As we expected, even though opponents have been warning that the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime needed to have a narrower scope, strong human rights safeguard and be more clearly defined in order to avoid abuse – the UN General Assembly has just adopted the documents, after five years of wrangling between various stakeholders.
It is now up to UN-member states to first sign, and then ratify the treaty that will come into force three months after the 40th country does that.
The UN bureaucracy is pleased with the development, hailing the convention as a “landmark” and “historic” global treaty that will improve cross-border cooperation against cybercrime and digital threats.
But critics have been saying that speech and human rights might fall victim to the treaty since various UN members treat human rights and privacy in vastly different ways – while the treaty now in a way “standardizes” law enforcement agencies’ investigative powers across borders.
Considerable emphasis has been put by some on how “authoritarian” countries might abuse this new tool meant to tackle online crime – but in reality, this concern applies to any country that ends up ratifying the treaty.
Another point of criticism has been that UN members individually already have laws that address the same issues, rendering the convention superfluous – unless it is to extend some of those authoritarian powers to the countries that don’t formally have them, and can’t outright pass them at home for political reasons.
Since the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution without a vote – after the text was previously agreed on by negotiators – it is not immediately clear how many countries might sign it next year, and ratify what would then become a legally binding document.
In the meanwhile, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres referred to the treaty as “a demonstration of multilateralism.”
Where opponents see potential for undemocratic law enforcement practices spilling over sovereign borders, UN representatives speak about “an unprecedented platform for cooperation” that will allow agencies to exchange evidence, create a safe cyberspace, and protect victims of crimes such as child sexual abuse, scams and money laundering.
And they claim all this will be achieved “while safeguarding human rights online.”
December 26, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United Nations |
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Five years later, we resolve never to forget how US hospitals deprived critically ill patients of ivermectin and other commonly used drugs that could have saved them.
Satoshi Ōmura, 2015 Nobel Laureate for his discovery of the ”wonder drug” Ivermectin, stands next to the River Blindness sculpture. His discovery cured this great scourge of the tropical world.
As I was researching our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, I was especially disturbed by countless stories of hospitals in various states who steadfastly refused to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients with ivermectin and other drugs (commonly used for other illnesses) that could have saved their lives.
I believe this episode constitutes the darkest chapter in the history of the U.S. hospital system. Strangely enough, the only serious legacy newspaper journalist in the entire country who covered it was Michael Capuzzo—formerly a reporter with the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he received four Pulitzer Prize nominations. Apart from Michael’s reporting . . . crickets.
Out of my conviction that we should never forget what U.S. hospitals did to patients who were consigned to die on ventilators instead of receiving FDA-approved, off-label drugs such as ivermectin, methylprednisolone, and even high dose aspirin, I am publishing our chapter on the extraordinary villains who committed this atrocity, and the good guys—including two great attorneys and humanitarians named Ralph Lorigo and Beth Parlato—who fought back. Please share this story with your friends and family and exhort them never to forget.
CHAPTER 28: Begging for the Wonder Drug
As Michael Capuzzo told the story in his long magazine piece “The Drug that Cracked Covid,” Judy Smentkiewicz was an eighty-year-old resident of Buffalo, New York. After working thirty-five years as an office manager for Metropolitan Life and raising two children, she had retired to her small house in the suburbs. A week after Senator Johnson’s second Senate hearing, she began preparing for Christmas, and looked forward to her two children, Michael and Michelle, visiting her for a few days. However, right after Michael and his wife arrived from Florida, she began to feel unwell. On December 22 she tested positive for Covid. Her kids were devastated and cancelled their Christmas celebration as Judy went into quarantine. A week later, she became short of breath and was rushed to the Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital. On New Year’s Eve she was admitted to the ICU.
It was a terrible moment in which Judy and her children realized they might never see each other again. In the days that followed, the doctors and nurses with whom Michael spoke didn’t offer much hope. They said there were no medications for treating COVID-19 approved by federal health agencies apart from remdesivir. This was administered to Judy, but it seemed to have no beneficial effect. On New Year’s Eve, as her condition deteriorated, her two children and six of their friends gathered on the street below her hospital window and prayed for her.
