gets in the way of achieving a particular strategic goal, but they won’t abandon it because it has proven to be effective in providing a legitimating frame and moral justification to U.S. hegemony.

If we look at the Roman empire we see how one constant theme was “expand or die”. Expansion isn’t only to be intended as territorial or military. Expanding influence, alliances, the use of Latin, the spread of Roman laws, currency, standards, culture and religion all contributed to the cohesion of the Empire. Given the current constraints to U.S. ambitions — namely the strategic partnership between China and Russia, BRI, the more assertive role played by regional powers, nervousness and conflicting interests among U.S. allies and a large budget deficit — the room for expansion has been considerably reduced. Thus the U.S. is doubling its efforts in areas where it still has room for maneuver.

Biden’s slogan “America is Back” sought to reassure allies but cannot hide the fact that the emperor is naked. Advertisers, politicians and psyops planners are continuously manipulating people into changing their perceptions of reality and making choices that ultimately do not benefit them. But no matter how hard the power-knowledge regimes of Western intellectual production work to conceal the decline, the West no longer dominates the world and the values it advocates are not unanimous, far from it. Labelling governments that don’t embrace liberal values and U.S. standards as “autocratic regimes” is just foolish sloganeering and doesn’t take into account the changing balance of power on the ground. The world is evolving toward a multipolar system and the U.S. had better take notice of it. Those serving in the NSC are still imagining a world that no longer exists, one where America has the power to force other countries into doing its bidding. The current ideological approach blinds pragmatic thinking, thus impeding discussions and negotiations.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Someone should tell the Biden team.

November 5, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

OSHA to Cover Up Vaccine Injuries by Preventing Workers’ Compensation Claims

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 3, 2021

As reported by Kim Iversen above, around the world people are gathering for massive protests against COVID shot mandates. In mid-September 2021, Italy became the first European country to announce the implementation of mandatory COVID-19 health passes (so-called “Green Pass”) for all workers, both public and private.

The Italian mandate took effect October 15, 2021. Residents have been protesting in the streets for months on end and there’s no sign of them letting up. Demonstrations are also taking place in The Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, Australia and France.

Even in Israel, mass protests are now taking place as it was announced Israeli’s will lose their health pass privileges unless they get a third booster shot six months after their second dose. New York City has also seen large protests in the wake of its vaccine requirement for restaurants and other public venues.

Leaders Turn a Blind Eye

Yet, despite massive protests, the push for vaccine mandates and vaccine passports that will create a two-tier society continue unabated. With few exceptions, world leaders are simply turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the fact that their residents want nothing to do with their new world order.

At the same time, government agencies charged with keeping us safe are doing the complete opposite. That includes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which President Biden has placed in charge of enforcing his unconstitutional edict that private companies with 100 employees or more must make COVID “vaccination” a requirement for employment or face fines of as much as $700,000 per incidence.1

OSHA will issue the mandate for employers as an emergency temporary standard (ETS), but as of this writing, no official mandate has actually been issued.

According to an October 18, 2021, report by PJ Media,2 OSHA has sent a draft to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review. Since it’s being issued as an ETS, there will be no public comment period.

Once the OMB review is finalized, the vaccination rule will be published. Only then will the mandate actually go into effect. That said, OSHA has already amended an already existing rule in a way that will hide the true extent of the damage that this mandate will have on the American workforce.

OSHA Rule Change Covers Up Vaccine Injuries

According to OSHA rules (29 CFR 19043), employers must record and report work-related illnesses, injuries and fatalities, whether the employer was at fault or not. As reported on May 26, 2021, by employment law firm Ogletree Deakins,4 this recording requirement initially also applied to adverse reactions suffered by employees who had to get the COVID shot as a requirement for employment.

The original guidance stated that employers were required to record an employee’s adverse reaction to the COVID jab if the shot was a) work-related, 2) a new case under 29 C.F.R. 1904.6 and 3) met one or more OSHA general recording criteria set out in 29 C.F.R. 1904.7. OSHA specified that an adverse reaction to the jab would be considered “work-related” if the shot was required for employment.

Then, in late May 2021, OSHA suddenly revoked this guidance, saying it will not enforce the recording requirement if the injury or fatality involves the COVID jab, even if required for employment. The nonenforcement will remain in place through May 2022, at which time the agency will reevaluate its position.

Why would they remove the requirement to record and report vaccine injuries incurred as a result of a vaccine mandate? According to OSHA, the agency is “working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations,” “does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts.”5,6 As reported by Ogletree Deakins:7

“There is no doubt that OSHA’s guidance created a disincentive for employers to mandate that their employees get vaccinated. With a mandatory vaccination policy, the guidance ensured that employees’ adverse reactions (with arguably little correlation to actual work-related injuries) could end up on a company’s OSHA recordkeeping logs — which could, in turn, negatively affect its insurance rates and, in some industries, its ability to bid for work.”

What Ogletree fails to address is that by not enforcing this recording requirement for COVID jab injuries, OSHA is intentionally covering up the ramifications these vaccine mandates might have on employees’ health. Meanwhile, employers are still required to record and report COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 deaths among their employees.

Federal Employees Get Special Treatment

In related news, federal employees must be fully “vaccinated” by November 22, 2021, or face the unemployment line. While coercion of this nature is abhorrent under any circumstance, federal employees at least get special treatment if they’re injured by the required jab. As reported by Stacey Lennox for PJ Media:8

“… October 1, 2021, the Federal Employee’s Compensation Act (FECA) issued a bulletin regarding coverage for vaccine injuries.9 FECA did not traditionally cover preventative measures and any resulting illness or injury. As of September 9, 2021, when President Biden announced the federal mandate, adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination are covered.”

As indicated in FECA Bulletin No. 22-01, dated October 1, 2021:10

“… this executive order now makes COVID-19 vaccination a requirement of most Federal employment. As such, employees impacted by this mandate who receive required COVID-19 vaccinations on or after the date of the executive order may be afforded coverage under the FECA for any adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, and for any injuries sustained while obtaining the vaccination.”

