California Bill Would Fine Retailers That Keep Boys and Girls’ Toys and Clothing in Separate Sections
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | February 25, 2021
A new bill proposed in California would fine retailers, including online stores, that continue to display boys and girls’ toys and clothing in separate sections.
Introduced by Democrats Evan Low and Cristina Garcia in the California state legislature, the bill would require retailers to display the “majority” of the items in unisex sections.
The legislation would also forbid signs that indicate whether the toys and clothing are intended for boys or girls.
Websites would also be made to show all the items on a single page entitled “kids,” “unisex” or “gender neutral,” something that would cause practical confusion even outside of the political intentions of the bill.
Retailers with over 500 employees would be hit with an initial $1,000 fine for non-compliance.
“There are clear political and social motivations behind this bill, namely to use the state to compel “inclusivity” and encourage the “self-expression” of disordered inclinations at a very young age. It’s despicable,” commented Evan James.
As we highlighted earlier, a new Gallup poll found that when it comes to Generation Z, one in six now identify as some form of LGBT.
Illinois’ Latest Use Of Taxpayer Money As Political Club
By Mark Glennon – Wirepoints – February 25, 2021
Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs and a group of 29 other state financial officials recently sent letters to six of the nation’s largest private sector money managers in a transparently partisan attempt to bully them out of supporting Republicans.
The effort is a misuse of the power that adheres to managing billions of dollars of taxpayer money and sets a dangerous precedent that might well invite retaliation in the same form by Republicans holding similar offices or from a Republican successor to Frerichs. It’s an attempt by incumbent officeholders to control much of the money that controls politics.
Unfortunately, the effort got no scrutiny and only a few news articles in the national media, including these in The Washington Post and Bloomberg.
Treasurer Michael Frerichs
Frerichs oversees the investment of some $35 billion of Illinoisan’s money. Together with the other treasurers, public fiduciaries and pension trustees who signed the letter, over a trillion dollars of public money is represented.
Their letter went in substantially identical form, one of which is here, to BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Fidelity Investments, State Street Corp. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
The letter purports to be mainly about transparency and political contributions to members of Congress who voted against certification of election results that came in from the states. On January 6, 147 Congressional Republicans voted against certification, which was well over half of the Republican members of Congress.
That, the letter says, made its writers worried about returns on their investments. “A functioning democracy is foundational to a stable economy,” the letter says, “and we rely on economic and political stability in order to generate consistent investment returns on behalf of our beneficiaries.”
Nothing political at all, the officials are claiming, they are just doing their best to maximize financial returns.
Take a closer look to see if that’s believable.
One implicit threat about contributions to those candidates is clear in the first sentence of the letters. “[With] assets under management of over $1 trillion,” Frerichs and the others wrote, “we are frequently asked to evaluate asset allocations to asset managers.”
And they ask in the letter, “Will [you] forswear corporate political spending (direct or indirect) to the 147 members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of a free and fair democratic election on January 6th, 2021?”
In other words, change your political contributions or, well, they didn’t need to spell it out.
There’s much more to it. The letters are a broad attempt to bully the money managers into partisan changes in their political activity.
You can’t even get past the letterhead, shown here, to see that broader, partisan agenda. It’s brazen, carrying the names of Service Employees International Union and Majority Action.
It’s so brazen you have to wonder what they were thinking.
SEIU is one of the largest public unions in the nation and huge Democratic benefactor. It is listed among Frerichs’ ten biggest campaign contributors in 2018, the last time he ran.
Majority Action, which spearheaded the effort behind the letter, is a progressive outfit focused on publicly shaming corporations into supporting like-minded causes, particularly on global warming.
Why are SEIU and Majority Action on the letterhead if not to signal general support for them as well?
As you would expect, it’s an entirely partisan group that signed the letter. Every one of the elected officials who signed it are Democrats. And each of the unelected officials who signed it are, from all I could find, active progressives and presumably also Democrats.
Are the letter writers sincere when claiming they are only concerned about their investment returns and election certification?
Objections to presidential vote certifications are not uncommon. Democrats have objected to all three certifications of Republican wins since 2000 – Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004. When Sen. Barbara Boxer objected to certification of Bush’s Ohio certification in 2004, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said on the Senate floor, “I thank her for doing that because it gives members an opportunity once again on a bipartisan basis to look at a challenge that we face not just in the last election in one State but in many States.”
Durbin’s point was fair, and Democrats had every right to make those objections. The letter writers undoubtedly didn’t object, nor are we aware of any objections they had to any of countless elected officials who stood silent and sometimes encouraged the political violence we saw over the summer.
There’s another oddity about the letter. Among its signers is Aaron Ammons as trustee of SURS, one of Illinois’ pensions, the State University Retirement System.
SURS, like most Illinois pensions, is among the walking dead in actuarial terms, being only 39% funded. Does anybody really think that saving democracy from insurrectionists is what SURS trustees should be focused on?
SURS Trustee Aaron Amons
Ammons, too, is a progressive Democrat. He’s a former chapter president of SEIU. Appointed by Gov. JB Pritzker, he was elected Champaign County Clerk in 2018 and co-founded the Champaign Urbana Citizens for Peace & Justice. He is married to Democratic State Representative Carol Ammons.
The letter isn’t entirely focused on campaign contributions to those who voted against the vote certification. It addresses campaign donations in general and asks what broader reforms the letter’s recipients will undertake to rigorously reassess their “corporate political spending and evaluate whether payments serve to advance the company’s business objectives and a stable democracy.”
But that’s an entirely political judgement that neither Frerichs, Ammons nor the other signers are charged with imposing. Even if they are sincere in their claims about what’s good for rates of return in the long run, suffice it to say that opinions vary.
Those broader topics and questions belie the letter’s real purpose, which is to tell the big money folks to toe the party line — or else. From the letterhead down, its recipients would be fools to miss that full message. It’s not about maximizing returns, it’s about telling them where to use their financial clout politically.
We are fortunate that, at least so far, public officials with different political views than the letter writers haven’t tried the same tactic. They well might, as might a Republican successor to Frerichs.
A bad precedent has been set. Money, unfortunately, already controls much of government. But if this precedent is followed, we would have incumbent politicians effectively controlling much of the money that controls politics, pushing and pulling in different directions.
