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How Much of Science Is Reproducible?

BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 27, 2022

Reproducibility is the most fundamental yardstick in science. If a result can’t be replicated, it doesn’t count as science.

Yet in recent years, there has been much talk of a ‘replication crisis’. Many results that we assumed were robust simply cannot be replicated. The term is typically used in the context of psychology and medicine, though it may apply to other fields as well.

So how much of science is reproducible? One way of tackling this question is to select a large number of studies from a particular field and then attempt to replicate them. This has been done several times.

A 2012 paper was only able to replicate 11% of 53 studies from pre-clinical cancer. A 2015 paper was only able to replicate 36% of 97 studies from psychology. A 2018 paper did slightly better, replicating 54% of 28 studies from that field. A 2016 paper was able to replicate 60% of 60% of 100 economics experiments. Another 2018 paper was able to replicate 62% of 21 social science experiments.

These numbers are sobering. But there’s an important caveat: the ‘studies to be replicated’ were selected somewhat arbitrarily, so the corresponding percentage can’t be taken as representative of the entire field.

Another way of tackling the question above is to simply ask researchers what percentage of the studies in your field can be replicated – a sort of ‘wisdom of the crowds’ approach.

This was done in a 2016 survey by the journal Nature. They got 1,500 responses – the vast majority from currently-working scientists. Respondents were asked, “In your opinion, what proportion of published work in your field is reproducible?”

The highest figure – 72% – was found in physics. The lowest figure – 52% – was found in “other” (which I suspect is mostly social scientists). Environmental science and medicine had intermediate figures – both 58%. Chemistry was a little higher at 65%. (Answers did not differ substantially between students and working scientists.)

These figures are again sobering. According to researchers themselves, close to half of published work in medicine, social science and environmental science cannot be replicated. Unsurprisingly, more ‘objective’ fields like physics and chemistry are perceived to have higher rates of replicability.

Overall, the two methods yield similar findings: a large percentage of results in more ‘subjective’ – dare one say ‘politicized’ – fields are not reproducible.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Is Trump Tucker Carlson’s JFK Assassination Source?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 27, 2022

On December 15, 2022, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue stating his conviction that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The presentation was remarkable given that that sort of thing is never found in the mainstream media. As most everyone knows, the mainstream media avoids the Kennedy assassination like the plague. 

Carlson’s presentation motivated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to issue the following highly dangerous tweet: “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson.”

Carlson made his presentation in the context of the CIA’s continued steadfast refusal to disclose thousands of its assassination-related records to the American people, along with President Biden’s decision to go along with the CIA’s decision. These are records that the CIA was mandated to release to the American people by the JFK Records Act, which was enacted in 1992 — thirty years ago! 

As I have long maintained, there is only one reason for the CIA’s continued secrecy. Those thousands of records contain pieces of incriminating circumstantial evidence that further establish criminal culpability on the part of the CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy. Obviously, the CIA has concluded that it simply cannot afford to permit the American people, especially assassination researchers, to view those records. Better to have the American people believing that the records are incriminating rather than letting them know that they are incriminating. 

On November 8, 2022 — approximately one month before the Carlson presentation — Gerald Celente conducted an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former judicial analyst for Fox News. In that interview, Napolitano recounted a conversation with President Trump, with whom he was friends. In that interview, the pertinent part of which you can view here, Napolitano stated: 

I once had a conversation … with President Trump when he was in the White House. He used to call me all the time. And we talked about everything under the sun. I said, “Are you going to release those documents or not?” And he said to me, “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t release them.”

In his presentation, Carlson stated the following:

In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. That act mandated full disclosure of all documents by 2017, 54 years after JFK was killed. The last administration promised to comply fully with that law. But under intense pressure from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, withheld, in the end, thousands of pages of CIA documents.

Today, this afternoon, the Biden administration did exactly the same thing. That would be thousands of pages of documents after nearly 60 years, after the death of every single person involved. But we still can’t see them. Clearly, it’s not to protect any person. They’re all dead. It’s to protect an institution. But why?

Well, today we decided to find out. We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?” And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” (Emphasis added.)

Is Trump Carlson’s source? It would make sense that he is. After all, just a little more than a month ago, Trump told Napolitano that he had seen the CIA’s still-secret records. He also implied to Napolitano that the still-secret records contain explosive information of an incriminating nature. What else could he have meant when he said, “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t release them”?

It also stands to reason that Carlson would have known about the Napolitano interview, given Napolitano’s longtime relationship with Fox News. It also stands to reason that Carlson would have reached out to Trump and that Trump would have talked to him, given Trump’s longtime close relationship with Fox News. 

But whether Trump is Carlson’s source or not, the obvious question arises: Why didn’t Trump order the release of those long-secret records of the CIA? Why did he, like Biden, participate in the CIA’s assassination cover-up by authorizing the CIA to continue keeping its half-century-old records secret? Indeed, why doesn’t Trump, a recently announced candidate for president, go public right now with what he saw in those records? 

One possibility is that the CIA “Hoovered” Trump into continuing to keep the CIA’s decades-old assassination-related records secret. By “Hoovered” I am referring to J. Edgar Hoover, who was a serial blackmailer when he was serving as FBI director. Hoover would acquire personal information about people with the aim of blackmailing them into bending them to his will. If they complied, he would keep the information secret. If they refused to comply with Hoover’s will, he would release the information through trusted assets in the mainstream press.

My hunch is that that is what happened with Trump. After all, when the deadline for release was coming due, Trump publicly announced that he intended to order the release of the CIA’s assassination-related records. Then, just before the deadline came due, however, the CIA somehow prevailed on Trump to suddenly change his mind and instead to grant the CIA’s demand to extend the time for secrecy. 

In the final analysis though, the CIA’s steadfast refusal to disclose those thousands of assassination-related records is, largely, irrelevant. As I have maintained over the years, once it was established beyond a reasonable doubt that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on Kennedy’s body, the gig was up. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! No one has ever come up with an innocent explanation for the fraudulent autopsy, and no one ever will. A fraudulent autopsy necessarily means criminal culpability in the assassination itself. See my article “Why the JFK Assassination Should Matter to Everyone.” Also see my books  The Kennedy AutopsyThe Kennedy Autopsy 2Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, and, most recently, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story

The CIA’s continued steadfast refusal to release the thousands of remaining assassination-related records tends to confirm what Trump told Napolitano. But those records would simply add additional evidence to what the fraudulent autopsy has already established: that the November 22, 1963, assassination was a regime-change operation intended to protect “national security” from a president who was determined to lead America in a direction different from the direction that the Pentagon and the CIA were determined to lead America.