“This bulletin is an interesting turn of events given previous OSHA guidance to private employers,” Lennox writes.11 Indeed, while OSHA is selectively choosing to hide the vaccine injuries of private employees, federal employees will have access to financial compensation for their vaccine injuries, over and above the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Act (CICP).12

Who Will Pay for Private Employees Injured by the Jabs?

On the whole, it’s clear that private employees will be at a distinct disadvantage in terms of compensation. If their employer requires them to get the jab to keep their job, and they get injured by it, the only recourse they have is to file a CICP claim, which is near-impossible to get. By not requiring companies to record vaccine injuries, it effectively shuts down the path for an employee to seek worker’s compensation if they’re injured by a mandated COVID jab.

“While OSHA recordability does not govern worker’s compensation, after managing both for several employers, I have never seen a compensable injury that is not OSHA recordable,” Lennox writes.13

As for CICP, in its 15-year history, it has paid out fewer than 1 in 10 claims.14,15,16 It also offers rather limited help, as you first have to exhaust your personal insurance before it kicks in to pay the difference.

Even if they can get it, CICP awards are likely to be a drop in the bucket for most people. The average award is $200,000, and compensation for fatalities are capped at $370,376.17 Meanwhile, you can easily rack up a $1 million hospital bill if you suffer a serious thrombotic event.18

Perhaps most egregious of all, it’s your responsibility to prove your injury was the “direct result of the countermeasure’s administration based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence beyond mere temporal association.”

In other words, you basically have to prove what the vaccine developer itself has yet to ascertain, seeing how you are part of their still-ongoing study. You must also pay for your own legal help and any professional witnesses you may need to support your claim.

The fact that federal workers who are injured by the mandated COVID jabs will be covered by FICA now gives unionized employees a new bargaining chip though. As noted by Lennox:19

“Without the OSHA ETS, unions would have bargained about having a vaccine mandate as a term or condition of employment at all. Now, unions should still have an opportunity for effects bargaining to ensure their members are covered if they sustain a vaccine injury.”

Recordability Guidance Must Be Changed Back

As mentioned earlier, the OSHA requirement to record vaccine injuries was scrapped because it disincentivized employers to mandate the shot. Having large numbers of injury reports can raise a company’s insurance costs. However, if OSHA is now going to require all employers with 100 or more employees to implement vaccine mandates, then most companies will be in the same boat.

Since no employer will be at a particular disadvantage, OSHA really needs to change its recordability guidance back, Lennox says, adding:20

“Private sector employees deserve the same protection as federal employees in the face of mandatory vaccines. The mandates will put a severe risk between them and their ability to earn a living for some people.

If they [employers] cave, they should be liable just as every taxpayer is now liable for a vaccine injury to a federal employee. If employers don’t want the liability, they should fight the mandate.”

Sources and References

November 5, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video | , , | Leave a comment

White House Expands Vaccine Mandate To Cover 80 Million Workers

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 4, 2021

The White House has just released new policies requiring all companies – big and small – to coerce their workers into accepting the vaccine, or face termination, as the Biden Administration continues to up the pressure on all working Americans to get vaccinated before Jan. 4.

According to Axios, President Biden is planning to announce Thursday that employers with more than 100 workers on their payroll must guarantee that their workers are fully vaccinated, or tested weekly, by Jan. 4, 2022. If not, they could face federal fines starting at tens of thousands of dollars per offense.

What’s more, health-care workers will face even tougher restrictions which will effectively require every health-care worker in the country to be vaccinated, or lose their job, despite the fact that millions of health-care workers have already been infected with the virus by natural means.

To be sure, managing weekly testing programs for a minority of corporate employees will be extremely costly, and the ramifications of this new policy will essentially force employees for the biggest companies in the US to accept the vaccine.

Per Axios, the new rules – formally known as the COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard – will be enforced by OSHA. They will affect roughly two-thirds of America’s workforce, or roughly 80MM people. Many businesses and hospitals have already started to enforce vaccine mandates, and while Axios reports that they have seen “minimal” noncompliance, that doesn’t exactly square with the fact that less than 60% of the American population is fully vaccinated.

While corporations might be able to absorb some of these costs, small businesses will likely be left with some difficult decisions to make. However, there’s one important catch: OSHA will mostly rely on “complaints” to enforce the rule, meaning it will be up to American workers whether or not they want to hold their fellow workers accountable for defying the policy. This incentive to snitch out co-workers and neighbors has already elicited criticism from some, including Conservative Radio host Dan Bongino, who has pushed back against vaccine mandates in favor of bodily autonomy.

The strict mandate for health-care workers is already creating some problems because, while 40% of health-care businesses have purportedly already enforced the policy, the supposedly “minimal” level of noncompliance is reportedly exacerbating worker shortages at hospitals and other critical service providers.

In another indication of how companies are struggling with the mandate, some federal contractors had been expected to enforce the Biden Admin’s vaccine mandate by Dec. 8, but those expectations have now been pushed back to Jan. 4. When asked whether the pushback was due to worker shortages, or the timing of the holiday season, they refused to comment, saying only that the delay is meant to “align” with health-care facilities and US employers.

Perhaps President Biden (and VP/President-in-waiting Kamala Harris) have already forgotten the lessons of Tuesday’s “off-year” election?

November 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

The EU is not revealing the details of its contracts with vaccine makers. Why?

By Robert Bridge | RT | November 3, 2021

As some Europeans continue to resist mandatory vaccine measures, a group of parliamentarians have upbraided the Commission for allowing pharmaceutical companies to ‘run roughshod over democracy.’

One of the most important lessons people learn early in life is to never plunk down hard-earned cash on a product before reading all of the fine print contained in the contract. ‘Caveat emptor,’ as every subject of the Roman Empire instinctively understood.

Yet, it seems that few bureaucrats in Brussels have purchased a new home, used car or some newfangled device lately, because that’s exactly what these bumbling fools have done. In an effort to ‘protect the health of their constituents,’ they bought millions of batches of Covid vaccines from various pharmaceutical companies without letting lawmakers sneak a peek at the contracts.