The letter is the most recent on a list of ways Frerichs has misused the public’s money for partisan purposes. Those stories and some on Frerichs’ other doings are in our articles linked below.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
- Pure genius: Illinois Treasurer Frerichs takes money from charities to make grants to charities January 29, 2021
- As markets tank, Illinois prioritizes social justice for investing public money March 9, 2020
- Success For Illinois’ Secure Choice Program? Better Check The Numbers November 25, 2019
- Illinois Treasurer playing activist shareholder again with stock not his; wants new Facebook chairman April 16, 2018
- Illinois Treasurer Shoots Self In Foot Defending Activist Social Investing January 15, 2018
- Illinois Treasurer Frerichs Playing Activist Shareholder With College Savers’ Money January 8, 2018
- Illinois Treasurer Shoots Self In Foot Defending Activist Social Investing January 15, 2018
- In Depth: $13 Billion Still Languishes With Illinois Treasurer, Misuse Mounts October 22, 2017
- Why that municipal bond purchase by Illinois Treasurer makes me nervous September 15, 2017
- Illinois Treasurer Churns $12.5 Billion Portfolio Every 3 – 4 days — $1 Trillion Per Year October 12, 2016
- Illinois Treasurer Will Punish Taxpayers, Blameless Shareholders and Employees for Wells Fargo Scandal October 3, 2016
In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says
By Aaron Maté | RealClearInvestigations | February 25, 2021
After four years of railing against “deep state” actors who, he said, tried to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump relented to US intelligence leaders in his final days in office, allowing them to block the release of critical material in the Russia investigation, according to a former senior congressional investigator who later joined the Trump administration.
Kash Patel, whose work on the House Intelligence Committee helped unearth US intelligence malpractice during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, said he does not know why Trump did not force the release of documents that would expose further wrongdoing. But he said senior intelligence officials “continuously impeded” their release – usually by slow-walking their reviews of the material. Patel said Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, was instrumental in blocking one of the most critical documents, he said.
Patel, who has seen the Russia probe’s underlying intelligence and co-wrote critical reports that have yet to be declassified, said new disclosures would expose additional misconduct and evidentiary holes in the CIA and FBI’s work.
“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel told RealClearInvestigations in his first in-depth interview since leaving government at the end of Trump’s term last month, having served in several intelligence and defense roles (full interview here).
Trump did not respond to requests seeking comment sent to intermediaries.
Although a Department of Justice inspector general’s report in December 2019 exposed significant intelligence failings and malpractice, Patel said more damning information is still being kept under wraps. And despite an ongoing investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the conduct of the officials who carried out the Trump-Russia inquiry, it is unclear if key documents will ever see the light of day.
Patel did not suggest that a game-changing smoking gun is being kept from the public. Core intelligence failures have been exposed – especially regarding the FBI’s reliance on Christopher Steele’s now debunked dossier to secure FISA warrants used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But he said the withheld material would reveal more misconduct as well as major problems with the CIA’s assessment that Russia, on Vladimir Putin’s orders, ordered a sweeping and systematic interference 2016 campaign to elect Trump. Patel was cautious about going into detail on any sensitive information that has not yet been declassified.
‘Continuously Impeded’ in Public Disclosure
Patel’s work on the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of its former Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, is widely credited with exposing the FBI’s reliance on Steele and misrepresentations to the FISA court. Yet congressional Democrats and major media outlets portrayed him as a behind-the-scenes saboteur who sought to “discredit” the Russia investigation.
The media vitriol unnerved Patel, who had previously served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon – a tenure that exceeds his time working under Trump. Patel says that ensuring public disclosure of critical information in such a consequential national security investigation motivated him to take the job in the first place.
“The agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to the Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure,” Patel said. “Everything we find, I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever, from your political perspective, we put it out.’ So the American public can just read it themselves, with a few protections here and there for some certain national security measures, but those are minimal redactions.”
That task proved difficult. The House Intelligence Committee’s disclosure efforts, Patel said, “were continuously impeded by members of the intelligence community themselves, with the same singular epithets that you’re going to harm sources and methods. … And I just highlight that because, we didn’t lose a single source. We didn’t lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion.”
“But each time we forced them to produce [documents],” Patel added, “it only showed their coverup and embarrassment.” These key revelations he helped expose include Justice official Bruce Ohr’s admission that he acted as a liaison to Steele even after the FBI officially terminated him; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s false statements about leaks related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation; and the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier to spy on Page. “There is actually a law that prevents the FBI and DOJ from failing to disclose material to a court just to hide an embarrassment or mistake, and it came up during our investigation. It helped us compel disclosure.”
Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’
For Patel, a key document that remains hidden from the public is the full report he helped prepare and which Trump chose not to declassify after pressure from the intelligence community: The House Intelligence Committee report about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
The ICA is a foundational Russiagate document. Released just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, it asserted that Russia waged an interference campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Despite widespread media accounts that the ICA reflected the consensus view of all 17 US intelligence agencies, it was a rushed job completed in a few weeks by a small group of CIA analysts led by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who merely consulted with FBI and NSA counterparts. The NSA even dissented from a key judgment that Russia and Putin specifically aimed to help install Trump, expressing only “moderate confidence.”
The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”
Along with that March 2018 report, Patel and his intelligence committee colleagues produced a still-classified document that fleshed out the ICA’s “tradecraft failings” in greater detail.
“We went and looked at it [the ICA], and looked at the underlying evidence and cables, and talked to the people who did it,” Patel says. According to Patel, the ICA’s flaws begin with the unprecedentedly short window of time in which it was produced during the final days of the Obama White House. “In two to three weeks, you can’t have a comprehensive investigation of anything, in terms of interference and cybersecurity matters.”
Patel said that still classified information undermines another key claim – that Russia ordered a cyber-hacking campaign to help Trump. The March 2018 House report noted that the ICA’s judgments, “particularly on the cyber intrusion sections, employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions,” but those were drowned out by partisan insistence that Russia was the culprit.
Constrained from discussing the material, Patel said its release “would lend a lot of credence to” skepticism about the Mueller report’s claim that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to install Trump.
That skepticism was bolstered in July 2019 when the Mueller team was reprimanded by a US District judge for falsely suggesting in its final report that a Russian social media firm acted in concert with the Kremlin. (Mueller’s prosecutors later dropped the case against the outfit.)
