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Most authors of clinical trials published in JAMA and NEJM in 2017 failed to disclose industry payments

Authors of papers published in JAMA and NEJMreceived millions in undisclosed payments in 2017, an analysis finds.

By Natalia Mesa – THE SCIENTIST – January 24, 2022

A new analysis finds that 81 percent of authors whose work appeared in [two of the world’s most prestigious medical journals–SB] the Journal of American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 failed to disclose conflicts of interest in the form of industry payments.

The analysis reviewed 31 clinical trial reports from each of the two journals that were published in 2017 and identified 118 authors who, in total, received $7.48 million dollars in industry payments. The payment information came from Open Payments, a US government website where drug and device makers must report payments to physicians and health care providers. The analysis was posted as a preprint on medRxiv on January 1 and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Of the 118 authors on the included papers, only a dozen did not receive any payments, according to the preprint. Of the 106 researchers who received payments, the payments ranged from as little as $6.36 to as much as $1.49 million. Researchers received payments for travel, food, speaking, and consulting services, among other things, STAT News reports. The 23 researchers that received the largest payments received a total of $6.32 million, of which $3 million was undisclosed.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that researchers disclose payments they received in the three years prior to submitting a study for publication, so the analysis included all payments made to researchers between 2014 and 2017.

When publishing in ICMJE member journals, which includes JAMA and NEJM, researchers are required to follow the disclosure guidelines promoted by the ICMJE—which include disclosing payments. But this expectation was not met by many of the authors of the papers included in the analysis. According to STAT, the authors of the preprint say that their results suggest voluntary disclosure may not be adequate for avoiding financial conflicts or ensuring transparency.

“I’m not surprised, but really, I’m saddened and disappointed,” says Brian Piper, a neuroscientist and medical ethicist at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, and one of the authors of the preprint, to STAT. “These are high-impact and highly influential journals. For many Americans, these are the centerpieces of evidence-based medicine. Many physicians subscribe to them. Many journalists turn to them for information.”

An NEJM statement to STAT says that the journal “follows the disclosure rules set by the ICMJE. The editors do review all of the more than 5,000 disclosure forms received each year but do not have access to primary records on which the information entered in the forms may be based. We expect the disclosure forms submitted by authors to be accurate and complete.”

JAMA has not yet responded to a request for comment on the preprint, STAT reports. 

According to STAT, Piper notes that disclosures that continue to rely on individuals may be a failed approach. Instead, he suggests that journals review Open Payments and provide a link showing payments made to authors.

January 28, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Blinken’s response to Russia NATO demand is frankly disturbing

By Marcus Stanley | Responsible Statecraft | January 27, 2022

Yesterday the U.S. State Department submitted written responses to Russian negotiating positions in the ongoing U.S.-Russia negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. The exact text and details of the responses are confidential. However, Secretary of State Blinken’s statement regarding the content of the U.S. response is disturbing. At a press briefing, Blinken reaffirmed the U.S. refusal to engage with the core Russian position that the Ukraine should not be permitted to enter NATO, adding that in the written response “we make clear that there are core principles that we are committed to uphold and defend — including Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the right of states to choose their own security arrangements and alliances.”

This is problematic from several perspectives. At the most basic level, it indicates that the U.S. is refusing to seek compromise regarding what Russia believes to be a core national security interest, namely that the U.S. should not make an alliance commitment to the military defense of Ukraine. Russia views Ukraine as a strategically critical nation due to its location directly on the Russian border and deep historical and cultural ties to Eastern Ukraine.

As Secretary Blinken must understand, NATO membership is not a decision made by Ukraine alone, and his claim that NATO membership is simply a matter of the Ukraine’s “right to choose” its own security arrangements is deeply misleading. NATO membership involves a two-way commitment, not simply the free choices of the entering member. Current alliance members must commit to mutual defense of the new member. Since the U.S. has by far the largest and most effective military forces in NATO, the most vital element of NATO membership is the American commitment to defend member borders. So Russia’s negotiating position is directed at a potential American commitment to defend Ukraine. Rather than engage honestly with the question of whether such an American military commitment really makes sense, Blinken deflects and reframes it as a matter of “core principles” around Ukraine’s choices and sovereignty.