As it turns out, entire pages of these documents – the few that have been made public, that is – have been heavily redacted. This has raised more than one eyebrow in the European Union, and perhaps none more conspicuously than that of Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes.

At the weekend, Terhes appeared at a press conference in Brussels with several other EU lawmakers at this side, all visibly shaken by the news that they would be required to produce, starting on November 3, a digital ‘green pass’ to gain entry into Parliament. Like many EU citizens, these lawmakers have declined to get the vaccine not because they are ‘anti-vaxxers’ but because they have been denied critical information regarding the product and procedures. Now they will be refused entry into Parliament, the place where the will of their people is (supposedly) represented.

Terhes revealed that, back in January, EU lawmakers were demanding “full access to the contracts signed between these companies that produce the vaccines and the European Union.” To say the parliamentarians were disappointed would be a gross understatement.

The Romanian MEP, who represents the Christian-Democratic National Peasants Party, quoted from a Euractiv article that reported: “The contract, signed between pharmaceutical company CureVac and the European Commission in November, was made available to MEPs [on January 12, 2021] in a redacted format after the company agreed to open the contract up to scrutiny.”

That is really putting the cart before the horse, for how can something that has been so grossly redacted be opened up to scrutiny? Terhes railed that Brussels is “imposing a medical product on European citizens without them knowing what’s in these contracts.” That’s simply inexcusable and should be easily struck down by even a third-rate lawyer.

More astonishing is that not even the EU members of Parliament know the details of the agreements.

To prove his point, the Romanian MEP held up individual pages of the CureVac contract, each one heavily redacted like some kind of imitation of artist Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square.’ It doesn’t get any less concerning when we drill down to which parts of the contract were blacked out. According to an analysis conducted by Euractiv, “4.22% of the liability section and 15.38% of the indemnification section was found to be redacted, while 0% of the section on the processing of personal data was redacted.”

Meanwhile, the contract’s annexes, which delve into the nitty-gritty details of the agreement, were redacted by some 61%. In total, almost 24% of the contract was hidden. Now ask yourself this simple question: Would you sign up for a home mortgage if it was discovered that one-quarter of the agreement was missing? I’ll crawl out on a limb and guess ‘no.’ Nor would anyone think you were ‘anti-mortgage’ or ‘mortgage hesitant’ if you did so.

The truth is that you, and millions of other rational people exactly like you, are simply ‘pro-transparency.’ Yet these medical consumers are being treated like second-class citizens for simply wanting more information before they agree to be injected with something. ‘My body, my choice’ is a battle cry that no longer applies, as millions of people are quickly discovering, in the current authoritarian climate.

Keep in mind that it is on the basis of these contracts that Europeans must come to a decision, based on “informed consent,” that they will ‘voluntarily’ take the jab so as not to be ostracized from polite society. Unless they agree to take one of the available vaccines, citizens of the EU face potentially being denied the right to work, enter a store, buy medicine, take their children to school and freely travel from one country to another.

Naturally, this makes the stakes for not taking the jab incredibly high, but that only makes it worse that details are being deliberately withheld from the public. It is no secret that the pharmaceutical giants enjoy full indemnity in the event that an individual suffers death or injury after receiving a Covid shot.  And although such unfortunate occurrences appear to be rare, even Pfizer-BioNTech, which has been granted approval to extend vaccinations to 12 to 15-year-olds in the EU, seems uncertain as to what the long-term effects of the vaccines may be.

“Additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine,” it clearly states on its website.

In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a damning report on Pfizer, saying negotiators for the drug company had behaved in a “bullying” manner with several Latin American countries. In Argentina they demanded “additional indemnity” against civilians seeking legal compensation after suffering adverse effects from their vaccines. In the agreements, Pfizer takes great care to ensure that all financial responsibility for compensating citizens injured from the inoculations is that of the respective government.

The company also enjoys the protection of non-disclosure agreements with many of its nation clients, including the European Commission and the US government. With regards to the EU, Brussels is forbidden from disclosing information that would be “material to Pfizer without the consent of Pfizer,” Public Citizen reported.

In fact, CureVac was being quite generous with the EU Commission, considering it was the only pharmaceutical company that agreed to release its contract to the light of day. Of course there wasn’t much to inspect with all of the redactions, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?

In light of the steady pressure bearing down on Brussels, much of it happening behind closed doors, the European Commission has obliquely admitted – almost one year too late, and after the rights and freedoms of European citizens have been crushed underfoot – that they failed to use good judgment when ramming through these emergency vaccines.

Last week, in an overwhelmingly passed resolution (458 in favor, 149 against and 86 abstaining), the EU Parliament demanded legislation that would make “the process of researching, purchasing and distributing Covid-19 vaccines more transparent, stating:

“This would enable MEPs to effectively scrutinize EU vaccine policies. At the same time, the Commission should be discussing these policies more openly with citizens.”

This shocking statement by the EU Parliament shows how little respect Brussels had for democratic principles when it was negotiating with the vaccine makers, who have, incidentally, reaped a windfall from the pandemic. The parliamentarians, who are coming under fire at home, demanded that “the Commission discloses who negotiates vaccine purchases on its behalf. It should publish purchase agreements made with vaccine suppliers, including details of public investments and vaccine costs, and publicise any potential breaches of contract.”

Then, in what comes off as the understatement of the century, the MEPs are of the opinion that “more information could help counter vaccine hesitancy and disinformation, and pharmaceutical companies should also release extensive clinical trial data and reports.”

Oh, you think so?

The following question is not an idle one: Why are MEPs ONLY NOW talking about the total lack of transparency and democracy that occurred between the EU Commission and Big Pharma? A more cynical person would be tempted to say it’s because the draconian vaccine mandates have finally reached the very door of Parliament, where the power brokers find themselves locked out of their offices, much like thousands of people on the street. Welcome to the club.