“We had multiple versions, with redactions, at different levels of classifications we were willing to release,” Patel said. “But that was unfortunately the one report, which speaks directly to [an absence of concrete evidence] that’s still sitting in a safe, classified. And unfortunately, the American public – unless Biden acts – won’t see it.”
Confirming earlier media reports from late last year, Patel says it was Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel who personally thwarted the House report’s release. The report sits in a safe at CIA headquarters in Langley. “The CIA has possession of it, and POTUS chose not to put it out,” Patel says. He does not know why.
‘Outrageous’ Reliance on CrowdStrike
Another key set of documents that the public has yet to see are reports by Democratic National Committee cyber-contractor CrowdStrike – reports the FBI relied on to accuse Russia of hacking the DNC. The FBI bowed to the DNC’s refusal to hand over its servers for analysis, a decision that Patel finds “outrageous.”
“The FBI, who are the experts in looking at servers and exploiting this information so that the intelligence community can digest it and understand what happened, did not have access to the DNC servers in their entirety,” Patel said. “For some outrageous reason the FBI agreed to having CrowdStrike be the referee as to what it could and could not exploit, and could and could not look at.”
According Patel, Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry, a former top FBI official under Mueller, “totally took advantage of the situation to the unfortunate shortcoming of the American public.”
CrowdStrike’s credibility suffered a major blow in May 2020 with the disclosure of an explosive admission from Henry that had been kept under wraps for nearly three years. In December 2017 testimony before the House Intel Committee showed he had acknowledged that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers removed any data, including private emails, from the DNC servers.
“We wanted those depositions declassified immediately after we took them,” Patel recalled. But the committee was “thwarted,” he says, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Dan Coats, and later by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff once Democrats took control of Congress in January 2018. According to Patel, Schiff “didn’t want some of these transcripts to come out. And that was just extremely frustrating.” Working with Coats’ successor, Richard Grenell, Patel ultimately forced the release of the Henry transcript and dozens of others last year.
Still classified, however, are the full CrowdStrike reports relied on by the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Patel said their release would underscore Henry’s admission while raising new questions about why the government used reports from DNC contractors – the other being Fusion GPS’ Steele dossier – for a consequential national security case involving a rival Republican campaign.
Doubting Reliability of CIA’s Kremlin Mole
The CIA relied on another questionable source for its assertion that Putin personally ordered and orchestrated an interference campaign to elect Trump: a purported mole inside the Kremlin. The mole has been outed as Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Kremlin official who fled Russia in 2017 for the United States where he lives under his own name. According to the New York Times, some CIA officials harbored doubts about Smolenkov’s “trustworthiness.”
Patel said he could not comment on whether he believes Smolenkov relayed credible information to the CIA. “I’m sort of in a bind on this one, still, with all the classified information I looked at, and the declassifications we’ve requested, but have not yet been granted.”
Patel did suggest, however, that those who have raised skepticism about the CIA’s reliance on Smolenkov are “rightly” trying to “get to the bottom” of the story. “But until that ICA product that we created, and some of the other documents are finally revealed – if I start talking about them, then I’m probably going to get the FBI knocking at my door.”
Will Key Documents Be Released?
On his last full day in office, President Trump ordered the declassification of an additional binder of material from the FBI’s initial Trump-Russia probe, Crossfire Hurricane. A source familiar with the documents covered under the declassification order confirmed to RealClearInvestigations that it does not contain the House committee’s assessment of the January 2017 that Patel wants released. Nor does it contain any of the CrowdStrike reports used by the FBI.
In addition to those closely guarded documents, Patel thinks that there is even more to learn about the fraudulent surveillance warrants on Carter Page. The public should see “the entire subject portion” of the final Carter Page FISA warrant, Patel said, as well as “the underlying source verification reporting” in which the FBI tried to justify it, despite relying on the Steele dossier. By reading what the FBI “used to prop up that FISA, the American public can see what a bunch of malarkey it was that they were relying on,” Patel added. “The American public needs to know about and read for themselves and make their own determination as to why their government allowed this to happen. Knowingly.
“And that’s not castigating an entire agency. We’re not disparaging the entire FBI because of Peter Strzok [the FBI agent dismissed, in part, because of anti-Trump bias] and his crew of miscreants. Same thing goes for the intelligence community. If they did some shoddy tradecraft, the American public has a right to know about it in an investigation involving the presidential election.”
Cuomo and the Failure of Covid Absolutism
By James Bovard | AIER | February 24, 2021
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is falling from grace at epic speed. His administration is now the target of a Justice Department probe for policies that resulted in the death of one out of eight nursing home residents in the state. Regardless of whether the New York legislature impeaches Cuomo, the standard he championed poses a continuing peril.
From the start of the Covid pandemic, the media idolized Cuomo for his “safety through absolute power” mantra. Last March 20, Cuomo imposed a statewide lockdown on 20 million New Yorkers, closing schools and businesses. Cuomo labeled his decree a “pause” and declared: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” At that point, most counties in New York state had five or fewer people who have tested positive for coronavirus.
Cuomo’s “just one life” standard for lockdowns should have obliterated his credibility. Instead, Cuomo’s maxim was treated as a triumph of idealism and benevolence. Cuomo’s power grab was enabled by media allies that fanned hysteria. As AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker recently noted, the New York Times’ Donald G. McNeil Jr. “was the first reporter from a major media venue to stir up virus panic and advocate for extreme lockdown measures… The Times allowed its voice to be used to promote a primal and primitive disease panic, which they surely knew would create a cultural/political frenzy.” Presidential candidate Joe Biden hailed Cuomo last Spring for setting the “gold standard” for leadership on Covid.
After Cuomo swayed the New York legislature to give him “authorization of absolute power,” as the New Yorker declared, he issued scores of decrees, including one compelling nursing homes to admit Covid-infected patients and permitting Covid-infected staffers to keep working at those homes. A New York democratic legislator said that Cuomo was “inclined towards tyranny. But in a crisis that’s what people want.”
A New Yorker profile, entitled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” For many liberals and much of the nation’s media, placing people under house arrest, padlocking schools, bankrupting business, and causing two million people to lose their jobs vindicated government as “a force for good.”
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace declared that Cuomo is “everything Trump isn’t: honest, direct, brave.” Entertainment Weekly hailed Cuomo as “the hero that America never realized it needed until he was on our television screens every night.” As National Review recently noted, local reporters failed to ask questions on his nursing home edict “for months, as the governor held his much-praised daily press briefings about the pandemic. There were literally hundreds of hours of Cuomo press conferences in the first half of 2020 where not a single question was asked about nursing homes.”
