Marseille to set up own Covid scientific council in a protest over ‘dependency’ on Paris scientists
RT | October 6, 2020
The French city of Marseille has adopted a proposal to form its own scientific council to assess Covid statistics and develop more informed local policies, as it battles against “unjust” lockdown rules imposed by the government.
The proposal was adopted on Monday, having been put forward by outspoken former French senator Samia Ghali, the current second-in-command of the city administration.
The move will see Marseille take a leading role in the assessment of its own health situation and provide the mayor, Michèle Rubirola, and city leaders with the necessary information to manage their own policies on Covid restrictions, Ghali said.
“The mayor must chair a scientific council … to see what the deficiencies are, and so we have a perspective and no longer depend on certain Parisian scientists, but also so we, ourselves, have the capacity to say what is going and what is not, and no longer suffer the thunderbolt of Paris.”
Ghali has been particularly vocal in her criticism of Parisian lawmakers in recent weeks, following the imposition of new Covid restrictions in Marseille and neighboring Aix-en-Provence. The government decreed in September that the southern city would become a ‘maximum alert zone’, causing the closure of all restaurants and bars for 15 days, which was seen by many in Marseille as unjustified. The restaurants were eventually allowed to reopen from Monday under certain conditions, which prompted Ghali to say the earlier strictures were “unfair and therefore not sustainable.”
Paris escaped fresh restrictions in September, leading many elected officials in Marseille to suggest France’s second city was not treated in the same way as the capital. Rubirola had previously shared her disapproval on Twitter, claiming “The announcements of Olivier Véran confirm this evening the unequal treatment suffered by Marseille. Inconsistent and unfair.” Restrictions were eventually introduced in Paris on Monday.
However, the announcement of a scientific council for Marseille has been met with criticism by some political leaders. The president of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Renaud Muselier, said there are already 10 existing and competent health bodies at national and regional level. “In this crisis, each of these structures has its own expertise and role to play. Adding a purely Marseille thing to it can only add confusion and cacophony to an already disturbing disorder,” he noted.
Round up the ‘anti-vaxxers’? Enlist religious leaders? Bill Gates warns US needs to brainstorm ways to reduce ‘vaccine hesitancy’
RT | October 6, 2020
Billionaire software tycoon Bill Gates has urged the US to prepare for a Covid-19 vaccine rollout by deputizing trusted community leaders to “reduce vaccine hesitancy,” bemoaning the rapid spread of “conspiracy theories” online.
The Microsoft founder-turned-vaccine-evangelist painted a mostly rosy picture of a vaccine rollout getting “rich countries” back to normal by the end of 2021 in an interview during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday.
However, with less than half of Americans saying they’d get a Covid jab – even if paid $100 for it – in a recent survey, Gates then focused his talk on enlisting the nation’s “trust network” to overcome the skeptics.
Lamenting that “vaccine hesitancy is in all countries and predates the pandemic,” Gates suggested American health officials start “thinking about which voices will help reduce the hesitancy, so we can get a level of vaccination that really has a chance of stopping” the virus.
Gates provided the example of challenges the polio vaccine faced in some countries – and the cunning lengths some were willing to go to get their populations jabbed.
“In places like Nigeria we had to go to the religious leaders, talk to them, have them speak out, you know, vaccinate their children. So [it is about] understanding the trust network – who is it that you view as an expert. Very few people can look at the formulation or data directly.”
Coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci hinted back in June that he was already on the task, revealing the government had a PR blitz planned in which “people [vaccine-hesitant Americans] can relate to in the community – sports figures, community heroes, people that they look up to” – will spread the pro-vaccine gospel.
Gates had typically harsh words for both conspiracy theorists and the social media platforms he believes enable them, complaining that “very titillating things” like the notion that “somebody intentionally made this virus, or that there’s some conspiracy” spread online “so much faster than the truth, which is that it comes from a bat.” Gates called on social media to “slow down or annotate things that actually cause huge damage, like not wearing masks or not being willing to take the vaccine if it proves that it is this key tool to getting back to normal.”
While he stressed he wasn’t suggesting Facebook and its peers go for “the Chinese solution” of telling companies what they must censor, the billionaire has previously called conspiracy theories about his funding of global vaccination schemes “a big problem,” and on Tuesday he slammed platforms for the absence of “smart solutions” to that problem.
Gates saved some barbs for the Trump administration, disparaging the government’s preparation for and response to the pandemic, accusing it of creating a “vacuum of leadership” by pulling out of the World Health Organization. Among other failings, “we didn’t do [pandemic] simulations” like some countries, he complained, referencing his now-famous 2015 TED Talk about the importance of comprehensive state-level planning for epidemics.
However, his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation actually staged one of the best-known pandemic simulations, Event 201, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in New York last October. The barely-fictional scenario involved a deadly coronavirus originating in geese spreading around the world, devastating economies and triggering the imposition of strict behavioral controls while leaving a trail of 65 million bodies in its wake. The narrative was so close to the subsequent outbreak of the novel coronavirus that Johns Hopkins was forced to include a disclaimer on the event website.
Indeed, the US government has run several such simulations in conjunction with representatives of local governments, hospitals, and various other private sector interests over the years. “Crimson Contagion,” one such exercise held from January to August last year, predicted the US would respond in a chaotic and disorganized fashion to an outbreak, exposing weaknesses that were apparently not remedied in time for Covid-19. A 2017 Pentagon report similarly warned that a “novel respiratory disease” emanating from, among other places, a Chinese wet market could spread throughout the world, hurting the military’s readiness and national security for as long as two years and prescribing correctives – which apparently fell on deaf ears.
Gates has previously warned that the “final hurdle” to a vaccine-fueled return to normalcy is convincing the population to actually roll up their sleeves and take the jab(s), and the World Health Organization – of which his foundation is the single largest funder, following the US’ departure – declared “vaccine hesitancy” one of the biggest threats to world health last year. The billionaire has stated he hopes to have seven billion humans vaccinated with whatever formula proves safe and effective, but has suggested a mandate would be counterproductive and actually increase resistance to vaccines.
Gates is far from the only voice urging governments to soft-pedal their inoculation demands. Noting that a straight-up mandate would probably be challenged and nullified in court, a paper published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine instead suggested at-risk populations be threatened with “penalties” like job loss for failure to get vaccinated. Australian PM Scott Morrison similarly had to walk back comments that vaccination should be “as mandatory as possible” after intense public outcry, and US President Donald Trump has promised the shot will be optional even as he tasked the military with delivering it.
Gates is funding the development of six leading Covid-19 vaccine candidates, and told the conference Phase III clinical trial data would be in before the year’s end. Acknowledging “we still don’t know whether these vaccines will succeed,” he nevertheless pooh-poohed Russian and Chinese vaccine development efforts, predicting that once ‘his’ – the Western – jabs were widely available at low cost, “I doubt there will be a lot of Russian or Chinese vaccine going outside these countries.”
New ‘Licence to Kill’ bill shows UK is happy to let its spies break the law – while lecturing other countries how to behave
By Tom Fowdy | RT | October 6, 2020
A bill giving Britain’s security services the green light to break the law is passing through parliament. It’s another abuse of government power that a compliant media is unwilling to question.
The British Parliament is in the process of pushing through a new law, with the consent of the Labour Party leadership. Perfectly normal, right? Except that this legislation has quite huge implications.
Titled the ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill,’ its purpose is to “authorise conduct by officials and agents of the security and intelligence services, law enforcement, and certain other public authorities, which would otherwise constitute criminality.”
That’s right, the security services of the United Kingdom are being given the green light to break the law, reducing the power of oversight and accountability behind what are already highly secret activities.
The mainstream media are not drawing serious attention to it, nor are they giving the bill any scrutiny. Although Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party agreed to pass the bill, he faced a rebellion from a cohort of 19 MPs, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn, who voted against it, arguing it is an abuse of government power and inherently dangerous.