In any case, the fact that Brussels has withheld the details of its agreements with the vaccine makers for almost a year, while at the same time casually destroying the civil liberties of its citizens, totally disqualifies them from punishing those people who are ‘hesitant’ about receiving the vaccine. ‘Informed consent’ is essential to any functioning democracy, and Europeans were clearly denied that right. Do the right thing, Brussels, and release these heavy chains from your people. The world is watching.


Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.

November 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Video | , , | Leave a comment

FDA approves Pfizer jab for kids, but even they don’t seem sure it’s safe

By Helen Buyniski | RT | November 1, 2021

American children have no choice but to act as experimental test subjects for the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to determine the jab’s safety, the Food and Drug Administration has apparently concluded. Good luck, kids!

“We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it,” editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard adjunct professor Eric Rubin argued last week, his words buried within the eight-hour barrage of presentations and discussions that swirled around the FDA advisory panel’s approval of the mRNA jab for children aged five to 11.

The FDA followed up on the advisory panel’s 17-0 recommendation with approval, as it typically does, on Friday. If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention follows suit, some 28 million American children will be quickly served up as fresh-faced fodder for a smaller dose of the Covid-19 vaccine already poised to inject some 100 million American adults. That is, as soon as President Joe Biden is able to whip up a legally-binding demand he can submit to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Friday’s FDA approval means only the CDC stands between American children and a warp-speed rollout of the Pfizer jab. However, the rush to approval doesn’t necessarily mean there are no concerns. A disturbingly large portion of the FDA committee’s members are connected to Pfizer in some way or another, leading vaccine skeptics to cry foul. Meanwhile, a growing portion of the country continues to denounce the mandates in general, insisting everyone should be able to make their own decision regarding whether or not they wish to get injected.

Echoing the newly-reanimated pro-choice slogan, mandate protesters recently swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge declaring ‘My body, my choice’ as New York City employees faced the potential loss of their jobs as firefighters, police officers, sanitation handlers, and corrections officers due to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s insistence that all municipal employees get vaxxed or be relegated to the purgatory of open-ended unpaid leave.

The FDA’s effort to put the cart so far in front of the horse mirrored the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the congressional tug-of-war over Obamacare in 2010. Faced with a phonebook-sized, dubiously-legal bill unlike anything Congress had passed before and no realistic timeframe to wrangle with the details, Pelosi suggested Congress would have to “pass the bill to find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy.”

Since then, legislation by brute force has only grown as the means by which laws are passed in the US, as ever-more-polarized parties refuse to give an inch and betray the appearance of weakness. Allowing the ‘other side’ to be seen as achieving even the slightest victory is unconscionable, and that framework remains in place in the vaccination arena – where it makes less sense than anywhere else.

After all, it was former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed that brought the world the Pfizer shot, even if the jab itself wasn’t rolled out until shortly (some would say deliberately) after the 2020 election and vaccine mandates have since become a cause celebre of the Democratic Party.

With half the US up in arms about the other half’s supposed refusal to roll up its sleeves and submit to an intensely politicized needle, anyone who hesitates is denounced posthaste in a 21st-century witch hunt – to be fired, if not set on fire; outfitted with the scarlet A for anti-vaxxer, not adulteress; and otherwise chased out of the public square – deplatformed from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, if not chased physically with pitchforks and torches. Similar divisions have erupted across Europe, and countries like Italy and France have pushed the issue even further, barring the unvaccinated from so much as entering grocery stores to buy food.

While the US study of the Pfizer vaccine’s effects on children five to 11 failed to turn up any deadly side effects, critics argued its population size was too small to be effective for such a purpose. Parents of some jab recipients have observed disturbing symptoms in their offspring in the hours and days following the shots and filmed heartbreaking testimonials describing their downfall from healthy children to pain-wracked perma-patients experiencing near-constant seizures, facial distortions, debilitating heart problems, or other dire health issues.

Another doctor on the FDA committee, Michael Kurilla of the National Institutes of Health, abstained from voting on recommending Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine entirely, citing a lack of evidence that all children need the shot, and while Kurilla, an infectious disease and pathology expert, was the only panel member to abstain from voting, he was not the only member to openly express misgivings about doling out the jab to young Americans. His colleague, Dr. Cody Meissner of Tufts University, suggested that it would be an “error” to mandate the jab for children to return to school until there was more hard data.

“We simply don’t know what the side effects are going to be,” he said, acknowledging the shot ​​– like its adult equivalent – probably wouldn’t prevent transmission of the virus. While he was not opposed to administering the shot to certain vulnerable subgroups inside the 5-11 age group, Meissner was concerned approving the shot for everyone in that category would lead to a heavy-handed mandate the likes of which is currently being wielded against American adults.

Children who receive the Pfizer-BioNTech jab may actually get less immunity and face more risk than supplied by getting and recovering from a current strain of Covid-19, Kurilla told the Daily Mail, referring to the Delta variant and other current strains of Covid-19 circulating among the population. “The question really becomes, does this vaccine offer any benefits to them at all?” he asked rhetorically during the FDA committee meeting. He would have voted ‘yes’ if the FDA had merely proposed opening up access to the vaccine to a ‘subset’ of those ages five to 11, but he disagreed with administering it to all children within that age group.

Two other panel members voted to approve despite their misgivings. Meissner argued that a “very small percent of otherwise healthy six-to-11-year-old children…might derive some benefit,” while President and CEO of Meharry Medical College James Hildreth agreed that “vaccinating all of the children…seems a bit much for me,” pointing to the relatively low risk of hospitalization and near-zero risk of death by Covid-19 for children.

Speaking up against the jab, even circumstantially, has become the kiss of death in the medical community, with even medical rock stars like Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA as a drug, cast into the dustbin of history for expressing skepticism that his invention was being incorrectly used to deliver the Covid-19 vaccine.

