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We Must Not Shut Down University Campuses Again

By Dr. Alberto Giubilini | Collateral Global | November 17, 2021

Like many other pandemic measures, the extended closures of university campuses has been a massive social and public health experiment.

The results in the report published this week in Collateral Global this week on the impact of pandemic restrictions on university students’ mental health – sadly – should not be too surprising. Young people were not a priority during the pandemic. It is quite telling that most countries – and most people – did not change strategies and attitudes after the initial uncertainty, as we gained more evidence about how minuscule young people’s risk is from Covid. We continued imposing population-wide restrictions, including the closures of schools and university campuses, and moving to online-only teaching, even when it became clear that these restrictions would not benefit young people. They did not need protection from Covid as much as they needed protection from the effects of policy responses on their mental health and their psycho-physical development more generally. This report emphasises once more how we failed to protect young people’s well-being from the inevitable harms of prolonged restrictions.

Public health policies are justified to the extent that they produce significant enough collective benefits without disproportionately burdening certain groups. Admittedly, in situations of uncertainty, a rigorous cost-benefit analysis is not always possible. And yet, the stricter the restrictions, the stronger the duty to rigorously gather real-time evidence on what costs they impose on different groups. Like many other pandemic measures, the extended closures of university campuses have been a massive social and public health experiment. But even experiments require constant interrogation as to whether they are working, and a measure of their success must be the continuous evaluation of whether they are creating collateral damage. It seems we didn’t want to see or give due consideration to such damage.

The prolonged closure of university campuses and the decision to move online all the teaching, socializing, and formal and informal interactions that play a central role in young people’s psycho-physical development resulted in enormous costs that we could not see on our computer screens. With the report this week, the evidence of the significant damage we caused to them becomes more apparent – for example, with the studies showing one in three students reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Those of us working in academic institutions (or better, working on that non-existent space that is Zoom) could not see what was happening beyond those discrete windows through which we were delivering classes or supervising students from our homes. When the world exists only to the extent that it appears on a computer screen, it is easy to forget that students’ existence and experiences do not end the moment they disappear from view. When Zoom meetings and classes are over and the computer shuts down, the young people remain out of sight. Many were sitting alone in their rooms, deprived of their lives as students and, indeed, as whole persons, at a developmental stage when experiences and social interactions play a critical role in helping them understand themselves and the world around them. Although we could not see that, it should not have been difficult to imagine the damage already when the cameras turned off.

There may be limited utility at this point in blaming those responsible for the public health decisions that completely disregarded this potential (and foreseeable) damage to students. It also might be pointless to assign culpability to the academics who kept (and continue to keep) supporting tight restrictions and advocating for online teaching from the comfort of their homes while relegating students to social isolation. But what is undoubtedly useful, in light of this week’s report, is to look ahead as winter in the Northern Hemisphere approaches and more people begin putting restrictions back on the table.

Before making any decisions, we must acknowledge that we don’t need to run social and public health experiments on students any more. We have data now about the harm we have caused to them. And we now know the threat that closing campuses and moving the whole student experience online can pose.

Any decision to close university campuses at this point can no longer be construed as an innocent mistake – if, indeed, it ever was.

Dr. Alberto Giubilini is a Senior Research Fellow in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

Collateral Global is a U.K.-based charity researching the collateral impacts of the mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions.

November 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles

By Glenn Greenwald | November 16, 2021

The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.

That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O’Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O’Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.

The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic “whistleblower” Frances Haugen.

On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.

This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”

This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.

What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.

I am very well-acquainted with this repressive tactic of trying to decree who is and is not a real journalist for purposes of constitutional protection. Many have forgotten — given the awards it ultimately ended up winning — that the NSA/Snowden reporting we did in 2013 was originally maligned as quasi-criminal not just by Obama national security officials such as James Clapper but also by The New York Times. The first profile the Paper of Record published about me the day after the reporting began referred to me in the headline as an “Anti-Surveillance Activist” and then, once backlash ensued, it was changed to “Blogger” (the original snide, disqualifying headline is still visible in the URL).

The Guardian, Jan. 29, 2014

As the New York Times‘ own Public Editor at the time objected, by purposely denying me the label “journalist,” the paper was knowingly increasing the risks that I could be prosecuted for my reporting. Indeed, recent reporting from Yahoo! News about CIA plots to kidnap or murder Julian Assange reported that denying Assange the label “journalist,” and then re-defining what I and my colleague Laura Poitras were doing from “journalist” to “information broker,” would enable the U.S. Government to spy on or even prosecute us without having to worry about that inconvenient “free press” guarantee of the First Amendment.

