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No Vaccine for Tyranny

By Ron Paul | November 2, 2020

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO ‘s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!

Slaoui is just the latest “expert” to endorse forcing the American people to relinquish their few remaining scraps of privacy to stop coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have urged development of a digital certificate for those vaccinated for coronavirus. People without the certificate would find their liberty severely restricted.

Those who think that the new surveillance system will be limited to coronavirus should remember that Social Security numbers were only supposed to be used to administer the Social Security program. They should also consider that the PATRIOT Act’s expansion of warrantless wiretapping was supposed to be limited to stopping terrorists. However, these powers have been used for a wide variety of purposes. Whenever government is given power to abuse our rights for one reason it will inevitably use that power to abuse our rights for other reasons as well.

Fauci and Gates’ digital certificate could, and likely will, be expanded to include proof individuals have received a variety of other vaccines and medical treatments. The digital certificate could even extend to monitoring a person’s lifestyle choices on the grounds that unhealthy habits make one more susceptible to diseases.

The digital certificate could also be tied to the REAL ID program to deny individuals who have not been vaccinated the right to travel. It could also be combined with a future mandatory E-Verify system to deny unvaccinated individuals the right to hold a job. Those who consider this “paranoia” should consider Britain is already developing a covid passport.

Liberty lost in the “war on covid” will not be voluntarily returned when the coronavirus threat ends — assuming the government ever stops moving the goal posts and declares the coronavirus threat is over. Instead, the people must be prepared to take back their liberty from the politicians. Fortunately, we still have the ability to do so by the peaceful means of educating our fellow citizens and pressuring our elected officials to reverse course. We must all do what we can to use these peaceful tools before we are in a “dark winter” of authoritarianism.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.

November 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

New Lockdowns Announced in UK

By Samuel May | OffGuardian | November 1, 2020

So, during ‘Prime Minister’s statement on coronavirus, 31 October 2020’, the usual trio of Johnson, Whitty and Vallance ‘did their thing’ once again, and sold us a lie.

We were shown some graph projections, made by the same people who were wrong in all their previous graph projections and which lacked any context whatsoever (like, for instance, what did last autumn’s hospital admissions look like by comparison?).

Yet these graphs were nevertheless unanimously and alarmingly clear, apparently: We’re all terribly, terribly at risk from the RONA, don’t you know, and we need a further 4 weeks of lockdown.

Johnson said:

From Thursday until the start of December, you must stay at home.

Although initially sold as ‘time-limited’, Michael Gove has already announced this will be extended if their computer models happen to show the mythical ‘R’ rating hasn’t gone down far enough.

So, consider yourselves primed.

Johnson described this latest lockdown as “less prohibitive and less restrictive” than April/March, although even the most lay of laymen will be acutely aware by now of what the true repercussions of this lockdown will be.

This lockdown will further widen the rich/poor divide, further depress the UK economy by shutting down ‘non-essential’ businesses etc., further isolate the young, needy and vulnerable and further cheapen the lives of the very elderly people whose wellbeing has endlessly and hypocritically been used to justify this evil charade.

Johnson said:

And even if I could now double [hospital] capacity overnight – and obviously I am proud that we have massively increased capacity, we do have the Nightingales, we’ve got 13,000 more nurses now than last year, we have many more doctors – but it still would not be enough, because the virus is doubling faster than we could conceivably add capacity.

So you see, anything that could possibly have been done would never have been enough. They know this. That’s probably the only reason they didn’t massively boost the NHS during the quiet summer months, despite the fact they’ve been warning of a possible resurgence for ages. You aren’t being conned here. We need to be very clear on that point. Move along now.

Oh…. and the army will be on our streets this time, testing lots and lots of people. Won’t that be nice. Johnson stated (our emphasis):

“… over the next few days and weeks, we plan a steady but massive expansion in the deployment of these quick turnaround tests.

Applying them in an ever-growing number of situations

From helping women to have their partners with them in labour wards when they’re giving birth to testing whole towns and even whole cities

The army has been brought in to work on the logistics and the programme will begin in a matter of days.

Working with local communities, local government, public health directors and organisations of all kinds to help people discover whether or not they are infectious, and then immediately to get them to self-isolate and to stop the spread”

You may remember we warned this was looming back in early October, when MP and 77th Brigade reserve officer Tobias Ellwood stood up in Parliament to request greater military involvement. It seems he was listened to. Or, at least, he popped up to ask a convenient question and plug a narrative hole at an opportune time.

