Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

FBI is ‘rotted at its core,’ Republican lawmakers say

RT | November 4, 2022

America is no longer a country where citizens are afforded equal justice under the law, as guaranteed by their Constitution, because the nation’s top law enforcement agency has been corrupted by politicized leadership and a “woke, leftist agenda” being imposed from the top, Republican lawmakers have claimed.

The allegations were contained in a 1,050-page report released on Friday by Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. The report, which was based on information gathered from 14 FBI whistleblowers who came forward to expose a pattern of misconduct, argued that the agency was “rotted at its core.”

“Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington,” the report said. “The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”

The report detailed such abuses as a secret partnership in which the FBI receives private information on conservative users from Facebook, without seeking their consent or going though the legal processes that would normally be required to tap such data.

Whistleblowers also alleged that the FBI “looked the other way” on dozens of attacks against anti-abortion groups, even as the agency sent heavily armed teams of officers to arrest pro-life activists at their homes for alleged violations of selectively enforced crimes. Parents who spoke out at school board meetings over controversial policies were targeted by investigators as alleged terrorists.

At the same time, former FBI official Timothy Thibault “shut down” a probe into the overseas business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and attempted to keep the case from being reopened, the report said. Thibault openly displayed his political bias in social media posts that included his official title.

“America’s not America if you have a Justice Department that treats people differently under the law,” Representative Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Friday. “It’s supposed to be equal treatment under the law. That’s not happening, and we know it’s not happening because 14 brave FBI agents came to us as whistleblowers and told us what exactly is going on here.”

The report also accused the FBI of inflating statistics on domestic extremism to help fuel a narrative promoted by President Joe Biden’s administration. FBI employees who have conservative views are being purged from the agency, it claims.

Republicans argued that the FBI was plagued by a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” as well as “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.” The agency’s shift toward “political meddling” has allegedly pulled resources away from legitimate law enforcement duties. For instance, one whistleblower claimed that he was told after the January 2021 US Capitol riot that child sex-abuse cases were “no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.”

November 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Willful Blindness

When people don’t see what’s right in front of them

Bill & Elliott Rothstein in “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess”
By John Leake – Courageous Discourse – November 3, 2022

Author’s Note: The following post is Part I of a series on Willful Blindness, Ideological Blindness, and other failures of perception.

According to Wikipedia:

Action is an American dark comedy series about a Hollywood producer named Peter Dragon, who is trying to recover from his last box-office failure. It aired on Fox during the 1999–2000 season. The series was critically praised for its irreverent and sometimes hostile look at Hollywood culture.

Peter Dragon’s Vice President of Production at Dragonfire Films is a former child actress named Wendy Ward, who also works as a high end courtesan for wealthy Hollywood denizens.

Episode 13, “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess,” was shot in 2000. Action was cancelled before it was aired, but the episode was released on DVD and posted on YouTube. In this episode, Peter desperately needs to acquire a script, and is distressed to discover it is owned by Bill and Elliott Rothstein—extremely boorish brothers who have a knack for spotting and acquiring valuable properties.

Peter visits them at their favorite restaurant and offers to purchase the script. They tell him to have his cute Vice President, Wendy Ward, deliver the check to their house the following evening. Being an exceptionally good sport, Wendy decides to go into the Lion’s Den. Though she succeeds in her mission, she is so traumatized by her encounter with the Rothstein Brothers that she leaves Hollywood forever. As she puts it: “I’m through with this, Peter. I called a cab and I’m gonna go home and pack and I’m gonna move some place, some place clean.”

It now seems astonishing that such a brutal depiction of Hollywood was made for what was intended to be a popular television series. It also seems obvious that Bill and Elliott Rothstein are modeled after Bob and Harvey Weinstein. The habits, manners, and appearance of the former strongly resemble the latter.

A few years later, at a 2005 comedy event, Courtney Love was interviewed on the red carpet by comedian Natasha Leggero, who asked her if she had any advice for young girls moving to Hollywood. “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party at his Four Seasons [hotel room] don’t go,” she said.

As “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess” and Courtney Love indicated, it was no secret that being alone with Harvey Weinstein was a grave occupational hazard for a young woman’s body and soul.

Human affairs are more complicated and messy than we are often comfortable acknowledging. We all want things, and much of life is about gauging how much we are willing to accept and tolerate in order to get them. When Gwyneth Paltrow thanked Harvey Weinstein at her Academy Award acceptance speech in 1999, and Meryl Streep thanked him at the 2012 Golden Globe Awards by calling him “God,” both women were probably being perfectly sincere. During those moments, they were thinking about his extraordinary talent as a film producer, and not his terrible reputation with women.

Willful blindness—averting one’s gaze from bad conduct—is usually done with a simple calculation—namely, I can’t object to this conduct because doing so would prevent me from receiving a benefit I really want.

