Americans aren’t dying at the hands of police because of racism.
For that matter, George Floyd didn’t die because he was black and the cop who killed him is white.
Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, died because America is being overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
These warrior cops may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us and they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution. As retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis warns, “The system is corrupt. Police really are oppressing not only the black community, but also the whites. They’re an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.”
Now, not all cops are guns for hire, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the populace.
However, the unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that the good cops—the ones who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—are increasingly being outnumbered by those who believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens.
It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.
Indeed, if you ask police and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with law enforcement, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings during encounters with the police.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, it doesn’t matter if a cop is in the wrong, it doesn’t matter if you’re being treated with less than the respect you deserve: if you want to emerge from a police encounter with your life and body intact, then you’d better comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.
In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”
This is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.
This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.
The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”
Warrior cops—trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—are definitely not making us or themselves any safer.
This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat has all but guaranteed that unarmed Americans will keep dying at the hands of militarized police.
Consider just some of the scenarios in which unarmed Americans have been shot and killed by police:
Killed for taking public transit.
Killed for standing in a “shooting stance.”
Killed for holding a cell phone.
Killed for displaying air fresheners from a rearview mirror.
Killed for behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat.
Killed for opening the front door.
Killed for being a child in a car pursued by police.
Killed for approaching police with a metal spoon.
Killed for holding a tree branch.
Killed for crawling around naked.
Killed for hunching over.
Killed because a police officer accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his taser.
Killed for wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey.
Killed for telling police you lawfully own a firearm.
Killed for leaving anywhere at all when a police officer pulls up.
Killed for driving while deaf.
Killed for shopping at Walmart.
Killed for being homeless.
Killed for brandishing a shoehorn.
Killed for playing in a park.
Killed for having your car break down on the road.
Killed for being in your own apartment.
Killed for staying up late.
Killed for holding a garden hose.
This is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.
Making matters worse, when these officers, who have long since ceased to be peace officers, violate their oaths by bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—they are rarely given more than a slap on the hands before resuming their patrols.
Much of the “credit” for shielding these rogue cops goes to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, police contracts that “provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse,” state and federal laws that allow police to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing, and rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats.
It’s happening all across the country.
This is how perverse justice in America has become.
If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and your property, you should be, because as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
April 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States |
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Nick Hudson, an actuary and private equity investor, co-founded Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics (PANDA) in response to the many threats to civil rights and freedoms that have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic response. While media and public health institutions have engaged in a campaign of smoke and mirrors — one that is perpetuating paralyzing fear, needlessly, to this day — data and facts don’t lie.
Hudson and his team at PANDA, which include a data analyst, economist, medical doctors, big data analyst and public health experts, are using live data1 and open science to empower the public to exercise freedom of choice and preserve free societies.2
Hudson spoke at the inaugural BizNews Investment Conference in March 2021, and his keynote address is above. He explains the ugly truth about COVID-19, which is that the world is being crippled by fear due to a false narrative. Anyone who challenges that narrative is being labeled as a lunatic, a menace or a danger to society, which is furthering the repression and unjustified fear.
Bringing COVID-19 Truth to Light
George Washington famously said, “Truth will ultimately prevail where there are plans taken to bring it to light.”3 With that in mind, Hudson saw the “seeds of a great tragedy” being planted with the false COVID-19 narrative, and has made it a mission to get the truth out. So, what is the reality about the pandemic? According to Hudson:4
- A virus that presents high risk to few and negligible risk to most hit some regions
- Few are susceptible to severe disease
- There are several available treatments
- Asymptomatic people are not major drivers of disease
- Lockdowns and mask mandates haven’t worked and instead caused great harm
- The vulnerable were hurt instead of helped
The misinformation has been spewed from the beginning, including by World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a March 3, 2020, media briefing, he stated, “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”5
But according to Hudson, the 3.4% represents case fatality rate (CFR), which is the number of deaths from COVID-19 divided by the number of cases of COVID-19, while the 1% is infection fatality rate (IFR), or the number of deaths divided by all infected individuals.
“By conflating these two separate points (CFR and IFR),” Hudson said, “Tedros was effectively lying.” Quantitative scientist John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, calculated the IFR for COVID-19 in a review of 61 seroprevalence studies, which was a median of 0.23%, and 0.05% in people younger than 70.6
Based on this, the IFR for COVID-19 is lower than that of the flu. And wouldn’t you know it, in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial published March 26, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and colleagues wrote that “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.”7
The media have suppressed this fact, Hudson noted, along with the fact that there’s a 1,000 times difference in mortality among those younger than 19 and those older than 70 — something that should have been taken into account in the pandemic response.
Is COVID-19 Really a ‘Novel Virus’?
Further inflaming widespread fear is the idea that COVID-19 is a “novel virus,” which makes it sound like it’s something humans have never encountered before. But is it really? According to Hudson:
“The reality is that the coronavirus is a very close relative, not even a separate subspecies, a very close relative of the 2003 SARS virus. There are seven related coronaviruses known to cause disease in humans, probably many others, and four of them are in general circulation.