However, governments worldwide are setting themselves up for civil war as populations are forced to choose one ‘side’ or another. Even many of the vaccinated have acknowledged that the jab should not be forced on anyone, while entire industries like shipping, air travel, defense, and the like grind to a halt as mandates run up against the stubborn will of their employees. Southwest Airlines was allegedly forced to cancel thousands of flights earlier this month, due to a reported mass ‘sickout’ by air traffic controllers unwilling to get vaxxed, though the airline itself has denied this, and rumors of trucker strikes from Australia to America have food sellers panicking at the thought of empty shelves.

As it stands, parents who were willing to submit themselves to experimental shots in the name of convenience and retaining employment may not be so willing to offer up their children as sacrifices to a company once denounced by the US Justice Department as the worst fraudster in the pharmaceutical industry.

Governments that have shown themselves as profoundly untrustworthy throughout the Covid-19 pandemic are unlikely to change their behavior at the last minute, and parents are wise to take care in where they place their trust.

November 2, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

One woman’s stand against the outrageous power grab in Australia

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | November 1, 2021

UNREPORTED by the MSM was an impassioned speech by an MP in the Victorian Parliament against legislation being pushed through to confer unlimited Covid powers on the State Premier, the egomaniac Dan Andrews, and the Health Minister. 

The MP is Steph Ryan, and she is an example to all MPs in threatened democracies worldwide. She is also the deputy leader of the National Party of Australia, known as the Nationals. She certainly deserves wider notice and recognition not just for the stand she is taking but for the quality of her speech. I am grateful to the despairing Australian reader who brought her to my attention:

‘We’re in trouble in this country,’ she wrote to me, ‘From being a free, relaxed and happy nation (after all, one of the stock-standard phrases used when expressing universal optimism was always “She’ll be right, mate!”) we’re now a fearful, cowering, woke country expecting cradle to grave coddling and direction.’

Steph Ryan’s speech is a lifeline for citizens like our reader. I found it truly inspiring. Setting out the very principles upon which democracy and our freedom are based, it is everything that we want and need to hear said by a politician. You can watch it below and the full transcript follows.

Steph Ryan: I feel sick that we are having this debate. I do not think there has ever been a piece of legislation come before this chamber that I have been more vehemently opposed to. I feel sick that Labor MPs are not brave enough to stand up and speak the truth about this legislation. I do not care if you think that the Premier’s handling of this pandemic has been infallible. I do not care if you stand with Dan. I do not care if you think he is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The truth is that this legislation is about handing the Premier and the Minister for Health the ability to rule by decree. Is that power that you want to hand to every future Premier and health minister? It does not matter what you think about the Premier. This is not even about the current government. This is about the management of pandemics but also the ability to trigger these powers for ever into the future. It is about the regime that it has the potential to set up here in this state. That is what is at stake here. Is that what we want as Victorians?

This Bill allows the government to declare a pandemic in Victoria and make orders that lock down the state even when there is no presence of disease here. Yes, the chief health officer needs to publish his or her advice within 14 days of those orders being made, but that advice, even if it contradicts the order made by the Premier or the health minister, does not invalidate those orders if it does not support them.

The Bill gives the government the right to make orders on the ability of attributes – things like race, gender, sexuality. How on earth can people support that? How on earth can members opposite support that? It is extraordinary. It offers no rights of appeal to courts for people who are incarcerated. It sets up a penalty regime of fines that would see an individual face more than $90,000 [c £50,000]. That would send most ordinary Victorians to jail. Who can afford a $90,000 fine? The government says, ‘Don’t worry. That’s just about the worst breaches.’ Well, that is not what the legislation says. It is extraordinary. I cannot believe that those opposite are not brave enough to stand up and speak out about it. I imagine that the member for Altona is going to speak on this legislation. She has been the Attorney-General; she has been a lawyer. She cannot possibly agree with this; she cannot. Where are your values?

There is no Parliamentary oversight of these powers. The Bill sets up a consultative committee of people appointed by the Premier and the health minister, and they do not even need to take the advice of that – it is just a consultative committee. Central to a liberal democracy is a belief in shared power, and central to a liberal democracy is a suspicion of concentrated power. Central to a liberal democracy is the accountability of the executive to the Parliament. Central to a liberal democracy is the preservation of the following rights: freedom to criticise the government, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of worship, the right to a fair trial, the right of assembly, freedom of movement. This Bill hands the government the power to throw out every one of those rights by decree, and there is no oversight of these powers. We are supposed to think critically in this place. We are supposed to come here, representing our constituents, thinking critically. That is why people elected us. Stop being sheep!

I find it inconceivable that a future Premier, for example, might determine that people with red hair cannot hold a job. I find that completely out of the realm of possibility. But do you know what? Two years ago I never contemplated that we would live in a world where someone who is not vaccinated cannot hold a job, cannot go into a shop, cannot go to an event. I never believed that we would come to a place as a state where we would see that – but here we are. These things do not happen overnight; they happen by degrees. Do I trust the Andrews government and all future governments to exercise these powers responsibly? No, I do not, and I think anyone who does is an absolute fool.

Labor MPs protest that this is what we asked for, that we called for elected politicians to be accountable for these decisions. What we called for was proper Parliamentary oversight, and that is why we have proposed that the power to make orders should require the approval of a constitutional majority of both houses of the Parliament.

When the president of the Victorian Bar Council comes out and says that the Stasi would be happy with the powers that this Bill confers, people need to sit up and take note. This is how he summarised it yesterday:

‘The Bill confers on the health minister in a practical sense an effectively unlimited power to rule the state by decree, for effectively an indefinite period, and without . . . judicial or parliamentary oversight . . . That doesn’t add up to good democracy.’

People might argue that ultimate accountability sits with the people at an election. If you do not like what a Premier has done, well, vote them out. But yesterday when we had the Bill briefing, the department could not say whether this Bill gives the power to the Premier to suspend elections. They did not know the answer to that, and they said they would have to come back and give us advice, which we still have not received. That remains unanswered.

The department does not know whether the Premier could use this Bill to suspend an election. Do you realise how extraordinary that is?