The docile media paved the way to Cuomo winning an Emmy award for his “masterful use of television” during the pandemic. The media’s valorization of Cuomo helped make his self-tribute book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller.
Cuomo has always known how to milk the media. When he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he explained to the Washington Post in 1999 how he would fix HUD’s dismal image: “The PR is the most important thing I do … Eighty percent of the battle is communications.” (I christened Cuomo as “the Clinton administration’s most megalomaniacal cabinet secretary in a 2000 American Spectator piece titled, “Andy At It Again: How to Keep Reinventing HUD to Advance Yourself.”) Flash forward to last June, and Cuomo prematurely issued a poster celebrating his and New York state’s victory over Covid. The political art (sold for $14.50 plus shipping and handling) featured a steep mountain symbolizing the rise and fall of Covid cases. The poster was plastered with insipid phrases such as “The sun on the other side, “The power of ‘We,’” “Winds of Fear,” “Follow the Facts,” and “Love Community Support,” and included a jibe against Trump. Though poster sales failed to deter second and third waves of Covid outbreaks, the PR campaign further encouraged the media to focus on Cuomo’s words instead of his deeds.
During the pandemic, “legitimacy” came not from adhering to the U.S. and state Constitutions but from continually invoking “science and data,” as Cuomo did. . Cuomo’s entitlement to absolute power came from modeling concocted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution bankrolled by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel noted last week in an AIER analysis, IHME forecasts presumed a death rate 30 times higher than the rate that actually occurred. That horrendous miscalculation sufficed for one governor after another to nullify Americans’ freedom with lockdown orders. Absurd statistical extrapolations forecasting future harm made tyranny irrelevant.
Cuomo describes himself as a “great progressive,” perhaps thereby entitling himself to any power he presumes necessary “for the good of the people,” Bill of Rights be damned. November, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York state restrictions that limited religious gatherings to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate, declaring that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” Cuomo’s allies in the liberal establishment reacted with horror to the limit on his sway. An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted to the New York Times that “the freedom to worship… does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf babbled that the ruling signaled that the Supreme Court belonged in “the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Cuomo remained revered even though his repressive policies failed to prevent New York from having among the nation’s highest Covid death rates. But a Justice Department probe into his nursing home policies launched last August may be his undoing. New York state reported barely half of the total of more than 12,000 New York nursing home patients who died of Covid. Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, told Democratic legislative leaders that “basically, we froze” when the feds demanded information. “We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice… was going to be used against us,” DeRosa said according to a leaked transcript.
But Cuomo’s culpability goes beyond hiding corpses. Early in the pandemic, he pushed to include a legislative provision written by the Greater New York Hospital Association to give a waiver of liability to nursing homes and hospitals whose patients died of Covid. A report last month by the New York Attorney General warned, “The immunity laws could be wrongly used to protect any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives.” As the Guardian noted, “Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), its executives and its lobbying firms.”
But Cuomo’s credibility should have been dethroned long before the latest disclosures. As early as last May, barely two months after the start of the state lockdown, a New York Post columnist groused: “So Gov. Andrew Cuomo killed Grandma and cratered New York’s economy. But he looked good doing it.” Cuomo’s cachet derived almost entirely from media scoring that until recently ignored almost all of the harms he inflicted.
Cuomo and other politicians have used Covid policy lodestars that were akin to crossing the Pacific Ocean with navigators who insisted the earth was flat. Melinda Gates admitted last December: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” The politicians who imposed shutdowns based on data from the Gates’ funded by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation apparently never bothered to estimate the collateral damage from their decrees. Similar myopia spurred crackdowns and restrictions in many states that helped cause the sharpest reduction in Americans’ life expectancy since World War Two.
Unfortunately, there is no indication that either politicians or the media have recognized the authoritarian dangers inherent in governors or presidents claiming a right to boundless power to save “just one life.”
A similar standard is helping justify keeping schools closed in many areas. Teachers’ unions have rallied around the motto: “If one teacher dies, isn’t that too many?” But like Cuomo’s shutdowns, that standard ignores the horrific collateral damage on American children. A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis concluded that shutting down the schools would reduce the current crop of students’ collective years of life by more than five million, based on “lower income, reduced educational attainment, and worse health outcomes.” It remains to be seen how much, if any, the role of the well-being of children plays in school policy in the coming months.
While it is unlikely that the media lapdogs who adore Cuomo and other prominent politicians will admit their follies, the exposure of hard facts may help blunt the next stampede to submission. The Justice Department investigation into nursing home policies that boosted Covid death tolls in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania could tarnish some of the nation’s most aggressive Covid lockdowners. Other investigations by the media or private groups could expose far more evidence of misconduct or of gross negligence that boosted Covid death tolls.
In a tour of television talk shows shortly after President Biden was inaugurated, Cuomo recited his latest catchphrase: “Incompetent government kills people.” This intended slapdown of Trump is recoiling badly on the New York governor. If Cuomo is impeached or forced to resign for his Covid fiascos, maybe he could score plenty of media appearances with a new slogan: “Absolute power with impunity kills.”
Tony Blair’s anti-freedom project continues, but ‘War on Terror’ is replaced by ‘War on Covid’
By Neil Clark | RT | February 25, 2021
The ‘War on Terror’ seems to have morphed into a ‘War on Covid’. And guess what? Serial warmonger Tony Blair is a key figure in both, seeking to curtail our civil liberties with the excuse that it’s all for the “greater good.”
The date: Monday November 6, 2006. The place: Downing Street news conference. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair dismisses the civil rights argument against ID cards, which his government is keen to introduce. He says it is an issue of “modernity” and “modern life.”
“We are building a new part of our infrastructure here. And like other such projects the gains to citizens will be much larger and more extensive than anyone could say at the time.”
Sound familiar?
Fast forward fourteen years, and the same Tony Blair is saying much the same thing about Covid vaccine passports. There’s been no more zealous British advocate of vaccine passports than the man the anti-lockdown journalist Peter Hitchens calls ‘The Blair Creature’.
“Prepare for a health passport now,” he said in December. “I know all the objections, but it will happen. It’s the only way the world will function and for lockdowns to no longer be the sole course of action.”