In the long term, this indicates an unwillingness to grapple with the question of how to align American military commitments and resources with our long-term strategic interests, and whether Ukraine represents a core interest which justifies the placement of many tens or even hundreds of thousands of new troops in Europe and risking a major war with another nuclear power.

More importantly in the short term, it digs the U.S. into a position “on principle” that no compromise whatsoever is available on the critical question of Ukrainian membership in NATO. This is particularly confusing because the Biden Administration has been clear that it is currently unwilling to directly commit the U.S. military to the defense of Ukraine – which is precisely what would be immediately required if Ukraine became a NATO member. A credible defense for Ukraine would require a massive increase in U.S. forces in Europe, possibly approaching Cold War level ground and air forces. It is hard to see any domestic appetite for expending this level of resources, and internationally an immediate beneficiary would be China.

January 28, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

New wave of Stasi censorship likely reveals the next phase of Pharma’s playbook

Pfizer and Moderna set to ask the FDA & CDC to grandfather in their reformulated coronavirus vaccines with almost no data

By Toby Rogers | January 27, 2022

I just got another 30-day suspension from Facebook. It’s always interesting to see which posts set off the Stasi. The purpose of censorship is to delete any facts that contradict the Pharma narrative. So every time they censor one of my posts it tells me that this content was directly over the target.

Many of my previous suspensions were in the weeks leading up to key FDA and CDC decisions on mRNA vaccine applications. I was highly visible on social media sharing information about why the risks of these shots outweigh the benefits. It seems that Pfizer and Moderna just put out the word that they want to get the approval across the line and the Stasi get to work banning anyone with data or analysis that might hurt their application. They ban me about three weeks before the FDA/CDC decision, get the approval they seek, and then my suspension expires.

And that seems to be the case again here.

In this instance, Facebook suspended me for a post from two months ago. They never explain their decision and never point out any factual errors in my post. But ask yourself, why did this particular post trigger the Thought Police?

November 28, 2021

Guys and gals listen up. The battle ahead is this: both Pfizer and Moderna have announced plans to develop new multivalent mRNA shots within 100 days to address new variants. They will argue to the FDA and CDC that these new shots (now the fourth dose of a failed product) should be grandfathered in without further clinical trials because they are similar to the existing (deadly toxic junk) product. If that happens, then all future doses of this product, whatever the formulation, will never go through clinical trials of any kind.

I am hard-pressed to imagine a more apocalyptic scenario — injections, for most everyone in the developed world, every six months, forever, with no clinical trials, and no idea of what is in the vial. It’s a eugenicists’ dream.

We must begin pushing now to tell every elected official and every regulator that there must be new clinical trials or they will be prosecuted at Nuremberg 2.0.

Republicans hoping to take back the Congress in 2022 must be on record as demanding new clinical trials.

Existing trials are terrible but they give us a chance to see how these companies rig the data and they give us a point of comparison (to show that they lied) when real world data comes in. We have very little data on new variants but Pfizer and Moderna’s plans to proceed without clinical trials are a possible extinction-level event for humanity.

Updated to add: the message to elected officials has to be simple — Any new formulation needs a proper new clinical trial (50,000 participants, at least 2 years follow up, conducted by an independent 3rd party).

My assertions in this post are based on years of studying the Pharma playbook. Is there any evidence that anything I said in this post is incorrect? Pharma is going to try to get these reformulated coronavirus vaccines grandfathered in without further regulatory scrutiny.

To the extent that there are any clinical trials — they will be these sham trials like the recent third dose Emergency Use Authorization applications. As you will recall, the Moderna third dose “trial” had 149 participants in the treatment group and the Pfizer “trial” had 200 participants total. I wrote about that (here). These “trials” were so bad that the top two vaccine safety regulators at the FDA quit rather than approve this worthless toxic junk under political pressure from the Biden administration. Indeed these “trials” were so bad that the hand picked Yes-men (and women) on the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee rejected the applications (16 to 2) — so Janet Woodcock just pushed the applications through under her signature, against their advice.