The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.’ Those opposite tell us that unprecedented powers are required for unprecedented times. Governments always present compelling reasons to concentrate power. My grandmother came to this country fleeing Mussolini, and I am glad that she is not alive today to see what is happening. I genuinely am. I think she would be absolutely horrified. I honestly never believed that the people elected to this chamber would think that it is appropriate to hand the Premier and the health minister the kind of power to lock people up, to lock people down and to cancel protests without the checks and balances of Parliament – to strip people of their most basic rights without the oversight and the checks and balances of Parliament. The erosion of people’s liberties does not happen overnight; it happens by degrees. Streamline pandemic laws, by all means. We do not argue with that. We know that the government needs a certain degree of flexibility to control dangerous outbreaks of disease. We are not arguing about that. We are arguing for proper accountability and oversight. This Bill does not deliver those measures.

Let me conclude with the proverb that we all know because it is inscribed into the foyer of this building:

Where no Counsel is the People Fall; but in the Multitude of Counsellors there is Safety.

That is the principle of this Parliament, and it is the principle that I urge members of the Labor Party to adhere to. Do not give this unchecked power not just to this government but to future governments. It is wrong.

November 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Internet Trolls Face Jail For Causing “Psychological Harm!”

By Richie Allen | November 1, 2021

The Times is reporting this morning that trolls could be sentenced to two years imprisonment for sending messages or posting content that causes psychological harm.

Writing in this morning’s paper, Home Affairs Editor Matt Dathan said:

Ministers will overhaul communication laws by creating new offences in the forthcoming Online Safety Bill, the flagship legislation to combat abuse and hatred on the internet.

The Department for Culture, Media & Sport has accepted recommendations from the Law Commission for crimes to be based on “likely psychological harm”.

The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the “harmful effect” of a message rather than if it contains “indecent” or “grossly offensive” content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality.

A new offence of “threatening communications” will target messages and social media posts that contain threats of serious harm. It would be an offence where somebody intends a victim to fear the threat will be carried out.

A “knowingly false communication” offence will be created that will criminalise those who send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause “emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience”. Government sources gave the example of antivaxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue.

The new offences will include so-called “pile-ons” where a number of individuals join others in sending harassing messages to a victim on social media.

I have been warning Richie Allen Show listeners for several years now, that this was coming. Long before the advent of covid-19, I predicted that people would eventually be prosecuted and even imprisoned for expressing their opinions.

You might well ask, how could the state prove that someone “knowingly” sent an anti-vaccine communication? In a fair and just world it would be next to impossible to prove that the accused antivaxxer didn’t believe what he/she was saying. But these are not fair and just times. It’s open tyranny now.

You might think that all any defendant would need do is march into court with the latest Yellow Card reports. UK citizens who believe that they have had an adverse reaction to a jab can report it on the government website. It’s known as the Yellow Card scheme.

Again, in a righteous world, that would be the end of it. But there’s nothing righteous about our world right now.

The Online Harms Bill was dreamt up to destroy the independent media. Three years ago, I was approached by academics from Salford University and an old friend who still works for the BBC.

They told me that they were coming for the independent/alternative media and that The Richie Allen Show was top of the list in the UK. You’ll remember me telling you that at the time.

Three years ago, The Department for Culture, Media and Sport held hearings about online harms and misinformation, to gather the facts before publishing the Online Harms white paper. As the producer of the country’s most popular independent news show, I peppered them with emails, asking to be allowed to provide a statement to the hearing about what it is that I (and others) do and why we do it. I never received a reply.

Throughout the scamdemic, I have platformed academics from long established universities and colleges, men and women who have challenged lockdown, the claims about covid and of course, the vaccines.

Every one of those guests earned the right to express their opinions in a public forum. But that just won’t do. If your agenda is to regularly inject everyone on the planet with mRNA and DNA jabs, you must first rid yourself of any opposition. It’s happening now.

I said it already, it’s open tyranny. Your government is proposing to lock up its citizens for expressing opinions based on their own personal experiences or what they have read elsewhere, often in official documents.

Some day soon, it’ll be an offence to question vaccine safety and a crime to declare that you do not believe the global warming narrative on the basis that expressing such thoughts causes real harm to others.

I can hardly believe that this is happening. But it is.

November 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Pharma-Controlled CDC Fake News on Breakthrough Infections

By Stephen Lendmann | October 30, 2021

Nothing reported by the Pharma-Controlled CDC, FDA and other US anti-public health agencies can be taken at face value.

The same goes for their MSM press agents.

The vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks occur in jabbed individuals.

Based on CDC fake news, the NYT falsely reported that fully-jabbed Americans “had a much lower chance of testing positive for flu/covid or dying from it” than their unjabbed counterparts (sic).

Reality is the other way around.

Except for natural immunity that protects best against infection, staying unjabbed is significantly safer from contracting the viral illness than if jabbed.

The Times quoted Pharma-connected epidemiologist David Dowdy’s Big Lie claim that jabs are “working (sic)” — ignoring indisputable evidence of the serious harm they cause.

The above fake news is all about pushing refuseniks to get theirs, along with urging double-jabbed individuals to get a third dose of health-destroying toxins from booster-jabs.

The more gotten, the greater the damage to health — at some point leading to premature death.

If hospitalized in the US for flu/covid, individuals aged-50 and older are willfully and maliciously mistreated with intent to eliminate them in cold blood.

For bloodcurdling more on what’s going on, see my article titled Healthcare Redefined: Hospitals Transformed into Prisons — for extermination of unwanted older Americans.

More Times-repeated CDC Big Lies followed, saying:

“(F)ederal data (show) that all three brands of (jabs) administered in the US substantially reduced rates of cases and deaths (sic).”

According to peer-reviewed truth-telling science, it’s the other way around.

Toxins in jabs destroy health and shorten lifespans. Jab-free individuals live longer in better health than their jabbed counterparts.

According to UK data, deaths of children in the country increased by 62% since mass-jabbing began — based on the average percent of fatalities of the group over the previous five years.

Kaiser Family Foundation data show that 72% of unjabbed US workers vow to quit if ordered to roll up their sleeve for doses of toxins designed to destroy their health.