Shortly after New Year’s Day, Michael received from his mother-in-law a video of Dr. Pierre Kory being interviewed by a reporter for Fox 10 News Now, KSAZ-TV in Phoenix, Arizona. That morning, Dr. Kory had given his Senate testimony on ivermectin. Michael watched it and was moved by Dr. Kory’s passionate intensity and eloquence. Immediately he called the hospital and told Judy’s attending physician that he wanted her to receive ivermectin. The doctor refused on the grounds that it wasn’t approved for COVID-19, but Michael refused to take no for an answer, and finally a hospital administrator approved one, 15-milligram dose. Less than twenty-four hours later, Judy was taken off the ventilator, and the next day she sat upright in a chair for a Zoom call with her son. She still wasn’t out of the woods, and when her heart started racing, she was moved to a cardiac unit, and the hospital refused to give her a second dose of ivermectin. Michael insisted but the hospital refused to budge.
And so, he contacted his friend and attorney Ralph Lorigo, and explained the situation. At the time, Lorigo knew nothing about ivermectin, so he too watched the interview with Dr. Kory, and then sued the hospital. New York State Supreme Court Judge Henry Nowak heard the case and ordered the hospital to commence treating Judy with four more doses of ivermectin, per her family doctor’s prescription.
The hospital refused to obey the judge’s order, which resulted in additional legal wrangling, including another hearing. Finally, the hospital’s lawyer agreed to allow Judy’s family doctor to administer the drug. He was under the impression it was on hand in the hospital’s pharmacy, but when he arrived to carry out his charge, he was told that it would have to be couriered from another facility. This caused another delay. Finally, at 11:00 pm that night, the second dose was administered, and she started to improve. Ten days later she walked out of the hospital.
As word spread about Judy’s happy outcome, Ralph Lorigo was contacted by countless others in the same situation, and soon his law firm had a new area of practice—trying to force hospitals to administer an FDA-approved, Nobel Prize winning, WHO “Essential Medication” to dying COVID-19 patients to whom nothing else was offered.
Mr. Lorigo was well-suited for the task. The energetic, punctilious attorney and Erie County Conservative party chairman has a formidable presence, with strong Italian good looks and a penchant for wearing beautifully tailored suit and power ties. Though he specialized in real estate law, he represented his clients seeking ivermectin with great care. A devoted family man with three children and multiple grandchildren, he empathized with the families who sought his help.
To be sure, it wasn’t an easy job, because the hospitals fought him tooth and nail, bringing multiple attorneys and expert witnesses to hearings. After a few more successes in which he prevailed and the patients recovered after receiving ivermectin, he received more queries than his staff could handle, so he contacted his friend, Beth Parlato, and asked her if she would be interested in taking some of the cases.
The 55-year-old attorney and mother of three had served as a judge in a New York State criminal court. Over the course of her career, she’d seen much of the good, the bad, and the ugly, but none of it had prepared her for the grueling path ahead. What she was about to witness would challenge all of her assumptions about the American healthcare and legal systems, and ultimately about human nature itself.
Most of her clients were referrals from the FLCCC, founded by Drs. Marik and Kory. The typical call would come into her office from a desperate husband or wife, daughter or son. Their stories were always the same. A much-loved family member had been languishing in hospital and was now headed for the ventilator and probable death. And though the doctors and nurses stated that the prognosis was poor, the hospital refused to administer ivermectin.
To patients and their families, the situation was incomprehensible. Many of Beth’s clients posed a variation of the question: “Mom [or dad] is declining and is probably going to die, so what’s the harm in her trying ivermectin?” Beth was at a loss for an answer. The hospital’s policy made no sense, neither as a matter of fact nor law. Many families wondered why “right to try” laws didn’t apply. Hospital attorneys claimed the “right to try” was only for experimental medications that were not yet FDA-approved. Ivermectin was FDA-approved, just not for the treatment of COVID-19.
Patients and their families found this argument perversely legalistic, but many judges—and all judges elected as Democrats—found it persuasive. Beth argued it was a legal, common, and longstanding medical practice to prescribe FDA-approved drugs off-label. Hospital attorneys retorted that the NIH guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19 did not recommend the off-label administration of ivermectin, and because the NIH was the final scientific arbiter of medical matters in the United States, the hospitals were required to follow its guidelines.
The trouble with the one-size-fits-all NIH guidelines for hospitalized COVID-19 patients was that they didn’t work. Almost a year into the pandemic, the United States had the highest COVID-19 death rate of the world’s top ten wealthiest nations and was in the top twenty nations with the highest death rates in the world. Approximately 80% of hospitalized patients who went on mechanical ventilation died. Also significant was the fact that that on January 14, 2021—in response to Senator Johnson’s letter requesting that the NIH review Dr. Kory’s presentation of evidence—the NIH dropped its recommendation against using ivermectin and adopted a neutral stance. Though far from satisfying for Dr. Kory and his colleagues, the NIH neutral stance at least gave doctors greater leeway to exercise their clinical judgement about the drug.