NOTE: Credit is given to Charles Burris, who first raised the possibility that Trump is Carlson’s source in the following article at LewRockwell.com: “Will Tucker Carlson Reveal The High Level Source Which Confirmed That The Deep State Murdered JFK In A Regime Change Coup d’état?

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Every social media company censoring for government – Elon Musk

RT | December 27, 2022

All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.

“*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the runup to the 2020 election.

In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”

lawsuit filed earlier this year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that officials from no fewer than 12 government agencies met weekly with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and other Big Tech firms in 2020 to decide which narratives and users to censor, with topics ranging from alleged election interference to Covid-19.

A self-described “free speech absolutist,” Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October. He has since released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.

The FBI said last week that correspondence between its agents and Twitter staff “show nothing more than examples of our tradition [of] longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.”

The White House has refused to answer allegations that the FBI directed Twitter to censor information damaging to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

FBI COINTELPRO Is Back, And Worse Than Ever

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | December 27, 2022

Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved of, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media companies.

Thus far, most of the American corporate media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue (or a cause for quiet celebration). At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.

The history of the FBI provides the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King Jr. and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the US were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the US headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego… it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”

The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstore’s “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit. The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program… to identify ‘demagogues.’”

The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in “intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise… They are mostly against marriage, children, and other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports… to try to identify the background of every person there… [and] who they were sleeping with.” The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and violence.”

The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted that the clearest FBI COINTELPRO constitutional violations consisted of “targeting speakers, teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful demonstrations… The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to get university and high school teachers fired… to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, including… most of the large antiwar marches.”

The FBI especially loathed any opposition to the Vietnam War. The bureau ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the “scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.” FBI agents were told: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI internal newsletter encouraged agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”

Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston, testifying to Congress in 1973, lamented the FBI’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”

Throughout the COINTELPRO era, presidents, congressmen, and other high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania to break the biggest scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating documents to the media. The shocking material sparked congressional and news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s legendary ability to control its own image.

The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “Only a combination of legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again.” But the Ford administration derailed legislative reforms by promising an administrative fix. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft threw out many of those reforms as part of “a concerted effort to free the [FBI] field agents… from the bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions” imposed after their prior abuses. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been… the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.” The same tripe has been uttered by many Democrats and liberals in the last five years.

The FBI’s latest war on wrong-thinking Americans took off after the FBI helped fabricate the narrative that the Russian government conspired with the Trump presidential campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The 1976 Senate report noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were barred…We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents… [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.” Senate investigators warned in 1976 that the “FBI intelligence system developed to a point where no one inside or outside the bureau was willing or able to tell the difference between legitimate national security or law enforcement information and purely political intelligence.”

In our time, FBI officials pressured Twitter to suppress Americans based on false claims of fighting foreign influence. The same pretext was used by the Department of Homeland Security to massively suppress Americans’ criticism of election procedures (especially mail-in ballots) for the 2020 presidential election.

One of the biggest “misses” in the media coverage of the Twitter Files is the stunning failure of Congress to expose the abuses that Elon Musk is revealing. A few months ago, FBI director Christopher Wray, facing vigorous questioning from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and others, walked out of a Senate oversight hearing claiming that he had an urgent appointment he must keep. It was later revealed that Wray’s “appointment” was hopping on an FBI jet for a family vacation. Congress punished the FBI with a $570 million budget increase, plowing $11.3 billion into its coffers in the coming year.

Is Congress terrified of the FBI nowadays like congressmen were in the COINTELPRO era? In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs revealed the shameless kowtowing on Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI]… has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny… Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.” (The Louisiana congressman died a year later in an apparent plane crash.)

But old quotes provide no protection against new depredations. The Twitter Files prove that G-men have been off the leash for years. We still have no idea how far the FBI and other federal agencies have gone to suppress our freedom of speech. Until federal abuses are fully exposed, Americans would be damn fools to believe their constitutional rights are safe.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran, Syria, Yemen: Twitter’s collaboration with the US military in information warfare

The damning exposure of collusion between the Pentagon and Twitter raises further suspicions about Washington’s ongoing online operations in West Asia

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | December 27, 2022

The Cradle has previously deconstructed the Pentagon’s online bot and troll operations targeting Iran. These wide-ranging efforts, over many years, sought to destabilize the Iranian government by disseminating and inciting negative sentiment against it, on a variety of social media platforms.

Their exposure led to the White House demanding an internal audit of all Department of Defense (DoD) “psychological operations online.” Ostensibly, this was triggered by high-level concerns that Washington’s “moral high ground” was potentially compromised by the “manipulation of audiences overseas.”

The audit was revealed in a Washington Post article, the details of which pointed to a very different rationale. One passage noted that representatives of Facebook and Twitter directly informed the Pentagon, repeatedly, over several years, that its psychological warfare efforts on their platforms had been detected and identified as such.

Weaponizing social media

Frustratingly, the focus wasn’t even that these operations were being conducted in the first place, but that the Pentagon got busted doing so.

For example, Facebook’s Director of Global Threat Disruption, David Agranovich, who spent six years at the Pentagon before serving as the US National Security Council’s Director for Intelligence, reportedly reached out to the DoD in the summer of 2020, warning his former colleagues that “if Facebook could sniff them out, so could US adversaries.”

“His point was, ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem,’” an individual “familiar with the conversation” told the Washington Post.

The obvious takeout from this excerpt – unnoticed by any mainstream journalist at the time – was that Facebook and Twitter staffers actively welcome their platforms being weaponized in information warfare campaigns, as long as it’s the US intelligence community doing it, and they don’t get caught in flagrante.

Moreover, in the event they are compromised, those same social network luminaries readily provide intimate insight on how US spooks can improve their operational security, and better conceal their activities from foreign enemies. Unmentioned is that these “foes” include tens of millions of ordinary people who are the ultimate target of such malign initiatives, of which residents of West Asia are preponderant victims.

‘Whitelisting’

Internal emails and documents from Twitter, published by journalist Lee Fang, have now confirmed that Twitter executives not only approved of the Pentagon’s network of troll and bot accounts, but also provided significant internal protection for them through “whitelisting.”

