IMF researchers propose to have AI use ONLINE history to determine credit rating, in name of ‘inclusion’ of course
RT | December 18, 2020
Traditional data used for credit-scoring could be replaced by AI-powered processes based on online search and purchase histories to better reach a billion-plus “unbanked people” globally, a group of IMF researchers has proposed.
Using non-financial data such as “the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases,” which is then fed into technology powered by AI and machine learning, could “advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas,” write Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven and Lev Ratnovski in a post on the International Monetary Fund blog.
The authors argue these “alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods,” which tend to boost credit expansion during booms and shrink it during busts. Moreover, they say, traditional credit data is not available for “certain kinds of people, like new entrepreneurs, innovators and many informal workers,” even well-off immigrants to the US.
Their AI-powered credit score based on web searches is just one of the proposals in the paper, which argues the Covid-19 pandemic is “turbo-charging” the technological transformation of the financial industry and looking at how the IMF can “get ahead” of the problems that might create.
Boot is a professor of finance at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Hoffman and Laeven are economists with the European Central Bank, where Ratnovski has been seconded from his job as an IMF economist. In other words, these are very serious finance people and their proposal isn’t meant in jest. They just don’t seem to be familiar with the “when I die, delete my internet history” meme.
Highlighted by Gizmodo on Friday, the proposal was met by alarm and derision by the US commentariat. New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel called it a “a fantastic example of people who have an idea that is perhaps well intentioned but incredibly foolish” and compared it to a slow-motion car wreck
Other responses compared the IMF proposal to a pitch for an episode of the dystopian series ‘Black Mirror,’ and joked that perhaps people should start running searches such as “Why am I so great with money?” and “I <3 the IMF.” Then there were those who worried that letting AI make lending decisions would be – what else? – racist.
The IMF proposal was also panned as yet another attempt to expand control by globalist institutions, along the lines of the World Economic Forum-proposed ‘Great Reset’ using the pandemic as a pretext.
Last month, a Deutsche Bank monthly featured a proposal by another researcher to tax people working from home in order to subsidize those that can’t, as well as the infrastructure sitting unused during the pandemic. In the same publication, the same researcher also authored a proposal to reimagine Western cities by abolishing zoning regulations.
Accomplished pharma prof thrown in psych hospital after questioning official COVID narrative
By Jeanne Smits – LifeSiteNews – December 11, 2020
Early on December 10, Jean-Bernard Fourtillan, a French retired university professor known for his strong opposition to COVID-19 vaccines such as those presently being distributed in the U.K., was taken from his temporary home in the south of France by a team of “gendarmes” — French law enforcement officers under military command — and forcibly placed in solitary confinement at the psychiatric hospital of Uzès. His mobile phones were taken from him, and at the time of writing, he had not been allowed to communicate with the outside world. The order for his internment appears to have been issued by the local “préfet,” the official representative of the French executive.
The systematic use of psychiatric hospitals in order to silence or punish political opponents became widespread under communism, having started shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. The method developed under Stalin and then expanded as opposition to the “socialist paradise” came to be considered a sign of mental illness. Under the 1966 penal code of the USSR, repression of dissidents openly targeted those who “spread false propaganda defaming the Soviet State and its social system.”
Fourtillan, a longtime critic of vaccines that use dangerous adjuvants such as aluminum (the 11 compulsory vaccines for newborns in France contain 17 times the maximum dose of aluminum defined as toxic by the World Health Organization), has been vocal during the COVID-19 crisis. He offers “alternative” explanations and warnings regarding the apparition of the SARS-COV-2 virus and the ARN vaccines that work by injecting pieces of virus message ARN with nanolipids with the aim of causing human cells to start fabricating viral particles and to thus trigger an immunological reaction.
In particular, Fourtillan has accused the French Institut Pasteur, a private non-profit foundation that specializes in biology, micro-organisms, contagious diseases, and vaccination, of having “fabricated” the SARS-COV-2 virus over several decades and been a party to its “escape” from the Wuhan P4 lab — unbeknownst to the lab’s Chinese authorities — which was built following an agreement between France and China signed in 2004.