To make matters even more confusing, healthcare professionals were provided with broad legal immunity by the federal PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness) of 2005. This authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to deploy a wide array of “Emergency Countermeasures” in the event of an infectious disease outbreak. When invoked by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the PREP Act provides immunity for the “manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration, and use of covered countermeasures.” On February 4, 2020, HHS Secretary Alex Azar declared COVID-19 an emergency and invoked the PREP Act.
The CARES Act of March 27, 2020, also provided immunity for healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients. Additional immunity was granted by governors’ executive orders in all fifty states. The governor of New York State, in which Beth was practicing, provided the following immunity:
Conduct Covered: Civil liability for injury or death alleged to have been sustained directly as a result of an act or omission by person(s) covered.
Person(s) Covered: Physicians, physician assistants; specialist assistants; nurse practitioners; licensed registered professional nurses; licensed practical nurses.
Conduct Not Covered: Gross negligence.
Many observers who were documenting U.S. healthcare policy with respect to remdesivir wondered if all this liability protection could explain why the new, experimental drug was the hospital standard of care despite numerous red flags raised about its safety. The contrast of this policy with the strict policy against administering ivermectin was stunning.
Additionally, all the patients that Beth represented, and their families, stated in writing that they would indemnify the hospitals of liability for any adverse effects apparently caused by ivermectin, and that their primary care physicians would come to the hospital to administer it. Despite these multiple provisions of immunity, hospitals were still dead set against giving ivermectin to dying patients.
The hearings were brutal affairs in which hospital attorneys and expert witnesses portrayed Beth’s expert witness (on the safety and efficacy of ivermectin) as a delusional quack. Their most common line of attack was that Beth’s witness was a lone, eccentric voice in challenging the overwhelming scientific consensus that informed NIH guidelines. This rhetorical strategy ignored that many of mankind’s greatest scientific insights were the work of individuals who challenged the orthodoxy of their day. The growing body of evidence, including RCTs, cited by Beth’s witness was dismissed by hospital experts with the assertion that the evidence was “low quality.” Thus, the judge was presented with opposing expert witness claims about the evidence, only with the hospital’s witness also claiming he had “scientific consensus” and therefore the NIH on his side.
Beth tried to argue that the patient retained sufficient bodily autonomy to decide if he or she wished to take an FDA-approved drug off-label. The hospitals’ attorneys retorted that hospital patients had never had the right to decide their treatment, and that granting it with ivermectin would set a terrible precedent, opening a Pandora’s Box of future patients demanding treatments after hearing anecdotes about their efficacy. Beth regarded this argument as another legalistic dodge. Her clients weren’t presuming to practice medicine—they were dying men and women, desperately begging for the right to try an FDA-approved drug as a last and only hope when nothing else apart from remdesivir was being offered.
The hospitals claimed total sovereignty over the patient—a godlike power over all decisions affecting his life and death, with the patient afforded no say. For most gravely ill patients, the decision of this godlike power resulted in death. Thus, to sick patients and their families, the Lords of Healthcare were neither competent nor compassionate.
From: The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Skyhorse, 2022.
POSTSCRIPT: As Dr. Pierre Kory noted in his book The War on Ivermectin, of the 80 lawsuits filed by lawyer Ralph Lorigo, in 40 the judge sided with the family, and in 40 with the hospital. Of those, in the 40 where patients received ivermectin, 38 survived, whereas of the 40 who did not, only 2 survived.
December 26, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has shut down after Republicans cut its funding. The agency was responsible for spreading propaganda abroad and, according to conservatives, censoring dissident thought at home.
The GEC announced on Monday that it would cease operations by the end of that day. “The State Department has consulted with Congress regarding next steps,” the statement added.
The organization employed around 120 people and had an annual budget of $61 million. Established in 2016, its stated goal was to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
In practice, the GEC spearheaded complex propaganda campaigns of its own. In two campaigns, the agency funded video games aimed at teaching children about the supposed dangers of anti-American narratives, releasing them in the UK, Ukraine, Latvia, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the GEC funneled money to a range of NGOs which then compiled lists of social media accounts supposedly spreading “disinformation” about the virus and its origins, which were then presented to the platforms to be banned or removed. Many of the accounts belonged to what Twitter’s former trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth, called “ordinary Americans,” raising concerns among conservatives that the GEC was violating its prohibition on operating within the US.