Annual, global circulation. So the naming of this disease is terribly inconsistent. This is really a rose by any name, SARS. A variant of SARS. It’s not novel.”
One study even found that 81% of people not exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, were still able to mount an immune response against it, which “suggests at least some built-in immune protection from SARS-CoV-2 …”8
Nonetheless, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 pandemic, stated that “a majority of the world’s population is susceptible to infection from this virus.”9 This is the first of two key elements that, Hudson said, lead to “homosapienophobia” — the idea that everyone is dangerous until proven healthy.
The idea of universal susceptibility to COVID-19 is nonsense, Hudson noted, as was demonstrated early on with the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Among the 3,711 passengers and crew onboard the Diamond Princess, 712 (19.2%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and of these 46.5% were asymptomatic at the time of testing. Of those showing symptoms, only 9.7% required intensive care and 1.3% (nine) died.10
PANDA data also showed that, starting in February 2021, there was not universal susceptibility to the virus. Their data showed cumulative COVID-19 deaths per million people. In Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, the population fatality rate was 112 per million compared to 710 per million in Europe and the Americas.
As for Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, Hudson said, “the population fatality rate there almost isn’t an epidemic. In a typical year, they’d have 10,000 deaths per million from all causes.”
Fear Mongering Over Asymptomatic Spread
The second element that enables the doctrine of “everyone being a danger” to continue is the idea of asymptomatic spread driving disease. “I was absolutely aghast to find out the poor quality of the science” behind it, Hudson said.
One of the seminal papers involved one woman who reportedly infected 16 colleagues while she was asymptomatic.11 The study was widely used to suggest that asymptomatic spread was occurring, but controversy later ensued over whether the woman was actually asymptomatic when the others were infected or if she was symptomatic and being treated for flu-like symptoms at the time.12
In June 2020, Kerkhove also made it very clear that people who have COVID-19 without any symptoms “rarely” transmit the disease to others. But in a dramatic about-face, WHO then backtracked on the statement just one day later. June 9, 2020, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s emergencies program, quickly backpedaled Van Kerkhove’s statement, saying the remarks were “misinterpreted or maybe we didn’t use the most elegant words to explain that.”13
“It’s utter, utter nonsense,” Hudson said, adding that Fauci also stated in January 2020, “asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person.”14
A JAMA Network Open study later found, in December 2020, that asymptomatic transmission is not a primary driver of infection within households.15 A study in Nature Communications also found “there was no evidence of transmission from asymptomatic positive persons to traced close contacts.”16
Lockdown Madness
The myth of widespread asymptomatic spread is what was used to justify worldwide lockdowns of healthy people. “Bruce Aylward will go down in history as a criminal of immense stature,” Hudson said, referring to Aylward’s role as the head of a WHO team that visited Wuhan, China, and concluded lockdowns were working to stop COVID-19 spread.17
“He takes a delegation to China, spends a few days, then comes back and says everyone should follow China’s response, the doctrine of universal susceptibility,” Hudson said. Yet, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic official guidelines for pandemic response plans recommend against large-scale quarantine of the healthy.
In fact, WHO wrote that during an influenza pandemic, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening and border closure are “not recommended in any circumstance.”18
Likewise, in 2021 a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation found no significant benefits on COVID-19 case growth in regions using more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closure orders (i.e., lockdowns).19
Data compiled by PANDA also found no relationship between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths per million people. The disease followed a trajectory of linear decline regardless of whether or not lockdowns were imposed.
What isn’t a lie, however, is that lockdowns cause a great deal of harm. Infant mortality, poverty, starvation and joblessness are on the rise, as are delays in medical treatment and diagnosis, psychological disorders among youth, suicide and deaths of despair.
Education has been disrupted for an estimated 1.6 billion children, Hudson said, and a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults revealed that 1 in 6 Americans started therapy for the first time during 2020. Nearly half (45%) of the survey respondents confirmed that the COVID-19 pandemic was the driving reason that triggered them to seek a therapist’s help.20 According to Hudson:
“Perhaps the hardest thing for me to swallow about all of this is in undergraduate epidemiology, it is a well-known finding that when you are confronted with a disease with sharp edge graduation, as you are with coronavirus, measures to generally suppress the spread of the disease have the effect, reliably, of shifting the disease burden onto the vulnerable, who we should be protecting. They worsen coronavirus mortality.”
Mask Rhetoric Is Misleading
It’s been touted that face masks are essential to stopping the spread of COVID-19 and could save 130,000 lives in the U.S. alone.21 But in 2019, the World Health Organization analyzed 10 randomized controlled trials and concluded, “there was no evidence that facemasks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”22
Only one randomized controlled trial has been conducted on mask usage and COVID-19 transmission, and it found masks did not statistically significantly reduce the incidence of infection.23
You may remember that in the early days of the pandemic, face masks were not recommended for the general public. In February 2020, Christine Francis, a consultant for infection prevention and control at WHO headquarters, was featured in a video, holding up a disposable face mask.