Relations between France and China regarding the project cooled over the years as China put its own interests first, but in 2017, France’s then–Interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, joined the official opening ceremony of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab, together with Yves Lévy, co-president of the steering committee. Lévy is the husband of Agnès Buzyn, who was France’s health minister when the COVID-19 crisis erupted. She was also responsible for signing the decree that banned over-the-counter sales of hydroxychloroquine in France in January 2020.
Is Jean-Bernard Fourtillan’s accusation true? While the Institut Pasteur has verbally announced that it would sue Fourtillan over the accusation, no judiciary action has been forthcoming on that front, and indeed, Fourtillan himself has since lodged a complaint against a spokesman of the Institute for “libel and lies that are prejudicial to the peoples of the world.”
Fourtillan himself has said he hopes legal proceedings will allow him to produce evidence he has built up: he is in fact anxious to debate the issues at stake. Now that he is in a psychiatric hospital, the possibility of this happening — in the interest of discovering the truth — is becoming more remote.
Among the public documents Fourtillan has analyzed and made public are patents for SARS-COV-1, which contains parts of the malaria virus, dating back to 2003. The patents were used by various labs to develop vaccines. Two thousand eleven saw the Institut Pasteur filing a further patent application for “SARS-COV-2,” which was identical to the previous one, according to Fourtillan, who says this was done because commercial exploitation of the first patent started in 2003 and would expire 20 years later, in 2023. According to Fourtillan, four sequences of the HIV virus — responsible for AIDS — were added to the virus, in view of creating further vaccines.
This point was also raised in France last April by Prof. Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine for having discovered HIV in 1983 together with another French scientist, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. Last April, Montagnier stated that the SARS-COV-2 virus was the result of a human manipulation. He was ridiculed by the mainstream media, but in August, an Italian microbiologist reached the same conclusion: Prof. Joseph Tritto published a book calling the Wuhan virus a “chimera.”
Montagnier, who had worked with a mathematician, described his findings through an analogy. Imagine the coronavirus as a “puzzle” with 30,000 pieces, and then consider several other 9,000-piece puzzles representing HIV-1, HIV-2, and SIV (another retrovirus close to the AIDS virus but targeting monkeys). If three pieces coming from each one of these smaller puzzles were to be found next to each other in the 30,000-piece puzzle, the probability of this having happened naturally would be nil. This is analogous to the presence of parts of the HIV sequence in SARS-COV-2, according to Montagnier.
According to Fourtillan, the present virus causing COVID-19 is this artificial virus. Fourtillan — as well as other researchers of the present crisis — considers this indisputable evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned. He believes that on October 13, 2015, a patent application was filed for a COVID-19 test; this was followed by commercialization in the whole world in 2017 for a whopping 10 billion dollars.
These claims are disputed on the grounds that the reference to the 2015 patent is only part of the later May 2020 patent, also filed by one Richard A. Rothschild, but was quoted as related to the remote diagnosis of COVID-19, enhancing the original patent as it were for the particular case of COVID-19.
Who is right? A sincere, public assessment and debate would lift any confusion or error, voluntary or not, but Fourtillan is now being treated as if he were both dangerous and insane.
Fourtillan gained widespread publicity when a recent film by Pierre Barnérias, giving a voice to critics of the official narrative, became viral in France. In Hold-Up, Fourtillan spoke of his concern that the COVID-19 crisis was fabricated and is being used to impose a dangerous vaccine on the world population.
Fourtillan is himself familiar with patenting procedures, as his résumé shows, having personally filed some 400 patents in the medical field. The French internet medium France Soir described him as follows: “Jean-Bernard FOURTILLAN, Ph.D., Chemical Engineer, Pharmacist, Hospital Pharmacist, Professor of Therapeutic Chemistry and Pharmacokinetics at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacology of the University of Poitiers, Expert Pharmacologist Toxicologist, specialized in Pharmacokinetics.”