In 2023, the GEC was forced to cut ties with George Soros’ ‘Global Disinformation Initiative’, after it emerged that the agency was paying Soros’ organization to compile lists of “high risk” news outlets to use in an advertiser boycott campaign. These news sites were predominantly right-leaning and American-based.
X owner Elon Musk called the GEC a “threat to our democracy” last year, describing the agency as the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation.”
Musk was instrumental in finally shutting down the GEC. A mammoth 1,547-page spending bill put before the House of Representatives by Speaker Mike Johnson last week would have preserved funding for the agency, until Musk threatened to fund primary election challenges to any Republican who voted for it.
Musk decried the bill – which also included pay raises for lawmakers – as “criminal,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” and ultimately “one of the worst bills ever written.” President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance then released a joint statement against the bill, forcing Johnson to replace it with a trimmed-down piece of legislation totaling less than 120 pages.
This Musk-approved bill failed in a 235-174 vote, with 38 Republicans joining 197 Democrats to block its passage. It eventually passed after Republicans added a section suspending the US debt ceiling for two years, a move that will add trillions more to the federal government’s $36 trillion debt.
December 25, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Allegations that Russia was behind a Romanian social media campaign that helped independent presidential candidate Calin Georgescu win a first round vote, and which contributed to the country’s constitutional court canceling the entire election, are false, an investigation has found.
Georgescu’s campaign was not funded by Russia but in fact by the pro-Western National Liberal Party (PNL), the media outlet Snoop has reported, citing the probe’s findings.
A critic of NATO and the EU and a staunch opponent of sending aid to Ukraine, Georgescu topped the first-round vote in Romania with 22.94%, beating other liberal leftist and democrat candidates.
Romania’s Constitutional Court promptly annulled the election ahead of the second-round vote, citing intelligence documents alleging ‘irregularities’ in Georgescu’s performance.
The documents claimed Georgescu’s candidacy was improperly promoted online, including on TikTok, by paid influencers and extremist right-wing groups, and that his campaign may have benefited from Russian interference – an allegation that Moscow has denied as “absolutely groundless.”
According to Snoop, Romania’s tax authorities analyzed financial flows and discovered that the campaign that promoted Georgescu on TikTok was in fact paid for by the PNL and run by Kensington Communication, a company which provides political marketing services, as well as online campaigns.
The briefs delivered to influencers were aimed at promoting “a responsible attitude and a mature choice” among Romanians that would help the country continue its “democratic path,” wrote Snoop.
Influencers were reportedly given a script to describe the qualities of a future president without giving a name. Some of them however left comments below the videos, providing Georgescu’s name.
“It is a shock to everyone that the public money that taxpayers had provided to the PNL was used to promote another candidate,” one expert involved in the investigation told the publication.
Kensington Communication has issued a statement alleging that its campaign had been “hijacked” or “cloned” and said it would file a criminal complaint.
The leak came on Friday, a day before the expiration of Romanian President Klaus Iohannis’ term, and just days before the supreme court is scheduled to hear the case initiated by Georgescu. Iohannis himself had earlier refused to leave office, citing the country’s legislation.
Georgescu, who was labelled “pro-Russian” by his critics, filed a lawsuit with the supreme court to challenge the annulment of the election results. The candidate’s lawyer described the situation as “a flagrant violation of the constitution” and “a coup d’état.” The first hearing is scheduled for December 23.
December 22, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | European Union, NATO, Romania |
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In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false story line that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.
December 21, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Republican Senator Eric Schmitt has addressed the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, asking for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to be cut off from temporary government funding that’s currently negotiated in Congress.
Schmitt – who was, as Missouri attorney-general, behind the Missouri v. Biden free speech lawsuit (that became Murthy v. Missouri) said in a post on X that GEC “must be excluded from any subsequent piece of legislation for the remainder of the 118th Congress.”
The senator added that Americans “deserve to know their First Amendment rights are being protected.”
The letter to Schumer reveals that the temporary funding measure, known as “continuing resolution (CR)” among its original 1,500 pages provides for GEC as well.
(It has since been removed from the slimmer bill that passed on Friday.)
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
This office has been the subject of scrutiny by legislators and the public for finding a way to flag social media posts for censorship, despite being a part of the government.