Last week it was reported that ´The Blair Creature’ had been lobbying hard for vaccine passports to be included in Boris Johnson’s so-called ‘road map’ out of lockdown. And they were. The government has announced a review. Michael Gove, a man who once wrote a piece entitled ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more; I love Tony (Blair)’, is heading it.
Tony must be delighted.
Back in 2006, ID cards were promoted as a way of tackling the ‘terrorism’ threat and keeping us all ‘safe’. Vaccine passports are presented today in the same reassuring manner. The War on Terror and the War on Covid have so much in common. They both have five level ‘alert’ systems. ´The Blair Creature’ is the key linking figure.
Both wars (Terror and Covid), have been used as smokescreens to pursue elite, globalist and extremely illiberal agendas. Under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism‘, the US, UK and their allies embarked on a series of regime change wars.
First up was Afghanistan, on the grounds that the Taliban-ruled country had been sheltering Bin Laden. But while you could make a case for linking this to a ’war on terror’ there could be no such excuses for the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Ba’athist Iraq – whose long serving Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a practising Christian – was actually a bulwark against extremist groups like Al-Qaeda. The assault on Iraq proved to us that the ‘war on terror’ was a sham. Far from making us safer, the invasion actually greatly boosted global terrorism by spawning ISIS.
In short ‘the war on terror’ made the global terrorism situation much worse, and that’s before we get on to the reduction in civil liberties at home. Air travel has never been the same. Restrictions that were imposed – such as prohibitions on bringing liquids on board flights – and which were billed as ’temporary measures’ are still with us. ‘Anti-terrorism’ legislation has been regularly strengthened while at the same time there’s been covert British action in Libya and Syria on the side of the terrorists, which has led to domestic blowback.
We know for instance that the Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi, responsible for the horrific attack in 2017 which killed 22 people, more than half of them children, and his father Ramadan, had links with the anti-Gaddafy Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, allegedly used by the UK authorities as part of their regime change operation. As I noted in a previous op-ed, Abedi Jnr was even rescued from Libya by the Royal Navy.
The ‘War on Terror’ was based on a fundamental deceit. It was a deep state/neocon con trick. Not only was it a war that could never be won, it was never meant to be won. It was meant to be permanent. But in 2020 it was superseded by a new war – the ‘War on Covid’.
Again, we see much the same Manichean rhetoric. George W. Bush famously stated “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” And so it is today, with ‘virus control’ and not ‘terrorism control’ the focus.
If you oppose oppressive lockdowns, restrictions on free movement, and the introduction of vaccine passports, then you are on the side of the virus. You want to ‘let it rip’. You have ‘blood on your hands’ just like the millions who marched against the Iraq War. Support a more nuanced, proportionate approach with people allowed to make their own risk assessments? No, that’s not allowed. You’re either with the ‘War on Covid’ or against it.
The ‘War on Covid’ gives the Western elites the opportunity to strip away our freedoms and complete the building of the digital ‘infrastructure’ that began under the ‘War on Terror’ and which Blair referred to in 2006.
‘Health passports’ are a key part of that infrastructure, as I noted last summer. The WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ is heavily dependent on their introduction.
Of course, it won’t just be your ‘Covid’ status that’ll be on them; they will be extended into full, digitalised bio-ID cards. Vaccine passports are the gateway to a Chinese-style social credit restricted access control system being rolled out in the West.
Blair, the great authoritarian, hopes to get in 2021 or 2022 what he couldn’t get fifteen years ago. “I think you’re going to the stage where it’s going to be very hard for people to do a lot of normal life unless they can prove their vaccination status… Vaccination in the end is going to be your route to liberty,” he said in a recent interview. And of course he is working hard to make sure we do get to that stage.
Will he succeed? His plan for ID cards fifteen years ago failed because of the strength of opposition. When Labour lost power in 2010, the scheme was ditched. But the Tony Blair Institute (which has received considerable funding for its work from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) boasted on Twitter last May that its ‘teams’ were “embedded in governments around the world, helping them to keep their people safe”.
We know that Blair has been ‘advising’ Health Secretary Matt Hancock and that the secret talks reportedly covered vaccines and mass testing. What is scary today is that the parliamentary opposition – now led by the uber-Blairite Sir Keir Starmer – seems to be even more pro-health passports than the government.
But we shouldn’t give up hope just yet. A petition against Covid-19 vaccine passports has raised almost 200,000 signatures. The campaign against health passports needs the support of the anti-war, anti-imperialist left and hopefully the fact that it’s Tony Blair who is pushing them will cause people to wake up and see the bigger picture. War on Terror, War on Covid. ‘Only connect!’, as the great novelist E.M. Forster might say.
Amid ‘political repression,’ Ukraine becoming American ‘colony’ in Europe: sanctioned opposition leader Medvedchuk
By Gabriel Gavin | RT | February 25, 2021
Moscow – A few weeks ago, Viktor Medvedchuk was celebrating as his party, Ukraine’s largest opposition bloc, topped a nationwide opinion poll. Now, he’s facing charges of funding terrorism that could land him behind bars for over a decade.
In an exclusive interview with RT, the MP and chairman of Opposition Platform — For Life, which advocates better ties with Moscow, insisted that the allegations were a tool of political persecution.
According to him, they are part of a wider pattern of repression linked to Kiev’s recent moves to shut down Russian-language media that has been critical of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. The embattled administration has seen its approval ratings nosedive amid worsening economic woes and a chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Very serious accusations
Last week, the country’s National Security and Defense Council announced it would seize properties belonging to seven people, including multimillionaire Medvedchuk and his wife, TV presenter Oksana Marchenko, for allegedly financially supporting terrorist organizations. Details of the charges have not yet been made public, but they could carry a 10-12 year prison sentence if he is found guilty.
“These are very serious accusations,” the politician said. “Especially given they are without any foundation at present.” The sanctions, he argued, “are expressly prohibited” by Ukrainian law and in contravention of the Constitution.
“Unfortunately, [prosecution for] crimes like treason and espionage is commonplace. Just as at one time there was a charge of hooliganism, now we can be charged with treachery or spying,” he said. However, despite believing his political opponents are abusing the justice system, any suggestion that the man once described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘favorite Ukrainian’ might flee abroad gets short shrift. “In spite of all of this, I feel like I’m ready to fight – to fight against arbitrariness, against repression, against falsification… I am prepared to stand up to these threats,” he said.
Just a few hours before Medvedchuk spoke to RT, the Kiev-based research group Rating published a poll which they claim shows more than half of all respondents across the country supported the action against the politician and his family. “They say 58 percent agree with the sanctions, but they have not seen any evidence or arguments,” he said incredulously. “So, what can you really say about this figure?”
Again though, he refuses to write off the prospects of healing political divisions in a country where more than half of the population would seemingly relish the prospect of putting him behind bars. “The split can be overcome,” Medvedchuk insisted, “because the East-West divide has existed for a long time. Since independence, even. Yes there are regions… that differ in mentality and attitudes, but that’s not such a terrible thing if there is a wise state policy with solid structures and good governance.”
“We can find shared ground when it comes to the development of the country’s economy, its social sphere, income growth and prosperity.”
External influence
As one of the flag bearers for a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 foreign policy, which pursued closer relations with Moscow until the bloody events of the Maidan uprisings, Medvedchuk is often characterized as being ready to give away the country’s independence to the Kremlin. However, he insists that it is Zelensky’s government, and its Western allies, that presents the real threat to Ukrainian nationhood.
“We live in an independent sovereign state,” he said. “Or, at least, we used to live in one. Now, both independence and sovereignty are being undermined by external influence and most importantly by external political systems imposed by Washington.”
The American embassy in Kiev raised eyebrows internationally earlier this month when it backed an order signed by Zelensky’s government to shut down a group of television channels and news sites owned by one of the country’s elected MPs, Taras Kozak, a member of Medvedchuk’s party. In a media landscape dominated by wealthy oligarchs, Kozak’s ‘Novosti’ media empire carved out a niche with Russian-language programming made and broadcast in Ukraine. Around one in three people in the country speak the language natively at home, and the vast majority of Ukrainians could be considered fluent. Despite this, under laws put in place in 2014, swathes of programming in Russian from Ukraine’s vast eastern neighbor are already banned.
“When you see that the US Embassy supported both the closure of the channels and the sanctions against me,” Medvedchuk said, “it causes real outrage.” He explained that Washington is “used to creating the image that they are the paragon of democracy, but it is their authorities who have imposed external governance and who are now running Ukraine as their colony,” adding, “They will of course target those who push back against external influence.”
The opposition leader reiterated that 2014 was the turning point, explaining that, since then, “the US has imposed its political power, and it has not benefitted my country or the Ukrainian people… nor will it ever be able to.”
Only a court of law can judge us
The shuttering of the Novosti Group’s media channels, Medvedchuk claims, was an extrajudicial act of repression. Having the backing of the country’s National Security and Defense Council, the same body that ordered the most recent sanctions against him, is not sufficient under Ukrainian law, he maintains.
“Did the Security Council have the right to sign a decree after applying restrictions and blocking channels? No!”
Three broadcasters were taken off air almost immediately and several news sites were banned, which Medvedchuk, who holds a doctorate in legal practice, says was unlawful. “There is nothing in the sanctions that enables them to stop broadcasting, or stop internet resources,” he said. “The law knows no such sanctions.”
At the time, Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, explained the move, saying, “it’s clear that sanctions on Mr. Medvedchuk’s TV channels are not about the media and not about freedom of speech… it’s just about effectively countering fakes and foreign propaganda.” Without action, he argued, the opposition media would “kill our values.”
Medvedchuk, however, rejects this as arbitrary and political, when only a judicial decision should apply. “They should go legal,” he insisted. “If you think someone is wrong, go to court. The channels can be defended in court – those who think there are arguments can present them. It is the court that decides who is right and who is wrong, not you, not me, or a government representative who thinks it is bad for the interests of the country when I say it is good for the interests of the people.”
“Only a court of law can judge us,” he concluded. “This is the procedure in all legal systems, and this is real, effective democracy. Everything else is evil!”
The American Embassy in Kiev, however, insisted that the move was “in line with Ukrainian law,” and that it supported Zelensky’s efforts “to counter Russia’s malign influence.”
“We must all work together to prevent disinformation from being deployed as a weapon in an info war against sovereign states,” a tweet from the diplomats argued.
Violating the principles of democracy
When the sanctions against him were first announced, Medvedchuk issued a fiery statement in which he accused the president of taking the country “down the path of establishing a “dictatorship and usurping power.” The government was, he insisted, “seeking to crack down on the parliamentary opposition legally elected by the Ukrainian people.”
No matter how evocative that rhetoric might be, however, the reality is that few in the West can imagine Zelensky as a budding despot, at least at the moment. When elected with more than 73 percent of the vote in 2019 after an unlikely rise from television celebrity to politics, he declared that he would only ever serve one term in the top job.
When pushed on whether his political opponent would really go back on that pledge, Medvedchuk insisted that “it all still looks cloudy and foggy.” However, Zelensky’s plans would become clearer, he said, at the next elections. But, in either case, whether the incumbent would succeed in a re-election bid, he said, “I have my doubts.”
The president’s falling popularity, which has seen support for his party drop in a recent poll to around half the level of Medvedchuk’s, “is the result of unprofessional management of the economic and social spheres, as well as the fight against coronavirus,” he said. “It is because of the lack of peace that he promised in the elections, the lack of return of Donbass to Ukraine.”
“And I think that political repression, the establishment of a dictatorship, the closure of channels, the policy of discrimination against the Russian language, the policy of Russophobia and the policy of usurping power are the result of him struggling to maintain and increase his authority and his ratings,” the opposition leader continued. “This is exactly the kind of illegal and unconstitutional way that violates the current legislation of our country, going out of the legal framework and really violating all the principles of democracy.”
European values
For all Medvedchuk’s talk about Zelensky’s undermining of Ukrainian democracy, the country’s president would likely throw those accusations straight back at him. Advocates of a tough line against both Russia and those Kiev politicians who seek better ties with the country argue that the Kremlin will always pose an existential threat to Ukraine’s nationhood.
Unless it finds its own distinct identity, they argue, through elevating the Ukrainian language and advocating an interpretation of the country’s history as separate to Moscow’s, it will forever be sucked into the orbit of its far larger neighbor. The Russian-language broadcasters that Medvedchuk points to as an example of Kiev’s growing autocracy are, to Zelensky’s supporters, a leash that would lead the country back to control from the East. For them, Ukraine’s future lies only in turning to the West.