MP for Coventry South Zarah Sultana stated: “I can’t support legislation that could give undercover state agents the licence to murder, torture and commit sexual violence.”
The bill marks the second time the Conservative government has sought to exonerate abuse of power from authorities with Labour’s support, with a bill legalising UK war crimes also passing through the House of Commons.
Once again, the United Kingdom believes that it is a law unto itself, which is hardly surprising coming from a government that believes Britannia still rules the waves. On one hand, it preaches the virtues of a democratic and open society, pointing fingers at countries implementing basic national security provisions and preaching ‘the rule of law,’ such as when addressing the situation in Hong Kong. But at the same time, it advocates a subtle mindset that its own actions in any capacity, even when much more questionable, are simply untouchable.
The latest act of parliament is simply the legal consolidation of a long established mentality that means the security establishment cannot truly be held to account, and it is best the public do not know about its activities.
Even before this new legislation, Britain’s intelligence services have long exempted themselves from meaningful scrutiny of their actions. The Five Eyes“PRISM” program, shared with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, is designed to counteract local privacy laws and legal constraints on government power by simply coordinating espionage activities and sharing the information.
Although defenders of this bill and the programme say it constitutes a common good – in terms of counter-terrorism, for example – they cannot say with absolute certainty that there will be no abuses of power, or more ‘political’ activities taking place.
The same people are equally likely to say that the ‘national security’ and ‘intelligence’ activities of countries such as China are always malign, oppressive and out of control, but is that the case at home too?
One of the most defining sagas of our time which suggests such is the fate of Julian Assange. Currently facing hearings over his extradition to America, his ‘crime’ is having revealed information about the activities of the US and Five Eyes intelligence around the world.
If he were Chinese or Russian, he would be heralded as a hero and glorified as a martyr. But for challenging the Western security establishment and their crimes, he’s merely considered a criminal and the Western media at large make a point of ignoring it, just as they do with this new bill authorizing criminal activity by the British security establishment.
In essence, the virtues of Western democracy do not appear to extend to challenging and scrutinizing covert, secret activities. Where is the transparency for MI5 and MI6? There is none.
And most unfortunate of all is the Labour Party leadership’s willingness to kowtow to this agenda. Under Sir Keir Starmer, the party is moving back towards the political centre and is eager to completely disregard the anti-establishment, anti-war and anti-imperialist policies of Jeremy Corbyn.
In a manner very similar to Tony Blair, he is reintegrating the party back into the core of the Western security establishment and supporting the government’s positions on these matters. This has caused many within the party to lambast the leadership as a ‘controlled opposition’ – one similar to the Democrats in the United States, which does not oppose the government’s foreign policy or national security agenda whatsoever. Such bipartisanship ultimately serves to protect the agenda of the ‘deep state,’ as it is sometimes described, from any serious public scrutiny, buffered by mainstream media complicity.
In this case, Britannia is a law unto itself. The government is securing the absolute power and untouchability of the security services beyond the rule of law, and bar a few Labour MPs and followers on social media, there is not a whimper about it.
For a country that prides itself on such deep moral and political superiority over others, it is simply not open to serious discussion, spotlighting or scrutiny of its activities in a way its values endeavour to profess. One rule for me, another for thee.
Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.
Israel army recruits ex-intelligence officers to spy on Arab Israelis
MEMO | October 6, 2020
The Israeli army is recruiting former intelligence officers from the Shin Bet to spy on Palestinians living in Israel under the pretext of combating the coronavirus, Israel’s Walla news site revealed.
The site quoted senior sources in the Home Front Command as saying that the army has contacted former officers in the Shabak, who are known for their knowledge of Arabs living in Israel, and asked them to join a new “security body” tasked with tracking coronavirus infections.
A former army officer, who had been contacted by the army, told the news site that while the official aim of the new “security body” is to help obtain information about coronavirus infections within the Palestinian community in Israel, he fears the new body has greater plans for the future.
A member of the Israeli Knesset, MK Aida Touma-Solomon of the Arab Joint List said the report paves the way for more legal violations against Arab citizens.
Israel views the Palestinians who remained in their homes in historic Palestine and who later became citizens of Israel as a demographic threat.
The former Director of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, publicly said that his apparatus would pursue every Israeli- Arab who refused to recognise Israel as a Jewish state while Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly described them as “demographic time bomb”.
Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel represent 21 per cent of the country’s population.
How NYT’s Trump Tax “Bombshell” Turned Out to be Yet Another Big Nothing Burger
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 06.10.2020
The New York Times’ report on Trump’s tax returns has missed a number of its apparent targets failing to implicate the president or find his alleged ties to Russia, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, adding that those who leaked Trump’s financial data may face criminal charges and civil damages.
The leaker or leakers who handed Donald Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times may have committed a felony, writes Just the News, a US national news agency founded by American investigative journalist John Solomon.
The NYT disclosure came amid the Democratic lawmakers’ longstanding effort to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns which is seen by the president’s proponents as a “fishing expedition” aimed at disrupting his presidency and the 2020 campaign, along with the “Russia collusion” story and an attempt to impeach him.
‘The Leaking is a Crime’
In a note to the NYT’s “bombshell” article in question, the newspaper’s executive editor Dean Baquet insisted that the president’s tax information “was legally obtained by reporters”, adding however, that they are not making the records themselves public because they “do not want to jeopardise our sources, who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public”.
“Under federal and state laws, income tax returns are confidential”, stresses Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel. “The rationale is they normally contain extensive amounts of information that filers would not want shared either with the general public or especially with competitors and political rivals”.
Citing Joseph diGenova, a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Just the News noted last Friday that if the documents were obtained by an IRS employee, a lawyer or an accountant, the leaking “definitely” constitutes a crime that could result in both criminal and civil legal actions.
In particular, Internal Revenue Code, Section 6103, protects an individual’s tax return information from disclosure to other parties by the IRS. In addition, 26 US Code § 7213 says that it’s a felony if any officer or employee of the United States discloses unauthorised information, including tax returns.
“It is unlikely that Trump or any family member leaked income tax information to the New York Times“, Ortel suggests. “However, it’s possible that disgruntled staff at a law firm or accounting firm may have done so. If true such actions would likely carry criminal penalties, and civil damages.”
Another possibility, more likely, is that federal or state government officials may have leaked this sensitive information to the paper, according to the investigative journalist.
“If true, this would be deeply concerning not simply to Trump and his supporters but to most sensible Americans”, he warns.
Kevin Brady (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, shares similar concerns. On 28 September, he issued a statement regarding the NYT’s story on Trump’s tax return raising the alarm over “the prospect that a felony crime was committed by releasing the private tax return information of an individual” and calling for an investigation into the matter.
‘10,000 Empty Words on Trump’s Taxes’
One might ask as to whether taking these “enormous personal risks” and leaking the president’s tax returns was worth the pain. In other words, did the NYT disclose something really “damning” about the president? According to Ortel, nothing of that kind was reported by the newspaper.
While the media’s story is largely focused on Trump’s alleged tax avoidance, it is not a crime to offset losses incurred against income, the Wall Street analyst underscores.
“Moreover it is common to use options available in relevant jurisdictions to make one claim about the value of a given asset and a different one in a loan application”, he says. “In every case, Trump and his organisation certainly will have worked closely with professionals to make sure that all claims were reasonable and defensible”.
Apart from this, Ortel doubts that a team of New York Times reporters have conducted a thorough and accurate analysis of the president’s documents.
“For a filer like Donald Trump, engaged in so many activities inside the US, tax returns are certainly lengthy and so complicated that professional firms likely are involved in submitting them, including accountants and lawyers”, the Wall Street analyst underscores.
As for left-leaning mainstream media’s claims that “Trump’s tax avoidance is a tax on the rest of us”, they have apparently overlooked the fact that “generations of Trumps employed thousands of New Yorkers directly and indirectly producing incomes and spending that filled tax coffers at federal, state, city and county level”, as Ortel noted in his 29 September opinion piece for The American Thinker.