She said, “Medical masks like this one cannot protect against the new coronavirus when used alone … WHO only recommends the use of masks in specific cases.”24 As of March 31, 2020, WHO was still advising against the use of face masks for people without symptoms, stating that there is “no evidence” that such mask usage prevents COVID-19 transmission.25
But by June 2020, the rhetoric had changed. Citing “evolving evidence,” WHO reversed their recommendation and began advising governments to encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult.26 Yet that same day, June 5, 2020, WHO published an announcement stating:27
“At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a similar about-face on mask usage, citing a study of two hair dressers in Missouri, who were reportedly symptomatic with COVID-19 and styled 139 clients’ hair.
None of the clients tested positive for COVID-19, which the CDC suggested was because they and the stylists wore masks.28 Hudson believes, however, that the customers were probably young and not susceptible to the virus in the first place.
Another study published in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases stated, “We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”29
PANDA data also showed no differences in transmission in states with mask mandates and those without. Still, health officials are now advising you should double or triple up on masks to make them work better.
Vaccines Being Sold as a Ticket to Freedom
People who stand to make countless billions out of COVID-19 vaccines are now selling them as a ticket to freedom, Hudson states:
“How convenient that we now have a logic that tells us that we need to vaccinate 7.8 billion people for a disease that has a mean survival rate of 99.95% for people under the age of 70. The profiteering here is naked. It is transparent.”
It’s a sad situation when teenagers, who aren’t at high risk, are lining up for vaccines just to get their freedoms back, he adds. When you add in all the other inconsistencies and lies — PCR tests that are not capable of diagnosing infectiousness, inflated death numbers, restrictions on travel, media propaganda and arbitrary rules, like the CDC’s recent change in physical distancing in classrooms from 6 feet to 3 feet30 — it’s as though we’re living in an Orwellian reality.
With looming vaccine passports, the loss of personal liberties is at an unprecedented level, while people are generally “enslaved by fear” — fear of infection or reinfection, “long COVID,” resurgence and mutant variants. “The underpinnings of our civilization are under threat,” Hudson noted, and we have a choice. “We’ve been pushed up against a precipice, will we be pushed off or will we push back?”
He urges people to support the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for “focused protection” and finding a middle ground between locking down an entire economy and just “letting it rip.” As of April 4, 2021, the declaration has collected 41,890 signatures from medical practitioners and over 13,796 signatures from medical and public health scientists.31
In addition, the declaration is open for public signatures and has collected 764,089 from concerned citizens around the world. The website allows you to read and sign the declaration, answers many frequently asked questions, shares the science behind the recommendations and explains how the declaration was written.
PANDA also published a protocol for reopening society “to provide a road map out of the damaging cycle of lockdowns.”32 Hudson quoted Nelson Mandela, who stated courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. We all need to strive for courage and support awareness campaigns aimed at stopping the harmful narrative, relieving fear and protecting future freedom.
Sources and References
April 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Hugh Osmond and Sacha Lord are back in court this week to argue that the Government’s refusal to reopen indoor hospitality is inconsistent with the opening up of “non-essential” retail. I wish them luck, I really do. But I fear that they are battling not against SAGE evidence but against the miserable assumptions on which that “evidence” is based.
Why has this Government gone to war on pubs when the hospitality industry was last year responsible for fewer that 3% of Covid infections? It’s tempting to conclude that the SAGE types are not worried that pubs are possible vectors of transmission, but that they are concerned that hospitality venues are potential theatres of dissent. Or, worse, that they are places where people have the temerity to enjoy themselves.
Heaven forfend.
The Lockdown Sanhedrin, the SAGE clerisy, is itself infected with the virus of puritanism. It’s impossible to look at Chris Whitty without concluding that other people’s enjoyment presents itself to him as a sort of personal Kryptonite. Boris’s self-announced “libertarianism” seems to amount to little more than the thesis that he gets to do what he wants and the rest of us can go hang. But I think it goes deeper than that – the Government and in particular its advisers are in thrall to a metaphysics of joylessness.
At the start of this crisis, the Government decided that it was qualified to make a distinction between those activities which are essential and those which are not. The latter were consequently eliminated from the list of what was permitted. To put it another way, it took upon itself the right to decide what counts as work, and what counts as mere “play”.
But it is not clear that any such distinction exists, and if it does then it does not follow that we should prioritise work over play, even in a pandemic. Aristotle claimed that the “first principle of activity is leisure”: that we work in order to play; that play is a more valuable activity than work because it is something that is done for its own sake. The vulgar utilitarianism which has shaped SAGE’s pandemic response is a crude sanitisation of our understanding of the human soul. Not every worthwhile thing that we do as human persons can be reduced to the requirements of a Downing St data slide.