The opposition leader, however, shrugged off the suggestion that the country could strengthen the president’s ambitions to join Western institutions like the EU and NATO by simply blocking opposing voices. “When he says he is leading the way to European democracy and is trying to break down the barriers to that, it is just seen as utter absurdity,” the MP argued. “If this democracy is about closing down channels alone, then I don’t know what his idea of European democracy is. European democracy has a mechanism for stopping broadcasting – and we’ve already talked about it – through the courts.”
“But what Zelensky is doing – imposing sanctions on his citizens, restricting constitutional rights extrajudicially, shutting down broadcasters illegally – is not democracy, European or otherwise,” he added. “This is the establishment of dictatorship and a way to seize power.”
“Note that the resolution adopted by the European Parliament in matters related to the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU, in several paragraphs it explicitly states that there can be no extrajudicial closure of television broadcasters. There can be no politically motivated action against the opposition – this is also explicitly stated.”
The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice was approached for comment on whether the sanctions against politicians and broadcasters were within the law. No response has been received.
Though Medvedchuk and Zelensky might lead warring factions, they share the same country, divided as it is. The great irony would be if, by trying to break the deadlock between them with promises of a bright, liberal and democratic future, the president and his supporters delivered the kind of autocracy that they have always accused the other side of wanting to install.
Israel said to warn Hamas leader not to run in polls
MEMO | February 23, 2021
Hamas leader Nayef al-Rajoub said Tuesday he was warned by Israeli intelligence agents against running in the Palestinian elections later this year, Anadolu Agency reported.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, al-Rajoub, 63, said he was searched during an Israeli raid on his home in the town of Dura, west of Hebron.
“An intelligence officer then threatened me not to run in the upcoming polls,” al-Rajoub said, adding that he was only allowed to cast a ballot in the elections.
Al-Rujoub, a brother of prominent Fatah leader Jibril al-Rujoub, received the most votes during the 2006 parliamentary elections won by Hamas.
In the Hamas-led government that emerged from those elections, Al-Rujoub served as minister of religious endowments. He had previously been detained by Israeli forces and served more than eight years in prison.
Earlier Tuesday, Israeli forces arrested 13 Palestinians, including Hamas leader Faze’ Sawafta, in overnight raids in the occupied West Bank.
Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, had earlier warned of Israeli plans to stage a mass arrest campaign against the resistance group ahead of Palestinian elections later this year.
Over the past month, several Hamas members were detained in Israeli raids, with the Palestinian group warning that the Israeli arrests aim to disrupt the Palestinian elections and affect its results.
Palestinians are scheduled to vote in legislative elections on May 22, presidential polls on July 31, and National Council polls on Aug. 31.
The last legislative elections, in which Hamas won a majority, were held in 2006.
African governments are crushing opposition using Israeli spyware
By Suraya Dadoo | MEMO | February 24, 2021
As internet penetration and smartphone usage increases across Africa, digital spaces have become increasingly important for organising political uprisings and opposition movements. In response, several of the continent’s regimes have shut down the internet or blocked social media apps. To sidestep the economic costs and global criticism that these online shutdowns incur, governments have turned to digital surveillance technology as a shrewder way to crush all opposition.
In a recently-released report titled “Running in Circles: Uncovering the Clients of Cyberespionage Firm, Circles”, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — which investigates digital espionage against civil society — details how government agencies in Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe are using the surveillance technology developed by Israeli telecom company Circles to snoop on the personal communications of opposition politicians, human rights activists and journalists. These seven African countries are among 25 around the world using Circles, which is affiliated with the notorious NSO Group whose invasive Pegasus spyware has been used to target human rights defenders and journalists around the world.
How does it work?
Circles technology is sold to nation states only, and intercepts data from 3G networks, allowing the infiltrator to read messages and emails, and listen to phone calls in real time. Using only the telephone number, a Circles platform can identify the location of a phone anywhere in the world within seconds.
Circles exploits flaws in Signalling System No.7 (SS7), the set of protocols that allows networks to exchange calls and text messages between each other. This allows government agencies to track individuals across borders without a warrant, bypassing international conventions.
In 2019, 3G became the leading mobile technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for over 45 per cent of all connections. With the faster — and possibly more secure — 4G networks being at least five years away from becoming the standard for mobile connectivity on the continent, Circles’ 3G-manipulating technology is ideal for power-hungry African leaders looking to cling to power by spying on critics.
The spying revelations came as African governments — including some named in the Citizen Lab report — are cracking down brutally on protestors and opposition groups.
Nigeria
Recent #EndSARS protests triggered a deadly response from Nigeria’s state security apparatus, with the government able to infiltrate the movement’s organisational structures successfully.
Citizen Lab identified two Circles systems in Nigeria that both began operating in June 2015. One of them was being used by the Nigerian Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). In 2016, the governors of Delta and Bayelsa states also purchased Circles systems to spy on political opponents and critics. The presence of Circles products in Nigeria goes back more than a decade, when former Rivers state governor, Rotimi Amaechi, became the first Nigerian politician to use the surveillance technology in 2010.
Circles’ government clients in Nigeria have a long history of abusing surveillance technologies to conduct mass surveillance of citizens’ telecommunications. Femi Adeyeye, a Lagos-based political activist who has been detained several times for criticising the Nigerian government, is not surprised that Muhammadu Buhari’s regime is using the invasive spying technology.
Adeyeye cited several cases where Nigerians were swiftly traced, arrested and detained after criticising the government. These include journalists Omoyele Sowore, Abubakar Idris Dadiyata and Stephen Kefas. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has also reported numerous cases of the Nigerian authorities abusing phone surveillance by targeting journalists’ phones to reveal and track sources for stories investigating government corruption.
“We are already in the worst stage of dictatorship,” warns Adeyeye. “Freedom of expression, media, and political association have been further weakened by this spying technology.”
He says that Nigerian political analysts now self-censor when commenting on national political issues, after witnessing the government’s infiltration of #EndSARS. “They have seen how people have been traced, their passports seized and bank accounts frozen, and how they have been forced to go into exile.”
Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe — which has witnessed intense anti-government protests recently — Citizen Lab detected three Circles platforms, with one dating back to 2013. A second platform was activated in March 2018 and is still operating.