Many thousands of US healthcare professionals and staff refuse to agree to destroying their health from jabs as a condition of employment.

According to one nurse likely speaking for countless others:

As “an intelligent, healthy, and empowered healthcare professional that takes excellent care of herself, it is an insult to expect that I would accept an injection of unknown substance and efficacy and provide an example to the great people that I serve that they too should submit their power over to pharmaceutical companies — convicted felons — in an effort to put a band-aid on the gaping wound of reality.”

“It is unconscionable to mandate injections without exemption, especially when the injection is a brand new medical product still undergoing its first year of study.”

“Breakthrough cases are not properly reported on.”

“We know (these jabs are) ‘leaky.’ ”

“The(ir) safety and effectiveness has not been proven.”

“There are other safe and alternative treatments.”

“It is impossible to give fully informed consent without longterm, unbiased data.”

“Threatening our jobs is blatant coercion.”

“Our God-given right to bodily integrity and personal autonomy has been stripped with these mandates and we will not stand for it.”

Another nurse made similar comments, saying:

“I did not take the (jab), even though I will be terminated.”

“Why would I need a (jab) for something with a 99% survival rate?”

“Health care workers are not taking it because they know that the side effects are real.”

“In urgent care, I have seen myocarditis, cellulitis, (and) unusual neurological symptoms, among a variety of other side effects.”

“I have seen people very ill post-(jabbing), and then go on to test positive.”

“The positivity rate for contracting (flu/covid) on the (jabbed) is very high per recent studies and what I am seeing in my clinic.”

Flu/covid jabs are “not working.”

“I will never take risk (harm) on myself.”

The above remarks are a snapshot of widespread opposition to jabs from healthcare professionals.

They’ve seen what damage they’ve done to countless numbers of people.

September survey data from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action showed that over 70% of respondents oppose mandated jabs.

Growing numbers in the US reject and oppose the steady drumbeat of pro-jabbing propaganda by Biden regime officials and their MSM press agents.

According to head of Convention of States Action Mark Meckler:

“Americans have never taken kindly to being told what to do, and they are not going to start now.”

“After being told ‘my body, my choice’ for nearly five decades by the same crowd now hypocritically pushing mandates, is it any wonder the public isn’t on board?”

If enough Americans and others reject mass-jabbing madness, refusing more doses by those already inoculated and none by others entirely free from their harm, the ugly scheme will collapse under the weight of Big Lies, mass deception and false promises.

October 31, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Canada: “Liberal” MPs support new internet censorship bill where “hurtful” content is targeted

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 30, 2021

“Liberal” MPs in Canada have expressed support for the government’s proposed internet censorship legislation. They went further to propose the appointment of a “Digital Safety Commissioner” who would be responsible for investigating complaints about “hurtful” content to be reported by users anonymously.

According to a report on Blacklock’s Reporter, Federal Liberal MPs have endorsed Trudeau’s internet censorship plans, on condition that there will be “proper due process” for those accused of posting “hurtful content.”

Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith insisted that the government should “ensure that there is public process or due process.”He added: “Fundamentally we need a public due process system to manage takedown by large companies.”

Internet censorship and online harassment are some of the top things the Trudeau administration is focusing on. The government started with Bill C-10, which focused on policing “user-generated content” on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. The bill did not pass before the end of the last parliamentary session because of opposition from conservatives.

Now Trudeau’s former Minister for Heritage Steven Guilbeault has proposed a new internet censorship bill. He said the new bill “is going to be controversial.”

“People think that C-10 was controversial. Wait until we table this legislation,” he added.

The new bill proposes social media companies to be held liable for “hurtful content” on their platforms. It also seeks to enable Canadians to anonymously complain about hurtful content to have it taken down.

However, the government is yet to define the term “hurtful.”

Under current laws, so-called “hate speech” is illegal.

Attacking the new bill, Conservative MP Michael Chong said: “I can say clearly that we don’t support censorship. We don’t support restrictions on freedom of the press.”

October 31, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Biden Offers ‘Flexibility’ as Workers Nationwide Threaten to Quit Rather Than Comply With Vaccine Mandates

Jeremy Loffredo | The Defender | October 29, 2021

The Biden administration is now suggesting federal employers and government contractors offer “flexibility” when enforcing COVID vaccine mandates against unvaccinated employees. This announcement is an about-face from the far-reaching rules President Biden laid out in a September speech where he lashed out at those who are hesitant to get the vaccine.

“Deadlines are not cliffs,” Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters at a briefing Wednesday. “The federal worker deadline is the 22nd of November, and the federal contractor deadline is not until December 8th​,” he said. ​

Zients added:

“​But even once we hit those deadlines, we expect federal agencies and contractors will follow their standard HR processes and that, for any of the probably relatively small percent of employees that are not in compliance, they’ll go through education, counseling, accommodations and then enforcement​.”

This announcement followed a meeting earlier this week between business groups and the White House Office of Management and Budget during which business leaders asked the Biden administration to postpone its vaccine mandate until after the holiday season.

The National Retail Federation, American Trucking Association and Retail Industry Leaders Association asked the White House to give businesses 90 days to comply, which would pause the implementation of the mandate until no earlier than late January.

In an interview with CNBC, Retail Industry Leaders Association President Evan Armstrong warned the coming mandate could trigger resignations at places already facing severe staffing issues.

While business leaders are holding discussions with policymakers and airing their grievances regarding how mandates will affect their bottom line, thousands of workers are protesting the policy, with some walking off the job.

A recent survey by Kaiser Family Foundation, found 72% of unvaccinated workers say they will quit their job if their employer mandates the vaccine.

Earlier this week, in Elma, New York, hundreds of workers at Moog Facilities walked off the job to protest the federal vaccine mandate.

“We just want to work,” said Matt Schieber, a Moog employee. “We don’t want to be forced to take a medical procedure if we don’t want it.”

New York City is requiring all city workers to be vaccinated before the Nov. 1 deadline. According to CBS-NY, employees from all city departments are protesting the mandate, some by “not providing city services and others by organizing rallies.”