Pubs matter for reasons that go further than the economics of the hospitality sector, important though those are. They matter because they are playgrounds for adults. They are important because they remind us that not everything has to be geared to the puritanical assumption that we work only to get up and repeat the same day.
And they matter because they have their own internal social grammar, one which has been handed down from generation to generation. The pub has its own set of protocols (the “round”) and its own systems of internal conflict resolution (“let’s take this outside”).
It is in the pub that people can whisper conspiracy against a Government narrative. And conspiracies always require that the like-minded are allowed to gather. It is over a drink that the millionaire and the pauper can come together and compare notes.
Johnson is currently offering us a sinister inversion of what a pub is, one in which you are tracked, traced, audited, judged, and humiliated. The “road map”, in this industry at least, is one that leads you not into “normal” but into a “Twin Peaks” version of it.
This Government needs to be careful. I am not persuaded that it has gone to war against us. But it’s starting to give that impression. Why? Because if you were given carte blanche to construct a police state this is how you’d do it: you would stamp on the enjoyment of the great unwashed and confiscate all mechanisms of dissent. The Government’s war on pubs is ticking both those boxes.
Sean Walsh is a writer and former university teacher.
April 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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Earlier, Twitter permanently suspended the account of Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, as the watchdog continues to release its “Expose CNN” series, including the broadcaster’s director saying that the channel was using “propaganda”.
James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, filed a defamation lawsuit against Twitter on Monday, denying platform accusations that he used false pages, considered in Twitter rules as a way to “artificially amplify or disrupt conversations.”
“This defamation action arises from Twitter’s false and defamatory April 15, 2021, statement concerning Twitter’s decision to ban Plaintiff James O’Keefe, an investigative journalist followed by over 926,000 Twitter users as of the time he was banned.”
“Twitter’s false claim that Mr. O’Keefe used ‘fake accounts’ on Twitter has caused Mr. O’Keefe damage and, unless retracted, will continue to cause him damage,” the lawsuit reads.
According to the lawsuit, “Twitter made such claims with knowledge of their falsity in order to distract and detract from Project Veritas’s CNN release of the same day.”
Last week, Twitter banned O’Keefe’s page after accusing O’Keefe of using “fake accounts.”
The ban came shortly after the release of a third Project Veritas revelation which included an interview with CNN technical director Charles Chester recorded clandestinely on a hidden camera. Chester claimed that the broadcaster was aiming to prevent former US President Donald Trump from being re-elected by focusing on negative news about him.
“Look what we did, we [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out…I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that,” Chester appeared to say during a secretly recorded conversation with a Project Veritas journalist.
Chester also claimed that CNN was only covering US President Joe Biden in a favorable light and asserted that the network had assisted BLM the movement by concealing crimes committed by people of color.
The non-profit conservative outlet Project Veritas was founded in 2010 by O’Keefe and includes a group of journalists who focus on publishing investigative reports on officials they claim are liberal as well as various organizations, including big tech companies.
Project Veritas and the social media accounts of several of its employees have faced a number of bans regarding their reporting about Facebook, Twitter, Google and Pinterest.
April 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception | CNN, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter, United States |
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CNN’s invitation to Dr. Anthony Fauci to opine on whether gun violence is a health issue in the US was totally misplaced. He’s not qualified to comment, and after his performance on Covid, few will be prepared to listen anyway.
The president’s chief medical adviser has been the darling of the political left ever since Covid-19 changed our world. He has been pushed and promoted outside his normal sphere to the extent that he was even invited to talk at the Latin American Music Awards alongside Ricky Martin. Boy, do I wish I was kidding…
Now that he’s the poster boy for all things health-related in America, it was perhaps not surprising that he was asked to appear on CNN’s State of the Union program for his opinions on whether or not gun violence is a health issue in America. But there’s a problem with that. Because Dr. Fauci is an immunologist, not a psychologist.
Sure, the good doctor has a right to his opinion. He gets to enjoy that right just as much as any other American. However, some opinions have more value than others. And in this particular case, I think that Fauci’s opinion is worthless. I have nothing personal against him, but I would much rather hear a psychologist discuss this particular topic. After all, there is always an individual or individuals behind the violence, and I think we need to know what goes into the decision-making process to compel someone to kill so many people with a gun.
Then again, I’m also cognizant enough to know that the left does not care at all whether or not Dr. Fauci is qualified to give his opinion. At the moment he is their go-to guy, as opposed to someone like Bill Nye. And, ultimately, the reason that Fauci is given airtime has nothing to do with his actual qualifications, but everything to do with the fact that he is to be used as a cudgel. The administration that he works for declared gun violence a public health epidemic earlier this month. So he is there to make it seem like its decision to make such a declaration is rooted in science.
It’s a rather cynical move, and one that clearly is not very well thought out. Trying to use an overexposed immunologist to push gun control is not exactly going to be something that resonates with a lot of people in America. Many are simply sick of seeing this guy everywhere, so there’s no way that they’ll listen to what he has to say with regard to what should be done with firearms.