This practice allowed these ‘superpower accounts’ to operate with impunity, despite breaking numerous platform rules and behaving egregiously. The “whitelist” status also effectively granted these accounts the algorithmic and amplificatory privileges of Twitter verification without a “blue check.”

As The Cradle previously reported, these accounts over many years sought to influence perceptions and behavior across West Asia, in particular Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. In many cases, users had “deepfake” profile photos – mocked up pictures of realistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence.

Target: West Asia

In respect to Twitter-enabled activities against Tehran, multiple different personae were formed to attack the Iranian government from different ideological and political positions. These were not your standard ‘opposition’ accounts – the ops were more sophisticated. Some posed as ultra-conservative Shia Muslims critical of the administration’s “liberal” policies; others as progressive radicals condemning the extent of the Republic’s enforcement of Islamic code.

Many users amplified Washington’s disinformation, disseminated by US government-funded Voice of America’s Farsi-language service, among a myriad of other US funded and directed propaganda platforms. All along, Twitter higher-ups were aware of these accounts, but did not shut them down and even protected them.

The impact of the collaboration between Twitter and the Pentagon on the tweets that users around the world saw and did not see is unknown, but likely significant. Twitter staff were aware of what they were doing.

For example, in July 2017, an official from the Pentagon’s central command for West Asia and North Africa (CENTCOM) emailed the social media network to request the “blue check” verification of one account and the “whitelisting” of 52 accounts that “we use to amplify certain messages.”

The official was concerned that some of these accounts, “a few” of which “had built a real following,” were no longer “indexing on hashtags.” He moreover requested “priority service” for several accounts, including the since-deleted @YemenCurrent, which broadcast announcements about US drone strikes in Yemen. The account emphasized how “accurate” these attacks were; that they only killed dangerous terrorists, never civilians – a hallmark of US drone war propaganda.

Of course, US drone strikes are anything but precise. In fact, declassified Pentagon documents indicate there was “an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll,” and that innocent people were killed indiscriminately.

In 2014, it was calculated that, in attempting to slay 41 specific, named individuals, Washington had murdered 1,147 people, among them many children – a rate of 28 deaths for every person targeted.

‘Misleading, deceptive, and spammy’

In June 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles testified to the US House Intelligence Committee on the company’s determined efforts to end any and all “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” on the part of hostile enemy states, stating these efforts were his employer’s “top priority.”

“Our goal is to remove bad faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics. Twitter defines state-backed information operations as coordinated platform manipulation efforts that can be attributed with a high degree of confidence to state-affiliated actors,” he declared.

“State-backed information operations are typically associated with misleading, deceptive, and spammy behavior. These behaviors differentiate coordinated manipulative behavior from legitimate speech on behalf of individuals and political parties.”

The following month, however, Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) to discuss the defense of the Pentagon’s “coordinated and manipulative” social media activities.

Then-Twitter lawyer Stacia Cardille noted in an internal email the Pentagon may be seeking to retroactively classify its malign online activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”

Jim Baker, then-deputy general counsel of Twitter and an FBI veteran, subsequently noted that the DoD had employed “poor tradecraft” in setting up numerous Twitter accounts, and was now covering its tracks in order to prevent anyone finding out multiple users “are linked to each other” or to the US government, one way or another.

“DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD,” he speculated.

Free speech absolutism

So it was the compromised accounts that were permitted to stay active, spreading disinformation and distorting the public mind all the while. Some even remain extant to this day.

To say the least, Twitter executives were well-aware that their eager and enthusiastic support of Pentagon psyops would not be received well if publicized. Shortly before the September Washington Post report on the DoD’s audit of these efforts, Twitter lawyers and lobbyists were alerted by a company communications executive about the forthcoming exposé.

After the Post story was published, Twitter staffers congratulated themselves and each other over how effectively the company concealed its role in covering up CENTCOM’s deeds, with one communications official thanking a welter of executives “for doing all that you could to manage this one,” noting with relief the story “didn’t seem to get too much traction.”

Were it not for the series of #TwitterFiles disclosures since Elon Musk controversially took over the company, these dark, shameful secrets would likely have remained buried forever. The full extent of the company’s mephitic collusion with US intelligence agencies, and the comparable, simultaneous collaboration of every major social network, must now be told in full.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran arrests agents linked to British intelligence

By Lucas Leiroz | December 27, 2022

Since the beginning of the mass protests in Iran, many suspicions have arisen that this could be another attempt of color revolution. In fact, the existence of foreign agents interested in promoting a regime change operation in the country seems increasingly clear. Recently, Iranian authorities arrested subversive agents linked to British intelligence. The case shows once again that the demonstrations are not really focused on guaranteeing women’s rights, but on attacking the West’s geopolitical enemies.

Members of the Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) announced on December 25th the arrest of seven leaders of a dissident group involved in the protests that have hit the country in recent months. According to the Guard authorities the criminals were involved with British intelligence agencies, and supposedly interested in destabilizing the Iranian political situation, making a regime change operation possible.

Although the arrest has happened now, when the suspects were finally identified and located, the investigation about the dissident group they were part of is old. The organization is called “Zagros” and would be, according to Iranian intelligence, creating a wide network of “counterrevolutionary elements” inside and outside Iran – receiving support from the British in order to foment social chaos in the Persian country. The seven leaders were found in Kerman province, where they were in constant contact with foreign agents. According to the Iranian police, the British agents have also been identified.

“An organized group called Zagros, which was led by agents from the UK and created a team of active counterrevolutionary elements inside and outside the country to lead subversive activities, especially during recent protests, has been identified as a result of a successful operation”, the Guard’s spokespeople informed Iranian media in a statement.

As well known, Iran has been the target of a drastic mutiny since September. Apparently, the reason for the start of the protests would be the alleged “murder” of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died when she was in the custody of the Iranian police after being detained for breaking some Islamic moral norms.

Iranian authorities have denied any involvement in Amini’s death, stating that the woman died of natural causes while in custody. In fact, images taken by prison cameras show that Amini was fine, healthy and without any injuries until minutes before she died, which contradicts the Western narrative that she was tortured and beaten to death.

However, even so, mass protests erupted across the country, leading to utter chaos. Quickly, the demonstrations ceased to be peaceful, and the protesters adopted extremely violent methods, resorting to acts of vandalism, sacrilege and beatings. Mosques were destroyed, religious leaders attacked, and government facilities vandalized. Later, the violence escalated to the open use of firearms by the protesters, who murdered several police officers in the streets of the country. Between late October and early November there were also two terrorist attacks, with attackers bombing civilian and military facilities.