Fourtillan’s forced internment made no mention of the COVID-19 controversy, which to date has led to no judicial proceedings, instead being officially linked to a lawsuit that has been opened against him for illegal practice of medicine because of his work on a hormonal patch against neuro-degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and others affecting motricity, balance, and memory, as well as sleep disorders.
His theory is that pollution, adjuvants such as aluminum in vaccines, and electro-magnetic interference destroy dark matter in the brain through lack of hormones, and he has — successfully, he claims — tested the administration of a hormone patch of valentonin and 6-Méthoxy-Harmalan (sleep and waking hormones), to compensate the damage, on 402 adults, himself included, who accepted the procedure under their sole responsibility and who were warned that the patch was not a drug, but a “technical sample, not for human use.” The procedure costs only a fraction of the price of newly developed drugs for these conditions.
Fourtillan had had a good rapport with the judge charged with the preliminary investigation of the case, Brigitte Jolivet of Poitiers. During his first interrogations at the end of 2019, she appeared to be convinced by his arguments, and the case was proceeding normally.
Last month, Fourtillan, who was staying in the south of France with his wife, was visited by four gendarmes coming from Marseille, who entered his rented cottage and asked for his computers. Although they had no search warrant, Fourtillan handed them over, saying he had nothing to hide, and that on the contrary, he was anxious to have his documents and methods assessed.
He saw the gendarmes leave and hand over his computers to a man in plain clothes in a car nearby.
Days later, his bank accounts and credit cards were suddenly blocked by an authority whose identity was not revealed to him. His pensions were also blocked.
Fourtillan had been summoned to a hearing in the lawsuit concerning his valentonin “treatment” on December 4 in Paris. He did not go, invoking the fact that he now had no way of paying for a train ticket to the French capital.
This information was given to LifeSite by a person who works with Fourtillan on the website http://verite-covid19.com/ and who knows him well — well enough to state that he “is certainly not insane,” having spent time with him recently.
Six days later, on Thursday morning, gendarmes once more came to Fourtillan’s home and asked him to accompany them in order to answer questions about his refusal to join the December 4 hearing in Paris.
Fourtillan agreed readily.
However, from the moment he left his home with the law enforcement officers, he was not able to communicate with his family. One of his lawyers, Marc Fribourg — who has since gone on record saying that Fourtillan is a “conspiracy theorist” — revealed that he was taken to the Uzès psychiatric hospital of Le Mas Careiron, where he has been held since. His other lawyer, who previously commended Fourtillan for the efficiency of his hormonal patches, was not reachable today.
See also:
Spain officially ends FORCED sterilization of people with mental disabilities – a practice still LEGAL in many US states
RT | December 18, 2020
The Spanish government will no longer sterilize disabled people against their will. Despite the fact that eugenics is generally considered a thing of the past, forced sterilization is still permitted in multiple US states.
The Spanish government officially ended the forced sterilization of disabled people on Thursday, publishing new legislation in an official newsletter. According to the newsletter, “In the last decade, more than a thousand forced sterilizations have been practiced in Spain, most of them on women.”
“The end to this practice…brings an end to one of the most detrimental human rights violations allowed under Spanish law,” the Spanish Committee of Representatives of Persons with Disabilities (CERMI) in a statement on Thursday.
But while the Spanish government’s newsletter described the now-illegal practice as a “serious anomaly in human rights terms,” one might be disturbed to find out that involuntary sterilization is still permitted in some US states.
At the turn of the 20th century, eugenics was a popular idea in the US among the progressives of the time. Corporate foundations like the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation funded the growing eugenics movement, and in 1906, breakfast cereal baron John Harvey Kellogg co-founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Michigan to take the movement’s ideas mainstream.
A year later, Indiana passed the world’s first sterilization law, with 31 states following suit. A controversial Supreme Court ruling in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927 upheld a Virginia statute allowing the forced sterilization of those considered “unfit” to reproduce, and from then until the mid-1970s, more than 60,000 people in the US were involuntarily sterilized.