“So, a fair accounting of all tax revenues created by the Trump Organisation likely will show enormous positive impact overall“, the analyst believes.
What Did NYT Reporters Fail to Find?
Still, it’s more important what the NYT “did not find”, i.e. any proof of Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Moscow which the Dems are continuing to speculate about even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller dug up no evidence to back these assumptions, the analyst notes.
In response to Trump’s unwillingness to release his tax returns after assuming the Oval Office, MSM observers suggested that the documents may show income from Russian sources or debt owed to Russians which potentially could make the president vulnerable to Moscow’s “influence”.
On 10 July 2020, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution insisted that “once in office, Trump proceeded to do things that raised suspicions about his relationship with Russia”. She claimed that there is no other way to answer whether the president “has been propped up by Russian money” than making his tax returns public.
However, the NYT’s review of the president’s financial documents has apparently hammered the final nail into the Dems’ “Trump-Russia collusion” story, according to Ortel: “Mueller and the New York York Times have failed to produce any evidence of Russian support, state or otherwise, to the Trump political campaign or enterprises”, he stresses.
“The decision to target Trump for theoretical illegal links to Russia clearly seems to be ‘gaslighting’ – bleating these scurrilous charges to distract from actual corruption involving a host of foreign powers going all the way back to Bill Clinton’s days as Arkansas governor forward to the present”, Ortel says referring to the “pay-to-play” scheme allegedly established by the Clinton Foundation.
NYT ‘Disclosure’ Won’t Make Trump Release His Returns
Trump’s tax returns leak bears some resemblance to what happened to Richard Nixon in 1973: nearly two years ago Politico referred to a scenario in which the president could be forced to release his tax returns.
“Disclosing confidential tax information is a felony”, the magazine wrote on 23 December 2018. “If Democrats can’t release Trump’s returns publicly, then they can’t discuss anything they see in them without putting themselves in legal jeopardy”.
The media outlet recollected that in 1973 The Washington Post and The New York Times launched a series of reports raising the question of whether President Nixon “grossly underpaid” what he owed the government.
In October 1973, the Providence Journal-Bulletin obtained Nixon’s tax returns, and released a “blockbuster report” indicating that the president paid just $792.81 in federal income taxes in 1970 and $878.03 in 1971. Nixon submitted to media pressure and agreed to make his tax returns public to restore “the confidence of the American people in the integrity of the president”. However, it did not help Nixon much amid a series of scandals which prompted him to resign on 9 August 1974 in the middle of his second term.
So, will the NYT article about Trump’s tax records affect the president in the same way and force him to publish his returns to clear the air before the election? If this was the trick it did not work, according to Ortel.
“I suspect he will not release any tax return information until, at the earliest, after the election”, the Wall Street analyst presumes. “This decision will further enrage Never Trumpers, but not lessen the enthusiasm that his base has to win re-election for Donald J. Trump”.
As our (un)civil war escalates towards the real thing, America is in throes of unrest unlike any in its history
By Michael Rectenwald | RT | October 5, 2020
Nearly two thirds of Americans believe the US is on course for civil war. One third now support political violence. The first Civil War’s death toll won’t be beaten, but the second’s nation-destroying potential will be unequalled.
The American left and right no longer inhabit a common moral universe. In fact, that imagined universe does not exist. The old, cherished political notions no longer apply, if they ever did. Not only are the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ complete misnomers under the current configuration, but the players are not as they seem, or as they are made out to seem.
First, Trump is hardly the stereotypical right-wing despot that the ‘resistance’ makes him out to be, his rough demeanor and coarse rhetoric notwithstanding. At the same time, the Democrats are hardly the vaunted champions of the ‘working class’ as imagined under the old dispensation. Instead, the resistance to Trump is actually led by an entrenched political establishment, although their supporters apparently remain unimpressed by this minor detail.
Take a look at this ironic and unlikely political alignment. It should go a long way toward understanding the perturbations throwing the nation into convulsions. The resistance includes the Democratic Party machine, the loyal Democratic Party voters, the ‘never-Trumpers’ among the Republican establishment, the permanent bureaucracy or ‘deep state’, the riotous Antifa and Black Lives Matter foot soldiers, and, but for a few isolated and dwindling islands, the entirety of the mainstream media. Given its uncontested hegemony, this establishment-backed resistance inhabits a parallel universe of its own making and projects a fabricated simulacrum as reality.
The resistance establishment controls the official narrative, which includes a few prominent elements: the tropes that Trump is an inveterate liar, a huckster profiting from his incumbency, and a criminal who is committing unspeakable (and undiscoverable) crimes against the nation and humanity at large. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Speaker of the House, went so far as to call Trump, the sitting president, an “enemy of the state.” This establishment resistance routinely declares Trump a dictator. It now asserts as an incontrovertible article of faith that he will refuse to vacate the White House should he lose the upcoming election.
The death of civility
Despite its own chicanery and possible criminality, the resistance establishment is so sure that its success is guaranteed that Hillary Clinton boldly urged Joe Biden not to concede the election under any circumstances. Rumors have even been floated that a contingent of military generals are prepared to remove Trump from the presidential domicile, if or when it comes to that. And now, since Trump contracted the coronavirus, Democratic Party leaders, a frothing media, and ardent party supporters have been unable to contain their glee at the prospect of his early demise.
As an indication that ‘civility’ is a thing of the past, one may point to the recent spate of tweets by Trump haters openly wishing for his death by Covid. Such posts became so prevalent and glaring that Twitter was forced to introduce a new policy declaring that any tweets wishing for the death of a politician would be removed. Conspicuously missing was any mention of even temporarily banning tweeters who infringe the policy. Such banning is routine for pro-Trump posters – and for far lesser infractions – if they are not contrived by the tech giant in the first place.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are routinely caricatured as a reactionary and irredeemably racist band of blind loyalists, including a significant contingent of white supremacists willing and already engaging in acts of racist violence. Even as Antifa and Black Lives Matter rampage and riot, leaving rubble in their wake, rightwing extremists, we are told, are the greatest domestic threat to national tranquility.
A very American coup?
At the same time, Trump Republicans and their few allies in an otherwise overwhelmingly Democrat-favored corporate media point to a growing body of evidence that a coup has been ongoing since before Trump assumed power. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, recently alleged in a letter published by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), just hours before the first (and perhaps last) presidential debate, that Hillary Clinton orchestrated “a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” – by linking Trump to Russia in 2016. The letter also claims that then-President Barack Obama knew about her intent and role in the contrived affair and did nothing to prevent his former secretary of state from ordering up the concoction.
While the resistance hurls an endless series of increasingly outrageous accusations and epithets at Trump, pro-Trump forces in the state nevertheless continue to pile up dirt on the Democrats and their assets in the permanent bureaucracy. For example, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigations into the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation of the Trump team’s supposed collusion with Russia has revealed evidence that a Russian asset, suspected by the CIA of being a spy, was the underlying source for the “dirty dossier” that prompted the FBI investigation. The committee has pointed to evidence that former FBI Director James Comey knew the dossier was unsubstantiated garbage peddled by a gutter-sniping mercenary hack when he or his staff members submitted FISA applications.
Added to this, the Department of Justice has since reported that more than two dozen phones belonging to members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team were “accidentally” wiped clean of data before the Justice Department’s inspector general could comb them for records.
Ironically, the Senate Judiciary Committee has also asserted that the son of former VP and current presidential candidate Joe Biden, namely Hunter Biden, actually engaged in a kind of ‘Russian collusion’ – when he received a whopping 3.5 million dollars from Elena Baturina, the wife of the corrupt former mayor of Moscow. Hunter Biden then allegedly funneled a part of these funds into human trafficking and prostitution rings. This alleged swindle, gained on the basis of his father’s influence peddling, would be added to the vast sums reportedly collected from corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.
All of these claims are either scoffed at and deemed conspiracies prima facie, or simply memory-holed by a complicit press. Nothing, it appears, will ever come of any of them.