Whichever way you look at it, Dr. Fauci is as qualified to comment on this as he is on how to repair a muffler on a semi truck, and everyone knows it. And what makes it even worse is that his contribution to the debate solves nothing.
Right now, Democrats simply do not have the numbers to push through an assault weapons ban on Capitol Hill. And no matter how much data is brought together to show how many people are killed by guns, there is an overarching issue that isn’t being addressed. And that is why people are pulling the trigger in the first place.
In my opinion, this is the question we should be striving to find the answer for. And our failure to do so makes the situation even worse and more depressing. It shows a lack of care for the people who are victims of gun violence, and a lack of desire to figure out what exactly drives people to do such things.
Whether it’s extreme mental duress or an actual mental illness, at some point our culture is going to have to figure out exactly what causes people to kill so freely if we ever want America to get better.
Parading Dr. Fauci around like a prize parrot is going to do nothing more than annoy people… while others lose their lives.
April 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CNN, United States |
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UK council authorities are putting more ‘COVID marshals’ onto the streets to report people to the police for not properly social distancing.
After the government lifted some lockdown restrictions on Monday, bars and restaurants were allowed to open outside.
This prompted the media to once again hysterically point to footage of people daring to enjoy themselves in order to whip up another contrived panic over a ‘4th wave’ of the virus returning despite Britain having one of the lowest case rates in the world amongst major countries.
Local government immediately responded by vowing to put more state spies on the streets.
“Councils across England have boosted the number of Covid-19 marshals patrolling city centres after scenes of overcrowding since outdoor drinking and dining resumed on Monday,” reports the Times.
The marshals have no enforcement power, so their role almost entirely depends on lecturing people about their behavior and then snitching on them to police if they fail to comply.
As we previously highlighted, when the second lockdown was implemented in the UK last autumn, COVID marshals were dispatched to ensure pubs and clubs were closed.
Photographs from the patrols showed marshals peering into windows and letterboxes to ensure gatherings or private parties were not taking place.
Images from London on Monday also showed masked security guards with attack dogs waiting to deal with any trouble caused by overcrowding as shops re-opened.
This is all apparently part of the process of regaining our freedom!
April 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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The Spanish security services have allowed an Israeli agent from the Mossad spy agency to interrogate a Palestinian journalist seeking asylum, Wafa news agency has reported. The incident at the Civil Guard building in the capital has been condemned by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate.
The syndicate called on the Spanish government to assume its responsibilities by ensuring the security of Muath Hamid and his family. It also called for the Spanish authorities to open an investigation into what happened during the interrogation.
Spain’s Civil Guard is the oldest law enforcement agency in the country and “military in nature”. The journalists’ union said that it is suspected of being “complicit” with Mossad in allowing the Israeli agent to interrogate Hamid in its building. “This was a gross violation of international law, a violation of Spanish sovereignty and a threat to the journalist’s security and safety,” the syndicate insisted.
It added that the case is being followed closely in conjunction with the Union of Spanish Journalists, the Palestinian Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Ministry, and the Spanish political and security authorities to ensure that Hamid is not subject to any harm or torture. The reporter for Al Araby TV and freelance contributor to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed is currently a refugee in Spain, where he lives with his wife and two children.
According to popular Spanish online newspaper Público last Friday, on 9 December Hamid received a telephone call from “Nicolás”, an officer on duty at the Civil Guard’s Spanish Information Services “Nicolás wanted to discuss Hamid’s work as a journalist, his past and his current life in Spain. This is a regular procedure for refugees and migrants.”
When the journalist went to meet “Nicolás” in Bilbao, he met another officer, Javier. “Hamid answered all the questions, explaining why he applied for asylum in Spain and describing his journey from Palestine to Europe through Turkey,” reported Público. “In early February, the young Palestinian journalist was summoned again by Nicolás… this time in the Spanish capital, Madrid.”
This time there was also another man in the room, allegedly named Omar, “who was introduced to him as a Palestinian. Hamid, however, immediately noticed his strong Israeli accent… and he decided to answer his questions in Hebrew.” Omar acknowledged that he was an Israeli, at which point Javier “left the room, leaving Muath in the hands of the supposed Mossad agent… who threatened the Palestinian journalist and his family, saying that they will never be allowed to go back to Palestine due to one of his journalistic investigations” related to the work of the Israeli spy agency.
Público sought comments and clarifications from the Israeli Embassy and the Civil Guard, as well as Spain’s Interior Ministry. It has received no replies.
April 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Spain, Zionism |
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‘All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.’ – Frank Herbert, Dune
Many of us want to be led. As children we look to our parents to protect us, to soothe our fears, to relieve us of responsibility. As adults we seek the same protection – we want powerful leaders, leaders who appear fearless and resilient.
Our narcissistic culture also demands that our leaders are charismatic, self-assured, and eloquent – we want leaders who can perform on the world stage.