On Thursday, thousands of firefighters and fire union officials protested the vaccine mandate in front of Gracie Mansion, the main residence of New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

“There is going to be a catastrophic manpower shortage if 3,500 firefighters that are currently unvaccinated are told not to go to work,” Uniformed Firefighters Association President Andrew Ansbro told ABC7.

The New York Post reported the New York City Fire Department is “preparing to shutter as many as 20% of all city fire companies and take an equal portion of its ambulances off the streets ahead of the impending deadline.”

Firefighters aren’t the only workers protesting the mandate in The Big Apple. Thirty-five percent of the workforce at the Department of Sanitation are unvaccinated and some have stopped showing up to work.

Residents of the Westerleigh neighborhood in Staten Island and the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn are beginning to see the result of a city missing large swaths of its sanitation workforce.

One Bay Ridge resident told CBS, “It’s starting to smell. They’ve got tuna fish bags down the block.”

New York healthcare workers are currently in court over the state’s vaccine mandate, which did not make exemptions for those with religious objections to the COVID jab.

Also, scores of healthcare workers took to the streets of Rochester, New York, Monday to express their opposition to Mayo Clinic’s vaccine mandate.

As of Oct. 14, about 8,000 workers — or 12% of Mayo Clinic’s entire workforce — were unvaccinated. The clinic said employees not in compliance with the mandate by Jan 3 will be terminated.

One Mayo Clinic administrative assistant who recently resigned over the coming mandates estimated at least 700 employees are “ready to quit or be fired.”

In New Jersey, one of the largest hospital systems, RWJBarnabas Health, fired more than 100 of its employees this week who refused to comply with its vaccination policy.

Another behemoth hospital chain, Ballad Health, decided to forgo its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers after computer modeling suggested 15% of their nurses would quit.

Police in several states have resisted and protested the new mandate requirements. As reported by the DailySignal, “major cities across the United States risk losing one-third or more of their police forces” due to COVID vaccine mandates.

Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara said, “It’s safe to say that the city of Chicago will have a police force at 50% or less for this weekend coming up.”

NPR reported at least 150 Massachusetts State Police officers resigned ahead of the state vaccine mandate.

The Washington State Police force has also faced problems regarding COVID vaccine mandates, with 74 commissioned officers, 67 troopers, six sergeants and one captain resigning in protest to new vaccine policies.

The city of Seattle lost more than 300 officers over the past year. Earlier this month, Seattle’s police department had to send detectives and non-patrol officers to respond to emergency calls because of a shortage of patrol officers.

At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, 185 employees quit as a result of the lab’s COVID vaccine mandate, which they opposed in court. Their legal action failed. Newsweek reported, “more than 100 scientists, nuclear engineers, research technicians, designers, project managers, and other employees joined the attempt to block the mandate.”

City workers in Los Angeles have until Dec. 18 to get fully vaccinated. Those who refuse to get vaccinated should “prepare to lose their job,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said earlier this week.

The workers originally had until Oct. 20 to get fully vaccinated. During the extended period, unvaccinated workers will have $65 deducted from their paychecks twice a week to cover the cost of weekly testing.

In Lafayette, Indiana, workers at GE Aviation are protesting the company’s vaccine mandate for a second time. Employees have until Dec. 8 to be vaccinated or they could lose their jobs.

Protesters say many of them have already had COVID so they feel their natural immunity will protect them. They say they feel they should have the choice to get it or not.

Jeremy Loffredo is a freelance reporter for The Defender. His investigative reporting has been featured in The Grayzone and Unlimited Hangout. Jeremy formerly produced news programs at RT America.

© 2021 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.

October 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

MEPs Protest Vaccine Passports

OffGuardian | October 30, 2021

In the latest editions of This Week in the New Normal, we mentioned a group of Members of the European Parliament who held a press conference where they opposed mandatory vaccination and the “Green Pass”.

On the 28th five of those same MEPs held another press conference, and while the whole thing is worth watching (embedded above), the highlight is definitely German MEP Christine Anderson who speaks for two of the truest minutes in the EU’s history:

All through Europe, governments have gone to great length to get people vaccinated. We were promised the vaccinations will be a “game changer”, and it will restore our freedom… turns out none of that was true. It does not render you immune, you can still contract the virus and you can still be infectious.

The only thing this vaccine did for sure was to spill billions and billions of dollars in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies.

I voted against the digital green certificate back in April, unfortunately it was adopted nonetheless, and this just goes to show there is only a minority of MEPs who truly stand for European values. The majority of MEPs, for whatever reasons unbeknown to me, obviously support oppression of the people while claiming – shamelessly – to do it for the people’s own good.

But it is not the goal that renders a system oppressive it is always the methods by which the goal is pursued. Whenever a government claims to have the people’s interest at heart, you need to think again.

In the entire history of mankind there has never been a political elite sincerely concerned about the well-being of regular people. What makes any of us think that it is different now? If the age of enlightenment has brought forth anything then, certainly this: never take anything any government tells you at face value

Always question everything any government does or does not do. Always look for ulterior motives. And always ask cui bono?, who benefits?

Whenever a political elite pushes an agenda this hard, and resort to extortion and manipulation to get their way, you can almost always be sure your benefit is definitely not what they had at heart.

As far as I’m concerned, I will not be vaccinated with anything that has not been properly vetted and tested and has shown no sound scientific evidence that the benefits outweigh the disease itself in possible long-term side effects, which to this day we don’t know anything about.

I will not be reduced to a mere guinea pig by getting vaccinated with an experimental drug, and I will most assuredly not get vaccinated because my government tells me to and promises, in return, I will be granted freedom.

Let’s be clear about one thing: No one grants me freedom for I am a free person.

So, I dare the European Commission and the German government: Throw me in jail, lock me up and throw away the key for all I care. But you will never be able to coerce me into being vaccinated if I, the free citizen that I am, choose not to be vaccinated.

October 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video | , , | Leave a comment