The practice is still legal in many states. The 1927 decision has never been overturned, and at least eight states still have involuntary sterilization laws on their books. These include California, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington. In the District of Columbia, a 2007 appeals court decision held that a doctor may sterilize a patient if he or she deems it in the “best interest of the patient.”
More than a century after the passage of the first sterilization law in Indiana, the legality of the practice has led to some shocking cases of abuse. In just one women’s prison in central California, 1,400 inmates were sterilized between 1997 and 2013. Where prison sterilization is not mandatory, it is often presented to inmates under duress. In Tennessee in 2017, a judge offered inmates 30 days off their jail sentences if they consented to free vasectomies or long-acting birth-control implants. A bipartisan bill outlawed the practice a year later.
White House Trade Advisor Navarro Rolls Out Report on 2020 ‘Election Fraud’
By Daria Bedenko – Sputnik – 18.12.2020
Although the US Electoral College has confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election by giving him 306 electoral votes, many Republicans, including the sitting president, continue to assert that the election was “rigged” and that massive “voter fraud” took place.
The director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro, on Thursday rolled out a report regarding allegations of election fraud in the 3 November 2020 presidential election in the United States, indicating that he did it in a personal capacity and not as an official White House advisor.
“From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket,” stated the Navarro publication, titled: The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities. “Indeed, the observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to ‘stuff the ballot box’ and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.”
According to Navarro’s unofficial belief, some ballots that he dubbed questionable due to “the identified election irregularities” would be enough to secure a victory for incumbent US President Donald Trump, “should even a relatively small portion of these ballots be ruled illegal”.
In the report, the Trump-appointed trade advisor examined what he described as “six dimensions” of election irregularity allegations, among which would be “outright voter fraud”, “ballot mishandling”, “contestable process fouls”, “equal protection clause violations”, “voting machine irregularities” and “significant statistic anomalies”. According to Navarro, the so-called six key dimensions were detected and proven in six battleground states.
“Evidence used to conduct this assessment includes more than 50 lawsuits and judicial rulings, thousands of affidavits and declarations, testimony in a variety of state venues, published analyses by think tanks and legal centers, videos and photos, public comments, and extensive press coverage”, Navarro’s publication states.
According to his report, without a “thorough investigation” prior to the 20 January Inauguration Day, Americans may see Biden’s presidency as illegitimate.
On Thursday, Navarro,”in his capacity as a private citizen”, discussed his findings at a press conference, according to the press release.
Despite that Trump and his Republican allies continue in their attempts to challenge the election outcome, the Electoral College on 14 December gave 306 votes to Biden, marking the Democrat’s victory, while Republican Trump, who has not yet conceded, received 232.
The Electoral College vote will be certified by the US Congress on 6 January, and there are reports that some Republicans could take final shots in attempting to scrap the Biden-Harris victory.
An effort is being led by GOP Congressman Mo Brooks and GOP Senator-elect from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, who said that he will “probably” meet with Navarro and “get his side of it”, hinting that the latter might join the initiative.
Trump has tweeted praise toward Tuberville several times, referring to him as a “hero” and “a man of courage”, and thanking him for the apparent intention to support.
Instagram censors claim that Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill led to ‘mass incarceration’ of black Americans
RT | December 17, 2020
Instagram has been actively censoring a meme about President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative record, after it flagged as “false” an artist’s post linking the ex-Senator’s 1994 Crime Bill to mass incarceration of black Americans.
The political meme, uploaded by Brad Troemel on Wednesday, shows an old photo of Biden and then-President Bill Clinton, along with a caption that reads: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after Clinton signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.”
The Facebook-owned platform quickly flagged Troemel’s image as “false information.” Instagram also cited “independent fact-checkers” from USA Today, who apparently “say this information has no basis in fact.” Thus, before being able to view the image, the platform requires users to first read a disclaimer, which links to a USA Today article allegedly debunking the claim that the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration of black Americans.