Meanwhile, the vastly outflanked pro-Trump camp maintains that the attempted coup extends to the upcoming presidential election. Fears are escalating that the Democratic Party’s election machinery has already been set in motion, harvesting fraudulent or otherwise invalid mail-in ballots in favor of Biden. These deep misgivings are compounded by early reports of dumped and discarded ballots for Trump.
Anarchy in the USA
Among the ground forces in both camps, some informed and some merely inflamed by baseless rhetoric, hostility has reached fever pitch. According to Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service, 83 percent of Americans believe that behavior once considered unacceptable is now deemed acceptable in the political sphere. Apparently, this behavior includes violence and threats of violence. Other studies found that 61 percent Americans polled believe the country is headed inexorably towards civil war. Other reports indicate that a nearly equal number of Democrats and Republicans (33 percent and 34 percent, respectively) believe that violence will be justified if their side loses the impending presidential election, up from just eight percent on both sides who believed that three years ago.
The ‘left’ justifies its campaign of violence given the supposedly disproportionate unjustified police violence against blacks. The ‘right’ justifies its pondered response as necessary self-defense and defense of the nation after months of almost unhampered rampages.
Surging gun sales across the country suggest that many Americans fear continued and increasing conflict. First-time gun and ammunition purchases have reached an all-time high. One might reasonably suppose that potential counter measures from pro-Trump ground forces are being seriously contemplated. The prospect of a protracted election controversy has both camps suggesting that they’re booted up and ready for action. Any state response to such action, on the other hand, remains unclear. Who, after all, will have the authority to direct state police forces if Democrats and their supporters claim that Trump’s ‘occupation’ of the White House is illegitimate?
Pro-Trump pundits warn that the violence coming from ‘leftists’ since May has only been a warm-up act for November 3 and beyond. There are so many related and somewhat disparate theories being floated that one’s head is left spinning. But suffice to say, anyone the least bit cognizant of the state of affairs is bracing for a massive confrontation.
‘Things fall apart’
The current and looming strife is demoralizing in the extreme, especially given the utterly incommensurable accounts held by the opposing sides. It is especially alarming to me, living as I do in urban Pennsylvania – a ‘swing state’ with the potential to be a center of a disputed election result that looks to tip over into open mortal combat. I plan on voting in the early morning, then driving immediately to another, probably uncontested, state.
The alarming state of affairs has led me to revisit a harrowing poem by William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’. The first stanza captures the temper and pitch of the moment so well that I quote in its entirety:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I met my first grandchild for the first time the other day. And I wept with trepidation for his future.
Michael Rectenwald is an author of ten books, including the most recent, Beyond Woke. He was Professor of Liberal Arts at NYU from 2008 through 2019. Follow him on Twitter @TheAntiPCProf
‘False’ positive Covid-19 tests saw non-contagious people counted as fresh infections & triggered 2nd wave alarm – Belgian media
RT | October 5, 2020
Over a half of coronavirus infections revealed this summer by one of Belgium’s biggest labs were old and no longer contagious, but were still reported as new cases, local media discovered.
Belgian daily newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws examined the tests carried out by AZ Delta, one of the largest labs in the country, and made a stunning discovery. Almost half of all positive cases reported throughout June, July and August were actually people with an old infection.
The problem, it turns out, lies in the PCR Covid-19 tests. The paper reports that scientific data reveals virus particles can be detected up to 83 days after the actual infection. This led to instances where people were no longer contagious, but were still registered as positive cases. According to HLN, all of these people had to be quarantined.
Belgian experts sounded the alarm in mid-July, when coronavirus numbers spiked after a relief in June, and even insisted that the second wave had already begun for the country.
“We may have had to deal with old infections largely in the summer months,” the lab’s clinical biologist Frederik Van Hoecke told the paper.
Is the UK heading toward medical martial law?
We are hearing frequent calls for the UK’s coronavirus “pandemic” response to become a military operation
OffGuardian | October 2, 2020
On the 28th September Tobias Ellwood, Tory MP for Bournemouth East, stood up in Parliament and suggested that the British Army and the Ministry of Defense be in charge of distributing and administering “millions of doses” of the Sars-Cov-2 vaccines, as well as issuing “vaccination certificates” which will “allow travel”.
And that’s just the highlights, there’s a lot more vaguely sinister language, camouflaged in his rather drab monotone voice. (You can watch the whole speech here, go to 20:24).
This is a concerning development, one very much worth keeping an eye on. The BBC don’t think so, of course, because the call for what would easily amount to medical martial law didn’t even make it into their “Today in Parliament” programme.
This is not new behaviour for Ellwood. He has always been a consistent voice for use of the military in response to the “pandemic”. On the 18th of September he requested the Prime Minister make “greater use of our fine armed forces”.
He specifically mentions “managing the narrative”, which is no surprise considering his role as a former Army officer, a current reserves officer, and his known affiliation with the 77th Brigade. For those who don’t know: The 77th is the British army’s team of “facebook warriors”. An information warfare unit whose job is to “counter misinformation”, “manage the narrative” and generally corral and control the internet conversation.
That’s not a “conspiracy theory”, their existence is readily acknowledged by both the government and the mainstream media. Considering they’re currently employed “countering covid misinformation“, they will likely be in the comments of this post (Hi guys!).
Other countries around the world have already moved on to this “war footing”, and the UK is likely not far behind.
Daniel Korski: The Intelligence-Linked Mastermind Behind the UK’s Orwellian Healthtech Advisory Board
By Johnny Vedmore |
Unlimited Hangout| October 1, 2020
As a futuristic, hi-tech dystopia increasingly takes shape around us, the concept of the Panopticon is more relevant than ever as it functions as the underpinning of the ever-growing mass surveillance grid.
For those who are not so familiar with 18th century social philosophy, a Panopticon was originally the design of a prison building by an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon prison’s architecture would allow one guard in a central guard tower to observe every inmate without those prisoners knowing that they were being observed, and so those incarcerated were left to assume that they were actually being observed all of the time. This prison would, in theory, allow that singular guard to maintain order over every inmate.
Much later, in the 20th century, the famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, would use the concept of Bentham’s original Panopticon as a way to describe and explore “disciplinary power”. According to Foucault’s work, disciplinary power had been successful due to its utilisation of three technologies; hierarchical observation; normalising judgment; and examinations. Hierarchical observation refers to the fact that the observer in a Panopticon can be of any hierarchical position within the observing body, meaning that a prison guard, supervisor, or a governor could be the person viewing the inmates. Foucault would also insist that the normalisation of judgement is imperative for disciplinary power to exist. The final principle, the examination, is used to combine the first two principles of the observations and the resulting judgements to help decide on whether further actions should be taken or punitive measures be applied.
Among the most notable of Foucault’s analyses of the utility of the Panopticon is the following quote from his book Discipline and Punish: “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, the uncertainty of whether or not an individual is being constantly watched induces obedience in that individual, allowing only a few to control the many.
In addition to Foucault, the concept of the Panopticon has been vigorously studied over the past few centuries and it has special relevance in understanding modern forms of mass surveillance. The aim of many of the modern day state surveillance apparatus function under a similar doctrine to the original ideology behind the invention of the Panopticon.
The British GCHQ, the US’s NSA, the Israeli’s Unit 8200, among many others, are the all seeing eyes of national intelligence agencies who have longed for a way to watch their populations remotely, i.e. online, without their citizens knowing whether or not they’re actually being observed. One man has striven to be at the center of the growing global Panopticon, from his base in the Panopticon’s birthplace — Britain. His name is Daniel Korski.
The Creator
When I first came upon the NHS Healthtech Advisory Board, a body created in 2018 to “advise” the UK’s Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock, its members opened my eyes to some of the darker actors involved in designing our tech-guided futures. One of the panelists on Matt Hancock’s team of tech pioneers, who are seeking “to transform technology in the NHS [National Health Service],” was Nicole Junkermann.