The fact that FB censored this two-month old post out of the blue suggests that this is exactly what Pfizer and Moderna are about to do — they are going to bum-rush these reformulated coronavirus vaccines through the rotten FDA and CDC and start injecting them into billions of people with no data on safety or effectiveness.

These reformulated vaccines are ostensibly to address the Omicron variant — although a new variant will have already taken its place by the time these reformulated vaccines are available. So once again these vaccines are likely to have zero or negative efficacy against the virus and produce unknown levels of harm including iatrogenic injury and antibody dependent enhancement. The introduction of reformulated vaccines is also likely to accelerate the evolution of new variants.

This is why we need a revolution. This is why we must overthrow the existing regime. Common carriers and most bourgeois institutions in the U.S. work for the Cartel. And the Cartel is engaged in democide throughout the developed world because democide is very profitable and this is now their business model.

January 27, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

FDA Asks the Court to Delay First 55,000 Page Production Until May and Pfizer Moves to Intervene in the Lawsuit

By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | January 26, 2022

As explained in prior posts, in a lawsuit seeking all of the documents the FDA relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, a federal judge shot down the FDA’s requested rate of 500 pages per month and instead ordered the FDA to produce at the rate of 55,000 pages per month starting on March 1.

Since the government has trillions of dollars of our money, it is putting it to good use by fighting to assure that the public has the least amount of transparency possible. To that end, it has now asked the Court to make the public wait until May for it to start producing 55,000 pages per month and, even then, claims it may not be able to meet this rate.

The FDA’s excuse? As explained in the brief opposing the FDA’s request, the FDA’s defense effectively amounts to claiming that the 11 document reviewers it has already assigned and the 17 additional reviewers being onboarded are only capable of reading at the speed of preschoolers.

Meanwhile…

As the FDA tries to obtain months of delay, guess who just showed up in the lawsuit? Yep, Pfizer. And it is represented by a global chair and team from a law firm with thousands of lawyers. Pfizer’s legal bill will likely be multiple times what it would cost the FDA to simply hire a private document review company to review, redact, and produce the documents at issue. Within weeks, if not days.

Pfizer is coming in as a third party. But Pfizer assures the Court it is here to help expedite production of the documents. Sure it is! Where was Pfizer before the Court ordered the 55,000 pages per month? Right, doing what it normally does: letting the government work on its behalf – like the way the government mandates, promotes, and defends Pfizer’s product.

But the government did not please Pfizer this time and so here it comes, likely looking for a second bite at the apple. Of course the FDA consented to Pfizer appearing. You can read the response my firm filed to Pfizer’s motion , as well as all of the other relevant recent filings in the link provided below.

Let me end by noting that all of this insanity is simply in response to an attempt to obtain some basic transparency. This should again bring into sharp focus why the government should never coerce or mandate anyone to get an unwanted medical product or procedure. Just look at this circus – the government mandates Pfizer’s product, gives it immunity for any safety or efficacy issues, promotes its product using taxpayer money, gives Pfizer over $17 billion and then uses taxpayers’ money to fight to avoid providing even the most basic level of transparency to the public.

The introduction from the brief opposing the FDA’s request is below and you can find copies of all the relevant court filings (FDA Motion to Modify Scheduling Order, January 18, 2022 / Plaintiff Opposition to Motion to Modify, January 24, 2022 / Pfizer Motion to Intervene, January 21, 2022 / FDA Response to Pfizer Motion, January 25, 2022 / Plaintiff Response to Pfizer Motion, January 25, 2022) here:

INTRODUCTION TO OPPOSITION TO FDA’S MOTION

It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues.[1] However, the FDA’s potential embarrassment over its decision to license this product must take a back seat to the transparency demanded by FOIA and the urgent need and interests of the American people to review that licensure data. The Court already recognized this unprecedented urgent need in its January 6th order directing the FDA to produce 55,000 pages per month.