Most of us occasionally engage in some degree of willful blindness. It would be wildly impractical to go through life protesting every bit of bad behavior we encounter. However, it seems to me that—since around 2000—willful blindness on a spectacular scale has been endemic to American business, culture, and politics. The corporate scandals of the early 2000s, the Iraq War under false pretenses, massive fraud on Wall Street leading to the Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve bailouts of the same people who caused the crisis. Then there was the Russian Collusion Hoax and the related, swamp of US government corruption in Ukraine—now a full-blown orgy for arms dealers and money launderers. Last but not least, the stupendous fraud and homicidal bad faith of the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex and its friends in Washington during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

All of the above could only happen because thousands of people in an array of organizations and institutions found it expedient to turn a blind eye to the innumerable signs they were participating in corrupt enterprises. It reminds me of a (perhaps apocryphal) quote attributed to Cicero: “Rome is made out of marble but it’s built on a sewer.

November 3, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Concerns About Western Weapons Flowing to Ukraine Growing Louder

Samizdat – 01.11.2022

The US and its allies have earmarked nearly $100 billion in security and economic aid to Ukraine so far this year. Last month, the White House asked Congress for a $11.7 billion top-up. Where is this money going? Who’s benefiting from Western taxpayers’ generosity? And why are some US officials suddenly so concerned?

As the Ukrainian security crisis enters its ninth month and the seemingly bottomless pit of Western military and economic support for Kiev continues to expand, some US media and lawmakers have expressed growing weariness about the prospect of shoveling even more cash into the conflict in the weeks and months to come.

On Monday, the editors of Bloomberg, the New York-based financial and business media empire, sent a signal to America’s business community through a rare collective editorial requesting more “transparency” from the Biden administration about where American aid to Ukraine is going.

“The scale of the aid effort is unprecedented. In just seven months, the US has provided Ukraine with nearly double what it gave all of Western Europe on an annual basis during the Marshall Plan in real terms. Support for Ukraine’s military this year equals what the US provided Israel, Egypt and Afghanistan combined in 2020,” the business outlet stressed, calculating that Washington’s support accounts for $60 billion, or two thirds of all Western support for Kiev this year.

At least $27.5 billion of that is for military needs, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker.

Pointing out that Kiev hasn’t exactly been a paragon of good governance and anti-corruption, even before the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, Bloomberg made the unprecedented admission that there’s “the possibility, however slight, that US-made weaponry could fall into the wrong hands or be sold to actors outside Ukraine.” Accordingly, the outlet asked Washington to appoint a special watchdog on Ukraine aid, similar to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction created in 2008.

The effectiveness of such an appointment would be questionable at best, and futile at worst. Last year, Brown University’s Costs of War project calculated that the United States spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan, equivalent to over $300 million per day for 20 straight years. Still, the effort to turn the war-torn West Asian nation into a model of Western-style governance and democracy collapsed like a house of cards in August 2021, when the Taliban* smashed the country’s NATO-trained army in ten days as US and allied forces evacuated. The inspector general’s appointment seems to have done little in stopping or even stemming the largess of spending on the war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, even the mere admission that US arms could destabilize the situation and cause a spike in weapons flows to international black markets and criminal groups is significant, as it echoes concerns that Russian officials from the president to the foreign and defense ministries have been expressing for many months.

“This is not a question only of small arms; there are risks of more powerful weapons falling into the hands of criminals, including man-portable air defense systems and high precision weapons,” President Vladimir Putin said at a recent meeting with regional security officials.

Last month, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose party appears poised to take the House and possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, expressed opposition to giving Ukraine a never-ending “blank check” of American aid as ordinary Americans suffer the consequences of a recession. President Biden admitted that he was “worried” about McCarthy’s rhetoric, accusing the GOP of not “getting” that Washington’s assistance to Kiev wasn’t about Ukraine, but about Eastern Europe, NATO, and “really serious, serious consequential outcomes.”

As domestic weapons stocks show signs of running low and amid US media reports citing behind-the-scenes grumbling from the military and government over the issue continue to mount, it bears repeating the question about where Western arms support for Ukraine is actually going.

Where are the Weapons Zelensky?

It turns out the White House and the Pentagon don’t actually know where the aid goes, with sources telling US media back in April that the Pentagon has “zero” clue where most of the arms end up after they drop into the “big black hole” of the conflict. This is especially the case with small and compact arms like Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable air defense missiles, which can’t be tracked via satellites and “with nobody on the ground” to keep a lookout.

From time to time, moments of clarity poke through the fog of war.

On Sunday, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation reported that weapons sent to Ukraine had somehow found their way into the hands of local motorcycle gangs, as well as criminal groups in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Earlier this year, Sputnik Arabic plunged into the seedy recesses of the so-called dark web, finding a Ukraine-based arms dealer willing to ship US-made M4 assault rifles to the conflict zone in Yemen via Poland and Portugal, for a fee.

Separately, in August, a major US television network posted and then quietly scrubbed an investigative feature which revealed that as little as “30 percent” of the Western military aid sent to Ukraine was actually reaching the frontline.

Some Western-dominated regional and international security cooperation agencies have also given an indication (mostly underreported by the mainstream media) on the danger of sending weapons to Kiev.

Europol, the European Union criminal policing agency subordinated to Brussels, continues to resist admitting the scale of the weapons smuggling problem, assuring in July that it is “working with Ukrainian officials to mitigate the threat of arms trafficking into the European Union” and that it has “full confidence” in Kiev’s “measures to monitor and track these firearms.”

However, Interpol, Europol’s older and more respected cousin, has urged the international community to brace for weapons that have been sent to Ukraine ending up in criminal hands. Agency secretary general Juergen Stock warned in June that “the high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.” Criminal groups are already preparing. “This will come, I have no doubts,” Stock said.