Critics say this rendered its activities, conducted with third parties and affecting speech on social media, unconstitutional.
Democrats had hoped to get the CR approved through mid-March (but would extend GEC for another year) – however, President Trump, and consequently Republicans dashed their hopes of reaching a quick, bipartisan deal.
Now Schmitt’s letter shows one of the many objections Republicans have to the proposed CR, slamming it as an example of backroom deals that fly in the face of “transparency, accountability, and responsible government.”
Schmitt notes that GEC was set up to combat foreign propaganda, but then “mutated” into a censorship-facilitating outfit suppressing speech at home on a mass scale.
The senator states that since the target of censorship were narratives which “questioned established thinking” and involved a number of powerful actors (the government, social media), this “risks creating a government-endorsed ‘truth’ immune to public scrutiny.”
And, essentially – there goes true democracy, starting with the First Amendment.
For these reasons, Schmitt urges Schumer to make sure that GEC “under no circumstances” continues to receive public money.
The Republican senator is severely critical of the “giant ‘Christmas tree’ spending bill” itself, not only for undermining trust in government and the country’s institutions but also, due to its size and the rush to adopt it, for “slipping into the text” policies that would have GEC renewed and funded.
Schmitt therefore demands to exclude GEC from any legislation considered by the current Congress.
“I will strongly oppose any end-of-year bills that include reauthorization or funding of the GEC and urge my colleagues to do the same,” Schmitt’s letter concludes.
December 21, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States |
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It’s been a bad few months for democracy. Election results offensive to the European Union were annulled in Romania; an attempted coup occurred in Georgia over elections that didn’t go the way the west wanted; the French government, widely hated, teetered over the abyss as president Emmanual Macron tried to ignore the last election; on December 16, Washington’s pet German government fell; lots of funny-business happened in the Moldovan referendum and election, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Moldovan voters living in Russia; elections were long ago cancelled in dictatorial Ukraine; and South Korea hosted an attempted coup. In short, western democracies’ storied enchantment with elections is over. As western populations grow sick and tired of their political class and vote against it, what are elites to do? Annul, cancel, overturn and ignore the elections, that’s what. The problem, for the west, is the voters.
What will happen if far-right Alternative for Deutschland sweeps the early German elections in February, or if far-left France Insoumise does the same in France? Will the U.S. through its NATO and EU tentacles annul those votes? Don’t think it won’t try. And Washington doesn’t even have to give the order, because its European puppets know exactly what’s expected of them. Granted, the Romanian front-runner, so feared by NATO, Calin Georgescu, was far right. But so what? Besides, I doubt that’s what led to the constitutional court vacating the vote. More likely it was his opposition to the Ukraine War – hence the court citing “foreign influence” (translation: Russian) via TikTok as its flimsy basis for negating the election. Incidentally, reports are coming in that the heat and internet to Georgescu’s house have been cut off, and, surprise! he can’t get anyone on the phone to help with this.
But you can’t blame European honchos for ditching elections. They’re just following Washington’s lead. After all, the post-2016 phony Russiagate hysteria may not have succeeded in ousting Trump, as was intended, but it did provide the template for American vassals. The four years of lawfare against Trump (and then another four after he left office) blazed the trail for Europe, so that now, if a candidate not favored by political bigwigs wins, all they have to do is scream “Russian influence!” to dump the election. In other words, democracy is dying in the west. It’s kicking the bucket in Europe – and if Trump ends the Ukraine War (provided Biden doesn’t utterly sabotage his peace efforts before he takes office) or gets us out of the NATO sinkhole, you can bet your paycheck the 2028 establishment campaign will dust off the 2016 playbook and get right to work.
In western media, Georgescu has been portrayed as an unknown. This is false. He is well-known in Romania and had a diplomatic career. But he is also a religious nationalist, and that’s verboten in the EU; worse yet, the U.S., aka NATO, built its biggest military airbase in Europe – where? You got it, Romania. So Washington can’t have just anybody running that country. It must be someone who will keep everything copacetic with the U.S. A nationalist opposed to Washington’s pet proxy war in Ukraine is not that someone.
As for Georgia, there the electorate proved itself most unreliable to the Exceptional Empire. It voted in a government that actually dares to require foreign NGOs to register as such – you know, the way we do, here in the United States. But here, those NGOs don’t aim to overthrow the government, like they do in Georgia, in order for Tbilisi to open a second front against Moscow. Indeed, the vast majority of rioters against the Georgian government, who were arrested, were – I’m shocked! Shocked! – foreign, i.e. European. The icing on the cake is that the French president of Georgia refused to leave office when her term expired – a president with French and Georgian passports, who boasts Nazis in her family tree.