Throughout this Number Ten briefing, Johnson/Vallance/Whitty seemed a bit nonchalant this time around, as they condescended to inform the unwashed masses of their fate. Or perhaps they were overcompensating, for there was a certain tenseness about their eyes, as of someone placing a powerful mousetrap behind a wardrobe…

November 1, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Entire social media is dominated by Zionists

By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | October 30, 2020

Instagram apparently has now unblocked the Supreme Leader of Iran’s account on Instagram after having blocked it due to the Supreme Leader speaking out about the censorship controversy in France.

It’s ironic, of course, that social media would be censoring people who speak out about a censorship controversy. But that’s where we are now in the Zionist-occupied West. You’re not even allowed to raise the topic of being censored. If you are censored and then you complain about being censored on a sensitive topic, they will censor your complaint, and nobody will ever even hear that you’ve been censored or what your argument is about it.

And this, in particular, seems to be the case with anybody who asks why it is that in a country like France, the leadership, namely Macron, seems to believe that it’s freedom of expression when you obscenely or pornographically incite violence by blaspheming and slandering and libeling a revered religious figure, in this case, the Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him. But it’s okay to imprison people and ruin their lives if they very calmly and compassionately and in a scholarly and academic manner question some of the victors’ history of World War Two.

Even raising this issue gets people censored. And it just happened to the Supreme Leader. And of course this is one reason that Press TV and other Iranian outlets, among many other world outlets, have been censored throughout social media. The entire social media is either owned or dominated by Zionists, as is the mainstream corporate media.

They don’t want anybody raising this gross contradiction in public. And the fact is that the reason that they won’t let you talk about this, just like the reason they won’t let you talk about World War Two victors’ history, is that the victors always write the history of every war and they always lie and they always exaggerate the crimes of their enemies and downplay their own crimes.

So the revisionists will probably win the argument. Those of us who’ve actually done some reading on the pros and cons of the World War II revisionist case—almost everybody who actually sits down and reads the books—ends up realizing that the revisionists are probably right about at least some of their claims. And that’s the reason we’re not allowed to talk about it. Because if this were debated freely and openly in a scholarly manner the revisionists would win, and the fundamentalist religion of Holocaust worship would disappear.

So, in France, we’ve got a censorship campaign censoring people who argue in a scholarly manner, but they protect “freedom of speech”—la liberté—of the people who blaspheme and use obscenity, pornography, libel, and incitement.

Now, this is exactly the opposite of the American First Amendment position. Here in the United States, we have a very well-developed jurisprudence of free speech under our First Amendment. And that jurisprudence has largely concluded that all serious arguments with social value are protected, but there are exceptions, including blasphemy, pornography, libel, and incitement.

The Zionists have managed to roll back some of that, and now some say that Zionist Supreme Court decisions have made pornography a protected category of speech. This is disgusting and insane. Blasphemy, obscenity, pornography, libel, and incitement are not protected speech and never will be. But apparently, in the Zionist world, those kinds of speech are the ones that you protect, while thoughtful academic scholarly speech investigating victors’ history and finding that it’s wrong deserves censorship. And the people, the scholars, and the historians who engage in that speech are routinely physically attacked, hospitalized, thrown in prison, their lives are ruined, all their books are suppressed. That’s freedom in the West today.

Dr. Kevin Barrett is an American author, journalist and radio host with a Ph.D. in Islamic and Arabic Studies. He has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003.

October 31, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

A Collection of Bovardian Epigrams

By James Bovard – Mises.org – 10/29/2020

Election Day can be the longest day of the year. Especially if the presidential race remains undecided late into the evening, neither Xanax nor vodka may be enough to kill the pain. In lieu of other sedatives, following are some cheerful lines which might blunt the impact of the prattling on CNN or MSNBC, though there is no known antidote to PBS’s piety.

Voting

  • The most dangerous political illusion is that votes limit politicians’ power.
  • Nowadays, we have elections in lieu of freedom.
  • The defects in any system of choosing rulers outweigh the risks of letting people run their own lives.
  • People are entitled to far more information when testing baldness cures than when casting votes that could lead to war.
  • What’s the point of voting if “government under the law” is not a choice on Election Day?
  • Having a vote does nothing to prevent a person from being molested by the TSA, spied on by the NSA, or harassed by the IRS.
  • Politicians are increasingly dividing Americans into two classes—those who work for a living and those who vote for a living.
  • Voting for lesser evils makes Washington no less odious.
  • Politicians have mandated warning labels for almost everything except voting booths.
  • On Election Day, Americans are more likely to be deluded by their own government than by foreigners.
  • Politicians talk as if voting magically protects the rights of everyone within a fifty-mile radius of the polling booth.
  • Political consent is defined these days as rape was defined a generation or two ago: people consent to anything which they do not forcibly resist.