The government implemented some counterterrorism measures to neutralize the rebellion. Several protesters were arrested, and investigations gradually progressed to find possible signs of connections between the protesters and foreign groups. Since the beginning of the unrest, the Iranian authorities made it clear that they suspected the existence of an intelligence operation to incite chaos and start a color revolution. The suspicions were corroborated by several geopolitical experts around the world. Now, with the arrest of these Iranian agents at the service of British intelligence, the veracity of suspicions of foreign involvement is even more evident.

Indeed, Iran, regardless of any criticisms that may be made about the local government, is a revolutionary regime safeguarded by broad popular support. Even during the recent demonstrations, there was a great movement of response from the masses supporting the Shia theocracy, who also took to the streets to fight the dissidents. Also, despite maintaining strict moral rules in respect of the traditional Islamic religion, the country has a progressive stance towards women, having high rates of female representation in universities and in high level jobs.

This makes it at least difficult to believe that protests of this magnitude could have developed “naturally” in the country, without incitement to riot by destabilizing groups. What is happening in Iran is something very similar to what happened in several emerging countries during the 2010s, when mass demonstrations evolved into armed clashes and civil wars, resulting in regime change attempts in enemy nations of the West.

But Iran has managed the situation well and seems to have avoided the possibility of a civil war.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

IRGC arrests seven riot leaders linked with UK intelligence services

The Cradle | December 26, 2022

Seven individuals active during the recent riots in Iran’s Kerman Province with ties to the United Kingdom were detained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on 25 December, Tasnim news agency reported.

According to information released on 26 December by the IRGC’s Tharallah base in the Kerman Province of central Iran, seven individuals of a network with ties to UK intelligence services were detained. Those arrested had allegedly been leading riots and were in charge of recent disturbances in the area.

The network, which went by the name “Zagros,” collected anti-revolutionary agents from inside and outside the nation to carry out plots against the Islamic Republic in an attempt to destablize the government, particularly during the most recent unrest, IRNA reported.

According to the information released by the IRGC’s Tharallah base, among those detained were dual nationals who had been trying to flee the country.

The British foreign ministry stated that it was requesting more information from Iranian officials in response to claims that dual citizens of Iran and the United Kingdom had been detained there.

On 1 December, the head of the IRGC’S Basij forces was quoted as saying that the ‘enemies’ of the Islamic Republic have been using “hybrid warfare” against the country throughout the recent unrest, and that 47 foreign intelligence agencies are involved.

Last month, a number of French intelligence agents were also detained in Iran in relation to the unrest gripping the country, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told state TV on 16 November.

“People of other nationalities were arrested in the riots, some of whom played a big role. There were elements from the French intelligence agency and they will be dealt with according to the law,” Vahidi said.

The interior minister did not specify the number of agents detained nor where they were discovered.

Several Mossad agents have also been arrested in Iran over recent months, who were allegedly planning to carry out sabotage operations and assassinations targeting security personnel.

On 22 December, Iran’s security forces identified and arrested members of four Mossad-affiliated operational teams, according to a statement disclosed by Tehran’s Intelligence Ministry.

The statement elaborated on how the Israeli intelligence agency planned to exploit Iran’s current instability in recent weeks, which began due to nationwide riots instigated by the alleged murder of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s Gasht-e-Ershad, also known as the morality police.

The Intelligence Ministry further added that it obtained “clues” about a Mossad ringleader based in Europe, disclosing that information regarding the investigation will be revealed upon completion.

A few days prior, in a similar incident, the Intelligence Ministry disclosed that it arrested several members of the Mossad group who were allegedly planning to sabotage Tehran’s defense industry.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter pushed the Pentagon’s Middle East war propaganda, and both will likely get away with it

By Daniel Kovalik | RT | December 26, 2022

Information continues to roll out about how Twitter knowingly became a conduit for US propaganda efforts abroad that only serve to produce more violence and chaos. Sadly, this news has seemingly been greeted with a collective yawn by both the US corporate press and the American public.

A recent article by The Intercept details how Twitter facilitated efforts by US Central Command, or CENTCOM, a division of the US Defense Department, to spread propaganda, particularly in and about the Middle East using fake accounts posing as private individuals in the region. These accounts were given special treatment by Twitter, which accorded them the same privileges as ‘blue-checked’ verified accounts, which, as The Intercept article describes, “would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.” And, of course, this was being done at a time when Twitter was deleting hundreds of accounts it viewed as associated with the Russian government and designating other such accounts as “Russian-state affiliated media” even when, as in the case of some of my friends, such as Fiorella Isabel, these accounts were of private individuals writing in their own, personal capacity.

One example of an account given “priority service” by Twitter was @yemencurrent (now deleted), which, among other things, “had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were ‘accurate’ and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.” Such a whitewashing of the US-Saudi war on Yemen – a war barely covered in the US press and therefore barely known to most Americans – is especially infuriating given that that war has been marked by the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure on a colossal scale and by the US government’s willful failure to even properly account for civilian casualties.

The US’ own Government Accountability Office has, in a restricted-access document reported upon by the New York Times in June, concluded that, since the war began in 2015, “[t]he State Department and the Defense Department have failed to assess civilian casualties caused by a Saudi-led coalition in the catastrophic war in Yemen and the use of American-made weapons in the killings . . . .” The NYT also reported that earlier, “in August 2020, the State Department inspector general issued a report that said the department had failed to take proper measures to reduce civilian deaths.” The result has been an estimated 150,000+ deaths, including nearly 15,000 civilians, and one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises in history.

And yet, Twitter aided and abetted CENTCOM’s misinformation campaign through fake accounts claiming that civilians were somehow not being harmed by US-manufactured weapons – claims that deceive American taxpayers about the war they are bankrolling, and which are designed to prime the government pumps for more aid to this unholy conflict that President Biden had promised to stop funding.

According to The Intercept article, other fake CENTCOM accounts given priority by Twitter “focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq.” Again, few Americans are aware that many of these militia groups the US has backed in Syria, while claiming to be “moderate rebels,” have themselves carried out terrible atrocities against civilians in that country. Fake Twitter accounts promoting such militia groups only further obfuscate this subject.