The EU finagled things more successfully in Moldova. That nation’s October 20 referendum on joining the EU won – kinda. In country, the Moldovan government only snagged 50 percent of the vote, but Moldovan expats in Europe gave it a boost, while the 400,000 Moldovans living in Russia found, to their dismay, only two polling stations open for them, by their government, in Moscow. That meant as few as 10,000 of them got to vote. And as East European expert and political scientist Ivan Katchanovski tweeted October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote. So all in all, the Moldovan referendum was a sorry excuse for a democratic exercise. Then there was also Moldova’s presidential election, equally compromised. But hey, Washington’s EU vassal got to lure a country out of Russia’s orbit, and that’s all that counts, not mere democracy, right? After all, Washington doesn’t stand for democracy. It stands for and has long stood for something quite different – power. Just look at it backing a terrorist takeover of Syria, among them a ruler on whose head Washington has a $10,000,000 bounty. Let that sink in. One American hand posts a huge reward for a terrorist, while the other hand paves his way to power. The obvious conclusion (also obvious to any student of American-backed coups and regime changes abroad going back at least 70 years) is that U.S. doesn’t stand for anything besides power (certainly not anything as antiquated and nettlesome as international law). That’s the definition of a gangster state.
If you doubt that, just peek at South Korea, where the CIA’s man, president Yoon Suk Yeol, faced a grim electoral future. The voters were unlikely to support him in the next election, given that they mostly back the opposition. And that opposition, per Col. Douglas Macgregor, wants a Korean four-star general, not an American one, to head the roughly 500,000 Korean armed forces and also wants to boot the 30,000 U.S. troops off the peninsula. This, of course, goes over in Washington with all the joy of a root canal.
So what to do? Yoon took the bull by the horns December 3 with martial law. During the few hours when it looked like our man in Seoul had pulled off a coup, the Biden gang was coyly silent. But there is nothing enduring in this world, as Gogol noted, and even the most brazen attempts at subverting democracy occasionally fail. The opposition gathered and voted against Yoon. His defense minister was deposed, jailed and attempted suicide, and Yoon’s own tenure came now, ahem, under a cloud, to say the least, as insurrection charges loomed, and he was impeached and suspended from office.
And don’t forget France, where Macron, affronted by an EU parliament vote last summer that installed many anti-Ukraine War representatives, totally lost it and, quite idiotically and hubristically, called snap elections. He promptly lost those to the left, but then snubbed the voters by breaking with tradition and refusing to appoint a left-wing prime minister. Surprising no one, the center-rightist he chose received a vote of no confidence, and Macron’s government looked likely to fall. That was temporarily forestalled by the appointment, December 13, of a centrist prime minister. But if his government does ultimately crash, expect Macron to do something really stupid, like suspend the legislature, call a national emergency or, a la Yoon, declare martial law.
Lastly of course we have Ukraine, that shining example of democracy, where its president rules illegally, having cancelled elections, banned the opposition, throttled the press, exiled the church, jailed anyone he doesn’t like and press-ganged thousands of vehemently objecting Ukrainian men into the military. All this while ferociously lining his pockets with western, mainly American, funds. This is the tyranny upon which Biden bestows hundreds of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars. It’s not even supported by Ukrainians, most of whom, according to recent polls, want the war over. But Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden, in his crazed enthusiasm for Ukrainian combat, just won’t stop. On December 11, Ukraine fired six ATACAMS into Russia. We can all thank God they did little damage, since the Russians shot two down and diverted four with electronic warfare. Had they inflicted real harm, we in the west might very well have had worse troubles than the death of democracy, namely death itself. Biden appears oblivious to this reality. For us, what’s at stake is life itself, and the whole, wondrous human and natural world. For him, it appears to be just another step on the path of endless war, another day, another dollar.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.
December 21, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | European Union, France, Georgia, Korea, Moldova, Romania, United States |
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Private entities were enlisted to flag content, even accurate information.
America First Legal (AFL) has revealed new information from a document it has been able to obtain through the lawsuit filed against the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
CISA is part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has a “foreign disinformation” unit, the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF).
However, as early as mid-February 2020, CISA (via CFITF) had already started to monitor domestic speech about Covid – nearly a month before the pandemic was officially declared by the UN’s WHO, and before orders started to be issued to shut down schools and businesses in the US.