Given the scale of the Ukrainian crisis, and the shady nature of criminal weapons smugglers’ activities to begin with, the real extent and scope of illicit arms smuggling operations, and just how far up the totem pole of Ukrainian and Western administrative power it goes, has yet to be revealed, and probably won’t be revealed, until years or even decades from now.

During the 1980s Soviet War in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency ran ‘Operation Cyclone’, a drugs and weapons running operation which armed the Afghan Mujahedeen with over $3 billion in US- and European-made weaponry, including Stinger missiles and other sophisticated equipment.

In the decades that followed, Washington discovered how difficult it is to recover these arms from the Afghan ‘freedom fighters’, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, and fought a two decade-long war against the US and NATO occupation, including using weapons sent in the 1980s. In the meantime, Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who served as one of the Arab commanders in Afghanistan in the 1980s, wound up declaring a holy war against the US, with Washington ultimately fingering his terrorist group for the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and in other attacks.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

How Fauci ignored ethics and the law as he barbarically experimented on babies and children

By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Fredom | October 21, 2022

Yesterday we published the first part of our extract from Robert F Kennedy Jnr’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Healtha critical look at Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. This second part continues to report on horrific drug trials carried out on children.

***

Warning: Some of the following details are distressing.

***

Two years later, [investigative reporter Celia] Farber would follow the trail of child casualties left by Dr Fauci’s Aids branch, DAIDS, in Uganda, exposing the pattern of abusing African mothers and children.

After the BBC documentary aired, AP reporter John Solomon made his own efforts to calculate the number of children who died in Dr Fauci’s Aids drug experiments. Solomon’s May 2005 AP investigation revealed that at least 465 New York City foster children were subjects in NIAID’s [US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] trials and that Dr Fauci’s agency provided fewer than one-third (142) of those children with an advocate – the minimum legally mandated protection.

A March 2004 letter from Vera Sharav to Dr David Horowitz, director of FDA’s [Food and Drink Administration] Office of Compliance, charged Dr Fauci’s HIV drug trials with numerous violations of federal law, including NIAID’s failure to protect the rights and safety of foster children, particularly during the perilous Phase 1 stages in which drug companies determine toxicity effects by exploring maximum tolerance levels. Sharav accused Dr Fauci’s team of illegally failing to provide state wards and orphans with independent guardians to represent their interests and protect their rights during brutal, dangerous, and often agonizingly painful experiments.

The 2004 FDA investigation of Dr Fauci’s AIDS research division urged the head of NIH to insist on better management from NIAID. ‘The overall management of this Division requires careful review,’ the report said. A May 2005 Congressional hearing also concluded that NIAID’s experiments had violated federal statutes.

In testimony before Congress, NIAID and its local partner – New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) – sought to justify the unethical research practices by claiming they were providing first-class, cutting-edge treatments to HIV-infected children who could otherwise not afford expensive medicines.

However, AHRP’s [Alliance for Human Research Protection] investigation revealed that many of the children NIAID subjected to Dr Fauci’s experiments were perfectly healthy and may not even have been HIV-infected. Those investigations focused on thirty-six of the trials. For obvious reasons, clinical trials virtually always occur in hospital settings with trained medical personnel, doctors and nurses, in attendance. However, ICC [Incarnation Children’s Center] was a non-medical facility. The decision to allow experiments with highly toxic drugs at an orphanage devoid of medical personnel was, itself, a stunning act of malpractice. Subsequent events suggest that the decision was deliberate, calculated to avoid scientific and ethical objections that might have put Pharma PIs [principal investigators] at odds with trained medical professionals. Publicly, NIAID pretended it would permit pharmaceutical companies to conduct their dangerous dose tolerance experiments only on children who had terminal Aids and were therefore likely to die anyhow. However, AHRP found that NIAID was quietly allowing its Pharma partners to experiment not only on children with laboratory-confirmed HIV infection, but also those ‘presumed’ to be infected. In other words, NIAID required no proof that these children actually had HIV. AHRP accused NIAID of exposing children who might never have developed Aids to lethal risks and the horrific adverse effects of highly toxic drugs for purposes that were not therapeutic, but purely experimental.

On March 8, 2004, NIH [National Institutes of Health, of which Fauci’s NIAID is a division] rejected a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the adverse event reports from NIAID’s trials conducted at ICC, citing FOIA’s ‘trade secrets’ and ‘privacy’ exemptions. AHRP then filed a complaint on March 10 with the FDA and the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP), charging that NIAID was depriving foster children of legally mandated federal protections against research risks. Two subsequent investigations validated AHRP’s complaint.

John Solomon’s AP investigation finally brought Dr Fauci’s experiments to national prominence. AP identified at least forty-eight Aids experiments NIAID conducted on foster children in seven states – mostly in violation of the federal requirement that NIAID provide those children with an advocate. In addition to the Dapsone trial that killed at least ten children, NIAID sponsored another study testing a combination of adult antiretroviral drugs. AP reported that of the fifty-two children in the trial, there were twenty-six moderate to severe reactions – nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever, and dangerous drops in infection-fighting white blood cells.