Democracy

  • Modern democracy pretends that people can control what they do not understand.
  • We have a drive-by democracy where politicians wave to voters every few years and otherwise do as they please.
  • The more power politicians capture, the more illusory democracy becomes.
  • A democratic government that respects no limits on its own power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect.
  • The surest effect of exalting democracy is to make it easier for politicians to drag everyone else down.
  • The Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But democracy also dies from too many Iron Fists.
  • The phrases which consecrate democracy seep into Americans’ minds like buried hazardous waste.
  • Rather than a democracy, we increasingly have an elective dictatorship. Voters merely designate who will violate the laws and the Constitution.
  • Democracy unleashes the State in the name of the people.
  • The more that democracy is presumed to be inevitable, the more likely it will self-destruct.
  • America is now an Attention Deficit Democracy where citizens’ ignorance and apathy entitle politicians to do as they damn well please.
  • Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
  • Americans now embrace the same myths about democracy that downtrodden European peasants formerly swallowed about monarchy.
  • Instead of revealing the “will of the people,” election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions.
  • Nothing happens after Election Day to make politicians less venal.

Lying

  • A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.
  • America is increasingly a “Garbage In, Garbage Out” democracy. Politicians dupe citizens and then invoke deluded votes to stretch their power.
  • Promising to “speak truth to power” is the favorite vow in the most deceitful city in America.
  • Truth delayed is truth defused.
  •  A successful politician is often merely someone who bamboozled more voters than the other liar running for office.
  • The biggest election frauds usually occur before the voting booths open.
  • Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer’s patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn’t matter what untruths the people are fed because they will quickly forget.
  • When people blindly trust politicians, the biggest liars win.
  • Secrecy and lying are often two sides of the same political coin.
  • The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits, and the more lies it must tell.

Government et Cetera

  • America is rapidly becoming a two-tier society: those whom the law fails to restrain, and those whom the law fails to protect.
  • Idealism these days is often only positive thinking about growing servitude.
  • It is naïve to expect governments to descend step-by-step into barbarism—as if there is a train schedule to political hell with easy exits along the way.
  • The first duty of today’s citizen is to assume the best of government, while federal agents assume the worst of him.
  • America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.
  • Every recent American commander in chief has expanded and exploited the dictatorial potential of the presidency.
  • Many people reason about political power like sheep who ignore the wolf until they feel its teeth.
  • Political saviors almost always cost more than they deliver.
  • There is no such thing as retroactive self-government.
  • The arrogance of power is the best hope for the survival of freedom.
  • Washingtonians view individual freedom like an ancient superstition they must pretend to respect.
  • Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their sway.
  • Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom.
  • The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States in which no asset or right is safe from marauding politicians.
  • P.T. Barnum may have been thinking of Washington journalists when he said there’s a sucker born every minute.

October 30, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

After the Virus: The World of 2025 – #PropagandaWatch

Corbett • 10/30/2020

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

What will the world look like in 2025? Don’t worry, you don’t have to think about the world you want and then work to bring it about. That’s silly! Just listen to the good Bilderbergers at Cognizant, who are more than happy to tell you about the new police state on steroids that is about to be erected to fight the invisible enemy of coronavirus . . . and how you can cash in on the opportunity!!!

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES
Episode 387 – Your Guide to The Great Reset

After the Virus: A Discussion Looking Back on the Next 5 Years (video)

After the Virus (whitepaper)

Episode 383 – COVID-911: From Homeland Security to Biosecurity

October 30, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Soviet-style thought-policing has come to America, outsourced to Big Tech corporations

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | October 29, 2020

Social media were supposed to democratize speech, liberating the people of the world from the tyranny of gatekeepers. They failed. Seduced by vanity and ideology, they’ve become censors themselves, a Soviet-style thought police.

Once upon a time, Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” Facebook was all about connecting people, and Twitter executives proclaimed it the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Fast-forward to 2020, and they’re all about ‘deplatforming’ voices the legacy media and the political establishment has denounced as unworthy of being heard.