And so trustingly, time after time, we relinquish our power to those grandiose individuals who covet high office, unaware that their determination – their sheer, dogged, winner-takes-all ambition, their superficial charm and seductiveness – may suggest that many are psychologically unsuited to these roles.
These individuals form a psychologically distinct minority group; although their numbers are limited, their reach is extensive, and the destruction they can cause is immeasurable.
Yet while their lies and manipulations, their recklessness and their lack of remorse can make them appear insane, most are not; the more highly functioning thrive in professions and corporations that value the opportunistic and the ruthless. Their ‘madness’ – such as it is – lies in their lack of conscience; their absolute freedom from ethical constraints. These disturbed and disturbing souls are more fittingly characterised as morally insane.
Take heed. The global influence of many of these high-profile individuals is growing. Together they have been forming grandiose plans. They will vaccinate the entire world. They will block out the sun. They will Build Back Better.
We don’t imagine that psychopaths might be politicians.
So, we blind ourselves, as many abused children do, to the reality of what our leaders are asking of us. When they separate us from our loved ones, suffocate us with masks, inject us with experimental vaccines, remove our civil liberties, crash our economy, close our schools, harm our children and lock us up ‘for our own good’, we justify their behaviour; we accept their lies and their attempts to control us. We reassure ourselves that they are keeping us safe.
We also look to the media for reassurance – to journalists and ‘public health experts’ to inform and guide us, to put our nascent feelings into words, to do our thinking for us. We may suspend our critical judgement in our desire for ‘news’ and reliable ‘facts’. And so we overlook the scandals, the cover-ups, diversions and corruption; we absorb their distortions and propaganda; the artfully conceived scapegoats that keep our hatreds focused elsewhere and our society divided. We may fail to notice the relentless construction of a world that benefits the predator class.
We don’t imagine that psychopaths might be journalists.
So, we heed their warnings about the virus, which accord with those of our leaders. Though they might confuse us with their reporting of ‘cases’ and ‘positive tests’ and ‘hospitalisations’ – with their graphs and statistics and relative risks – we are reassured that the message is a simple one: that the jab will be our route to freedom; that our vaccine rollout is the fastest; that our NHS is the finest in the world: clap clap clap clap clap!
And we probably believe, if we give it any thought at all, that the pharmaceutical industry develops products that relieve suffering and save lives. We are unaware of the institutional corruption; the crimes that have led to millions of deaths and adverse reactions, the billions paid in health fraud settlements; the flagrant distortions of the medical literature; the falsified trials, the targeting of whistle blowers.
We don’t imagine that psychopaths produce vaccines.
For we dare not imagine that we have been entrapped by an unaccountable psychopathic elite who have subverted our democracies; have captured and undermined our institutions; have caused economic devastation the world over; have spawned a global mental health crisis which will reverberate for generations.
We dare not imagine. And so terrorised by fear and shame and relentless propaganda, we fall back on the protection of our psychopathic programmers: far easier to accept their virus narrative, to play the game, to submit, than to acknowledge our protectors’ abuse.
Closing ranks against outsiders we huddle together in our virtual pens; we relinquish our autonomy, we disregard our intuition – our primitive, essential wisdom – and accept the increasingly infantilised role that the pathocracy has created for us. We visit our doctor and accept our jab and we are rewarded with a sticker.
And although others warn us that the testing regime is flawed; that the deaths are misreported; that the vaccine is unsafe; they cannot penetrate our defences. How they enrage us when they disturb our illusions! When they try to force open our blinded eyes! ‘Wake up’ they plead, but we are not sleeping; ‘think!’ they cry, as if we cannot hear.
They don’t know – nor yet do we – that we are shielding ourselves from an existential threat more overwhelming to us than any virus, using the only weapon we have in our wretched armoury: denial.
Because deep down, deep deep down, we do know, we do know and we’ve known all along about the danger we are in, but we ignored the warnings of our inner compass, we ignored the red flags and the brutality and the glaring inconsistencies.
We shielded ourselves from the horror of acknowledging that we are powerless and vulnerable and totally alone in an indifferent Universe. And because a life of servitude seemed preferable to one of existential terror, we collaborated with our oppressors.
We stayed safe.
Andrea Halewood isa Chartered psychologist/psychodynamic psychotherapist and a former lecturer & researcher in counselling psychology.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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In a small phase two trial, Imperial College researchers have found that psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, is at least as effective as pharmaceutical medication at treating depression.
In their admittedly small scale study, some 59 volunteers with depression were split into two groups.
One group was given a daily dosage of the widely used antidepressant escitalopram (AKA Lexapro, Cipralex, and others). They were also administered very weak doses of psilocybin twice, three weeks apart, over the course of the study.
The second group received much stronger doses of psilocybin, with a placebo instead of antidepressant medication.
After six weeks, the self-reported results from the patients suggested the psilocybin was just as effective as the pharmaceutical, and in many cases showed a slightly bigger – but ultimately statistically insignificant – improvement in symptoms.