New York Times, June 6, 2013

All of this demonstrates how dangerous it is to invoke this very same not-a-real-journalist tactic against O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Yet, if one warns of the dangers of the FBI’s actions, that is precisely what one hears from liberals, from Democrats and from their allies in the media: the FBI’s targeting of Project Veritas has nothing to do with press freedoms since they’re not real journalists. They are invoking the authoritarian theory that maintains that the state (or, in this case, the FBI) is vested with the power to decree who is a “real journalist” — whatever that means — and who is not.

There are so many ironies to the use of this framework. So often, employees of media corporations who have never broken a major story in their lives (and never will) revel in accusing independent journalists who have broken numerous major stories (such as Assange) of not being real journalists. At the height of the Snowden reporting, I went on Meet the Press in July, 2013, only for the host, David Gregory, to suggest that I ought to be in prison alongside my source Edward Snowden because I was not really a journalist the way David Gregory was. At the time, Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, noted how bizarre it was that the TV personality David Gregory assumed he was a real journalist, whereas I was a non-journalist who belonged in prison for my reporting, given that Gregory — like most employees of large media corporations — had never broken any story in his life. Rich used a Q&A format to make the point this way:

On Sunday, Meet the Press host David Gregory all but accused the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald of aiding and abetting Edward Snowden’s fugitive travels, asking, “Why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” And, speaking to his larger point, do you see Greenwald as a journalist or an activist in this episode? And does it matter?

Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer. Meet the Press has fallen behind CBS’s Face the Nation, much as Today has fallen to ABC’s Good Morning America, and my guess is that Gregory didn’t mean to sound like Joe McCarthy (with a splash of the oiliness of Roy Cohn) but was only playing the part to make some noise. In any case, his charge is preposterous. As a columnist who published Edward Snowden’s leaks, Greenwald was doing the job of a journalist — and the fact that he’s an “activist” journalist (i.e., an opinion journalist, like me and a zillion others) is irrelevant to that journalistic function. . . . [I]t’s easier for Gregory to go after Greenwald, a self-professed outsider who is not likely to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and works for a news organization based in London. Presumably if Gregory had been around 40 years ago, he also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers. In any case, Greenwald demolished Gregory on air and on Twitter (“Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?”).

At the time — both in terms of that exchange with Gregory and my overall reporting on the NSA — I had significant support from the liberal-left (though it was far from universal, given that we were exposing mass, indiscriminate, illegal spying by the Obama administration). But few believed that I ought to be prosecuted on the grounds that, somehow, I was not a real journalist.

So why are so many of them now willing to endorse this same exact theory when it comes to O’Keefe and Project Veritas, or even to justify the prosecution of Julian Assange? The answer is obvious. They are unwilling and/or incapable of thinking in terms of principles, ones that apply universally to everyone regardless of their ideology. Their thought process never even arrives at that destination. When the subject of the FBI’s attacks on O’Keefe is raised, or the DOJ’s prosecution of Assange is discussed, they ask themselves one question and only one question, and that ends the inquiry. It is the exclusive and determinative factor: do I like James O’Keefe and his politics? Do I like Julian Assange and his politics?

This primitive, principle-free, personality-driven prism is the only way they are capable of understanding the world. Because they dislike O’Keefe and/or Assange, they instantly side with whoever is targeting them — the FBI, the DOJ, the security state services — and believe that anyone who defends them is defending a right-wing extremist rather than defending the non-ideological, universally applicable principle of press freedoms. They think only in terms of personalities, not principles.

The FBI’s actions against Project Veritas and O’Keefe are so blatantly alarming that press freedom groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) have expressed grave concerns about it, including on their social media accounts for all to see. Even the ACLU — which these days is loathe to speak out in favor of any person or group disliked by their highly partisan liberal donor base — issued a very carefully hedged statement that made clear how much they despise Project Veritas but said: “Nevertheless, the precedent set in this case could have serious consequences for press freedom” (at least thus far, the ACLU has just quietly stuck this statement on its website and not uttered a word about it on its social media accounts, where most of its liberal donors track what they do, but the fact that they felt compelled to say anything in defense of this right-wing boogieman demonstrates how extreme the FBI’s actions are). The federal judge overseeing the warrants has temporarily enjoined the FBI from extracting any more information from the cell phones seized from O’Keefe and other Project Veritas employees pending a determination of their legal justification.