The Israeli Intelligence-Linked Team behind Carbyne911 (including Nicole Junkermann)
Junkermann’s multiple links with Jeffrey Epstein, which appear to have begun around 2002, exposed her as someone who couldn’t be trusted with the future direction of the UK’s healthcare system. Furthermore, Junkermann’s connections with Ehud Barak, Peter Thiel, and Jeffrey Epstein via her investment in the Israeli intelligence-linked surveillance company Carbyne911, made her entry into the United Kingdom’s government advisory panel very problematic for everyone involved. But she was not the only interesting character intimately involved in this particular government project.
While the Healthtech Advisory Board has been hailed since its creation as the brainchild of Matt Hancock, he was actually guided to the project by the man who was, and is, the real mastermind behind the board’s founding, a man who has been helping to quietly write the history of Britain from behind the scenes for the last two decades. He is somebody you’ve probably never heard of, even though his impact on public policy is felt not only in the United Kingdom, but globally.
This man has been a senior advisor to the US State Department, an advisor to Hamid Karzai in post-invasion Afghanistan, the team leader of the Basrah Reconstruction Team in post-invasion Iraq, the Head of Political-Military Affairs for the Office of the High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a Committee Specialist for the House of Commons Defence Committee. If that weren’t enough, he was also a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, an advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission, a special advisor to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, deputy head of policy at 10 Downing Street. Yet, even these are just some of the public offices he has held. This man’s name is Daniel Korski and he should be notorious.
Described as a “Foreign Policy Writer” and a “Post Conflict Expert”, Daniel Korski is currently only in his early forties and yet his experience is vast. How does one get the opportunities which have been afforded to Mr Korski? Do you need to be a member of a special club from a very young age? Everything about Korski points to military intelligence, so to find him on the same advisory board as a Mossad-linked Epstein associate isn’t too much of a shock, but it does deserve further scrutiny.
This is especially true now that Daniel Korski has left public office and set up a venture capital firm which specifically funds government-related tech startups. While Korski wants to publicly appear to have left government work, it is pretty clear that, upon further inspection, he hasn’t drifted too far from the authorities. So, let us look at Mr Korski’s history in more detail and work our way forward towards his more current projects. In doing so, I truly believe that you will not be able to deny his continuing role as an intelligence operative. You will also be shown evidence of his dystopian side projects and connections to one of the largest growing, government-backed mass surveillance projects in the world. This is an introduction to Daniel Korski, one of the creators of the current digital panopticon.
Daniel Korski’s Curious Past
Henryk Korski, grandfather of Daniel Korski eluded the Nazi’s whilst living in Poland in the 1940s. After the war, he would join the Polish Communist Party and by the mid-to-late 60s he was working in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. But a decade later, when his grandson Daniel was born, the whole family had already relocated to Copenhagen. If you were to go by Daniel Korski’s Wikipedia page then you would be told that his family were expelled from Poland in the late 1960s. But, if you were to look behind the scenes at Korski’s Wikipedia pages history then you’d discover that someone disagreed with that description of events.
On 21st April 2013 someone edited this part of Daniel’s Wiki page. This editor wanted people to know: “Korski is the son of Polish Jewish refugees, who fled persecution.” I decided to see if I could trace the I.P. Address of the person who made this change. I managed to track the computer to Brussels in Belgium and the edit was made while Daniel Korski was living in the Belgian capital when working as an advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission. It’s also just before he left that post and headed off to become a special advisor to the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron. It seems that Daniel Korski wanted everyone to believe that his parents had fled persecution in Poland, but was this true?
Daniel Korski himself would eventually head to Twitter to show people the evidence that his parents were Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. He would post two images of official court documents sealed in plastic sleeves and describe it as evidence of a pogrom. For those who are unaware, a pogrom is described as “an organized massacre, especially of Jews”. But do the documents supplied by Daniel Korski provide any evidence of a massacre of Jewish people? The straight answer is a definite no. The court papers Korski so proudly presents on Twitter do not mention Judaism at all, but they do mention Henryk Korski’s stance on the war between Israel and Egypt. The documents, which were written in Polish, relate to a court case involving Henryk Korski and his employer.
Henryk demanded to be reinstated into his previously held position in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Trade and compensation to be paid for the wages he had been denied. The court refused Mr. Korski’s application and the Korski family would soon move to Denmark, a decision which Henryk himself said turned out to be a lucky move. There is no massacre of Jews in Poland at this time and there is no pogrom involving Korski’s family either. In fact the last recorded pogrom happened in 1946. Instead, Daniel Korski is caught misleading the public in an attempt to appear as though his parents were Jewish refugees fleeing the threat of death in communist Poland. Is it any wonder then that in the same year as Daniel Korski was making up parts of his family’s history, he would also be appointed as vice president of the United Kingdom’s Jewish Leadership Council.
Daniel Korski grew up in Denmark, so how did he become such an important part of the British government? Korski didn’t start studying for his degree until 1997 when he was 20 years old. He would attend the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and would later attend Cambridge University for his Masters. He was either well connected or very talented, maybe even both, as by the age of 25 he was working for ex-Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown as Head of Political-Military Affairs while Ashdown was serving in the office of High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Korski would hold that position between 2002 until 2004 and he would then go on to be the Committee Specialist for the UK House of Commons Defence Committee. That short term position would be followed by his first official role overseas on behalf of the British government. In 2005, Korski would be in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was officially advising the Karzai government on counter-narcotic operations. He would also soon become part of the UK Government’s “Stabilisation Unit” for the war-torn country.
His next appointment, in 2007, was a move to Iraq as the team leader for the Basrah Provincial Reconstruction Team and during this work in Afghanistan and Iraq, Korski became a senior advisor to the US State Department. With all this experience, we are able to see that Daniel Korski, who was still only 30 years old, had very clear intelligence connections. So it will come as no surprise that in 2009 Daniel Korski helped to found the European Council on Foreign Relations where he would also be named a “Senior Policy Fellow”. Korski would, soon after the creation of the European CFR, become an advisor to the vice president of the European Commission, Catherine Ashton, also referred to as Baroness Ashton of Upholland.
In 2013, Korski would return to the UK as a special advisor to the David Cameron government. In May 2015, he would take up the position as deputy head of policy at 10 Downing Street and would stay in that position until Cameron stood down following his defeat in the EU referendum. The Brexit defeat hit everyone involved in the Cameron administration like a hurricane. Many of the politicians who orchestrated the lacklustre campaign for Britain remaining part of the EU immediately stepped down and some went into hiding.
Quite amazingly for any advisor to a Conservative government, Daniel Korski had managed to get through almost 15 years in leading Whitehall positions without being involved in a single sex scandal; at least that’s what he thought. Yet, on 14th November 2017, the Telegraph, in an article entitled “David Cameron aide denies groping television writer at Downing Street event,” the paper named Daniel Korski as the man who allegedly groped producer Daisy Goodwin. The article states:
“Daniel Korski, who left his post as special adviser following the Brexit vote, admitted that he had met the TV producer in Number 10 on two occasions, but said that any accusation of inappropriate behaviour was “not only totally false but also totally bizarre”
Ms Goodwin, 55, has claimed that she was “summoned” to Downing Street to discuss a proposed TV show when Mr Cameron was Prime Minister and an official told her she looked like a Bond girl before putting his hand on her breast as she went to leave.” Korski, by the time the sexual assault accusation had been made public, had started his own venture capital firm called simply “Public” or Public.io. Even though he was officially outside government at the time, Korski’s capitalist venture would specifically focus on tech startups designed for government applications. They set up base at an address in 1 Horseguards Avenue, Westminster, just opposite the HQ for the UK Ministry of Defence. Public.io also owns Eva Health Technology, previously named Microtest Ltd, which supplies patient management systems for healthcare professionals, including everything from simple customer booking software through to documentation software for vaccines.