The research team, led by Imperial College London neuroscientist Robin Carhart‑Harris, also highlighted the limited timeframe of the study as playing an important factor in the results, and suggested that a longer study might yield different results, possibly favouring pharmaceutical intervention.
The scientists were also quick to highlight the importance of guided psychotherapy to manage any hallucinatory experiences among the trial volunteers, lest members of the public attempt to self-medicate.
“We strongly believe that the … psychotherapy component is as important as the drug action,” Carhart-Harris said.
“With a psychedelic it is more about a release of thought and feeling that, when guided with psychotherapy, produces positive outcomes.”
Some five patients taking the SSRI stopped or reduced their doses due to negative effects, but none in the psilocybin group did. Furthermore, volunteers with a family history of psychosis were excluded from the trial, which may have tipped the results positively in favour of the psychedelic intervention.
Previous research has found that psilocybin treatment had fewer side effects and had an almost immediate impact compared with common antidepressant medication, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
SSRIs are often perceived to blunt emotional response, whereas the psilocybin had the opposite effect, according to fMRI scans which showed an apparent increase in emotional connections within the patients’ brains.
There are often a slew of side effects associated with SSRIs, ranging from lethargy and mood swings to so-called ‘brain zaps’, or the sensation of electrical shocks in the brain associated with the use (or discontinuation) of the medication.
SSRIs also typically have a lead time of up to six weeks to reach full effect, while ongoing side effects which can persist beyond this initial phase include insomnia, weight gain, and persistent fatigue, among others.
Further, the efficacy of such antidepressants can wane for some patients over time, so breakthroughs in the field of psychedelic treatments may provide huge relief for patients with adverse reactions to the more common interventions – though it is still too early to make any sweeping assertions about psilocybin treatments among the wider populace.
Still, with an estimated 800 million people with mental health disorders worldwide, new treatment options could soon be available.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Human rights, SSRIs |
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The force was excessive so the DOJ punts on “willfulness”
Today, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia issued a press release explaining their decision to not prosecute the officer who shot and killed unarmed protester (and veteran) Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021.
It states that DOJ officials, along with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, “conducted a thorough investigation of Ms. Babbitt’s shooting.” This included reviewing video footage, getting statements from officers and other witnesses, collecting physical evidence, and the results of Ms. Babbitt’s autopsy.
They explain:
“As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor.”
You’ll notice there’s no mention of a verbal warning to Ms. Babbitt or other efforts to subdue her without the use of deadly force.
Continuing on, the DOJ maintains that the “focus of the criminal investigation was to determine whether federal prosecutors could prove that the officer violated any federal laws, concentrating on the possible application of 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute.”
The press release focused on the term “willfully”:
The DOJ concluded:
“The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
This conclusion should be no surprise. Not because of the law or the facts, but because of the people in charge of the Department of Justice. The U.S. Capitol Police, like the Park Police, have always had a special relationship with the DOJ – one that includes preferential treatment. This case is no different.
For starters, the three basic elements to a prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 242 are that the defendant (1) acting under color of law; (2) willfully; (3) deprived the victim of a federally protected right.
Excessive force is easy to establish. The Supreme Court has held that the government must introduce evidence that the action of the officer in shooting to kill Babbitt was “excessive in relation” to a legitimate government objective. Kingsley v. Hendrickson, 135 S. Ct. 2466, 2473-2474 (2015). This is an objective standard – the force must be objectively unreasonable when viewed from the standpoint of a reasonable officer at the scene. Here, Babbitt was unarmed, was climbing through a window and not attacking anyone. In response, she is shot and killed. Easily excessive.
This brings us to “willfulness.”
We have serious doubts about the DOJ position that there was “no evidence” to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully violated Section 242. As an initial matter, the DOJ press release neglects to mention whether the officer used excessive force, instead going right to an analysis on willfulness. We believe this reveals their intent to soften the blow of the press release.
As to willfulness, 18 U.S.C. applies “when the defendant understands that he is unjustifiably invading a legally protected interest, or acts in reckless disregard of the law.” However, the defendant need not have been “thinking in constitutional terms,” as long as his “aim was not to enforce local law but to deprive a citizen of a right and that right was protected by the Constitution.” Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 106 (1945).
Here, the DOJ exaggerates – and at worst, lies – about its “willfulness burden.” We doubt the DOJ couldn’t prove willfulness in this case.
In fact, the DOJ has brought Section 242 prosecutions with less egregious facts.
As the DOJ has argued in other cases, the officer’s prior training on the use of force could be viewed “as evidence that his conduct was willful.” Are we to think that this officer didn’t have training on when force became excessive?
In another case, the DOJ argued to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that to establish “willfulness,” the jury was required to find that the defendant “intended to use more force than was reasonable under the circumstances – i.e., force that violated [the victim’s] well-established due rights as a pretrial detainee.”
What makes the Babbitt case different? The victim and the location.