As for the “anti-Iran messages in Iraq” and elsewhere, The Intercept explains that, as reported earlier by the Stanford Internet Observatory, some of the fake Twitter accounts falsely “accuse Iran of ‘threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,’ while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.” Such propaganda has a dual purpose: to gin up tensions and conflict between nations in the Middle East and to manufacture consent in the US for potential armed conflict between the US itself and Iran.

In other words, Twitter has been aiding and abetting the US Defense Department in war propaganda, an act that was established to be a crime in the post-WWII Nuremberg trials. If we had a fair and working system of international law, Twitter and Defense Department officials involved in such offenses would indeed be investigated. However, we do not have such a system. Therefore, it is up to the American people to act, having learned of such misconduct by their government and by the social media companies they so rely upon to hold them accountable. It is also up to Americans to finally realize that, when it comes to matters of war and peace, they are being lied to constantly, and they must withhold their consent for the wars that our government undertakes with the help of traditional and social media alike.

Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is author of the recently-released No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Fusion Power Breakthrough? Don’t Count On It

StevenKrivit – December 21, 2022

This video explains:

1. The actual device input energy that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory omitted in its December 2022 announcement.

2. The real-world significance of fusion ignition/scientific breakeven.

3. The gap between the ignition result and the energy needed for device breakeven.

4. The extremely brief duration of the fusion reaction.

5. Why the claims that fusion is an “unlimited, abundant” source of energy are not true.

6. That one of the two required fuels for most nuclear fusion concepts does not exist.

7. That there currently are no good ways to make tritium.

8. Visually, how far away this fusion device is from becoming a practical source of energy.

National Ignition Facility — Recommended Reading and Viewing https://news.newenergytimes.net/nif/

Credit for the visual concept for the diagram: David Kramer.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Daily Mail Promotes ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ Scare that Experts Call “Junk Science”

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 24, 2022

The Daily Mail recently published a story claiming the world could face a mass extinction of plants and animals within less than 80 years, with more than a quarter of species dying by 2100. It was an eye-catching headline, timed of course to appear at the same time as the UN’s biodiversity conference. But curiously missing from the article, based on a recent science paper, was a note that most of the data underpinning the eco-scare were created by the authors of the report, while assumptions were made that global temperatures would rise by up to 5°C. Given that global temperatures have risen only 1.1°C over the last two centuries, and over the last two decades probably no more than 0.1°C, this looks a tad on the high side.

The report authors give considerable weight to the view that food chains are fragile in nature, and one extinction leads to another. This may be true in some cases, although most animals in the wild are resilient in adapting their diets to changing conditions. But building a media ‘mass death’ headline surely needs a few actual facts. The authors admit: “Apart from the obvious modelling and computational challenges to incorporate interactions among species, the main reason why there are few studies accounting for interactions is that obtaining sufficient data in most communities is intractable.” They add that an important caveat is that “while our virtual species are functionally realistic, they do not have taxonomic or phylogenetic meaning.” According to the Mail, the scientists aimed to build an “ecologically plausible Earth”.

Modelled results were obtained via a supercomputer assuming temperatures suddenly leap by between 4-5°C in just 80 years. The so-called ‘pathways’ feeding in these huge temperature rises are themselves the product of computers. But reality has started to bite in climate model circles with the realisation that their mock-ups are running far too hot. Four decades of wrong forecasts and the knowledge that global warming went off the boil two decades ago has led to a slight lowering of the various projections. But claiming that a quarter of species could disappear within 80 years as temperatures rise five times more than they have done for the last 200 is just fanciful speculation.

The Mail reported that the scientists’ tool can map extinctions everywhere on earth. It is said to confirm “beyond doubt” that the world is in the throes of its sixth mass extinction.

The sixth mass extinction scare is becoming very popular in climate Armageddon circles. Heavily promoted by the World Wildlife Fund, it has a lot going for it on the propaganda front, although some may quibble that it is notably short on actual proof. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 823 animals and plant species (mostly animals) that have gone extinct since 1500. If we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, as the Mail reports, we might have expected to be able to name more than 823 extinct species in 522 years.

Five years ago, the eminent Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin dismissed sixth mass extinction talk as “junk science“. He went on to state that “many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were”.

The Australian science blogger Jo Nova had an interesting take on the latest mass extinction science paper. “So a supercomputer adds up 15,000 webs of low level data on sloths, bark and butterflies, with error bars larger than trends, in systems we don’t understand, and a million lines of code, and extrapolates data up the kazoo – what could possibly go wrong?”

She goes on to quote Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who has noted that most of the species going extinct, “never existed in the first place”. Moore is another who is underwhelmed by extinction work produced by computers. He is unimpressed by estimates from the biologist Edward Wilson that 50,000 species go extinct every year. This estimate is based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world.

“There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species,” he wrote.

Finally, let us remember the Bramble Cay melomys, the first animal said to have become extinct due to human-caused climate change. Until recently, this little brown rat lived on a small sandy island off the coast of Australia. How it got there nobody knows, but rats are very resourceful and it probably hopped on a passing branch, said goodbye to a billion of its close relatives, and set sail. It liked its new home since there were plenty of blue turtle and birds eggs to eat. But, alas, its home was only three metres above sea level and the area prone to cyclones (your fault), so one day it got washed away. The Guardian was particularly taken with its sad end since it called for a “moment of silence”, and said it would “continue to fight for the things you believe in” – although presumably not eating blue turtle eggs.

December 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Twitter promoted Pentagon propaganda to whitewash occupation, war crimes in West Asia

The Cradle | December 21, 2022

Twitter has reportedly collaborated with the Pentagon for at least five years to wage a secret “PsyOps campaign” across West Asia, in a scheme to sway public opinion in favor of Washington’s military interests in the region.

According to an investigation of Twitter’s archives, emails, and internal tools by The Intercept, the social media giant created a special “whitelist,” exempting accounts run by US Central Command (CENTCOM) from spam and abuse flags, granting them greater visibility on the platform.

According to the findings of investigative journalist Lee Fang, the Pentagon used this network of bots and US government-generated news portals to shape the discourse regarding the wars in Yemen and Syria, as well as the continued presence of US occupation troops across the region.

In particular, Fang revealed that much of the Pentagon’s covert social media ops focused on promoting the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Washington has recently boosted its military presence in the war-torn country, reportedly in a bid to control its natural resources like they do in Syria.

The investigation of the internal Twitter documents also shows that the PsyOps campaign promoted narratives that specifically demonized Russia, China, and Iran.