Committee to Protect Journalists, Nov. 15, 2021

The reason this is such a grave press freedom attack is two-fold. First, as indicated, any attempt to anoint oneself the arbiter of who is and is not a “real journalist” for purposes of First Amendment protection is inherently tyrannical. Which institutions are sufficiently trustworthy and competent to decree who is a real journalist meriting First Amendment protection and who falls outside as something else?

But there is a much more significant problem with this framework: namely, the question of who is and is not a real journalist is completely irrelevant to the First Amendment. None of the rights in the Constitution, including press freedom, was intended to apply only to a small, cloistered, credentialed, privileged group of citizens. The exact opposite was true: the only reason they are valuable as rights is because they enjoy universal application, protecting all citizens.

Indeed, one of the most passionate grievances of the American colonists was that nobody was permitted to use the press unless first licensed by the British Crown. Conversely, the most celebrated journalism of the time was undertaken by people like Thomas Paine — who never worked for an established journalistic outlet in his life — as he circulated the pamphlet Common Sense that railed against the abuses of the King. What was protected by the First Amendment was not a small, privileged caste bearing the special label “journalists,” but rather the activity of a free press. The proof of this is clear and ample, and is set forth in the video we produced on Monday night.

But none of this matters. If you express concern for the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe, it will be instantly understood not as a concern about any of these underlying principles but instead as an endorsement of O’Keefe’s politics, journalism, and O’Keefe himself. The same is true for the discourse surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse. If you say that — after having actually watched the trial — you believe the state failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in light of his defense of self-defense, many will disbelieve your sincerity, will insist that your view is based not in some apolitical assessment of the evidence or legal principles about what the state must do in order to imprison a citizen, but rather that you must be a “supporter” of Rittenhouse himself, his ideology (whatever it is assumed to be), and the political movement with which he, in their minds, is associated.

On some level, this is pure projection: those who are incapable of assessing political or legal conflicts through a prism of principles rather than personalities assume that everyone is plagued by the same deficiency. Since they decide whether to support or oppose the FBI’s actions toward O’Keefe based on their personal view of O’Keefe rather than through reference to any principles, they assume that this is how everyone is determining their views of that situation. Similarly, since they base their views on whether Rittenhouse should be convicted or acquitted based on how they personally feel about Rittenhouse and his perceived politics rather than the evidence presented at the trial (which most of them have not watched), they assume that anyone advocating for an acquittal can be doing so only because they like Rittenhouse’s politics and believe that his actions were heroic.

In sum, those who view the world through a prism bereft of principles — either due to lack of intellectual capacity or ethics or both — assume everyone’s world view is similarly craven. It is this same stunted mindset that saddles our discourse with so much illogic and so many twisted presumptions, such as the inability to distinguish between defending someone’s right to express a particular opinion and agreement with that opinion. In a world in which ideology, partisan loyalty, tribal affiliations, in-group identity and personality-driven assessments predominate, there is no room for principles, universally applicable rights, or basic reason.

November 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

‘Most vaccinated’ place on earth cancels Christmas

RT | November 16, 2021

Amid a surge in Covid-19 cases, Gibraltar has canceled official Christmas events and “strongly” discouraged people from hosting private gatherings for four weeks. Gibraltar’s entire eligible population is vaccinated.

The government of Gibraltar recently announced that “official Christmas parties, official receptions and similar gatherings” have been canceled, and advised the public to avoid social events and parties for the next four weeks. Outdoor spaces are recommended over indoor ones, touching and hugging is discouraged, and mask wearing is advised.

“The drastic increase in the numbers of people testing positive for Covid-19 in recent days is a stark reminder that the virus is still very prevalent in our community and that it is the responsibility of us all to take every reasonable precaution to protect ourselves and our loved ones,” Health Minister Samantha Sacramento said.

Gibraltar, a tiny British Overseas Territory sharing a land border with Spain, has seen an average of 56 Covid-19 cases per day over the last seven days, up from fewer than 10 per day in September. The rise in cases, described by the government as “exponential,” comes despite Gibraltar having the highest vaccination rate in the world.

More than 118% of Gibraltar’s population are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, with this figure stretching beyond 100% due to doses given to Spaniards who cross the border to work or visit the territory every day. Gibraltar’s entire adult population has been fully vaccinated since March, and masks are still required in shops and on public transport.