The so-called “fact check,” written by Doug Stanglin and published in July, asserts that despite the Crime Bill being “a grab-bag of crime-fighting measures,” ‘mass incarceration’ actually began “in the 1960s” and is not a racialized phenomenon.
Troemel’s interaction with Instagram was easy to verify, as the platform still almost immediately slams the “false information” label on a newly uploaded image.
Yet, USA Today’s analysis appears to fly in the face of assessments by both left-wing and some conservative supporters of criminal justice reform.
The issue ultimately appears up for debate, with some critics saying that the Crime Bill contributed massively to mass incarceration, while others split hairs, saying it simply exacerbated an already ongoing trend.
Instagram’s move, however, was largely seen as overly-protective of Biden, with some even calling it political censorship.
Facebook spokesperson Stephanie Otway told the New York Post, that Instagram would not stop flagging the Biden meme, as long as the platform’s “fact-checking partners” keep the rating the same. The Post itself referred to the so-called fact-check as “hotly disputed.”
After his post was flagged, Troemel updated his Instagram bio to say he was “currently shadowbanned for criticizing Joe Biden.”
In October, Biden himself admitted it was a “mistake” to support the bill, after facing renewed criticism over its impacts – and later reiterated the point during the final presidential debate against Donald Trump.
US designates anti-govt. Bahraini group as ‘terrorist’ after Manama inks peace deal with Israel
Press TV | December 16, 2020
The administration of outgoing US President Donald Trump has designated Bahraini opposition group Saraya al-Mukhtar as a “terrorist” organization, months after the Manama regime agreed to a Washington-brokered normalization with Israel.
In a statement released on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said his office had blacklisted the group as “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” claiming that it was “posing a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
He alleged that Saraya al-Mukhtar receives “financial and logistic support” from Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and seeks to depose the Bahraini government.
“The group has plotted attacks against US personnel in Bahrain and has offered cash rewards for the assassination of Bahraini officials,” Pompeo further claimed.
The designation freezes any of the group’s US assets and generally bars Americans from dealing with it.
Iran has not commented on the claims so far.
The Bahraini government welcomed the US blacklisting of Saraya al-Mukhtar.
The Bahraini Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it “commends” what it called “the relentless efforts undertaken by the United States of America in combatting all extremist terrorist organizations.”
Bahraini courts have already sentenced suspects allegedly linked to Saraya al-Mukhtar to years in prison and revoked their citizenship.
Several Bahraini groups have faced accusations of ties to Iran since 2011, when an uprising began in the kingdom against the ruling Al Khalifah regime. Tehran has, however, dismissed such allegations as false.
Analysts see the blacklisting as an American reward to Manama, months after it reached a US-brokered normalization deal with the Israeli regime.
The agreement sparked several angry street protests in Bahrain, with the participants slamming the regime in Manama for turning a deaf ear to the nation’s calls against making peace with the occupiers of Palestine.
In addition to Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan and Morocco have also reached similar agreements with Israel.
Joe Macaron, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, told the Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal that “the activities of Saraya al-Mukhtar have significantly diminished since 2018 but the Trump administration is standing by those Arab allies who normalized with Israel.”
“While Morocco got US recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara and Sudan was delisted as a state sponsor of terrorism, the Trump administration is showing support for Bahrain in a designation that has no real impact whatsoever,” he added.
Bahrain — home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet — has seen anti-regime protest rallies since the onset of the uprising. The major demand has been the ouster of the Al Khalifah dynasty and the establishment of a just and conclusive system representing all Bahraini nationals.
In an attempt to stifle those calls, the Manama regime has been pressing ahead with a heavy-handed crackdown against the protesters and persecution of human rights campaigners and political dissidents.
‘Hate crime entrepreneurs’ are cashing in on taxpayers’ money while they try to kill free speech in Britain
© Getty Images/Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency
By Joanna Williams | RT | December 15, 2020
Free speech is under assault in the UK from organisations who inflate the number of supposed ‘hate crimes’ and ‘incidents’ to fill their coffers with government cash and leave us with only police-sanctioned expression.
Make a bad joke on Twitter, give a speech at a Conservative party conference, or refer to someone using the wrong pronouns, and you could find the police knocking on your door.
Last year, the police in England and Wales recorded over 100,000 hate crimes, up eight percent on the previous year.
Hate crime is defined as “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.” This can include verbal abuse, intimidation, threats, harassment, or bullying, directed at individuals or groups on account of their race, religion, sexuality, disability or transgender identity. In addition to this – and the cause of much of the door-knocking – police also investigate and report ‘hate incidents.’ A hate incident is not a criminal offence at all, but simply any speech or action that someone from a ‘protected’ group finds offensive.
As I investigate in ‘Policing Hate’, a new report published by the think tank Civitas, in England and Wales today we do not have free speech. We are only permitted to say things that do not offend others. And we do not have equality before the law; some groups of people are awarded additional legal protections to everyone else.
Now, the Law Commission, an independent body designed to review the law and make recommendations to the government, is proposing changes to hate crime legislation. Unfortunately, if enacted, these changes will go even further in curtailing free speech.
To understand why the Law Commission’s proposals are so censorious, we need to look to the influence of groups I’ve labelled ‘hate crime entrepreneurs’. These are charities and campaigning organisations, like Stonewall, Disability Rights UK, and StopHate UK, that support and advocate for people with disabilities, transgender people, and the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.
Many of these groups do a great job of representing their members’ interests. But when it comes to the law, this is a problem – they are neither neutral nor objective. In order to raise the money necessary to keep services functioning and pay staff wages, they need to present the people they support as disadvantaged and oppressed. Hate crime and hate incidents appear to provide one measure of just how victimised a particular group is.
But no matter how many statistics about hate incidents charities compile, we are no nearer to having an objective measure of the verbal abuse or hostility different groups experience. Offence is experienced subjectively. It is entirely possible for two people to hear the exact same joke, or listen to the exact same speech, and for one person to be offended while the other finds only humour or interest. One person might see themselves as a victim of a hate crime while their friend brushes off the same incident with a shrug of the shoulders.
Through their websites and campaigning, groups like Stonewall define hate crime and then encourage their members to see themselves as victims and to report crimes to the police. They then use these inflated statistics as part of their publicity material. Stonewall, for example, claims, “Two in five trans people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months.” This sounds shocking, but it may mean little more than they saw a transgender person being ‘misgendered’ on social media.
Furthermore, many groups that lobby on behalf of particular communities receive government funding for their work. For example, ‘Challenge It, Report It, Stop It’, a previous government hate crime action plan, reports on plans to support a range of groups such as the Jewish Museum, Show Racism the Red Card, Searchlight Educational Trust, and Faith Matters’ ‘Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks’ (MAMA) project. As a result, these groups are effectively paid by the government to tell groups advising the government (civil servants or the Law Commission) what they want to hear.
Hate crime entrepreneurs have a vested interest in presenting the people they represent as victims. So it is hardly surprising that, when asked by the Law Commission, they argue for the law to be changed to define hate crime ever more broadly and to extend protections to yet more groups. What is surprising is that the Law Commission should draw upon evidence from such organisations in compiling recommendations for legal changes.
As the Law Commission’s paper makes clear, these campaigning organisations, along with academics, have had considerable influence in shaping both the analysis and recommendations that comprise the consultation. The role of hate crime entrepreneurs is evident in the paper’s acknowledgement that, “every submission to the inquiry containing data about local or national trends had agreed that: the situation is getting worse and that, due to large numbers of hate crimes not being reported to third-party services or the police, the true profile of hate crime in the UK is akin to an iceberg, with the majority hidden from view.”
If the legal limits on what we can say are to be determined by those with a financial incentive to be easily offended, then we will have even less free speech than we have at present. If hate crime entrepreneurs get their way, we will be left with nothing other than state-sanctioned, police-approved speech. It is vitally important that, before the Law Commission’s consultation closes on December 24, they hear from people who consider free speech to be the most important, foundational right we have.
Joanna Williams is the founder of the think tank Cieo. She is the author of Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating From the Gender Wars and is a regular columnist for Spiked. Follow her on Twitter @jowilliams293
The Supreme Court had one last chance to keep the American Republic together. It failed.
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 12, 2020
By washing its hands of responsibility to hear the Texas challenge to the 2020 presidential election, the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court may have sealed the country’s fate and made a kinetic civil war much more likely.
On Friday, the highest court in the land decided that Texas “lacked standing” to challenge the conduct of elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin under Article 3 of the US Constitution. Yet the article in question explicitly states that the SCOTUS will be the original jurisdiction in “Controversies between two or more States; – between a State and Citizens of another State; – between Citizens of different States,” among other things.
Contrary to media reports, Texas did not seek to “overturn” the election of Democrat Joe Biden. The motion filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton very explicitly called for the court to order the state legislatures thereof to seat the electors, as is their constitutional prerogative. Yes, those legislatures are majority Republican, but nothing guaranteed they would actually back President Donald Trump. After all, Georgia has a Republican governor and secretary of state, and both declared the election clean as a whistle, brushing off all evidence of alleged irregularities.
The very same media that brayed for the past four years about how the 2016 election was somehow tampered with by Russia – never offering any evidence for that – have declared the 2020 one pure as driven snow, the most secure in history, perfect in every way. In what was surely a massive coincidence, it even happened to exactly mirror the 2016 result, with Biden getting 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232.
The Silicon Valley tech giants, who in the run-up to the election censored and suppressed the story about Joe Biden’s family business deals overseas – that later turned out to be accurate – and slapped “disputed” warnings on Trump’s claims of electoral fraud the way they never did on ‘Russiagate,’ are now openly censoring any notion that 2020 wasn’t perfectly legal.
You’re now forbidden to say that. Soon you won’t be allowed to think it. In America, the country that invented the constitutional amendment guaranteeing the freedom of speech and thought!
Democrats and their allies in the media and Silicon Valley were eager to declare the Texas motion “seditious.” One influential House Democrat said any Republican backing the lawsuit was “engaging in rebellion against the United States” and should be stripped of their office under the 14th Amendment, originally written to justify disenfranchising the Confederates after 1865.
The irony here is that the Supreme Court could have actually prevented another civil war had it chosen to hear the Texas lawsuit, and then ruled against it on non-pretextual grounds. That, at least, would have sent the message to Trump supporters that the System works, and that they should continue to place their trust in it. There would always be the possibility of a rematch in the 2022 midterms or 2024.
Odds that the Nine would actually side with Texas and block the electors were always slim. The justices are notoriously allergic to rocking the boat – unless the case involves discovering ever-expanding constitutional protections discovered in “emanations and penumbras,” from abortion to Obamacare, that is. The court could have resorted to any of these mental gymnastics they have previously employed to legislate from the bench in an effort to reach some kind of Solomonic solution.
Instead, they literally abdicated their constitutional responsibility – and sent a message to 75 million Americans who voted for Trump that their votes don’t matter. Worse, that the System of government that supposedly made the US special, takes a back seat to the media, Big Tech and the consensus manufactured by people who tend to riot when they don’t get their way.
One can only guess as to how they reasoned. Perhaps that Republicans are law-abiding and won’t revolt – especially since much of the GOP has been more than willing to toss Trump overboard and return to its traditional role of the Democrats’ loyal opposition.
Maybe they remembered Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence, that “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Yet right after those words, Jefferson laid out the case for why the Americans of 1776 should do just that.
The Biden-Harris administration, now but inevitable, has said it wants to cancel Jefferson as a racist and “change” America in the name of “equity.” Part of that agenda is abolishing the Senate filibuster and “packing” the Supreme Court by appointing additional justices, to cancel the supposed conservative majority. Perhaps the Nine, including the trio appointed by Trump, figured that this decision would save them from being diluted that way?
As someone who (barely) lived through a civil war, I know a thing or two about not just how they’re fought, but also how they break out and why. The past month has made me realize that the US has actually been fighting one already, probably since just before Trump was elected. In keeping with the times, it has been fought in the legacy and social media, in the courts, in the ballot-counting back rooms, and even on the streets, but hasn’t quite gone “kinetic,” to borrow the Pentagon parlance.
Civil wars begin when a faction decides it can no longer pursue its goals through the political, legal or economic means, as they have all been foreclosed to them. Can anyone argue, with a straight face, that no Trump supporters feel like this?
Whether rightly or wrongly, they believe the election was stolen and that the people who did so got away with it. How likely are they to trust any election going forward? About as much as they trust the media, the corporations, or the courts right now.
The Supreme Court had a chance to defuse this ticking time bomb. Instead, they channeled Pontius Pilate and said “not our problem.” That’s how Bosnia happened. I hope and pray that doesn’t happen here, but fear that it shall.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Stealth Green New Deal language being slipped into take-it-or-leave-it House spending package
AEA Urges Senate and House Leaders to Reject “Sense of Congress” Nonsense
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | December 14, 2020
WASHINGTON DC – The American Energy Alliance (AEA), the country’s premier pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, and free-market energy organization, sounded the alarm today on a proposed Sense of Congress resolution that if adopted, could cause a major disruption of America’s energy system.
AEA has obtained a page from a discussion draft dated December 13 at 5:28 PM that appears to include a provision from the Green New Deal-like energy legislation, H.R. 4447, making it a “Sense of Congress” to call for 100% of power demand to come from “clean, renewable, or zero-emission” energy sources. Information around these terms, or how they would be implemented, appears to be left intentionally vague.
Putting Congress on record supporting 100% renewables is a major statement of policy and it should not be tacked onto a massive spending bill with no discussion or debate warns AEA. To make matters worse, this provision appears to give the Secretary of Energy a blank check authorization from Congress to impose 100% renewables.
Thomas Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance, issued the following statement:
“While most Americans are eagerly looking for news about access to a COVID-19 vaccine, or juggling their expenses and schedules this holiday season, some unnamed Members of Congress are making a last-minute attempt to to sneak bad energy policy into a take-it-or-leave it spending bill before checking out for the year. It’s shameful and should be rejected outright.
“Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate are negotiating behind closed doors to jam a a stealth Green New Deal provision into a massive year-end bill to fund the entire federal government. Language uncovered in a “discussion draft” would give the Secretary of Energy the authority to effectively change the Department of Energy into the Department of Climate Policy.
A major policy shift and resulting disruption of America’s energy system should never occur as the result of a backroom deal to secure a legacy legislative item for an outgoing chairperson. It should be fully transparent, debatable, and subject to amendment. It’s no wonder that Americans are losing faith in their government institutions.”
Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | Children’s Health Defense | December 11, 2020
Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).
Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.
They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”
Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.
In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.
Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.
Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.
In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.
To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.
Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.
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From the Archives
Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
- German CDU MPs Seek Climate “Misinformation” List
- The ‘Gaza Treatment’: How Media Headlines Obscure Who is Bombing Yemen
- Ro Khanna urges Democrats to strip Israel ‘integration’ provision from defense bill
- Why Iran designated British MI6, Royal Navy, and RAF as hostile, terrorist organizations
- Armenian opposition politician dies in custody
- US still trying to recycle failed hypersonic missile programs
- France’s ‘Cold War’: Paris blames Tehran for supermarket fridge hacks
- Psywar no more? 77th Brigade’s sudden death
- Ukraine Already Carved Up… Before Talks Begin? /Prof. Richard Sakwa
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- German Authorities Start Initiative To Evaluate Public Register For Climate “Disinformation” Spreaders!
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