PsyOps – the military jargon for psychological operations – is defined as targeting foreign adversaries “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

Twitter reportedly introduced the “whitelist” in 2017 after US military officials asked the company to improve the visibility of 52 Arab language accounts used to “amplify certain messages.”

And while Twitter executives claimed for years that the platform did not allow deceptive state-backed influence operations, the social media company was aware of the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign and tolerated the accounts’ presence until at least May 2022.

Over the same period of time, Twitter suspended or outright banned accounts that reported on Israeli war crimes in Palestine, as well as many that were linked to the governments of IranRussiaCuba, and Venezuela.

The revelations come as part of the so-called “Twitter files” release, which compiles internal company documents provided for journalists following the purchase of the company by billionaire Elon Musk.

The bombshell report comes at a time when the US army and its proxy militias are accused of illegally occupying vast regions of Syria and Yemen, looting oil from both war-torn countries, just over a year after their brutal occupation of Afghanistan ended.

Just last week, the White House succeeded in stopping the senate from voting on a legislation that would have severely restricted their operations in Yemen.

On top of this, last month, the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice issued a report detailing how the Pentagon has been allowed to covertly deploy troops and wage secret wars over the past two decades in dozens of countries across the globe.

Despite the damning revelations, in the coming days, US President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law the biggest annual defense budget in history, allowing the Pentagon to continue spending trillions of dollars despite being the only branch of the US government to have never passed a financial audit.

December 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nobody Knows What is in the Vials

Covid-19 injections are dangerous, non-compliant biological materials. Their production must be stopped until a full investigation can be done.

By Sasha Latypova | Due Diligence and Art | December 22, 2022

Many of us are familiar with the following conundrum: on one hand, highly credentialed scientists and doctors have written numerous research papers explaining the dangerous mechanisms of action underlying mRNA/DNA “platform” technologies. The papers are meticulously researched and depict, correctly in my opinion, many terrifying consequences of the technology that breaches the innate protective mechanisms of human cells. Furthermore, these theoretical papers are validated by the observed outcomes, such as for example, increases in all-cause mortality in high correlation with increases in rates of vaccination in a given territory, unprecedented increases in the adverse events and deaths recorded by various passive reporting (https://openvaers.com/), astonishingly high reports of the adverse events and deaths from the pharmas’ own pharmacovigilance systems, and autopsy findings in vaccinated post-mortem showing the mechanisms of mRNA technology damage in histopathologic evaluations. On the other hand, many who have received the injections report no adverse effects and deem the data points above a “crazy conspiracy”. The question from the uninjured seems to be – why don’t we see MORE deaths if what you say about mRNA products is true?  Setting aside ethical limitations of this question, here is a possible answer why:

The mRNA shots do not conform to their label specifications. In practice both “blank” and “lethal” vials and anything in between is produced. Without full compliance, nobody, not even the manufacturers or regulators, know exactly what ends up being produced.

Vials of mRNA injections are not routinely tested by the manufacturers for conformity to the label. The only vial-level tests specified by Pfizer in leaked Chemistry Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) documents are the vial weight at filling, manual inspection for large visible particles, and some tests related to integrity such as vial capping. However, no vial or dose, i.e., “unit-level as dispensed” tests verifying the ingredients are described as routine. How is the public assured that each Pfizer dose contains 30 mcg of mRNA as stated on the label? What level of variability of this key ingredient and other ingredients is acceptable? The ingredient conformity tests described in Pfizer CMC package are based on the bulk product batch testing – an upstream manufacturing process step. It is a regulatory requirement to retain samples of each batch produced, and these samples of vials should exist and be available for examination. Per contracts with the US Government, the product is shipped to the DOD who retains the ownership of the vials until the product is injected into people. These contracts are very detailed and specify manufacturing data to be delivered to the DOD, however, I did not find any descriptions of sampling of the vials for purposes of verification of their contents vs the label. Furthermore, it is expressly forbidden by the international vaccine supply contracts to perform the vial tests for label conformity.

Despite the disturbing prohibition of the independent vial testing, covert random testing of the mRNA vials has been ongoing worldwide. Reported thousands of vials have been obtained and tested by dozens of research groups working independently of each other. The quality of these studies varies and depends on the conditions of the samples acquired, access to the lab equipment and the experience of the investigators. However, the consistent finding among all is that there is yet a single vial to be found in full conformance to the manufacturer’s label. A review of these independent testing efforts has been published recently. Another high-quality report summarizes experiences testing vials from various manufacturers in Germany. These studies use different techniques ranging from optical to electron microscopy, spectroscopy, as well as isolation of genetic and protein components and in some cases sequencing of the RNA.

Some vials contain RNA as well as high concentrations of DNA and protein impurities in quantities far exceeding allowed limits specified by the manufacturer. When RNA was sequenced, the sequences did not fully match the specified BNT162b2 sequence, and a large quantity of RNA fragments was found.  In other instances, vials are found apparently without RNA or DNA in them (evidently absent nitrogen and phosphorus).

Want to know what’s inside the vaccine vials?

These results could depend on the methods used and more thorough testing may be needed.  Nevertheless, I was able to confirm that the apparent “blank” vials from at least one researcher came from batches of Pfizer and Moderna that had almost no adverse events reports in VAERS: two batch numbers had 1 report each and one batch number had no reports.  This should be contrasted with some batch numbers of Pfizer and Moderna associated with 5000+ adverse event reports in VAERS, and an average of ~1500 adverse event reports including ~700 serious reports and deaths across all CDC verified batch numbers.

Almost all vials examined contain high contamination levels of various metals that are toxic to human body. This finding is consistent across all groups and methodologies, and therefore should be deemed more conclusive. There is no explanation of the origin or purpose of these materials according to the known manufacturing processes. Additional findings include various forms of carbon, including, potentially graphene oxide which is a known toxin. Finally, almost all vials examined contain a variety nano- and micro-particulate contaminants – another conclusive finding with plenty of photo and video documentation. These appear under microscope examinations as shapes and structures of various sizes and include characteristic ribbons, fibers, and crystals.  Several published reports by qualified and credentialed microscopy experts have excluded the possibility of environmental dirt on the microscope slides. Sometimes a process of movement and what can be described as “self-assembly” is visible and has been documented in a single take video. The researchers also take steps to maintain the chain of custody, examine unexpired product and keep the vials frozen per manufacturer’s instructions.