Gibraltar is currently doling out booster doses to the over-40s, healthcare workers, and other “vulnerable groups,” and administering vaccines to children aged between five and 12.

Similarly well-vaccinated countries have also reported surges in Covid-19 infections recently. In Singapore, where 94% of the eligible population have been inoculated, cases and deaths soared to record highs at the end of October, and have since subsided slightly. In Ireland, where around 92% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, cases of Covid-19 and deaths from the virus have roughly doubled since August.

November 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

They Just Admitted What The Passport System Is For

By Tom Woods | Principia Scientific International | November 16, 2021 

You’ve probably seen a handful of people on social media say that vaccine passport systems make them “feel safe.” You know and I know that these systems have nothing to do with health or safety.

Well, some authorities in Canada just admitted what you and I knew: the aim is to punish the unvaccinated.

The British Columbia Parks and Recreation department says: “Remember, the purpose of the PoV card is to incentivize residents to be vaccinated, not to control the spread of the virus.”

Then further: “This is an important shift to keep aware of for your decision-making; the province has shifted from actions that provide a COVID-safe environment to actions that provide discretionary services to the vaccinated.”

Patricia Daly, Chief Medical Health Officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, added:

“The vaccine passport requires people to be vaccinated to do certain discretionary activities such as go to restaurants, movies, gyms, not because these places are high risk. We are not actually seeing covid transmission in these settings.

It really is to create an incentive to improve our vaccination coverage…. The vaccine passport is for non-essential opportunities, and it’s really to create an incentive to get higher vaccination rates.”

So even though cities and countries with these systems in place are doing no better than countries that don’t, that isn’t the point.

The point, as I’ve said all along, is to punish those who decline the vaccines.

Bold emphasis added.

November 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Europe heads the stampede to medical apartheid

By Tom Penn | TCW Defending Freedom | November 16, 2021

WHILE the media engaged in a classic diversionary tactic – chortling over reports that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock was to write a book about how he won the Covid war – they virtually ignored perhaps the most concerning pandemic news out of Western Europe so far.

The Netherlands entered a three-week partial lockdown, the news of Austria’s lockdown for the unvaccinated was ‘officially announced’, and Germany’s health agencies began clamouring for tougher restrictions. 

Segregation on so-called medical grounds is finding ever firmer footing in Europe – no doubt spurred on by its increasingly successful introduction in Australia and New Zealand even in the face of huge, impassioned protests.

This is the hyper-normalisation of medical apartheid at work, and one day soon the witless masses who permit this process to erode unchallenged the moral bedrock of their societies, will wake up to find that it was they, not their governments, who were the engineers of an all-encompassing punitive style of governance whose dystopian interventions not even the quadruple-jabbed will ultimately be able to evade.

On home soil the supposed leak of the UKHSA’s plan to abandon attempts at stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2 ‘at all costs’ come springtime, using their exit-strategy named ‘Operation Rampdown’, should come as highly disconcerting and not optimistic news in light of the madness playing out across the Channel right now.

Quite aside from the fact that we have heard all this tosh about promised freedom numerous times before and yet here we are still stuck waist-deep in the bog of Covid-19 interventions, from what we know of the 160-page dossier so far, the scaling-back of spread-control measures is limp to the point of portentous: the real question being just what will such controls be replaced with?

The last 20 months has shown that when the State give with one hand, they use the other to put more shackles on the recipient – we, the people – and Operation Rampdown already sounds not like the Yellow Brick Road to freedom but the paving of the way for medical apartheid.

Ten-day self-isolation is supposedly to be entirely done away with: however, in all likelihood only for those vaccinated and with up-to-date boosters. Free Covid testing is supposedly to end: a move designed to impose a Macron-style financial burden on the unvaccinated, as private testing firms with ties to Government break free of the pricing limitations never enforced in the first place, and the national ‘Test and Trace’ system is purportedly to be scrapped, the billions invested set only to reveal the software’s original design-objective: universal health passports.

When Johnson talks about the ‘storm clouds gathering over Europe’ I don’t envisage the DHSC’s Covid-smoke wafting our way, I see instead scope for ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdowns for the unvaccinated; given succour via the majority of people’s inability to heed the deafening alarms currently being sounded by various neighbouring EU Governments.