“Who the hell elected you?” thundered Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during Wednesday’s hearing, expressing frustration over the platform’s crackdown on a story about a major political scandal. In attempting to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s dubious business dealings, Twitter has locked the account of America’s oldest publishing newspaper, and even gone after White House officials and members of Congress.

Yet anyone who didn’t see this coming in the months after the 2016 US election simply hasn’t been paying attention. The greatest irony is that Cruz and his fellow Republicans enabled it themselves, partly by preferring sound bites over legislative action, but also by validating the ‘Russian meddling’ conspiracy theories peddled by their political opponents in an effort to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump.

Make no mistake, ‘Russiagate’ is how Big Tech was pushed onto the path of censorship. By way of just one example, the Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ was used to bludgeon Facebook into hiring censors and partnering with outside ‘fact-checkers’. When it eventually turned out there had been no scandal and the whole thing was a manufactured outrage by self-serving ‘whistleblowers’ and the media… there wasn’t so much as an apology, and the mechanisms stayed in place.

Silicon Valley has been more than eager to go down that path, too. Public records show the vast majority of their employees donate to Democrats, while their executives have poured millions into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden this year.

Nobody needed to pressure Google into embracing the role of the ‘good censor’, its executives and employees did so themselves. Not surprisingly, the president of their parent company at the time, Eric Schmidt, had been fully invested in Clinton’s campaign.

It took a mere suggestion of a crackdown by an influential Senate Democrat for Twitter to ban all RT advertising and overhaul its entire advertising policy, back in October 2017. Not surprisingly, the proposal by Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) went nowhere, but its purpose had been accomplished.

Like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled, the pressure to censor ‘objectionable’ content steadily rose over the course of the Trump presidency. It marched on regardless of the revelations that ‘Russiagate’ was a scam and that the real ‘collusion’ was between the spies, police, prosecutors, media, and the political establishment.

Things almost boiled over when the platforms started deleting any mention of the alleged ‘whistleblower’ who kick-started the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings against Trump – even those made by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).

The Covid-19 pandemic the very next month saw an expansive effort to ban ‘misinformation’ about the virus – meaning anything not coming from ‘authorities’, even as those very authorities kept changing their line over time! That was probably when the ‘frog’ first began noticing the boiling water.

By then, however, Twitter had begun openly censoring Trump this spring. Condemning riots? “Glorifying violence,” restricted. Putting rioters on notice they can’t set up a lawless “autonomous zone” in Washington, DC? “Abusive behavior, threatening harm,” restricted.

Oh, granted, the same insane standard was later applied to a metaphorical statement by a self-identified socialist, but whether that was the exception that proves the rule or an effort to ‘both sides’ the issue, at the end of the day, Twitter had appointed itself arbiter of acceptable speech – and that was the point.

How can this happen in a country where free speech is the very first enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights? Because, as both Democrats and libertarian-minded NeverTrump Republicans have been quick to argue, the First Amendment applies only to the government, not to private companies! This is manifestly absurd, but hasn’t been challenged in the courts just yet.

This sophistry has enabled the champions of corporate thought-policing to argue that technically, the US doesn’t have the kind of censorship of word and thought once attributed to the Soviet Union. Because it has Big Tech, it doesn’t have to! Meanwhile, some lawmakers certainly aren’t shy about demanding for more censorship, either.

If you think the comparisons to the KGB or the Stasi are too much, note Twitter’s insistence that the New York Post – founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 – needs to delete the “offending” tweet [linking to the Hunter Biden emails] before its account can be unlocked, but it will supposedly be free to repost it then, because the rules have since changed.

In order to truly work, submission must be voluntary. That’s why Americans still file their tax returns, even though the IRS has been withholding taxes from their wages since the Second World War. That is why in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith couldn’t just be broken – he had to love Big Brother. That is why Twitter forces you to bend the knee before they will allow you to speak.

What started as anyone’s ability to compete with the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN on equal footing has morphed into the neutral ‘platform’ choosing to promote their non-stories while shutting down legitimate lines of thought and inquiry under the guise of ‘protecting our democracy’ and fighting (phantom) ‘Russian disinformation’.

So Twitter is basically everything they claim Russia is: They’re manipulating what information people see to try to influence the election.

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) October 28, 2020

It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. But it will take more than just strong words to make speech in America free again.