The FDA now insists it must delay its first 55,000-page production until May 1, 2022 – four months after the Court entered its order. However, the FDA’s own papers seeking this delay make plain it can produce at a rate of 55,000 pages per month in February and March. The FDA affirms it has already “allocated the equivalent of nearly 11 full-time staff to this project” and that “a review speed of 50 documents per hour was within the normal range for document review in a complex matter” in private practice; and here the 50 document per hour rate would be faster since there is only a need to review for personally identifying information (“PII”) for most pages. Hence, if the FDA’s 11 full-time reviewers work only 7.5 hours per day and review 50 pages (not documents) per hour, the FDA could review over 88,000 pages per month in February and March.  That is more than sufficient to produce the 55,000 pages per month currently ordered for these two months.

Instead of complying with this Court’s reasoned order, the FDA claims these 11 reviewers can only review a total of 10,000 pages per month. What the FDA does not say, and what basic math shows, is that a rate of 10,000 pages a month for 11 full-time reviewers amounts to only 5 pages per hour!  This rate is made even more absurd because most of the pages the FDA will be reviewing during this period are repetitive data files that only require second level review to redact minimal amounts of PII that Pfizer may have left in the documents. FDA’s reality defying claim and contemptuous approach to its production obligations should not be countenanced.  (Infra § I.)

It is also apparent that the instant demand is just the start of a campaign to delay the production ordered by the Court.  In this first salvo, the FDA is not really asking the Court. It is instead expressly telling the Court it does not intend to produce more than 10,000 pages per month for February and March, and despite claiming it is making “unprecedented” efforts, the FDA repeatedly tells the Court: “It is not possible to guarantee that FDA will be able to fully comply” with the 55,000-page production rate thereafter. (Dkt. No. 38 at APPX004, APPX008.) Americans must follow the law and the FDA, a multi-billion-dollar agency, should similarly be given no safe harbor from complying with the orders of this Court.  (Infra § II.)

The FDA should also be held to what it attests. The FDA, with over 18,000 employees and an over $3 billion discretionary budget, repeatedly assures the Court that it is taking steps to “marshal every possible resource available to it,” “acting with maximal urgency to assemble every possible resource available to it” and “putting every available resource at its disposal into its efforts to achieve compliance.”  (Dkt. No. 37 at 10, 3, 10.)  The FDA also attests that over the coming weeks, it will have 28.5 full-time people reviewing the documents. Working 7.5 hours per day for 20 business days per month, 28.5 people reviewing 50 pages per hour can review a total of approximately 213,750 pages per month.  Putting aside that most of this production can be reviewed far faster than the rate of 50 pages per hour, Plaintiff asks that the FDA be held to its representations and be directed to produce at the rate of 180,000 pages per month starting in April.  (Infra § III.)

The Court is, other than Congress, the only check on the FDA.  In a free country, transparency is paramount, and the FDA has chosen to thwart transparency and the requirements of FOIA by anemically understaffing the office it maintains to respond to FOIA requests.  It is akin to the boy that kills his parents and asks for sympathy for being an orphan.  Decrying that this Court is now making it comply with the law – by actually producing documents in a timely manner – is ridiculous.  It is also incredible for the FDA to claim that compliance here would harm its health policy objectives.  Even if the FDA really does need to spend $4 to $5 million which, as shown below, is an absurd overestimate, that is an inconsequential amount of its overall $3.41 billion discretionary budget.  Moreover, the issues with the Pfizer vaccine – including waning immunity, variants evading immunity, the failure to prevent transmission, myocarditis, and pericarditis – show that the FDA’s priority should be to address this product before rushing off to engage in other activities.  (Infra § IV.)

For these reasons, as explained below, the Court should refuse to reduce the rate of production in February and March and should increase the rate of production for April and thereafter to 180,000 pages per month consistent with the FDA employing 28.5 full-time reviewers in the coming weeks to conduct the review and the fact that most of the pages need only be reviewed for PII.