At present the UK population is like an infant flat on its back, staring beguiled at a revolving cot-mobile, off which dangles the likes of Matt Hancock, dog coronavirus, and a Harry Kane international hat-trick; whilst Papa Johnson is busy disabling the home’s smoke alarms and opening all the windows in an attempt not to let Covid-19 out, but the far more noxious smoke of apartheid in.

Matt Hancock, I suggest not the working title ‘How I Won the Covid War’, but ‘How I Started the Covid War Engineered Never To Be Won’, alongside the quote from yourself, dated March 16 2020:

‘We should only use the NHS when we really need to.’

You say the war is won, Mr Hancock, yet we still can’t use the NHS. Write a book about that, why don’t you, then you’ll finally find yourself on the same page as the six million poor sods awaiting treatment.

November 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

IMF Correctly Predicts Arrival of Compulsory Vaccination Across Russia After Gifting Kremlin $18 Billion

By Edward Slavsquat | Anti-Empire | November 16, 2021

Before October, most of Russia’s 85 regions had few (if any) COVID-related restrictions; mandates requiring businesses to vaccinate the majority of their employees—introduced in Moscow and several other regions in June—had not yet become the norm.

This all changed after the State Duma elections in late September. Speaking a day before the election results were announced, Annette Kyobe, IMF Representative in Russia, made a prophetic observation. As TASS reported at the time:

“There is no appetite [in Russia] for restrictive measures, lockdown, at least on the part of state authorities. <…> After the parliamentary elections, perhaps a more unpopular measure, like mandatory vaccination, can be initiated as early as October-November. “

What an incredible prediction! As it just so happens, COVID “cases” and “deaths” inexplicably began to skyrocket immediately after the Duma elections, forcing Russian authorities to introduce mandates and QR codes across the country.

IMF totally called it!

Starting in October, Russian regions began the mass adoption of vaccine mandates and digital “health” passes. On October 14, Deputy Finance Minister Timur Maksimov told the IMF and World Bank that Russia’s government understood how important it was to shove a needle into every arm:

Participants in the autumn session of the IMF and the World Bank on Wednesday came to the conclusion that the problem of the crisis in the global economy cannot be solved until the population of all countries is vaccinated in the required proportion, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Timur Maksimov told reporters following these meetings.

“Until all countries are vaccinated in the required proportion, the world will not return to the old normality. Therefore, the question was raised that it is necessary to increase efforts to produce, to ensure access to vaccines. more and more waves of COVID cover different countries, “Maksimov said.

But wait… how was the IMF—an organ of Western Financial Extortion—able to so accurately predict Russia’s warm embrace of the global Vax Caste System?

Just a lucky guess. Obviously it had nothing to do with the 18 billion United States Dollars that the IMF shoveled into the Kremlin’s coffers back in August. The head of the IMF described the generous cash-injection as part of a “vaccination for the world economy during an unprecedented crisis.” (We should note for the sake of accuracy that the $18 billion was awarded in the form of “special drawing rights.” SDRs are units of account for the IMF and represent a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged.)

Outrageously, some Russian analysts and media outlets have suggested that something is slightly suspicious about all this—but why would they suggest something so silly? Anyway:

“There is no appetite for restrictive measures, lockdown, at least on the part of the state authorities. After the parliamentary elections, perhaps a more unpopular measure, such as compulsory vaccination, can be initiated as early as October-November.”

This is an excerpt from the speech of the IMF Resident Representative in Russia Annette Kyobe during the Fitch Ratings webinar “Russia – Macroeconomic Forecast 2021”.

On the air on the Tsargrad TV channel, Alexander Losev, a member of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, explained why our country continues to cooperate with discredited organizations and why the IMF wants to vaccinate all of Russia:

“The IMF and the World Bank are two organizations that have introduced such a concept as the Washington Consensus.

Adherence to this Washington Consensus is written for all developing countries.

First of all, this is a limitation of state sovereignty, less support for business, more – the market, invisible hands of the market, there are many of them, and some requirements for budgets and budgetary policy.

All countries that followed the Washington Consensus ended up poorly, with crises.

The second point is why the IMF says it.

At the end of August, the Bank of Russia received $ 18 billion from the IMF in the form of special drawing rights, that is, it received money. I’m not hinting at anything, I’m just stating: was the money accepted? Accepted.

These are the institutes of world governance created by the United States. And now the activity of these institutions is an attempt by the United States to preserve its hegemony, to preserve its power over the world.