Even though several layers deep, CFITF was still a government entity, and in order to circumvent constitutional issues related to censorship of online speech, the document indicates that the unit turned to what AFL brands “the censorship industrial complex” – specifically, its private sector component.
These were “fact checkers,” “bias raters” and similar that keep cropping up in revelations about the Covid-era censorship: Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory, Alliance for Securing Democracy, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) (a UK-based group, which now passes as “British-American”), Global Disinformation Index (GDI), and even an openly foreign government project, EU’s “EU vs. Disinfo.”
Among the kinds of speech CFITF would monitor and/or flag was that of President Trump, his comments about Hydroxychloroquine going back to 2020. The document reveals that CFITF (via Atlantic Council, DFR Lab) knowingly chose to give itself the right to flag even accurate information, justifying a thing as serious as censorship by presenting hypothetical scenarios:
“Once-accurate information can become misinformation as it ages, leading to erroneous conclusions and misinterpretation of the current situation,” the document reads. This was put in the context of the rapidly changing “nature” of the pandemic.
However, it took years for the same awareness – that information related to Covid was constantly changing – to start reversing some censorship decisions (e.g., the Covid origin theory).
As for CISA/CFITF early pandemic activities affecting online speech, AFL believes that they may represent “a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s ‘major questions’ doctrine, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress.”
December 20, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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UK’s Online Safety Act has come into force and the Office of Communications (Ofcom) regulator has quickly set out to start enforcing it, with noncompliance resulting in high fines.
What those opposed to the legislation consider to be a censorship law and a sweeping one at that, is, according to Ofcom, a way to “protect” online users in the UK from illegal harms by legally requiring tech companies to “start taking action to tackle criminal activity on their platforms” as well as “make them safer by design.”
But what the law’s provisions in reality do, say critics, is bring in even more censorship, while at the same time providing for possibilities to undermine encryption via backdoors.
Then there are those who don’t think the Online Safety Act goes far enough, and are in particular upset by the gradual way it has been designed to boil this particular “frog.”
Right now, the deadline of March 15, 2025, has been given to tech companies to come up with risk assessments regarding the consequences that illegal content has on their users, and then starting two days later, they will have to begin putting measures in place to reduce those risks.
But going forward, Ofcom, which says the current requirements are “just the beginning,” plans to introduce more measures, including “crisis response protocols for emergency events (such as last summer’s riots).”
Here, the fear is that newsworthy content about various forms of protests could get censored as well.
Citing crimes like child abuse and terrorism as the reason, Ofcom also reserves the right to force tech firms to build and implement what are effectively encryption backdoors.
Ofcom says the Online Safety Act allows it to, “where we decide it is necessary and proportionate, make a provider use (or in some cases develop) a specific technology to tackle child sexual abuse or terrorism content on their sites and apps.”
Coupled with this, another provision – hash-matching – starts to gain sinister overtones, contrary to what the stated reason for it is, namely, preventing the sharing of “non-consensual intimate imagery and terrorist content.”
Ofcom is for now short on details regarding this, but the two requirements combined could easily be used for encryption backdoors.
Privacy is one victim of weakened encryption that immediately comes to mind, however, harm to online security, and the economy is often overlooked.
“Creating an encryption ‘backdoor’ for law enforcement would effectively be a blackmailer’s charter, allowing criminals and hostile foreign actors to exploit security flaws,” notes the Adam Smith Institute, and adds:
“Such measures would undermine the growth and competitiveness of the UK technology sector, potentially resulting in large companies withdrawing from the market entirely.”
December 20, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, UK |
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The European Parliament has taken another step in its ongoing efforts to control the flow of information online, approving the creation of a new committee tasked with combating what it describes as foreign interference and disinformation.
Dubbed the European Democracy Shield, the initiative is framed as a safeguard for democratic processes but raises significant concerns about censorship and overreach. The committee’s establishment aligns with the European Commission’s policy agenda for 2024-2029 and is expected to begin operations next year.
At a plenary session in Strasbourg, the decision received strong support, with 441 members voting in favor, 178 opposing, and 34 abstaining.
While presented as a measure to protect democracy, critics have long questioned whether such sweeping powers risk stifling dissenting views under the guise of fighting disinformation.
The committee’s mandate extends to scrutinizing online platforms, AI-generated content, and so-called “hybrid” threats—broad categories that could potentially encompass legitimate political speech or alternative narratives.