… you can read the rest of the brief here

[1] Reflecting the issues with this product, the FDA failed to send a representative to a federal court hearing in this matter on December 14th because of the “FDA’s protocols” regarding COVID-19. Meaning, despite the FDA’s claim the vaccine is “effective,” the FDA is apparently still scared to send a representative to the hearing.  Its actions speak volumes and cast serious doubt on its words.

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

Live and Unplugged – True Covid History given to Irish Nurses Group!

Ivor Cummins | January 26, 2022

My recent talk to Irish Nurses and Mother’s Group – no punches pulled – please share!

NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W

– alternatively join up with my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IvorCummins

January 27, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

COVID Vaccines Causing Miscarriages, Cancer and Neurological Disorders Among Military, DOD Data Show

By Pam Long | The Defender | January 26, 2022

Attorney Thomas Renz on Monday told a panel of experts that data provided to him by three whistleblowers show COVID-19 vaccines are causing catastrophic harm to members of the U.S. military while not preventing them from getting the virus.

Following Monday’s panel discussion on COVID vaccines and treatment protocols, led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Renz summarized data obtained from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), the military’s longstanding epidemiological database of service members.

The data show:

  • Miscarriages increased 300% in 2021 over the previous five-year average.
  • Cancer increased 300% in 2021 over the previous five-year average.
  • Neurological disorders increased 1000% in 2021 over the past five-year average, increasing from 82,000 to 863,000 in one year.

The whistleblowers provided the data knowing they would face perjury charges if they submitted false statements to the court in legal cases pending against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

Renz told the panel a “trifecta of data” from the DMED, the DOD’s military-civilian integrated health database, Project SALUS, along with human intelligence in the form of doctor-whistleblowers suggest the DOD and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention have withheld COVID vaccine surveillance data since September 2021.

“Our soldiers are being experimented on, injured and sometimes possibly killed,” Renz said.

Following Renz’s presentation, attorney Leigh Dundas reported evidence of the DOD doctoring data in DMED to conceal cases of myocarditis in service members vaccinated for COVID.

The military whistleblowers reported a DMED search of “acute myocarditis” resulted in 1,239 cases in August 2021, but the same search in January 2022 resulted in only 307 cases.

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCollough, commenting on Renz’s presentation, told the panel myocarditis is being falsely described as mild and transient when in reality it causes permanent heart damage and is life-limiting in most cases.

The military did not take any safeguards for the most at-risk age group for vaccine-induced myocarditis — 18- to 24-year-olds.

Renz also highlighted a broader data set from Project SALUS, run by the DOD in cooperation with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which sends weekly reports to the CDC.

Project SALUS analyzed data on 5.6 million Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 or older. Data were aggregated from Humetrix, a real-time data and analytics platform that tracks healthcare outcomes.

According to Renz, the Project SALUS data as of late last year show:

“71% of new cases are in the fully vaccinated, and 60% of hospitalizations are in the fully vaccinated. This is corruption at the highest level. We need investigations. The Secretary of Defense needs investigated. The CDC needs investigated.”

The Humetrix presentation summarizing the data in Project SALUS, “Effectiveness of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines against the Delta variant among 5.6M Medicare beneficiaries 65 years and older” (Sep. 28, 2021) has not been made public.

The Project SALUS report also included data on natural immunity, stating the vaccines have waning protection. The data also showed an upward trend of breakthrough cases suggesting booster shots could contribute to prolonging the pandemic.

“Breakthrough infection rates 5 to 6 months post-vaccination are twice as high as 3-4 months post-vaccination,” the report said.

According to the Humetrix overview of the Project SALUS data, Congress must investigate vaccine failure, along with increased risk reported for breakthrough cases (or vaccine failure) in North American Natives, Hispanics, Blacks, and males.