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

October 30, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Trump is really a 3rd Party candidate, taking the first axe to the two-party US dictatorship in 170 years

By Robert Bridge | RT | October 29, 2020

Washington despises Trump because he’s an outsider – a third-party gatecrasher – who has upset the duopoly that has had a stranglehold on American politics, and they’re doing everything they can to stop him doing it again.

The meteoric rise of Donald Trump defies the law of US political gravity in that he has elevated himself inside of a rigidly controlled two-party system while going against the interests of the establishment. That is a remarkable accomplishment, and no other modern politician – aside from perhaps John F. Kennedy – has made it this far in Washington by promising to drain the very swamp it sits upon. The Manhattan real estate magnate has essentially become a third-party tour de force, the ultimate bugbear of the powers that be.

Trump is no fool and understood early in the game that there is a veritable army of burly gatekeepers in Washington, standing guard against the threat of third-party provocateurs. In fact, one of the largest gatekeepers is none other than the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a non-profit third-party terminator that is actually sponsored by the Democratic and Republican parties. So when people complain that the Democrats and Republicans are two heads of the same poisonous snake, they are right. This organization is so powerful that it barred the highly popular Ross Perot from appearing on the debate stage in the 1996 presidential campaign alongside Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole.

A buried footnote with regards to Trump’s political career is that he made his first serious foray into the swamp as the presidential nominee in Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 2000 elections. When those efforts fizzled out, Trump, aware that the road to the White House via a third-party platform was largely inaccessible, began to weigh his chances at running for the presidency on the Republican ticket. Not a bad idea considering that the last time a president was elected in the US who did not identify as either a Democrat or Republican was in 1848, with the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor. At the time, however, much of Washington wrote off the tycoon’s dream as a bad joke; the egoistic yearnings of a billionaire who thinks the White House is just another real estate venture.

But Capitol Hill seriously underestimated both the dark mood that had descended upon the nation, as well as Trump’s ability to capitalize on it. With an uncanny gift for electrifying audiences wherever he went, people no longer laughed at his political ambitions. Eventually, Trump went on to do what the polls said was virtually impossible – he defeated the veteran Washington insider, Hillary Clinton, becoming the 45th president of the US. At this point, Trump the ultimate interloper began to use the Republican Party as his own personal Trojan horse to enact radical changes that could not have been achieved otherwise.

For example, despite Washington’s bipartisan love affair with overseas entanglements, Trump held back the dogs of war. He has given the US military arguably its longest break from the battlefield in living memory. That’s not to say that Uncle Sam has suddenly morphed into a marijuana-smoking peacenik under Trump, not at all. In fact, future historians may ultimately blame Trump, the consummate businessman, for selling massive amounts of military hardware to foreign states – like Saudi Arabia, and former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe – that lead to some catastrophic conflict down the road. And who could forget Trump’s crass “we’re keeping the oil” comment with regards to America’s so-called withdrawal from Syria, or the harmful sanctions that have been slapped against Iran?

Meanwhile, Trump has carried out other controversial initiatives, like plugging the gaping hole in the US-Mexico border. Republicans were always content to ignore the massive influx of illegal migrants from South America, so long as it meant cheap labor, while the Democrats found it a great way to capture future voters. Not until a ‘third-party’ solution came along, courtesy of Donald Trump, did the gates begin to close on the “invasion.”

Perhaps Trump’s most ambitious ‘third-party’ project to date has been to take America’s long-ailing industrial sector off of life support. Unfortunately, this program, built around Trump’s pledge to ‘Make America Great Again’, has taken relations with China to the brink. Accusing the People’s Republic of engaging in “unfair trade practices,” the Republican leader took a protectionist position by imposing a number of tariffs and trade barriers, which has naturally triggered a tough response from Beijing. While opinion is split on the matter, a number of analysts agree that the US had been at a severe disadvantage in trade with China and the change Trump fought for was necessary.

Whether or not people agree with Trump’s actions isn’t really the point. The point is that issues that were being ignored by the Democrats and the Republicans, and rarely discussed by the mainstream media, only got attention after a Washington outsider bulldozed his way onto the political scene on behalf of millions of voters. And for all of his efforts, Donald Trump has been one of the most harassed US presidents, suffering a three-year ‘Russiagate’ investigation, as well as impeachment, while still holding onto office with new elections just days away.