Comprising 33 members, the Ad Hoc Committee on the European Democracy Shield will serve a 12-month term. Its composition, to be determined by political groups, will be announced in late January. The scope of its responsibilities includes reviewing existing laws for potential weaknesses that could be exploited and recommending reforms. However, skeptics may argue that this approach could lead to increased regulatory burdens on digital platforms, raising questions about freedom of expression and transparency in decision-making.
December 20, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | European Union, Human rights |
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A motion to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is unlikely to move forward, as there is less than a week left to vote on such a ban in this legislative period, and sources involved with the effort say there is no majority in place for such a move.
The motion, originally put forward by CDU MP Marco Wanderwitz, who previously said he would retire after this term, will definitely not be put forward this term, co-signer Carmen Wegge (SPD) told the Rheinische Post.
As Remix News previously reported, it appeared as if a ban procedure would almost certianly move forward just a month ago, with 105 MPs voicing cross-party support, including from MPs like Claudia Roth and Katrin Göring Eckardt from the Greens, and Ralf Stegner and Helge Lindh from the SPD, just to name a few.
The motion will only move forward if there is a majority, but so far, the CDU and the SPD have spoken out against it. There are grave worries that such a ban procedure could take years, and in any case, with elections expected to take place in February, it could lead to a substantial boost for the AfD. Currently, the SPD and CDU also see no success with the Constitutional Court, which has the final say in such a ban procedure.
So far, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and CDU leader Friedrich Merz do not back the ban, although both have hinted that they may support such a procedure in the future.
Notably, politicians involved in the ban procedure are once again resorting to claims of protecting democracy by banning what is currently the second-largest party in the country.
“Due to the early elections, it is not yet clear whether we can put our motion to a vote in this legislative period,” said Wegge. “The AfD represents the greatest threat to our democracy.”
She claims the party’s goal is to abolish democracy, despite the AfD actually putting forward motions for direct democracy in the country, which would allow the country to make decisions via nationwide referendums — undoubtedly a purer form of democracy than what currently serves as democracy in Germany.
Meanwhile, as Remix News previously reported, the Greens are working on an alternative ban procedure which would be more gradual but which MPs of the party, and other parties, believe would have a better chance of succeeding.
Efforts to ban the AfD are certainly not helped by the fact that it is the second most popular party in the country at the moment, routinely polling between 18 and 20 percent. A move to outright ban the party would be seen as a catastrophic blow to democracy.
December 20, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Germany |
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For a while now, emerging AI has been treated by the Biden-Harris administration, but also the EU, the UK, Canada, the UN, etc., as a scourge that powers dangerous forms of “disinformation” – and should be dealt with accordingly.
According to those governments/entities, the only “positive use” for AI as far as social media and online discourse go, would be to power more effective censorship (“moderation”).
A new report from the US House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government puts the emphasis on the push to use this technology for censorship as the explanation for the often disproportionate alarm over its role in “disinformation.”
We obtained a copy of the report for you here.
The interim report’s name spells out its authors’ views on this quite clearly: the document is called, “Censorship’s Next Frontier: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Control Artificial Intelligence to Suppress Free Speech.”
The report’s main premise is well-known – that AI is now being funded, developed, and used by the government and third parties to add speed and scale to their censorship, and that the outgoing administration has been putting pressure on AI developers to build censorship into their models.
What’s new are the proposed steps to remedy this situation and make sure that future federal governments are not using AI for censorship. To this end, the Committee wants to see new legislation passed in Congress, AI development that respects the First Amendment and is open, decentralized, and “pro-freedom.”
The report recommends legislation along four principles, focused on preserving American’s right to free speech. The first is that the government cannot be involved when decisions are made in private algorithms or datasets regarding “misinformation” or “bias.”
The government should also be prohibited from funding censorship-related research or collaboration with foreign entities on AI regulation that leads to censorship.
Lastly, “Avoid needless AI regulation that gives the government coercive leverage,” the document recommends.
The Committee notes the current state of affairs where the Biden-Harris administration made a number of direct moves to regulate the space to its political satisfaction via executive orders, but also by pushing its policy through by giving out grants via the National Science Foundation, once again, aimed at building AI tools that “combat misinformation.”
But – “If allowed to develop in a free and open manner, AI could dramatically expand Americans’ capacity to create knowledge and express themselves,” the report states.
December 19, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Canada, European Union, Human rights, UK, United Nations, United States |
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