People with kidney disease, liver disease, heart disease and cancer treatment, along with people over age 75 are the most likely to experience breakthrough cases, while medical authorities advocate vaccines to these same populations to allegedly “protect the vulnerable.”

Project Salus reported the vaccines were only 41% effective. This low level of infection prevention needs to be analyzed against the counterweight of a threefold to tenfold increase in chronic disease signaled in DMED.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires only two adequate and controlled studies to approve a biologic, even if those studies are industry-sponsored.

The FDA now has data from the entirety of 3 million people employed by the DOD and 5 million people in Medicare. This data serves as independent substantiation that scientific fraud has occurred.

Based on this data, the FDA must revoke the Emergency Use Authorization for the Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccines, and the Biologics License Application for Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine.

It would be wrong for the FDA to extrapolate the industry’s clinical trial data to pediatrics without halting the use of the vaccines and conducting an investigation based on this real-world data.

Watch Renz’s testimony here:

Pam Long is graduate of USMA at West Point and is an Army Veteran of the Medical Service Corps.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

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

Satellite Images of Russia – A Puzzlement

By Walrus | Turcopolier | January 26, 2022

The Australian ABC has today posted an article syndicated from AP entitled “Here’s what sanctions the US could impose on Russia if it invades Ukraine”

This suggests, charmingly, that among other targets for sanctions, President Putins alleged partner might be a suitable victim.

However while Alina Kabaeva is most attractive, that is not the image that quite caught my eye.

This one: “A satellite image of a Russian troop build-up at Klimovo, Russia, 13 kilometres north of the Russia-Ukraine border.(Supplied: Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies)”

Google suggests this is one of a series referenced by a Radio Free Europe article “Military Buildup: New Images Capture Russian Armor Massing Near Ukraine”:

This provides helpful images of the aforesaid build up. With reference to these images, taken on January 19 2022, an amateur makes the following comments:

Image 1 – A full vehicle park at Yelnya, 150 miles from Ukraine. Two of the tanks have been running engines, they are the ones not covered by snow the rest are dead cold. What would one expect for daily vehicle checks for an active unit? Yelnya is an established base for at least seven years.

Image 2 and image 5 show an equipment store at Klimovo, some 30 kilometers from the Ukraine border. the comment on image 5 states: “Military equipment massed (I love that emotive word) at the Klimovo storage facility on January 19. Older imagery from Google Maps of the same location shows a fraction of the military vehicles present.“

This links to a google image of an empty facility which PROVES that massing has occurred.

There is just one problem; inspection of that location with Google Earth Pro shows that the ’empty” image date is 9/13/2014! Eight years ago.

I cannot comment on the other images, but I’m puzzled by what I’m seeing and how it supports the idea of a massive build up.

Could others please examine these images?

January 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Creating Records By Hiding The Past

Tony Heller | January 20, 2022

Almost all of the claimed climate records the press keeps touting were created by erasing the past – when weather was at least as extreme as it is now.

Also on Youtube

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

Activists complain bipartisan antitrust law proposal could make online censorship more difficult

The challenge comes from “free press” groups

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 24, 2022

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act that is currently making its way through Senate committees before being put up for the final vote, is attracting attention both from those who support it and Big Tech’s lobbyists, who earlier reports said had already launched a broad campaign against it.

The bill that has so far received bipartisan support, aims to significantly limit the way Apple, Amazon, and Google use their monopolistic business practices to undermine competition and antitrust laws.

Either by design or coincidence, it isn’t just openly lobbying firms who are attacking the bill from various angles; they are joined by organizations like Free Press, which claims it is nonpartisan and fighting “for your right to connect and communicate.”

However, in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, Free Press sees a “flaw” that would, essentially, make connecting and communicating easier – and doesn’t like it. Namely, the bill, if passed, they argue, could prevent censorship, specifically of what’s labeled as “hate speech or misinformation.”

After the narrative has been built for months if not years of “misinformation” being the most serious evil on the internet (despite it only being subjectively defined, unlike the clear and clearly damaging Big Tech antitrust behaviors), it makes sense that in order to discredit anything, reaching for the “misinformation” label is now a good idea.