As in Nigeria, there has been a government crackdown on anyone exposing corruption. Investigative journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, and Jacob Ngarivhume, the leader of the opposition group Transform Zimbabwe, were detained ahead of anti-government protests last year. Circles technology is facilitating this suppression.
Equatorial Guinea
A Circles surveillance system was also found in Equatorial Guinea, where dictator Tedoro Obiang has ruled for 40 years in a climate of torture, extra-judicial executions, arbitrary arrests and the persecution of political activists and human rights defenders. Obiang has crushed protests violently and ignored demands for electoral reforms and limits on terms of office.
Morocco
Morocco’s Ministry of the Interior has been a Circles client since 2018. Rabat has a history of leveraging digital technology to unlawfully target Moroccan human rights activists.
Eroding democracy in Botswana
It’s not just countries such as these facing protests, or those with a dismal record of human rights abuses, that are spying on their citizens. Even supposed democracies are involved. Botswana is hailed widely as one of Africa’s most stable democracies. Yet, the country’s Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services (DISS) was linked to two Circles surveillance systems dating back to 2015. The targets were journalists investigating corruption by politicians.
According to Moeti Mohwasa, spokesperson for the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), Israeli companies have been selling spyware to the Botswana government for years. Mohwasa says that some of this equipment has been used to eavesdrop on opposition politicians and union leaders in the country.
Enabling authoritarianism in Kenya
Citizen Lab also reported a Circles system in Kenya. While the East African nation is often lauded as a strong democracy, critics accuse the Uhuru Kenyatta administration of being an authoritarian regime.
“In Kenya, freedom of expression and media freedoms are under constant threat,” says Suhayl Omar, a policing, surveillance and militarism researcher from Nairobi. “The Kenyatta regime has waged a war against constitutionalism and any form of opposition in Kenya.”
Omar believes that the Kenyan government relies heavily on surveillance of its citizens to crack down on any form of opposition. “For this, they look to undemocratic and violent states — like Israel — to fund, equip and train their agents and armies for these unconstitutional missions.”
Zambia
Zambia is also a Circles client. In 2019, the Zambian authorities reportedly used a cyber-surveillance unit in the offices of Zambia’s telecommunications regulator to pinpoint the location of a group of bloggers who ran an opposition news site. They were duly arrested, with the authorities in constant contact with the police units on the ground throughout the operation. Given its capabilities, it is likely that a Circles system was used to do this.
Should the Israeli government be held accountable?
African governments will justify spying by claiming that it is a matter of national security. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has distanced itself from these anti-democracy purges. Israeli Minister Zeev Elkin denied any government involvement, telling Israeli radio, “Everyone understands that this is not about the state of Israel.” But it is.
The Israeli government, through its Ministry of Defence, implicitly sanctions such activities by providing tech firms with export licences. In January 2020, Amnesty International filed a lawsuit in Israel calling for the ministry to ban the export of invasive spying software, as it was being used to attack human rights activists by the governments purchasing them. Last July, an Israeli court denied Amnesty’s request.
“The Israeli regime has actively enabled the authoritarianism of Uhuru Kenyatta,” explains Suhayl Omar, commenting on the situation in Kenya. Moeti Mohwasa in Botswana agrees about official Israeli involvement. “In recent years, the Botswana government has increasingly been eroding civil rights, and becoming intolerant of political dissent. Israel is aiding these dangerous trends.”
Friends with benefits
Although developed by private companies, the spying equipment is also a key part of the Israeli government’s diplomatic charm offensive in Africa. By helping African governments cling to power through arming them with the weapons to wage cyber-warfare on their citizens, Tel Aviv is hoping to make more African friends. The aim is to dissolve African solidarity with Palestine, and capture African votes at the UN and so defeat resolutions that are critical of Israel’s brutal military occupation. Israel is also trying to find partners to lobby the African Union to grant the occupation state observer status.
In his book War Against the People, Jeff Halper writes that Israel is exporting its expertise in population control gained through its occupation of Palestine, and leading the “global pacification” industry, assisting state security agencies around the world. The danger, Halper warns, is that gradually we will all become like Palestinians, fearful of being tracked and detained for organising a protest, defending human rights or trying to hold the powerful to account.
As repressive African governments continue looking to Israel to help them shrink the safe space for human rights defenders even further, the danger is that Abuja, Nairobi, Gaborone and other capitals across the continent may end up under digital occupation just like Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Gaza City.
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Teacher: I Won’t Force Kids To Wear Masks & I Won’t Wear One Either
By Richie Allen | February 24, 2021
The Telegraph newspaper, to its credit, has published an opinion piece by a secondary school teacher who is based in Essex. The teacher believes that forcing kids to wear masks in the classroom is “Dystopian and abhorrent.”
The teacher has been reading “The Handmaid’s Tale with Year 11’s and described a class full of masked children as “like something out of Gilead.” Expressing concern that masks would make it seem to youngsters that schools are not safe when they desperately need some normality the teacher wrote:
They are already being flooded with messages in the media and the outside world which fill them with fear on a daily basis. The government’s whole campaign is built on fear and children have absorbed that. They have also faced a year of disruption to their learning and been kept apart from their friends. What sort of message does it send to them if we then make them wear a mask in the classroom too?
As well as being physically uncomfortable, it’s going to be almost impossible for them to communicate with me as their teacher. It will have a detrimental impact on their confidence, make them even more reluctant to put their hand up in class to ask questions and engage in the lesson. Many of them, especially those who were already struggling, have fallen massively behind during lockdown and will find it difficult or even impossible to catch up.
I’ve also seen very little evidence to suggest that masks are effective anyway. I am cynical about this idea of asymptomatic transmission. Schools aren’t necessarily the cleanest places in the world but children are meant to be exposed to a few germs to build up their immune systems.
The teacher is absolutely right. It’s dystopian and disturbing in the extreme. Of course it will unsettle children but it will also do them serious harm. Wearing masks for eight hours a day may have a seriously detrimental effect on their physical health. Dozens of studies have found that masks make breathing more difficult, especially for children.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that:
… inhaling high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be life-threatening. Hypercapnia (carbon dioxide toxicity) can also cause headache, vertigo, double vision, inability to concentrate, tinnitus (hearing a noise, like a ringing or buzzing, that’s not caused by an outside source), seizures, or suffocation due to displacement of air.
Parents wise up and wise up fast. You must not allow your children be forced to wear a face covering when they return to the classroom.
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Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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