In some ways Trump’s political rise was a fluke, unlikely to be duplicated anytime soon. The mainstream media and Big Tech are doing absolutely everything in their power to prevent a second term for the populist. They have even taken the unprecedented step of blocking explosive news on his competitor, Joe Biden, from being seen or shared by the public.‘Once bitten twice shy’, as the expression goes, and the Washington gatekeepers will do everything to block any Donald Trumps and their third-party ideas from storming the scene in the future.

That is very bad news for the US political system, which will continue to be held hostage by the same two parties, with little chance for any winds of change reaching the inner sanctum of power. Trump may very well be the last blast of fresh air in Washington for a long time, and Americans should enjoy the change while they can.

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge

October 29, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | | Leave a comment

Bolivia’s former ‘interim president’ and coup government ministers could face trial over 2019 crackdown on protesters

RT | October 27, 2020

The Bolivian parliament has approved a resolution demanding a criminal case be opened against the nation’s former interim president Jeanine Anez and some of the ministers in her government over their 2019 crackdowns on protests.

The motion says Anez must stand trial over a decree authorizing the army to use force against the protesters back in November 2019, and exempting the military from any criminal responsibility as well as for what was called “massacres” in the cities of Cochabamba and El Alto.

Anez and her government had just ousted President Evo Morales in a coup, and deployed the security forces in a violent crackdown on his supporters. The law enforcement and the military fired live rounds at the demonstrators on several occasions.

At least 37 people died in clashes with the soldiers and riot police officers, according to local media reports. Police and army were even reported to have assaulted processions of mourners carrying coffins of those killed in previous demonstrations.

In addition to Anez herself, seven ministers from her government also face various charges that include corruption and illegal purchase of non-lethal weapons. The list of those that could stand trial involves Foreign Minister Karen Longaric, Defense Minister Fernando Lopez, and Justice Minister Alvaro Coimbra.

Upon learning of the parliament’s decision, Anez rushed to Twitter to declare it an example of political persecution.

“MAS [Movement Towards Socialism party] is returning to its habit of prosecuting those who think differently,” she wrote, even though it was her own government that was accused by Human Rights Watch of persecuting its political opponents.

Anez came to power after Morales, who had ruled the country for some 14 years, resigned under pressure from the military. The November 2019 coup came following massive protests led by the opposition supporters of the former Bolivian president, Carlos Mesa, who insisted that the October elections that handed victory to Morales had been rigged.

As Morales resigned and fled, first to Mexico and then to Argentina, Anez declared herself “interim president,” even though she lacked a quorum in the Senate to get a confirmation.

Earlier this month, MAS leader Luis Arce won the presidential election in a landslide. Anez herself had withdrawn from the running after polls showed her with just ten percent of popular support.

October 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Some questions about “the new normal”

By Richard Hugus | October 24, 2020

Dear Editor, Cape Cod Times :

According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health*, on October 22, 2020 only 1 person diagnosed with Covid 19 was counted as “hospitalized” and  0 were counted in the ICU at Falmouth Hospital. The count at Cape Cod Hospital in these categories was 0 and 0. Falmouth has a population of about 30,000 people. The population of Cape Cod is about 212,000.

Some questions:

Should 212,000 people be required to wear face masks and maintain a distance of six feet from everyone else when just one person is in the hospital?

Should small businesses Capewide be forced into onerous restrictions and widespread closings?

Should students be kept out of school and forced into “virtual” education via computer screen? For that matter, should students be denied an education altogether, or workers be denied employment, if they refuse to get the flu shot that has been mandated in Massachusetts in order to keep the case load (of 1, in this case) in hospitals down?

Should the healthy be required to quarantine when such measures have never been taken before?

Should our right to assemble be curtailed?

Do public health officials, or does anyone, have a right to limit our right of assembly? Or our right to travel?

Should children in day care centers be required to wear masks, and learn at the beginning of their lives that not being able to see other kids’ faces is normal?

Does oxygen deprivation from wearing masks make sense?

Is it right to make people so afraid of the virus that they fear getting medical attention for other illnesses?

Is it acceptable to see young people committing suicide in greater numbers because of the dark world the virus scare has ushered in?

If there was a raging virus, would masks make even a bit of difference?

Are masks a preparation for vaccines which we will also have no choice about?

Does the pharmaceutical industry perhaps have a profit motive in seeing vaccines mandated? Does that industry perhaps have undue influence at WHO and the CDC?