Free Press writes in a blog post that the bill would provide an avenue to businesses hurt by Google and others purposefully downranking them in search results to launch legal battles against such decisions.

The bill is meant to prevent Big Tech from manipulating the all-important search results and listings as these giants promote their own products and services over those of competitors – but could also provide a way to those hit by censorship and obscured from view by the same technology to have a chance of fighting back. And that, Free Press believes, should not be allowed.

The same argument is being made by another group, this one openly close to the tech industry, TechFreedom. “If a majority of FTC Commissioners were bent on a partisan agenda — e.g., forcing mainstream platforms to carry Parler — it would be significantly easier for them to use the administrative litigation process to do so,” this group said. Coordinated or not, Parler was also mentioned in the blog post published by Free Press.

January 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

An Amateur Look At “Russian Build Up” Photographic Evidence

By Walrus | Turcopolier | January 22, 2022

Western Media talk knowledgeably about a “Russian Build Up on the Border with Ukraine”. These stories are often accompanied by one of two satellite images which purport to show evidence of the same.

The first of these, as used by Politico, correctly identifies the location of this vehicle park as Yelnya. However the image is cropped so you cannot see the extensive barracks and infrastructure which identify this as a permanent military base constructed no later than 2016. Furthermore Politico defines “near” the Ukraine border as within 150 miles for that is Yelnyas distance from it.

The second image used is located at Soloti – again the image is cropped so the extensive permanent barracks and infrastructure are excluded. This base is about 30km from the Ukraine border but it has been there since 2005!

Details of the formations based at these locations are available here:

https://www.gfsis.org/maps/russian-military-forces

I have not included details of the sizes of the ammunition dumps that would be required to support any “invasion” of Ukraine. They would stick out a mile but are invisible today.

IMO, the “Russian Build Up” story is rubbish.

January 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Secret of ‘microwave weapons’ targeting US diplomats revealed

By Paul Robinson | RT | January 23, 2022

US diplomats and security officials suffering from a spate of unexplained health problems were victims of Russian microwave weapons, we were told time and time again. But now the CIA admits Moscow wasn’t actually behind “Havana Syndrome.” The story fits a disturbingly familiar pattern of misinformation.

With each passing week, the list of discredited allegations against Russia grows and grows. Time and time again, Western governments and the media have sprung into action to inform us of some new evil plot, only to backpedal later when it became clear that there was nothing to it.

Take, for instance, the multi-year saga that was Russiagate, built on the idea that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. There are still some believers, but for the most part people lost interest once it became clear that it was a load of baloney and that the “Steele Dossier” that sparked it off wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Then there were the claims that Russia was arming the Taliban, that it had inserted malware into the Vermont electrical grid, that it had bankrolled Brexit via British businessman Arron Banks, and so on. All are now discredited.

Yet the allegations keep on coming. A case in point is the story of Havana Syndrome, which was in the news again this week. For those of you who have missed it, Havana Syndrome is the name given to mysterious symptoms experienced by hundreds of American diplomats and CIA agents around the world, including “headaches, fatigue, hearing and vision loss, severe and debilitating cognitive impairment, tinnitus, brain fog, vertigo, and loss of motor control.”

Such a wide set of symptoms casts immediate doubt on whether there is a single cause. Nevertheless, speculation soon ran rife that they were all examples of a single “syndrome,” and that American diplomats were being targeted by some sort of unknown microwave emitter designed to fry peoples’ brains.

After examining four possible causes of Havana Syndrome – infection, chemicals, psychological factors, and microwave energy – a US government report concluded that “directed pulse RF [radio frequency] energy… appears to be the most plausible mechanism.” Havana Syndrome was “real, and it is serious,” remarked CIA Director William Burns, adding that there was a “very strong possibility” that it was the result of intentional actions.

Who might be doing such a thing? In public, US government officials avoided naming names, admitting that they lacked the evidence to do so. In private, however, the finger was pointed firmly at the Russian Federation, a charge rapidly amplified by the international media.