This case should have gone to the jury. If this killing took place in Minnesota or Chicago the results would have been different.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | DOJ, Human rights, United States |
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It’s easy to laugh when middle-class greenies write about their eco-anxiety, under headlines like ‘Can you drink milk and stay ethical?’, but there’s a deadly serious side to this that threatens to curtail our freedoms.
The world of the eco-warrior is a gloomy one indeed. Just as the rest of us are starting to enjoy the first loosening of government-imposed lockdown and pondering the post-Covid-19 world, they, while drinking their barista-quality oat milk lattes, are preoccupied with highly moral dilemmas most of us don’t have the time or money to think about.
What follows is not made up, but is a shortened version of Guardian columnist Emma Beddington’s moral dilemmas facing the post-Covid-19 world.
While anxious to minimise her part in transforming the Earth “into a flaming wasteland,” she has a major dilemma with milk, well, multiple problems. Why? Because milk is apparently, “bad news for the planet: three times worse in greenhouse emission terms than any plant milk.” (We’ll come back to the moronic concept of ‘plant milk’ below). But her dilemma is that while knowing this for “ages” she has pretended it is not. And why? “Because tea is horrible with oat milk.” Who would have thought? (We’ll come back to this equally moronic concept below too).
According to Beddington, the horror of this complex dilemma is earth-shattering, or scorching, depending on where you place your carbon footprint. Her solution is to seek out what she terms “the least bad dairy”: she gets her milk from “cows fed on seaweed, which reduces bovine belching.” Apparently, research has recently found this can cut methane emissions by up to 82%.
But before you can breathe a sigh of relief (while perhaps pondering whether feeding cows seaweed does not constitute abuse and animal cruelty), it gets even worse. Her ‘good’ dairy comes in plastic bottles, not glass ones, which makes it bad. Because her household finishes two pints of seaweed milk precisely six days after the weekly delivery, ordering another two-pint bottle, would mean “most of it would end up down the sink” – obviously a no-no for sustainability. So, her instinct is to hold out. But this results in an even greater moral dilemma because it means imposing her “eco-guilt” on her younger son, who, bless him, “has the smallest carbon footprint of any of us, and just wants milk on his cereal.” The result? She ends up buying a pint of “Bad Milk from the corner shop.” (The horror!).
At the very least, this suggests her son has something she lacks: namely, the ability to recognise that Bad Milk tastes good while Good Milk is, in her own words, “horrible.”
But who would have thought that living ethically was so complex and difficult? Milk is just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. Every consumer decision is laden with moral dilemmas: how to shop without contributing to “flat-pack landfill waste.” What’s the point in recycling “like a demon, sorting, flattening, rinsing and parsing the council’s opaque and inadequate recycling policy” when no-one “will take plastic takeaway boxes” (an admission that Beddington and her fellow eco-warriors have spent lockdown dealing with their eco-dilemmas while eating takeaway food delivered by people who, in all likelihood, are relying on food banks for their survival, not struggling with the pros and cons of seaweed-fed bovines).
But for the virtual signalling eco-middle class every choice is bad and carries a heavy burden. The weight of having to balance “one harm against another” is causing them mental health problems. So, what is her solution? Well, she says, “as in so much of life…I just want someone authoritative to tell me what to do.”
This is where eco-anxiety ceases to be a source of comedic brilliance and where virtue signalling becomes a serious political issue.
What Beddington and the Guardian are advocating, in reality, is that we should all succumb to the dictatorship of experts – but only the experts that accept misanthropic eco-anxiety, not those who might question it.
The concepts they use, like ‘plant milk’ already indicate the type of conformity they expect and demand. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘milk’ as “a whitish fluid, rich in fat and protein, secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals (including humans) for the nourishment of their young, and taken from cows, sheep, etc., as an article of the human diet.” As such, it reflects human ingenuity and how mankind has transformed nature to meet human ends. This is precisely what nonsensical misnomers like ‘oat milk’ seek to undermine.
The assault on language is just the thin edge of the wedge. ‘Tell me what to do’ is the political rallying cry of the middle class. They have really loved Covid-19 and the lockdown that was imposed by the state on the word of politically unaccountable experts who apparently knew what’s best for the rest of us. And they’re expert at that.
The moral complexity of eco-anxiety, expressed so comically by Beddington, should not lull us into a false sense of security. As bonkers as it is, it serves to strengthen the idea of the need for expert diktat.
This has been the message of the high priest of environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. She has not tired from drawing out the lessons that acting on the advice of scientists “should be applied to the climate crisis.”
As we move haltingly towards freedom in the post-Covid-19 era, eco-anxiety is set to fill the authoritarian expert gap that will follow. The battle over the next global emergency – the environment – will make the Covid-19 battle for debate, contestation and anti-state authoritarianism look like a walk in the park.
But it is not all bleak. As one reader, ‘Donercard’, humorously referring to the ‘Ian Rush Accrington Stanley’ milk advert by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1980s, puts it: “You (Beddington) can drink milk and be ethical but you will never play for Accrington Stanley.”
Exactly!
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights |
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