They are tools. Behind them is the United States and their establishment, those who manage capital, world politics – or think they do.

[…]

The main beneficiaries of the pandemic are, of course, financiers. Because all the money that governments and central banks sent to help the economy, they basically all went through the banking system. The American banking system is $ 90 trillion in assets. All the money that the government allocated went there too.

The estimate is how much money was allocated and how much got into the banking system, from 24 to 27 trillion dollars. Equivalent. In different countries, including developing countries.

Utter nonsense! Russia adopted nationwide compulsory vaccination policies because there was a huge, dangerous wave of COVID that emerged immediately after Duma elections, which required more Sputnik V, everywhere and for everyone. If Russians don’t like it, they will have a chance to vote again, in the next Duma elections, in 2026.

Public health is a funny thing.

November 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The Geniuses Are Locking Down Again

By Tom Woods | Principia Scientific International | November 15, 2021

Today someone shared the chart below, generated by the Financial Times. Try to pick out which one of these countries hasn’t implemented a vaccine passport system:

I’ll bet you know which one it is.

Meanwhile, parts of Europe are going back into lockdown.

Austria is locking down the one-third of the population that is unvaccinated.

The Netherlands is 72 percent fully vaccinated and is going into lockdown for everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of inanely blaming “the unvaccinated” for this, the robots on social media would at least admit that this isn’t how they expected it to go, and that there shouldn’t be this level of cases and deaths after the introduction of vaccines?

It’s like Sweden: we were supposed to believe that Sweden would have one of the worst death rates in the world because it ignored the so-called experts demanding lockdown.

Well, Sweden is currently #53 in the world for COVID death rate. Number fifty-three. Not one. Not two. Not ten. Not twenty. Fifty-three.

The crazies are still criticizing Sweden, naturally.

But my question is: when you were screaming hysterically at Sweden to lock down, did you think they’d end up all the way down at number 53 in the world in death rate?

Aren’t you the least bit curious about that? Is there a chance that if we hadn’t wrecked societies it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway?

Same with Florida: did the hysterics expect them to have one of the better rates of age-adjusted COVID mortality in the United States?

Of course not. They were warning that Florida would be one of the worst.

And yet in none of these cases can they bring themselves to say: thank goodness things turned out better than we predicted!

Instead, they just double down.

November 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Cops probe school board head over eerie ‘dossier’ on parents

RT | November 14, 2021

Scottsdale, Arizona Police are investigating a school board president after he was found to have access to a digital dossier which included social security numbers and divorce records of parents who held opposing views.

Jann-Michael Greenburg, the president of the Scottsdale Unified School District board, made headlines this week after he was allegedly found to have access to an eerie dossier on school parents who had criticized the board and protested mask mandates.

Social security numbers, divorce records, financial data, Facebook comments, and photos of children were just some of the items allegedly contained in the dossier, which appeared to target parents who opposed mask mandates and Critical Race Theory (CRT) being taught in schools.

On Saturday, the Scottsdale Police Department said it was “aware of the allegations” against Greenburg and is investigating.

“We are conducting an investigation into the matter and will report our findings once it is complete.”

The dossier – which was allegedly created by Greenburg’s father, Mark Greenburg – was uncovered after the school board president accidentally shared a Google Drive link with a mother who he accused of being “anti-Semitic,” after she criticized left-wing billionaire George Soros.

Though the dossier has since been pulled offline, it reportedly contained files on several parents and referred to them as “wackos,” “psychos,” and “anti-mask lunatics.”

On Wednesday, the Scottsdale Unified School District wrote a letter to parents distancing itself from the dossier, which it dismissed as “unrelated” to the district’s work.

Though the district cited Greenburg’s father as the creator of the dossier, Greenburg himself allegedly had editing access, and one of the parents, Amanda Wray, noted that he “had the drive open on his computer” in a screenshot that he emailed.

Greenburg’s social media accounts and website were taken down amid the controversy.

November 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Biden Regime War on Humanity with Mass Destruction in Mind

By Stephen Lendman | November 14, 2021

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 | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Welsh Government can’t provide any evidence for vaccine passport effectiveness

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 13, 2021

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 | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube suspends senator over Covid-19 vaccine video

RT | November 13, 2021

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 | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Biden’s vaccine mandate fails ‘reality & common sense’ check, judge rules

FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Evelyn Hockstein
RT | November 13, 2021

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 | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

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