Thus the New York Times reported that officials “familiar with the report” mentioned above said that the country behind the “attacks” was Russia. CIA veteran Lewis Regenstein claimed that Russian/Soviet attacks of this sort had been going on since the 1950s, penning an article for the Washington Times headlined “68 years of Russian microwave radiation attacks on Americans with impunity.” “Russians use ‘secret microwave weapon’ to target American spies across the globe,” claimed The Sun. And so on. The media had made its mind up – Russia was to blame.

Why the Russian secret services might be doing this has never been explained, with some experts speculating that Havana Syndrome was the result of deliberate attacks, and others believing that the harm to humans was an unintended side effect of some scanning machine designed to extract intelligence from diplomats’ electronic devices. Either way, the Russians were responsible, even though not the slightest jot of evidence in support of this thesis has ever been publicly produced.

It didn’t take long, though, for skeptics to come up with other theories. One was that the syndrome was caused by the loud noise made by crickets. Support for this theory later came in a report commissioned by the US State Department that concluded crickets were the most likely culprits in 21 recorded cases.

Late last year, another theory emerged. Havana Syndrome was “a mass psychogenic illness,” a group of US scientists decided. It was, they said, an example of the “nocebo effect,” the opposite of the placebo effect. In this, expectations of something negative happening to one’s health causes something negative to happen. After the initial incident in Cuba, US diplomats were told to look out for “anomalous health” issues, and as a result they started feeling them. In effect, it was all in their heads.

Whatever the truth, the story of Russian microwave weapons continued to gain traction. But it now seems that even the CIA is having doubts. According to reports this Thursday,

“In a new intelligence assessment, the CIA has ruled out that the mysterious symptoms known as Havana Syndrome are the result of a sustained global campaign by a hostile power aimed at hundreds of US diplomats and spies, six people briefed on the matter told NBC News.

In about two dozen cases, the agency cannot rule out foreign involvement, including many of the cases that originated at the US Embassy in Havana beginning in 2016. Another group of cases is considered unresolved. But in hundreds of other cases of possible symptoms, the agency has found plausible alternative explanations, the sources said.

The idea that widespread brain injury symptoms have been caused by Russia or another foreign power targeting Americans around the world, either to harm them or to collect intelligence, has been deemed unfounded, the sources said.”

Oh dear! How embarrassing. For sure, there are still a few cases in which the cause of illness remains unknown and so foreign involvement “cannot be ruled out.” But that is hardly evidence for ruling it in. This latest assessment knocks the “Russia done it” narrative for six.

In short, once again we found that we’ve been fed a tissue of lies. By now, we should hardly be surprised, but the whole affair speaks to the credulity of much of our political and media establishment, and to the need for a much more cautious and evidence-based approach to allegations of wrongdoing.

It’s common nowadays to complain of the public’s lack of trust in traditional political and media institutions. One of the reasons for this is that people have become skeptical of the old “gatekeepers” of the truth due to their tendency to shout wolf at every available opportunity. If people believe disinformation coming from newer sources, it’s because they’ve become disenchanted by the misinformation coming from the old ones. The latter are under threat, but they have only themselves to blame.

Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.

January 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Yamashita’s Gold and the CIA

Tales of the American Empire | January 20, 2022

During World War II, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito directed the looting of the national treasures in 13 nations his army had conquered. This included the wealth of Britain, Netherlands, and France, which had moved some of their gold to Asian colonies for safety. What happened to these treasures, estimated at around 100 billion in 1945 dollars? This loot was combined with treasure seized from the Germans to create a vast slush fund called the Black Eagle Trust, which was used to finance clandestine activities of the CIA. These funds allowed the creation of a huge organized crime syndicate in Asia that supplement their funds via drug and arms trafficking, and government contract and bank fraud.

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“Protecting the American Opium Trade”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbMtl…

“The Empire Enters the Cocaine Trade”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMmeI…

January 23, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

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