Whatever Covid may once have been, it now looks a lot like a political agenda masquerading as a health crisis. Too many things just don’t make sense. It’s time to say no to whatever and whoever is driving this agenda.

—————

* See 10:50 mark of video presentation

Resources

October 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent

Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.

By Raul Diego | MintPress News | October 27, 2020

Days away from the most polarized electoral contest in American history, social media companies like Facebook have vowed to censor any voices which they and their partners in the federal government consider inconvenient. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is ready to implement election information strategies that have been in the works for years.

Company spokesman Andy Stone told the WSJ that the social media giant will be applying the “lessons” learned from previous elections in accordance with the designs of “hired experts” and vague references to “new teams,” who are leveraging their “experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s de facto monopoly over online peer-to-peer communication tools has given Facebook an inordinate amount of influence over the political narratives at both national and regional levels, which it has shown a willingness exercise with topics like the Philippines and Palestine.

Last week, the company took a major step in solidifying its grip over the content purveyed on its platform with the official launch of the Facebook Oversight board. A body that is to function like a ‘Supreme Court’ for chat rooms, if you will, with the power to review any decisions regarding post removals or deplatforming and to make policy recommendations. Members have been drawn from “law experts… rights advocates” and journalists from around the world. The oversight board currently boasts 20 members.

Four members – two of which have extensive experience in the U.S. judicial system – serve as the board’s co-chairs and were handpicked by Facebook, according to The Guardian. Other board members include former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is also a co-chair and is perhaps only remembered outside of Denmark for her selfie faux pas at Mandela’s funeral in 2013 when she was photographed taking a group photo with Barack Obama and David Cameron during the commemoration.

Judges of little character

Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.

Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.

Palmor posing with Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016. Photo | Israeli Government Press Office

Inviting a literal state censor from a country with such an atrocious record of oppression and overt ethnic cleansing policies to serve in a supervisory role at one of the largest content networks in the world, should be reason enough for concern. Perhaps, even reason enough to call for the board’s dissolution given that such an egregious choice of personnel reveals an unacceptable political bias in an ostensibly impartial quasi-judicial body.

A clear agenda

A look at the other co-chairs on the oversight board leaves no doubt as to which interests Facebook intends to further through its sham social media traffic court. It might not be a surprise to learn that an American company would tap American legal minds to form part of a dispute resolution body, as Jamal Greene, an oversight board co-chair, describes it.

Greene is a Dwight Professor of Law Columbia Law School who served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris during the highly-controversial Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prior to this, he was a law clerk for late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 1997 Internet decency controls decision that shot down legislation that sought to regulate online speech. An auspicious sign, perhaps, but tempered by Steven’s own pragmatist views on free speech, leaving the door open to context when protecting the “public interest” surrounding the first amendment.

Sitting alongside Greene and Helle Thorning-Schmidt on the oversight board’s co-chairmanship is Michael McConnell; a constitutional law scholar who served seven years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit court. McConnell wrote the dissenting opinion in the seminal “Ten Commandments” case, which centered around the government’s authority to decide which monuments can be erected in a public park.

Judge McConnell, who has been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee more than once and is “highly regarded for his writing on church-state law,” argued in favor of the government’s discretionary powers, claiming that private donations to public facilities – like the ten commandments monument in a public park in Utah, that spurred the case – became “government speech” and, therefore within the purview of governmental authority.

Rounding out the co-chair suite is Catalina Botero Marino, a Colombian attorney and former special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Organization of American States (OAS); an organization well-known for being Washington’s mouthpiece for D.C.-aligned policy in Latin America.

Botero expressed her position on the very topic she will be dealing with first-hand in her new position as co-chair of the Facebook oversight board in a 2019 paper titled “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: standards, contexts, and lessons from the Inter-American Human Rights System.” In it, Botero reveals why she was tapped to join the make-shift panel of social media judges when she defines freedom of expression as “individual and collective self-government” and highlights her “utmost concern” over the “deliberately false circulation of information, created and put into circulation with the purpose of deceiving the public” in electoral processes.

Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.

October 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter: Double Standards & Advertising

Twitter earns billions from advertising. But restricts Trump tweets on the grounds they might mislead.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 28, 2020

Censorship by big tech companies is a growing problem. On Monday, a week prior to a national election, Twitter interfered with a tweet by the current president of the United States. The company took steps to prevent anyone from ‘liking’ or sharing this message from Donald Trump:

Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.