Below are some representative images from various manufacturers’ injection vials from many studies:

Dr. David Nixon – Australia, Pfizer

Another Dr. from Australia, Pfizer:

The images above are startling and remain unexplained to date. Some scientists insist these are all “salt and cholesterol”, and nothing to see here folks! I disagree. Images of salt and cholesterol under microscope may match some of these structures, but by far do not explain all of them, and seem especially poor explanations for assembly-disassembly processes that have been observed and video recorded. Sizes of these structures alone are problematic. Dismissing them as “manufacturing junk” is not a great way to instill confidence in anyone.

These contaminants and bizarre objects are not rare, in fact as the last image shows, at least some of the vials are teeming with them. While many speculations can be made, one overwhelming conclusion from all the vial tests by independent investigations is that the products are extremely “dirty”, do not conform to their labels and should thus be deemed adulterated. This is a clear indicator that the manufacture of these products is not compliant with the current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP).

Sloppy manufacturing process may result from numerous factors, including lack of accountability, negligence, incompetence and possibly fraud. Review of the contracts with the manufacturers made by the U.S. Department of Defense, BARDA and HHS shows that the main driver were the gigantic sums of money made available with no real accountability for quality or safety – all resulting from the forced extreme speed (“warp speed”) of the scale up of manufacturing. The U.S. DOD contracted Pfizer in May of 2020 for production of at least 100 million doses by October 31, 2020, and up to 500 million doses later. Pfizer’s initial contract award was for $10 billion, with many additional incentives for delivering more doses faster. Similar contracts were made with numerous other “vaccine” manufacturers, and hundreds of other suppliers, all under the guise of panic buying for covid countermeasures. No real accountability for product quality or consistency or safety was built into those contracts, in fact the manufacturers were explicitly exempt from all possible liability under the PREP Act, which is specified in a separate contract clause. The purchaser is the DOD, the distributor is the DOD (and not the licensed and accountable pharmaceutical distributors), and furthermore, the product is not serialized and hence open to both adulteration and falsification or mislabeling.

To meet the contract obligations, Pfizer’s manufacturing batch size has increased from microgram scale for lab and animal study volumes to commercial batches of ~140 liters at the end of 2020 and ~300 liters by late 2021. In my experience commercializing biotechnologies from academia, failure to scale is one of the leading causes of failures of all new technology ventures. Showering this problem with money rarely accelerates the solution, and very often accelerates the demise of the whole venture. This is common sense. For example, placing an order today for 1,000,000 of a new type of vehicles with Ford Motor Company to be delivered in 6 months will likely fail no matter the dollars spent, since even obtaining the raw materials in time will be problematic. Complex manufacturing requires materials, systems, capacity, experienced staff, established processes, suppliers, and most importantly control systems at the correct scale to be successful and produce high quality consistent product. Now imagine simultaneously asking several direct competitors – Ford, GM and Toyota to produce 1,000,000 new cars each in the next 6 months.

Based on review of available literature on mRNA manufacturing and my discussions with experts who have made mRNA in the lab, it is not clear that mRNA can be manufactured at the scale that is estimated for these injections from known shipment numbers and disclosed manufacturing documentation: 200-300 liters of drug product per average batch, 700+ batches a year in the US alone. This is particularly unlikely if strict cGMP rules are applied to the manufacturing requirements, and we know that cGMP is not followed for production of these injections. Recently FDA found Catalent non-cGMP compliant. Catalent handles large volumes of fill-finish for Moderna, therefore batches processed through Catalent are non-cGMP compliant.

The generation of mRNA by in-vitro transcription (IVT) at large scale and under current good manufacturing practice conditions is challenging. For example, the specialized components of the in-vitro transcription IVT reaction must be acquired from certified suppliers that guarantee that all the material is animal component-free and GMP-grade. Furthermore, the availability of large amounts of these materials is limited and purchasing costs are high. This is true, for example, in the case of the enzymes used for translation and capping. Even the glass vials themselves were reported as a shortage. Additionally, the low yields and batch failure are a known problem. Conceptual process flow of making mRNA drug substance contains several steps:

The process is composed of a 2-step enzymatic reaction in continuous form, followed by enzyme recycling using tangential flow filtration strategies and two multimodal chromatography steps, one in bind-elute mode for the intermediate purification, and a second in flowthrough mode for polishing. Formulation is achieved using a third tangential flow filtration module. This means the mRNA needs to be made by chemical reaction, and then purified, and then capped and purified again. There are many variations of this process, and no standards exist. At the “formulation” step (last box in the picture), there are further multiple steps to create lipid nanoparticles, and get the mRNA encapsulated. Further, there are fill and finish steps that likewise are not problem free and decrease the yield. Finally, transportation and manual dose preparation add an extra variability layer.

Here is a simple heuristic to understand any manufacturing process flow and not get confused by the jargon: each arrow in the flowchart points to places where errors accumulate Each output-input point in a complex manufacturing flow is where the errors can be checked for and rectified or, if unsolved, will amplify and destroy the product quality and consistency. This is especially dangerous at the extreme speed and scale.

In science papers mRNA manufacturing is described with problem-free cartoons, it all works beautifully regardless of whether it is microgram or kilogram output, and not a single paper on this topic dwells much on low yields or process failures. This is because the academia never has to confront reality. However, the pesky reality of manufacturing mRNA (or anything else) at large scale is highly error prone. Each step has a yield of anywhere between 50% and 80%, and sometimes the whole batch fails, and that is especially true at the large scale of production. mRNA reaction fidelity is less than 100%, the caps and tails fall off, mRNA breaks into fragments, lipid nanoparticles do not form perfectly and PEGylation can be inhomogeneous leading to their breakage and subsequent escape and breakage of mRNA. Large mRNA breaks into smaller fragments, and these remain in the substance. At large scale of reaction, the enzymatic process for making mRNA was reported seizing at 37.5 liters of mRNA substance (before encapsulation into LNP and making drug product) according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) documents.  It is not clear how this was resolved and transitioned to 100’s of liters scale in a matter of few months, and for all suppliers.  mRNA fragments were deemed process related impurities by the EMA who raised a significant concern, but they were dismissed by the FDA as a “theoretical problem” – as leaked emails from EMA have shown. mRNA “fragments” may or may not code for proteins, however micro-RNAs (miRNA) can interfere with endogenous cellular processes to detrimental health effects which is described in many scientific papers and even in a textbook on biological weapons published by the NIH in 2018.  Chapter 6 of the book describes gene therapy as a class of biological weapons. Coincidentally, the DOD-pharma contracts for covid-19 shots also explicitly state that the product is being developed for both civilian and military applications.