In 2018, Korski would become Chairman and Co-Founder of the Govtech Summit, which is planned to be held each year in Paris and is a global stage to pitch next-generation technologies to governments from around the world. Govtech is a place where Daniel Korski and his Public.io business partner, Alexander de Carvalho, can introduce the world to such tech startups as Ehud Barak’s Carbyne, a company frequently advertised by Public.io and Govtech even though they are not direct investors in the Israeli firm. It was also in 2018 that the Healthtech Advisory Board, supposedly the idea of Matt Hancock, was formed and began to bring together such people as Nicole Junkermann and Daniel Korski to help create the future blueprint for the hi-tech “transformation” of the UK’s public health sector.
Some members of the Healthtech Advisory Board, (Rear) Daniel Korski, Parker Moss, Nicola Blackwood, Nicole Junkermann (Front) Dr Ben Goldacre and Matt Hancock
But Korski, since leaving official government employment, has been involved in other activities too. One of his other enterprises is with a man who already has a foothold in the mass surveillance business via a government application and who intends to repeat his early successes on a global scale, as well as many other interesting characters. Please, take your predesignated seats, strap yourself in and welcome to Daniel Korski’s Panopticon.
Enter the Panopticon
Nicole Junkermann and Daniel Korski have many common interests in the big tech sector. In 2017 and 2018, they both began to invest in and focus on mass surveillance technology and future healthcare-related tech with great intensity. If one didn’t know any better, one might come to the conclusion that both Junkermann and Korski had inside knowledge of a coming healthcare crisis, such as a pandemic. Conveniently for Korski’s and Junkermann’s investment portfolios, the current pandemic has become an excuse for government to take away our current civil liberties and implement widespread mass surveillance technologies on an unwitting public.
While Junkermann was personally investing with Epstein and Thiel in Ehud Barak’s Carbyne911, Korski was supporting similar projects in the UK. On 26 March 2018, Daniel Korski became the director of the UK registered company Panopticon Technologies Limited. If you were to go to their previous website, Panopticon.Tech, then you’d be met by a dead link, but the Wayback Machine captured their original site twice in 2018.
The founding team at Panopticon Technologies included:
- Sir Mark Rowley QPM who is described as “one of the most respected and decorated police leaders in the UK”. Rowley had led the national police counter terrorism effort as Assistant Met Commissioner in the UK.
- Alastair Aitken CBE, who helped restructure the Army in the UK, informed by his three decades of experience in the UK military. He was also heralded as helping to redesign US military strategy and was involved in every complicated war zone over the last three decades.
- Mark Austin, a former global board member of PricewaterhouseCoopers and senior executive at IBM. An expert in finance, technology and corporate governance.
- Dale Murray, a partner in the digital strategy consultancy Founders Technology. She was a co-founder of Omega Logic as well as being another advisor to David Cameron on the “Business Taskforce”.
- Max Chambers, who is also part of Korski’s Public.io and was a former senior advisor to David Cameron. He was principal adviser on all aspects of home affairs policy, including security, immigration, counter-extremism, policing and criminal justice.
There are two other important players who also played major parts in the creation of Panopticon Technologies. One is Mike Iiams, the CEO and President of Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc., one of the leading electronic monitoring companies globally. The second is a man named Alasdair James Eli Truett. These last two men should be examined in greater detail.
SCRAM Systems and Mike Iiams
Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc. was founded in Colorado by Michael Leonard Iiams among others. Iiams would go on to be a very successful President and CEO of Alcohol Monitoring Systems/SCRAM for almost 20 years. His name would also be on the patent as one of the inventors of the SCRAM Systems Bracelet, a useful technology designed specifically for use by professional law enforcement. America has a well-developed law enforcement technologies industry and it also has plenty of problem drinkers. Police departments all over the country are equipped with some of the most state-of-the-art equipment available. One of the first successful forms of police technology to be widely adopted by many states was an alcohol detection system, which was used to track problematic drinkers who would commit offences while under the influence. This system was a simple tool in dealing with crimes related to alcohol abuse.
In 1985, Dr. Daniel J. Brown of Indiana University School of Medicine published studies on the subject of measuring volatile substances through the skin including sensing alcohol in sweat. By 1991, the first patent was filed for the Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM) System. In 2005, the SCRAM system was monitoring 1,700 offenders a day and the program was active in 30 states. Over the following decade and a half, improvements in technologies have seen the addition of further functions on top of the capabilities of the original device. By the rollout of the 4th generation of this technology, it had reduced in size and included the introduction of GPS tracking that would also allow the police to monitor people on house arrest.
Today, this technology has developed into a multifaceted tracking bracelet that allows officers to monitor suspects via a tablet or a mobile phone and it is being rolled out globally. Mike Iiams inclusion into Korski’s Panopticon Technologies came just before SCRAM Systems tagging technology won UK Home Office backing for its use in tackling Britain’s problem drinkers. In 2020, national rollouts were announced in Wales, England, and the Netherlands with the intention to continue its expansion into other countries. According to Public Health England, alcohol-related crime costs the UK economy more than £21.5bn a year and the Ministry of Justice has declared that the Alcohol Abstinence Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) can be imposed by courts in accordance with community-based orders, which allows for the use of these “next-generation” SCRAM Systems bracelets, referred to in the UK as “peace tags”.
Although Mike Iiams is not listed as a director of Panopticon Technologies in the official UK companies database, he is listed as someone with significant control of the company with shares of over 25%. Iiams has also worked for the accounting firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. in Alaska, during the building of the TransCanada pipeline, and has been in a senior executive role with JD Edwards, which is now part of Oracle.
Alasdair James Eli Truett
The other person of significance, who was at one point a director at Panopticon Technologies alongside Korski, is Alasdair Truett. Truett’s involvement in the project makes for a fascinating addition to PT, as his background is in military intelligence. Truett’s LinkedIn shows him simply as an officer in the British Army for over 20 years between 1997 and 2017, but the title of officer seriously understates Lt Col Alasdair Truett MBE’s experience.
In the British Army, “Alasdair was advising, planning and executing domestic and overseas intelligence and security policy and operations,” as described on the homepage of Cerebra Global Strategy. His profile goes on to tell us:
“He has operated at the political, strategic and tactical levels for national intelligence, national influence, small and large scale wars and counter-terrorism. Since 2017, Alasdair has provided advice and commercial services to leaders in governments and corporates on a spectrum of matters to do with national, corporate and personal intelligence, security and leadership.”
Truett was not just your average garden variety grunt with a gun on the British Army payroll, Lieutenant Colonel Alasdair Truett was in fact a very focused specialist in the field of military intelligence. Truett claims to have only been at Panopticon Technologies for its first 7 months of operation, afterwards he would found both Fortisat, followed by Cerebra Global Strategy Ltd.
In a Cyber Unplugged podcast entitled Social Engineering: The Threat Is Coming From Inside The House, Truett describes Fortisat as “a national security advisory and business intelligence company that looks at ‘human network intelligence’ and offers advice to governments on emerging technologies that will enhance their national security.”
Flash in the Pan(opticon)
So, why has Panopticon Technologies recently gone dark? Although it is still an active company, the pulling of the Panopticon.Tech website seems to suggest that the enterprise is on hold, or about to be abandoned. But these data hungry lobbyists for government mass surveillance often work in the shadows.
What do we know about Panopticon Technologies? They described themselves as “a new, ethical, tech-enabled UK security company” and have stated that “we are passionate about new technology and providing immigration, police, intelligence and probation officers with high quality hardware and software to enhance their day-to-day work in monitoring offenders and protecting the public.” But their method, described as using “new behavioural and compliance models powered by cutting-edge analysis,” may have been too much for supporters to bear after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Korski and his Public.io, led by Max Chambers, may have been rash to launch PT so publicly in the first place. For a Panopticon to be successful, the inmates must know that there is the potential for them to be observed and that is very much the society we find ourselves in today. In this vast cyber-Panopticon, the masses are being observed by the few, and people like Daniel Korski, Alasdair Truett, Nicole Junkermann, Ehud Barak, and Mike Iiams lobby governments to expand and normalise their own homeland mass surveillance programmes. It only takes one government to agree to private companies being responsible for the mass surveillance of their populations for this trend to begin to take a permanent place in our societies. Now, with Covid-19, there are many excuses to implement panopticonic technologies to further the observation power of the few over the many.
Korski has positioned himself to be one of the most influential players in the modern UK government tech sector. He has used his many UK government connections to benefit himself financially and has been eager to remain publicly affiliated with the ruling UK Conservative government since leaving Whitehall. Korski’s Public.io venture capital firm is located at the heart of the UK MoD and is just a stone’s throw away from the UK Parliament. His entry into military intelligence at such a young age suggests he was recruited by an intelligence agency before attending university. He would start studying for his first degree later than most, at the age of 20, leaving us with a small two year gap in his timeline.
Before he’d even reached his thirties, and with no obvious experience in fighting the war on drugs, Korski would become a counter-narcotic operations advisor to the relatively recently installed Afghani leader, Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s brother, Wali Karzai, would later be revealed to have been on the payroll of Western intelligence agencies and also one of Afghanistan’s most prominent, and notorious drug traffickers. His drug trafficking activities were allegedly protected by his brother’s government and his CIA benefactors.
Korski was also heavily involved in the UK government’s stabilisation and reconstruction projects in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was even acting as a senior advisor to the US Department of Defense just before he would help create the European Council on Foreign Relations. His intelligence links led him to become one of the most important advisors during the David Cameron government.
His links with military intelligence have become clearer since he’s officially left the halls of power, with Korski’s Panopticon Technologies bringing some of the leading advocates for government overreach who also have deep links to military intelligence. Alasdair Truett, Alastair Aitken, Mark Rowley and Max Chambers have all had leading roles in the creation of the modern intelligence networks in the UK for both homeland security and global intelligence strategies. Korski’s work on the Govtech summit has been keenly supported by French President Emmanuel Macron, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Matt Hancock. Korski’s work has also been a vehicle for the normalisation of the use of public big data by private companies.
Daniel Korski listens to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau at Govtech Summit 2019
The NHS Healthtech Advisory Board gives us a brief glimpse inside the on-going creation of the modern digital panopticon. It let us see some of the intelligence-linked tech sector giants vying for opportunities to gain access to mass national databases. Junkermann’s Carbyne911 and Korski’s Panopticon Technologies are the monsters lurking in the shadows of the big tech world. They are constantly circling the part of the public sector that they see as soft targets, because control over the data from the public sector means access to every piece of private information from every citizen. Korski and Junkermann may have beautiful smiles and a charming way about them, but they are simply cogs in a machine leading us towards a dystopian future.
So, who is Daniel Korski actually working for? His deep love and support for the European Union suggests that his whole-hearted allegiance is to the European project. But with his globalist back story, his establishment connections, and his association with both public and private intelligence agencies, Daniel Korski would be a useful asset for any power with a similar agenda of creating a digital Panopticon.
Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com
Take the jab or lose your job: Medical journal calls for a MANDATORY Covid vaccine
‘Noncompliance should incur a penalty’
RT | October 1, 2020
With half the US population reportedly unwilling to submit to an experimental Covid-19 shot, a new scientific paper has shed light on how state health authorities might enforce compliance with vaccine mandates.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, the paper outlines strategies for circumventing widespread fears over the safety of a rushed-to-market vaccine against the novel coronavirus, providing health authorities with a playbook for coercing a skittish populace.
The writers acknowledge that voluntary measures should be tried first, rather than mandating the vaccine for everyone out of the gate. However, if the target population doesn’t comply within a trial period, a mandate should be rolled out, and the penalties for refusing to submit should be harsh. Given “the costs of a failed voluntary scheme,” the writers warn, authorities should wait no more than a few weeks before rolling out a mandate if uptake falls short of expectations.
The paper says “six substantive criteria” must be met before a Covid-19 vaccine is imposed by the state. A federal body, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, must greenlight administration to certain groups of the populace first, and “only recommended groups should be considered for a vaccination mandate.”
“High-risk” groups should be given priority on that list.
“[T]he elderly, health professionals working in high-risk situations or working with high-risk patients… persons with certain underlying medical conditions,” and people living in “high-density settings such as prisons and dormitories” – as well as active-duty military service members – should be ordered to get the jab as soon as health officials are confident they have a sufficient supply to cover these groups, the paper suggests.
Rather than attempting to pass laws requiring certain populations to get the vaccine, the paper recommends that “noncompliance should incur a penalty” – and a “relatively substantial” one. The non-compliant should be threatened with “employment suspension or stay-at-home orders,” though fines or criminal charges are discouraged, because they “disadvantage the poor” and risk getting the mandate itself challenged in court. Worse, they “may stoke distrust without improving uptake,” it adds.
Whatever they do, authorities should avoid flaunting their relationship with vaccine manufacturers, the paper recommends – a tall order, given that President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine development initiative is helmed by Moncef Slaoui, the former head of pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division who had to quit the board of directors of Moderna – a frontrunner in the vaccine race – to take the job. Slaoui notoriously was forced to offload over $10 million in Moderna stock after its value briefly skyrocketed following the announcement of promising early trial results.
For the non-high-risk groups, the writers suggest authorities “encourage voluntary uptake… using means such as public education campaigns and free vaccination.” Health officials have been hard at work conducting focus groups on which variety of “influencers” might best convince the American people to embrace what would be the quickest vaccine rollout in history (the standard timetable for vaccine development and approval, complete with post-shot monitoring for side effects, is 10 years or more) and what kind of emotional tone the message should take.
A Yale University study conducted in July evaluated messaging strategies including guilt, economic benefit, trust in science, embarrassment, and community benefit to measure the effects on not only confidence in the vaccine itself but how willing the participants were to persuade others to take the shot – and how much they feared or looked down on those who had not received it. The results of that study have not been published.
The authors of the NEJM paper hail from Yale, Stanford University, and Indiana University, all institutions that have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has poured billions of dollars into developing multiple Covid-19 vaccines, setting up seven facilities to manufacture the leading candidates. While the US, UK, and several other countries have already paid for hundreds of millions of doses of multiple jabs, no western pharmaceutical company has yet declared victory in the vaccine race – on the contrary, the clinical trials of frontrunners like AstraZeneca and Moderna have yielded a bumper crop of troubling side effects.
Fears about the rushed rollout of the vaccine coupled with both Republicans and Democrats’ determination to turn the jab into a political football have convinced a majority of Americans that they don’t want to be among the first to get vaccinated. A poll conducted earlier this month suggested less than half the country would take the shot, even if they were paid $100, and polling shows the portion of Americans willing to take it has declined steadily since May.
The UN Ignores NGO’s Warnings About Mandated Vaccines
Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Inc. | August 20, 2020
Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Inc. is an NGO in Special Consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) New York / Geneva / Vienna / Addis Ababa
Vaccine Mandates Violate the Right to Informed Consent
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared pandemic status for COVID-19, the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Governments responded by implementing unprecedented “lockdown” measures globally with no clear exit strategy apart from the stated goal of rapidly developing a vaccine. Concurrently, advocates of this hypothetical solution have called for lawmakers to make COVID-19 vaccinations compulsory.
However, compulsory vaccination violates the right to informed consent, one of the most fundamental ethics in medicine and a human right recognized under international law, including the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights of 2005, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol of 2006 and under internationally recognized agreements such as the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects of 2002, and the World Medical Association Declaration Of Helsinki of 1964, revised in 2013.
The United Nations (UN) and WHO are legally obligated to uphold the right to informed consent yet have instead been complicit in violating it.
For example, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) praised the Maldives government for passing a law in November 2019 that effectively outlawed the exercise of the right to informed consent by threatening parents with prosecution for non-compliance with public vaccine policy.
In January 2020, two articles in The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal ) revealed that the WHO had been sponsoring a malaria vaccine trial that included 720,000 children in three African countries without having ensured that the prior informed consent of the parents had been obtained. Most egregiously, parents had not been informed that earlier trials had found the vaccine to be associated with an increased risk of childhood mortality, particularly among girls.
WHO also promotes the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine in global vaccination campaigns, despite the best available scientific evidence showing it to be associated with an increased rate of childhood mortality. While the vaccine may protect against the target diseases, it appears to detrimentally affect the immune system in a way that makes children more vulnerable to other diseases. This “non-specific effect” has been found to be true for non-live vaccine generally
WHO is aware of the evidence, but has dismissed it on the grounds that it comes from observational studies, which are prone to selection bias. However, WHO accepts the findings of observational studies showing beneficial non-specific effects of measles vaccination.
Additionally, the members of the WHO committee tasked with reviewing the evidence had conflicts of interest, including three having ties to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the manufacturers of DTP vaccines and the manufacturer of the experimental malaria vaccine.
WHO also receives funding from vaccine manufacturers, including GSK, Sanofi, and Merck. The single largest source of funding for WHO presently is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which promotes vaccines while holding investments in vaccine manufacturers including GSK, Sanofi, and Merck.
The public is repeatedly assured by public health officials and the media that “vaccines are safe and effective”, but in the absence of randomized placebo-controlled trials comparing long-term health outcomes, including mortality, between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, that statement is not justifiable. Vaccines do not undergo such trials before licensing. Nor are whole vaccine schedules studied for safety. With respect to the routine childhood vaccine schedule recommended by the United States of America (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Institute of Medicine in 2013 observed that “studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.”
There are many legitimate concerns about vaccines in addition to their non-specific effects. Policymakers do not consider the opportunity costs of vaccination, such as the superiority of immunity acquired naturally compared to that conferred by vaccination.
For example, studies have found that having a flu shot annually could increase the risk of infection with novel influenza strains, as well as with non-influenza viruses, in part due to the lost opportunity to acquire the cross-protective, cell-mediated immunity conferred by infection.
A complementary hypothesis is the phenomenon of “original antigenic sin”, whereby the first experience of the immune system with an antigen determines future responses. Priming the immune system with antigen components of the influenza vaccine could potentially cause a mismatched antibody response to strains that the vaccine is not designed to protect against, thereby increasing the risk of infection as compared to an immune response in which naive T and B cells are instructed to fight off the infecting virus.
This phenomenon might help explain an increased risk of serious dengue infection among Filipino children who received the dengue vaccine and who had not already experienced a prior infection. This finding led the Philippines to the withdrawal of the vaccine, which the government had implemented into its childhood schedule upon the recommendation of WHO, despite earlier data having indicated that the vaccine might cause precisely that outcome.
A related hypothesis is that of “antibody dependent enhancement” (ADE), whereby vaccine-induced antibodies, instead of protecting the individual from subsequent infection, enhance the infection and thereby increase the risk of severe disease.
Attempts to develop a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS) were impeded by this phenomenon, whereby vaccinated animals were found to be at increased risk of viral infection. This past experience has raised concerns about the potential for ADE with vaccines under development for SARS-CoV-2.
As another example of opportunity cost, surviving measles is associated with a reduced rate of all-cause mortality in children, and this survival benefit appears to more than offset measles deaths in populations with a low mortality rate from acute measles infection.
Additionally, measles infection has been observed to cause regression of cancer in children and has been associated with a decreased risk of numerous diseases later in life, including degenerative bone disease, certain tumours, Parkinson’s disease, allergic disease, chronic lymphoid leukaemia, both non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Hodgkin lymphoma, and cardiovascular disease.
Other infections have also been associated with health benefits, such as a reduced risk of leukaemia among children who experience Haemophilus influenzae type b infection during early childhood.
There is also the potential for mass vaccination to put evolutionary pressure on pathogens, as has been seen with the diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, and the emergence of pertussis strains lacking pertactin, a key antigen component of the vaccine. According to CDC, such strains “may have a selective advantage in infecting DTaPvaccinated persons.”
Population effects of vaccination must be considered in addition to their effects on individuals. Data suggest that the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine has not been cost-effective but has rather increased health care costs due to the inferiority of vaccine-conferred immunity. This is because mass vaccination appears to have shifted the risk burden away from children, in whom it is generally a benign illness, and onto adolescents and adults, who are at greater risk of complications. Due to the loss of immunologic boosting from repeated exposures, elderly people who had chicken pox as children are at greater risk of shingles. But rather than reconsider existing recommendations, policymakers respond to this problem by recommending a shingles vaccine for the elderly
In the US, many parents are concerned that manufacturers of vaccines recommended by CDC for routine use in childhood enjoy legal immunity from injury lawsuits because this represents a disincentive to pharmaceutical companies in terms of developing safer and more effective means of disease prevention. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) of the US government effectively shifts the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the industry and onto taxpaying consumers.
Another major problem is that policymakers treat vaccination as a one-size-fits-all solution to disease prevention, when the science is unequivocal in establishing that a risk-benefit analysis must be carried out for each vaccine and each individual. Not everyone is at the same risk from the target disease, and not everyone is at the same risk of harm from the vaccine.
For example, children with a mitochondrial disorder may be at increased risk of vaccine injury. In one case adjudicated under the VICP, the US government acknowledged that vaccinations can cause brain damage manifesting as symptoms of autism.
In a 2018 interview, the director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office acknowledged the possibility that vaccines could cause autism in genetically susceptible children but stated that it was “hard to predict who those children might be.”
Legislators do not have the specialized knowledge required to conduct the necessary risk/benefit analysis of the individual. Only the individual, or in the case of a child, the parents, possess that knowledge.
All vaccines carry risks. Compulsory vaccination constitutes a gross violation of the right to informed consent. Governments urgently need to orient health policies towards protecting rather than violating this human right.
Download original report here…
Mexico finally orders arrest of soldiers in mysterious case of 43 missing students
Press TV – September 27, 2020
On the sixth anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of 43 Mexican college students, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has issued dozens of arrest warrants for soldiers, who are suspected of involvement in their still un-resolved abduction from a teacher’s college in the state of Guerrero.
Lopez Obrador announced the arrest warrants at an event with parents of the missing students on Saturday.
“Orders have been issued for the arrest of the military personnel,” he said. “Zero impunity —those proven to have participated will be judged.”
Gomez Trejo, the prosecutor leading the investigation into the case, said in a separate statement that 25 arrest warrants had been issued for the “material and intellectual authors” of the crime, including military members, and federal and municipal police.
They are accused of carrying out or knowing about the students’ disappearance that had happened on September 26, 2014, near a large army base in the city of Iguala, Guerrero.
The highest-ranking official in the case, Tomas Zeron who at the time of the incident was the head of the federal investigation agency, is accused of torture and covering up forced disappearances.
The students who had commandeered public busses to travel to a protest, disappeared in the state of Guerrero.
The former administration had concluded that authorities took the students for members of a rival gang and killed them before incinerating their bodies at a garbage dump and tossing the remains in a river.
The remains of only two of the students have been identified so far.
Current Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero, however, said he believed there had been a “generalized cover-up” that led to further arbitrary arrests and torture.
Relatives of the students as well as independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights also rejected the report as faulty.
They have continued to demand answers as independent investigations have shown the military was aware of what happened to the victims.
The kidnapping of the students, who were training to be teachers, sent shockwaves across Mexico and became a symbol of police violence and corruption that has plague the North American country.
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“Democratic Institutions?” – 10 Lessons from history that will destroy your trust in the CIA
By Kit | OffGuardian | July 20, 2018
… At every corner, we are urged to simply believe what we are told. Whether it is about believing Porton Down and MI6 about “novichok”, or believing the White Helmets about Sarin, or believing the FBI about “collusion”, we are presented with no facts, just assertions from authority. Those who question those assertions are deemed “bots” at best or “traitors” at worst.
Well here, fellow traitors, are the Top Ten reasons to question anything and everything the CIA – or any intelligence agency – has ever told you. … Read full article
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