From the outset, Dr Fauci’s experiments served his vain obsession to develop an HIV vaccine. (Despite these expenditures of tens of billions of dollars, he has failed – for forty years – to develop an HIV vaccine that was safe or effective for human use.) Medical records that NIAID ultimately and reluctantly released proved that Dr Fauci’s PIs were testing his dangerous vaccines on children from one month to eighteen years old. AP writer John Solomon confirmed that despite contrary requirements in official NIAID protocols, NIAID was knowingly allowing its Pharma partners to violate NIAID’s written study protocols by conducting these experiments on children with and without proof of HIV infection.

For example, published reports acknowledge that NIAID, Genentech, and Micro-Genesys co-sponsored a vaccine trial code-named ACTG #218. The ACTG #218 protocol states ‘Patients must have: Documented asymptomatic HIV infection,’ and the ‘Expected Total Enrolment’ was seventy-two. However, an internal report acknowledges that NIAID was allowing the companies to openly violate those requirements: ‘125 immunized children proved to be HIV uninfected’. Another report stated: ‘A total of 126 children were not infected’. NIAID’s final analysis acknowledged that ACTG #218 ‘showed no clinical benefit to vaccine recipients’.

Another HIV Phase 1 vaccine trial, ACTG #230, tested two experimental vaccines, one by Genentech, another by Chiron/Biocine. This time, the protocol openly declared: ‘Accepts Healthy Volunteers’. As Solomon discovered, the ‘volunteer’ subjects of that unethical experiment were newborns aged three days or less. NIAID randomized these infants to one of three doses of either experimental HIV vaccine or placebo. These reports validate AHRP’s concerns that Dr Fauci experimented on infants and children who were never at risk of Aids, and that he exposed them to deadly risks and agonizing discomforts in a speculative drug and vaccine exercise that offered absolutely no potential benefit for them.

Dr Fauci was certainly aware of the peril to which he was subjecting his gallant infant ‘volunteers’. Most of the drugs that his PIs tested on these children were previously approved for adults with Aids and carried Black Box warnings of potentially lethal side effects: Aldesleukin, Dapsone, Didanosine, Lamivudine, Nevirapine, Ritonavir, Stavudine, and Zidovudine.

Finally, even in cases when the children were genuinely ill, Dr Fauci’s pretence that his experiments were compassionate gestures to impoverished orphans was always a sham. NIAID’s claim that their experiments were the only opportunity for those children to receive ‘life-saving’ drugs was a canard from the outset. New York State law requires that physicians provide ‘life-saving’ treatment to wards of the state, if need be, to provide treatment ‘off-label’.

Furthermore, drug companies do not primarily design clinical trials to benefit the individual subjects. Their purpose is to gain safety and efficacy information that may prove helpful for subsequent patients and be profitable for their bottom line. Finally, not all subjects get the ‘most promising’ drug in a trial; some get placebos.

Liam Scheff’s January 2004 article, The House that AIDS Built, ignited an outraged internet controversy, prompting the New York Press to publish a follow-up article by Scheff,Inside Incarnation. Scheff’s detailed descriptions are worth reading if only to understand the sacrifices that Dr Fauci demanded from his venturesome ‘volunteer’ babies for ‘the greater good’.

Scheff’s chronicle suggests that Dr Fauci and his PIs purposefully took advantage of Incarnation Children’s Center’s status as a non-medical facility. The PIs had free rein to engage in conduct that experienced professional nurses and doctors would have flagged as unethical and illegal.

When children declined to take the toxic drugs, NIAID and its Pharma partners arranged to surgically implant feeding tubes in their bellies to force obedience. Scheff wrote, ‘When Mimi [a staff member with no medical background] started at ICC, the tubes were used infrequently. “But when the kids got older, a lot of them started to refuse the medication,” she recalled. “Then they started coming in with the tubes more and more. Kids who refused too much, or threw up too much, they’d get a tube. First it was through the nose. But then it was more and more through the stomach. You’d see a certain child refusing over and over, and one day they’d come back from the hospital from surgery, and they had a tube coming right out of their stomach. If you asked why, the doctors said it was for ‘compliance’ – the regimen. Got to keep up the regimen,” said Mimi. “Those were the rules”.’

Mimi describes how children suffered – and how some died: ‘One girl, a six-year-old, Shyanne . . . She was the most delicate little flower – beautiful, polite, full of life. Her family never gave her meds. So, Administration for Children’s Services brought her into ICC . . . she came in and started the meds. And it was three months, maybe three months. And she had a stroke. She could not see. She was this normal girl, singing, jumping, playing. Then, poof, stroked out. Blind. We were freaked out. Then, in a few months, she was gone – dead.’

Between 1985 and 2005, NIAID and its Pharma partners conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as human subjects of clinical trials testing NIAID’s experimental Aids drugs and vaccines. ICC and the medical research centers that conducted the trials received substantial payments for hosting the experiments, from both the National Institutes of Health and the manufacturers of the drugs. Among those companies were Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, Micro-Genesys, Biocine, Glaxo, Wellcome, and Pfizer.

Further reading: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/exclusive-an-interview-with-faucis-nemesis/

October 31, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

EX-BIG PHARMA REPRESENTATIVE TELLING THE TRUTH – GWEN OLSEN

Video link

Gwen Olsen’s Website
https://gwenolsen.com/home/

October 29, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | 3 Comments

DR PETER GØTZSCHE EXPOSES BIG PHARMA AS ORGANIZED CRIME

August 16, 2022

October 29, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | 5 Comments

Will Ursula von der Leyen be forced to resign, and will her deeds be investigated?

By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 28.10.2022

Europe has been rocked by large-scale protests over the last few weeks, and many politicians and media organizations in the EU see this as a reflection of public dissatisfaction with the policies of the European Commission and especially its head, Ursula von der Leyen. The main concern is the rising cost of living, the rapid increase in energy and food prices, and the anti-Russian policies of the European Commission, which have led to an energy and economic crisis that is affecting not only Europe but many other countries who have committed themselves to a close relationship with Europe.

Always keen to show her unwavering support for Washington and London, in her speech at the inaugural summit of the European Political Community, the President of the European Commission extended a warm welcome to Liz Truss – despite the fact that no-one other than Ursula von der Leyen considers the former British premier’s policies to be a success. As the Daily Express notes, the speech was greeted with an uncomfortable silence.

Internet users in the EU have criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s most recent promises to help the Kiev regime “as long as is necessary” and provide Ukraine with billions upon billions of Euros in credit. Her statements have been attacked on social media as ignoring the interests and wishes of EU citizens, and users have called for her resignation.

Writing on Twitter, the French politician Florian Filippo criticized her call for regular subsidies for Ukraine: “Ursula is completely crazy! Lock her up!”

In an interview with Le journal du Dimanche, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has accused the European Commission of lacking the authority to make decisions on arms purchases. As he explained, the European Commission is an administrative body, and it is unclear on what basis Ursula von der Leyen considers that she has the authority to speak up on matters relating to foreign policy or arms purchases. Just a few days after the beginning of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, the President of the European Commission announced that the EU would finance “the purchase and delivery of arms and other military equipment” to Ukraine. Europeans are continually hearing about the need to provide the Kiev regime with billions of euros from EU coffers to buy arms, and they blame Ursula von der Leyen. Nicolas Sarkozy alleges that the EU’s policy in relation to Ukraine was too dependent on “escalation, irritation and thoughtless actions.”

The Israeli television channel i24news and the former Socialist candidate for the French presidency (in the 2007 elections) Ségolène Royal have also recently criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s stance. Ségolène Royal claims that instead of helping Russia to stop the war, the President of the European Commission is lobbying on behalf of the USA’s Ukraine policy and has effectively become a NATO and Pentagon press secretary.

In addition to the criticism’s of her policies, Ursula von der Leyen has also found herself at the center of corruption scandals in recent months. Especially since the beginning of the European public prosecutor’s investigation into EU purchases of COVID-19 vaccines. Public attention in relation to the scandal has centered on the role played by the President of the European Commission, who, as even Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council noted on October 20, “went all out and purchased 4.6 billion(!) COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer pharmaceuticals at a cost of 71 billion (!) euros.” “That is 10 vaccine doses for every EU citizen,” he added.

According to the journal Politico, Ursula von der Leyen has admitted to exchanging text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla while the EU was negotiating the vaccine purchase contract. Two EU supervisory bodies have already accused her of wrongdoing in relation to the purchase, criticizing the Commission for refusing to provide the documents required for the investigation into the matter to proceed further.

However, the Pfizer purchase is not the first scandal that Ursula von der Leyen has found herself involved in. There was another scandal three years ago, when, shortly after a call from the EU elite to “make the process of electing the EU leadership more democratic,” the members of various different political groupings complained that at the beginning of 2019 the heads of the main EU bodies were selected in closed meetings “under cover of night.” The presidency of the European Commission did not go to the leader of the group winning the most votes in the May 2019 elections, but was instead “handed to” Ursula von der Leyen, as Donald Tusk, evidently satisfied that he had done his duty, informed journalists at the end of a two-week EU summit.

This political backroom deal in which the position was clearly reserved for Ursula von der Leyen took place at a time when the EU was supposedly undergoing a “democratic reform.” Since 2014 the so-called leading candidate procedure has been in effect, for the purpose of selecting a new President of the European Commission. Among other requirements, the procedure requires that the candidates from Europe-wide parties who won the largest numbers of votes in European Parliament elections should be given priority when selecting the President of the European Commission.

The reservation of the post for Ursula von der Leyen, the then German Minister of Defense, was highly controversial at the time, even in her native Germany, both among politicians and within the expert community. For example, Markus Söder, at the time head of the Christian Democratic Union, described his views to the DPA press Agency as follows: “Manfred Weber would have been a legitimate President of the European Commission, his election would have been democratic. It is a pity that democracy failed, and the winner was chosen in a behind-the-scenes deal.” The heads of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)-led coalition, in government at the time, also opposed her nomination to the most senior post in the EU. “The decision to award the presidency of the European Commission to the Minister of Defense undoes all the efforts that have been made to strengthen democracy in Europe, take into account citizens’ interests and support the role of the European Parliament,” the SPD leaders claimed in a statement.

Significantly, at the time Ursula von der Leyen did not even take part in the election campaign, did not stand as a candidate in the European elections, and was probably most known for her anti-Russian position and her unquestioning support for Washington. It was most likely that support that played the key role in bringing about her nomination as President of the European Commission.

So, one may ask, what did Ursula von der Leyen do to achieve the honor of being given the post she now occupies? She is the daughter of Ernst Albrecht, a high-ranking politician in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and between 1988 and 1992 she worked as an assistant doctor in the gynecological department of Hanover Medical School. However, in 2016 Hanover Medical School checked her doctoral thesis for plagiarism, and noted its “obvious shortcomings.”

Having raised seven children, she is often informally referred to in her native country as “the mother of Germany.” Her political career began in 1990, when she joined Angela Merkel’s CDU, and in 2005 she was appointed to her first ministerial post, as Minister of Family Affairs and Youth in the Merkel administration. In 2009 she was appointed Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, and in 2013 she became Minister of Defense, a post which she occupied for six years, during which she was involved in regular scandals and responsible for controversial decisions. According to statements by Germany’s three main parties (the Green Party, the Left Party and the Social Democrats), many of the 3,800 contracts concluded during her “management” of the German Armed Forces from 2014 onwards (relating to the restructuring of the Armed Forces and also its IT systems) appear to have been awarded to the “right people,” including relatives and friends, and some contracts may even have involved some form of bribery. Back in 2017 the German newspaper Bild, citing a report by the Federal Audit Office, accused Ursula von der Leyen of being strikingly incompetent during her time as Minister of Defense, when it was revealed that not one German submarine was operational, and less than half of its frigates and tanks and just a third of its military helicopters were in working condition.

With such a “success” record, Ursula von der Leyen was already being seen as a burden on the Armed Forces and the CDU. As, with the elections coming up, there was no suitable free ministerial post she was “nominated” for the presidency of the European Commission – a convenient decision for Germany at the time.

However, as time went by it became clear that the EU could not expect to derive much benefit from her appointment.

For Washington, however, which has no interest in the EU being led by strong politicians following their own line independent of the US, the decision to give Ursula von der Leyen the presidency of the European Commission in 2019 played right into its hands. And as a result she is now promoting the interests, not of European citizens, but of Washington alone, by helping US pharmaceutical companies make huge profits from selling the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine or by providing the US military-industrial complex with millions upon millions of euros in arms orders, paid for by European taxpayers, to support the Kiev regime.

In the present circumstances it will be interesting to see how Ursula von der Leyen’s “career” ends – will she be brought down by the results of investigations into the corruption scandals which she has clearly been involved in, or following demands for her resignation by the European public, who are becoming increasingly critical of her actions…

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Russophobia | , , , | 1 Comment

Biden’s Bivalent Booster Blunder

Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts | October 26, 2022

The Biden administration has made a fool of themselves with their bivalent vaccine roll out. Pretty much all decisions were errors, and very likely these will hurt them politically. The only way for Biden to save himself from his terrible Covid policy is to fire all his advisors and rehire good ones. Let’s review the facts:

The Biden administration granted emergency use authorization to Pfizer and Moderna for a bivalent booster that targeted Wuhan and BA45. That vaccine received EUA based on mouse data (8-10 mice). There were no human data at the time of approval. (Please don’t confuse the BA4/5 with BA1 bivalent)

Since then, both companies have press released results, but do not specificify the numeric values of antibodies generated in people. No one has clinical data– i.e. is there a reduction in hospitalization? Severe disease? And if so, we don’t know which people (how old) have a further reduction in severe disease or hospitalization from this vaccine.

We also know breakthrough can occur. Rochelle Walensky herself received the vaccine and then had COVID one month later. Ironically, this is probably the peak vaccine efficacy (peak Ab). I don’t know what the vaccine effectiveness is, and neither does she, but my guess is it isn’t terrific.

The Biden administration said that we didn’t have time to wait for clinical trials in people. But each passing day reveals that is a lie. The uptake of this vaccine is abysmal. No one wants it. If no one was going to get it then why not take the time to run the proper studies?

recent pre-print has shown that the bivalent booster is not better at generating BA45 antibodies than getting the old booster one more time. This is the failure of not generating human trial data.

You could have sorted this out pre-market. *Let’s be clear, these are not clinical data (living longer/better) but without better antibodies, clinical endpoints seem unlikely to be met*

Many universities are now requiring this vaccine for 20-year-old college students who have had three prior doses and Omicron. I think you have to be dropped on your head to actually believe a 20-year-old man in good health who’s gotten three doses and just had Omicron will derive any benefit from this bivalent booster. I have never met even one doctor who thinks that that is true. And yet that is the position of the Biden administration.

They are so hellbent on earning Pfizer money– I mean vaccinating people who just had covid —that they are willing to ignore the mountain of data that suggests that’s not what you should be spending your energy on.

More than a year ago, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause the number one and number two at the US FDA vaccine branch resigned, citing White House pressure to approve boosters for all ages. Their published remarks suggest that they wanted to do it only for the elderly and vulnerable. Their message was repeatedly ignored as the Biden administration rammed booster after booster through the US food and drug administration for ultra low risk populations.

They have actually said a 5-year-old who has had three doses and had covid should get this booster. It’s insane.

Their entire vaccine policy seems to be interested in giving Pfizer and Moderna a perpetual market share for a yearly vaccine. But seems to have no interest in generating credible randomized control trial evidence to inform the public. As such, they fail the American people.

I am concerned that after this White House stint: Ashish Jha, Rochelle Walensky, Vivek Murthy, and Peter Marks (post FDA) will work for or consult for Pfizer and Moderna. That would be devastating.

American people obviously do not want to receive a vaccine every year with non-trivial adverse events without knowing that it gives them some benefit. Benefit to third parties cannot be had because it cannot stop transmission.

Some misguided policy makers argue that even a small reduction in transmission is meaningful. That’s nonsense. The problem is that you can get COVID every single day of your life from now until the end of your life. Even changing the probability modestly won’t change the outcome. Because the probability you will get COVID is one over time. Think of it this way:

You can play Russian roulette with one bullet or three bullets. I would much rather play with one bullet, if I had to. But if you have to play a thousand times in a row, we all know how that game ends.

That’s COVID 19. It’s not going anywhere. You’re going to have to play over and over and over again. And that means you’re all going to get COVID. So the only question is how many doses minimize severe disease? And who needs that to be minimized?

Today in the governor’s debate of New York state, only the Republican candidate was opposed to children’s mandates. It’s amazing that the Democrats are clinging to a failed vaccine policy. Their covid-19 policy is going to lead to catastrophic losses.

They need to fire all their advisors and start new. That’s the only way to fix the situation.

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine a test range for Western arms – defense minister

Samizdat – October 26, 2022

The conflict in Ukraine gives Western arms producers a chance to see which products fare best in a real fight against Russia, the country’s defense minister has said.

“We have a combat testing field in Ukraine during this war,” Aleksey Reznikov explained. “We have eight different 155mm artillery systems in the field … so it’s like a competition between systems” to see which one proves best.

The comments came in an interview with Politico published on Tuesday. The testing ground idea was previously expressed by Reznikov’s deputy, Vladimir Gavrilov, who claimed that some American defense contractors were fielding their prototypes in Ukraine.

Kiev expects military aid from NATO members to continue flowing into the country for years and wants to benefit more from it, Reznikov said. For example, Ukraine could start joint ventures with Poland, the UK, or Germany to produce weapons.

“We have to develop a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) industry not only for aerial drones but also on land and in the sea because it’s the future” of warfare, he noted.

He was also skeptical about restrictions under which Ukraine’s supporters are shipping arms to Kiev. As the conflict with Russia unfolded, the US and its allies have repeatedly reconsidered previous decisions not to send heavier weapons, the defense minister pointed out.

“I’m really optimistic that Abrams tanks are possible in the future and I am sure that fighter jets like F-16s, F-15s, or Gripen from Sweden will also be possible,” he said.

Washington was initially reluctant to provide lethal aid to Ukraine out of concern that Russia would consider it an escalation but gradually reconsidered and supplied increasingly sophisticated weapons, which Reznikov sees as a favorable trend.

Western officials cited logistical issues with training Ukrainian pilots and maintenance of the fighter jets among the reasons why Ukraine can’t get F-16s or F-15s. But according to media reports, Kiev may get them in the long run.

Reznikov said European NATO allies were looking to the US in their aid decisions, so it was up to Washington to up the ante.

“After the first Abrams [arrives] I’m sure we will have Leopards, Marders, and other types of heavy armored vehicles like tanks,” he told the news outlet.

Among the weapons the US most recently designated for Ukraine are the NASAMS air defense systems. Washington is also reportedly considering sending some old HAWK surface-to-air missiles it has stockpiled to see if they are still effective.

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Act of 1986

Good products do not need universal liability shields, but bad actors are enabled by them.

el gato malo – bad cattitude – october 22, 2022

much as been made about the possibility of schools mandating covid vaccinations for kids to be allowed to attend.

it may or may not happen. perhaps it will be treated like a flu shot. perhaps they’ll try for requirements. it’s likely to vary place to place and many states are already saying “no way” and if imposed this could cause flood of school change and really unleash the idea of vouchers and free choice and a swansong for public schools.

in the end, i’m not sure how many are crazy enough to try it and honestly, i doubt that any public school system in america could survive for long mandating this.

i doubt that this is really what the approval is about.

it’s about the liability shield and the subsidies.

and that is a thing we need to fix.

longtime gatopal™ jennifer cabrera has a simple, common sense solution:

If the predicted red wave produces a strong Republican majority in Congress, one of their first acts should be to repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. No excuses, Republicans. Liability is the only mechanism that can produce safe vaccines.

because this law is an abomination.

it creates ALL the wrong incentives and has swollen the US pediatric vaccine schedule (which used to be 3 well tested vaxxes, MMR, DTP, polio) with ineffective or marginally effective crap lacking valid risk reward and possessing meaningful side effect tails.

the case for several (HPV, flu, rota, pneumococcal) is basically non-extant.

but hey, no liability, no need to worry.

interestingly, gardasil does not appear to have this coverage hence the mass of lawsuits.

stop me if this sounds familiar:

landing in court on this is not, perhaps “the system working” as this vaccine looks to have been approved and marketed on numerous false pretenses and perhaps outright fraud. but at least the system is cleaning up its mess after the fact and discouraging such behavior in the future.

and the covid vaccines put all the others in the shade in terms of corners cut and data looking dodgy. but if we shield them and other things like them from liability, where is the disincentive to act badly? (and if you just said “because the drug companies wouldn’t lie to us!” i have some denver harbor bonds to sell you.)

you can get around this exemption by pfinding phraud, but should this really be necessary (especially when they hide the data and thus could have all sorts of little gems in it that the public had not seen)?

so how about we end this harmful “safe harbor” instead?

there is NO good consumer protection reason for this act. it’s a license for pharma to misbehave and it eliminates accountability and incentive to test properly. if you want to jab your drugs into kids, you need to own the side effects.

if you fail to predict or disclose risks, you own the ill outcomes instantly and forever.

let them decide, on that basis, how many studies to do and for how long prior to release.

i would LOVE to see what a class action jury award for fraud in a child vaccine lawsuit looks like.

this is the reason we have a tort system.

let it work.

it’s really simple:

either get voluntary informed consent risk waivers or stop mandating drugs.

mandate + no liability = disaster and “soft mandates” are just as bad.

everyone passes the buck to claim “iT wUZ nEvER a MAnDatE!” when they know full well that it functionally was.

how many times did you see this?

you mandate, you own the side effects. simple, reasonable, and incentive aligning.

this is one we can easily do.

we made this law. it has had perverse, anti-consumer effects. so let’s unmake it.

no more liability waivers.

only voluntary informed consent to risk subject to strict disclosure liability. “oh, we never tested for that!” is no longer an excuse.

i am not saying you get to sue for any bad outcome. but if the risks were not disclosed or were misstated you can. if they did not look for fear of what might be found, they own that. the onus is on them to prove safety and delineate risks and share them accurately and completely.

this encourages full, accurate reporting so people can make real, informed decisions.

it’s kind of stunning that we don’t have this.

if any public agency requires a jab, they become liable for bad outcomes.

no one gets forced and drug companies need to make a case for risk reward that will convince people and providers of healthcare.

let the market find the proper level of testing and reporting.

because healthcare is everywhere and always a cost benefit decision.

and you need free choice and sound data to make such choices well.

not exactly rocket surgery, is it?

or did you need another tour of the land of perverse incentives and regulatory capture?

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Von der Leyen presented with Great Reset award

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has singled out Ursula von der Leyen for her “extraordinary commitment” to the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Free West Media | October 23, 2022

The Gates Foundation named Von der Leyen as one of the four winners of the so-called Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards. The other winners are Radhika Batra, co-founder of Every Infant Matters; Zahra Joya, a journalist from Afghanistan; and Vanessa Nakate, a climate activist from Uganda.

Until recently, the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset was called a conspiracy theory. This week, the EU Commission president received an award for her commitment to the same Great Reset.

The award ceremony, presented by Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, was not supposed to be satire: Von der Leyen was praised for her role in the purchase and distribution of Corona vaccines. Her husband Heiko, is the director of Orgenesis, which is owned by Pfizer – the same company that Ursula signed a secret 71 billion euro contract with.

“It is a great honour to receive this award,” the EU boss said. She dedicated the award to the millions of Europeans who “helped us all get through the pandemic”. “From the scientists, who developed the life-saving vaccines, to the healthcare workers on the frontline. This award is also for them.”

Meanwhile the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into the EU’s procurement of Corona vaccines. There has long been criticism of the secrecy surrounding the European Commission’s billion-dollar contracts with vaccine maker Pfizer.

And Von der Leyen has refused to clarify her negotiations with Pfizer boss Albert Bourla.

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, War Crimes | | 2 Comments

Fauci forced to testify on social media censorship

Samizdat | October 22, 2022

The White House’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, and other senior officials are set to be deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit claiming the government worked alongside social media platforms to create a “massive censorship enterprise” throughout the Covid-19 outbreak.

In a Friday ruling, Judge Terry Doughty granted a joint request from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to compel several current and former officials to testify in the suit, among them Fauci, ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and two high-level figures from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the [Joe] Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement. “It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth.”

While the defense insisted that senior officials can only be called to testify about their actions in office under “extraordinary circumstances,” Judge Doughty said the personnel in question met that standard. He added that the two GOP-led states “have proven that Dr. Fauci has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to Covid-19,” ordering him to cooperate with a deposition.

Requests to depose the other officials were granted on similar grounds, as the judge concluded all either held direct meetings with social media firms about the purported censorship, or had close knowledge of those discussions.

Jen Easterly, who heads up the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was also ordered to testify. She played a “central role” in “flagging misinformation to social-media companies for censorship,” the plaintiffs argued, describing the cyber agency the “nerve center” of “the federal government’s efforts to censor social media users.” The same official was said to be involved in the DHS’ now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – dubbed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ by critics – which would have created a new mechanism to facilitate cooperation between the White House and social media sites.

Initially filed last May by Schmitt and  Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lawsuit claims the federal government encouraged online platforms to censor, delete or ban certain speech about the pandemic, including discussion of the “lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin,” as well as questions about the effectiveness of face masks, vaccines or lockdown policies, among other issues. The two AGs have largely relied on documents obtained through subpoenas of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook’s parent firm Meta, which detail regular communications between the government and social media sites.

The White House, as well as the eight officials ordered to testify, have yet to comment on Friday’s ruling. The depositions must take place within 30 days of the order, though it remains unclear whether the defense intends to appeal the decision.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | 2 Comments