Twitter further inserted a warning above the tweet:

Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process. [bold added]

As if the list of ideas that are disputed isn’t endless. Will we next be denied the opportunity to ‘like’ tweets that refer to Pluto as a planet, since its status is likewise disputed?

Some people dispute the efficacy of annual flu shots. Will Twitter, as a result, be neutering all tweets in favour of those vaccines? Some people dispute the notion that climate change is a crisis and an emergency – rather than a manageable problem. Will Twitter henceforth be preventing us from sharing 17-year-old Greta Thunberg tweets, which mention multiple things a week many grownups would dispute?

It’s hilarious that Twitter’s other concern is that Trump’s assertions might be misleading. This company survives on advertising. By huge multinational brands. Cosmetics. Casinos. Pharmaceuticals. We all know those ad campaigns are orchestrated by saints rather than spin doctors.

Seriously, folks. Spin is a fact of life. Sometimes it’s political. More frequently, it’s financial. The notion that Twitter exposes its users to billions of dollars worth of advertising, yet polices utterances by the US President lest they mislead tells us everything we need to know.

Big tech companies are about double standards and selective censorship. Their thumbs are firmly on the scale. Even during election campaigns.

October 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Newly Increased Coronavirus Crackdowns in Europe, a Preview of What Joe Biden Wants for All of America

Biden campaign rally, 27 October
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | October 28, 2020

Across Europe, supposedly in reaction to rises in the numbers of coronavirus cases, many national governments are imposing increased crackdowns that severely restrict the exercise of liberty. These coronavirus cases are in large part derived from testing that produces many false positives and that is often conducted on relatively young and healthy people who have very little risk of dying or even becoming seriously sick from a coronavirus infection.

Of course, the European politicians exerting their newly increased power say “the science” supports their tyrannical actions. And they will tend to give platforms to doctors and other scientists who back up those claims while ignoring or deriding the many doctors and other scientists who disagree.

If Joe Biden were president of the United States now, we can expect he would be following the course of these European power grabbers. The only likely reasons for restraint, aside from the potential of overwhelming popular revolt, would be if Biden had already implemented and maintained a countrywide crackdown of such high degree that he thought he could not feasibly increase it further or if congressional opposition or court orders managed to stop him.

In an August interview with David Muir at ABC, Muir asked Biden if Biden would shut down the country if “the scientists” say to do so because of coronavirus. Biden replied, “I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists.” Of course, the scientists Biden is referring to are people like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx who have helped stir up and maintain overblown fear of coronavirus and support for state and local crackdowns while members of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force. Biden is not referring to people like Scott Atlas, a more recently added coronavirus advisor of Trump, who argues that much of the government action taken in the name of countering coronavirus cause more harm than good.

Biden also reiterated in the ABC interview his commitment to imposing a national mask mandate.

Keep in mind that Biden, in the ABC interview, is talking about both what he would do at the time of the interview and what he would do as president after he takes office on January 20 — about three months from now, five months after the interview, and ten months after crackdowns began to be imposed across America. He seems content to impose extraordinary mandates on Americans for a long time. In large part this appears to be the case because Biden places little or no value on the average American’s freedom. Biden, in the ABC interview, provides this response to people who say a mask mandate “impacts on their freedom”:

Come on. Give me a break. It’s about saving lives.

Biden disregards freedom. He disregards science as well given that the evidence indicates wearing masks does not prevent coronavirus infection and does damage health.

The beginning portion of the Thursday presidential debate was dedicated to discussion by Biden and President Donald Trump regarding coronavirus policy. The exchange presented a sharp contrast in views related to coronavirus policy. Biden described the upcoming situation with coronavirus in America by saying “we’re about to go into a dark winter,” a hyperbolic description supporting his advocacy for imposing draconian countrywide mandates. If he wins, Biden will take office during that winter. In contrast, Trump said in the debate “no we’re not gonna shut down.” In regard to crackdowns continuing on local and state levels, Trump stated, “we have to open our country.” Trump further stated that “the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself, and that’s what’s happening.” Also, unlike Biden, Trump has been very sparing in his wearing of masks and has never proposed a national mandate.

In October, European nations have imposed and expanded draconian mandates in the name of countering coronavirus. Meanwhile, some American states and local governments have eased up on coronavirus mandates while others have increased them. Should Biden become president in January, expect him to act to make the coronavirus crackdown in America go countrywide and go big.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.

October 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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