Returning to mRNA manufacturing, multiplying even an optimistic 80% yield by, for example, 7 process steps results in 20% final yield, and if the in-process failures are larger, final yield is single digit percentage or a failure has occurred. Each step generates large amounts of impurities, which are never fully removed as aggressive purification will break the fragile product. Furthermore, the mRNA substance is never equally distributed in the batch volume as thorough mixing of the product is not possible due to its fragility, and lipids tend to float to the top of the vat as well as stick and congregate together.  Dangerous possibly cytotoxic aggregates of broken LNPs and mRNA (mRNA adducts) can result and were reported by Moderna a full year after large scale deployment of their product. As a result, the larger the volume of the batch, the more inhomogeneity at the vial level. These conditions can create over-concentrated, toxic vials and the ones that could be “blanks”, or anything in between. The larger the batch volume the more duds it will produce, which in case of this product is largely good news for the injectees. Avoidance of specifying any product conformity tests at the vial level by the manufacturers seems to be intentional in this context.

Data from Pfizer’s own CMC documentation submitted to EMA at the end of November 2020 shows “failure to scale” beginning at approximately 25% of the current commercial scale of the batch (current scale = 600,000 vials = 3-4 million doses per batch). The graphs below were generated using exact sizes in vials and doses for each Pfizer batch manufactured between August and November 2020 (Figure 1) and all Pfizer shipped doses in the US up to end of April 2022 (Figure 2). I used reported deaths and adverse events in VAERS database associated with those batches as a measure of batch variability. This does not address vial variability but provides directional information especially for the scale of manufacturing. The batches in Figure 1 were the first ones to ship commercially and were likely all used close to 100% since at that time the demand for these injections was insatiable. As the “scale-up” of manufacturing proceeded in 2020, the batches were manufactured in a variety of sizes from 50,000 and up to 300,000 vials (~140 liters of drug product). During this time, several major changes were made to the manufacturing, for example, transition from the pilot facility at Polymun Scientific to Pfizer’s own plants and changing major manufacturing steps to new processes.

Figure 1.

First, the overall data indicate a statistical trend toward increased number of reported deaths with the increase in the batch size – the more this product is used, the more deaths are reported. This is not news for anyone who has been paying attention to the injection related adverse events and deaths.  However, the variability batch-to-batch demonstrated by the vertical dispersion of the death reports associated with batches of the same size is already apparent at approximately 150,000 vial batch size (25% of the full commercial scale). Batches of the same size are 4-5 times different from each other in the number of reported deaths.

The “failure to scale” story gets larger at scale, no pun. Recently, the exact sizes of Pfizer lots shipped in the United States became known via a FOIA data release, including all doses with associated lot numbers shipped as of end of April 2022 to various vaccination centers. Figure 2 is the plot of all batches from Pfizer, by their reported size in doses on the x-axis and serious adverse events including deaths reported for those lot numbers on the y-axis. Data from VAERS was downloaded on September 24, 2022.

Figure 2.

This graph includes the “early” scale up batches from Figure 1, as well as what appears smaller shipments possibly for batches that were largely distributed overseas. What is immediately apparent from the data – the staggering inconsistency of the product batch-to-batch and the rapid decline of apparent toxicity measured by the adverse events with increase in batch size. The latter trend is the opposite of what was observed with the early batches. The product is causing fewer adverse events per dose when there are more doses available. This does not make sense, except if these doses are simply sitting on the shelves. Of note is batch FM0173 (only 26,700 doses shipped in the US) that generated the highest rate of serious adverse events (3.3/1000 doses), upper left dot.

The scale of manufacturing strains the credulity. A batch of 12 million doses translates to approximately 900+ liters of mRNA! Given the manufacturing steps involved, impurities generates and the amount of raw materials, and the scale of manufacturing equipment and disposables needed, it should be questioned whether this truly was a single production run.

Figure 3 is the same data as in Figure 2, with outlier batches removed for clarity (includes batch sizes from 100K to 4M doses):

Figure 3:

It is evident that the variability batch-to-batch is highly significant and remains unexplained.  It is also strangely declining as the size of the batch is becoming larger. The only reasonable explanation to this is that the usage of this product per batch has plummeted. Most of what is produced later in the time period is sitting on the shelves.  At the end of the time period in this graph (end of April 2022), an estimated 100M doses were manufactured but not administered in the United States. At the beginning of this graph, nearly all manufactured doses were administered. That is the only reasonable explanation – and it proves that these injections cause the injuries and deaths reported to VAERS!

Table below lists all batches >4 million doses, including their date of manufacture and the number of serious adverse events and deaths reported for them in VAERS:

Table 1:

The “mega” batches are not entirely benign. They are simply a larger lottery pool. The single death reported for batch FL0007 is for an 8-year-old girl who died in Texas from a multi-system organ failure (VAERS ID 2327226-1) – see Figure 4. While the first batch listed in her report RL0007 appears to be a typo (RL series do not exist for Pfizer), it is evident that she received both doses from the same FL0007 batch and passed away 3 months later.

Figure 4:

Here is my educated guess on what is going on with the batch variability: Pfizer’s (and other manufacturers’) contracts were for delivery of DOSES. Millions of them and fast. Contract scope is simply a “demonstration of large-scale manufacturing” and billion-dollar bonuses attached for shipping millions of doses by certain dates. No accountability, no checks, no liability, just ship the doses on time! The batches of 5 million+ doses should be questioned in this context.  These appear largely benign from the adverse event perspective but, since the demand for these shots has plummeted coinciding with production of mega-batches, it is hard to say what the real driver of “safety” is – over-dilution of the product or refusal of the customers to be injected. I hope it is the latter.

Here is as close as I can get to answering the question “why aren’t MORE people dying?”: Too many people have died and have been injured by these injections, and plenty more will ultimately have their lives cut short. The manufacturers are making both – lethal shots and highly diluted “blanks” in a sloppy, uncontrolled, unaccountable, and ultimately fraudulent manner.

To know the truth, these products must be tested at the vial and dose levels, in a random sampling by independent 3rd party laboratories. In the meantime, the products must be recalled, and a proper investigation initiated.

December 25, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment