The United States government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland Security, is raising the alarm about the threat of “foreign influence” that is “leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” CISA defines “malinformation” as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In 2021, CISA, along with the White House and private sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and Twitter to censor accurate information about the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and covid vaccines.
And yet CISA is failing to do its job when censoring malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation about climate change, including by “threat actors,” often funded or employed by foreign governments. A Google survey of over 2,300 people conducted last year by the nonpartisan research organization Environmental Progress, which I founded and lead, found that 53% of people surveyed in the U.S. agree with the false statement, “Climate change is making hurricanes more frequent,” while 46% agree with the false statement, “Climate change threatens human extinction.”
I strongly oppose efforts by the U.S. government to censor American citizens by ordering social media platforms to remove content, sometimes while threatening to end Section 230, the federal law that makes companies like Facebook and Twitter possible. Such censorship is a violation of the First Amendment. The journalist Matt Taibbi, former State Department official Mike Benz, and I have all pointed to the emergence since 2016 of a censorship-industrial complex operated and funded by the U.S. government. It should be defunded.
But it’s notable that the censorship-industrial complex has shown no interest in censoring climate misinformation that has led people to believe that climate change is making hurricanes more frequent and threatening human extinction. “An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead,” writes CISA. And yet that is precisely what foreign disinformation threat actors like Greta Thunberg, her allies at the German government-funded Potsdam Institute, and even the U.N.’s own Secretary-General Antonio Guterres routinely do when they share videos of people in poor countries suffering from flooding, which is a direct result of lack of flood management infrastructure, not slightly more precipitation from climate change.

Moreover, the censorship-industrial complex has sought to censor accurate information about climate change and energy. Last June, former Biden Administration Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded censorship of those who criticized the failure of weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021, even though such criticisms were factual. “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” said McCarthy.
In her interview, she went on to falsely claim that critics of renewables are funded by “dark money” fossil fuel companies — the same false claim that Democrats made of the world’s most influential scientist studying hurricanes and climate change, Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado. As such, McCarthy spread disinformation in order to undermine the legitimacy of her opponents.
The U.N. continues to wage its disinformation campaign against the people of the world, as today’s headlines about its new report show. “‘The climate time-bomb is ticking,’” reads the CNN headline. “Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster,” says BBC. “Earth to hit critical warming threshold by early 2030s, climate panel says.” The U.N. most journalists are implying that scientists have determined that a temperature increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic.
The U.N. report is malinformation. The supposed 1.5-degree “threshold” is political, not scientific, as Pielke and others have shown. Global warming causes incrementally greater risk. Temperatures are expected to rise less than most thought as recently as 10 years ago, thanks to abundant natural gas. And humankind’s physical security is assured, given our success at adapting to more extreme weather and producing more food on less land.

All of this raises a question. Why, if the U.N. and U.S. governments are so committed to censoring disinformation, are they themselves spreading it? Why, in other words, do U.N. officials perfectly fit their own definition of “disinformation threat actors,” and often foreign ones at that?
March 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | United Nations |
1 Comment
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses its solidarity with Dr. Ahmed Shehadeh after Panamanian immigration authorities at Tocumen International Airport detained and deported Shehadeh, the head of the Brazilian-Palestinian Institute (Ibraspal), on Thursday, March 16. The Panamanian officials confiscated and held his Brazilian passport while he was transiting at the airport on his way to the second conference of the Palestinian Federation of Latin America, taking place between 17 and 19 March in Barranquilla, Colombia, Ibraspal’s vice president, Sayid Marcos Tenório, said.
“Shehadeh was interrogated by Panamanian intelligence agents, possibly with the participation and support of U.S. and Israeli intelligence,” Tenório said. “The state of Panama is under American occupation. American and Israeli intelligence are targeting anyone working against imperialist Zionist policies.”
Palestinian community sources in Brazil reported that extensive contacts took place with the Brazilian authorities, as Alexandre Padilha (Minister of Institutional Relations), Paulo Pimenta (Federal Deputy) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs intervened, as did the representative of the Brazilian Embassy in Panama, communicating with the Panamanian authorities until Shehadeh returned to Brazil after his deportation, where his passport was returned to him at Brasilia airport.
Shehadeh was detained and interrogated for many hours before he was told that Panamanian immigration authorities were deporting him back to Brazil rather than allowing him to continue his journey to Colombia and the Palestinian conference taking place there.
Rawa Alsagheer, Palestinian activist and member of Samidoun Network in Brazil, denounced the action of the Panamanian authorities. “This reflects a Zionist and U.S. attempt to target and disrupt the organizing of Palestinians in exile in diaspora, especially in Latin America,” she said.
Brazilian media and social media widely reported on the news of Shehadeh’s detention and deportation, and many Brazilian and Palestinian organizations denounced the Panamanian action. The Panamanian Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People also condemned the immigration authorities’ actions.
Brazilian organizations and parties are planning to visit Shehadeh to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and their rejection of the Panamanian authorities’ decision to prevent him from participating in the Palestinian Federation of Latin America’s conference.
March 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Latin America, Palestine |
Leave a comment
Amidst calls for online censorship
Just days after a Senator was caught asking whether there were systems in place to censor social media in an attempt to prevent a bank run, “disinformation experts” are partially blaming the Silicon Valley bank collapse exacerbation on online conspiracy theorists on social media.
“Russian media outlets, far-right websites, short sellers and doomsday preppers were among those who pushed and amplified conspiracy theories online focused on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” Bloomberg alleges.
According to anti-disinformation for-profit firm Alethea, a wide range of accounts used the bank’s collapse to promote their own agendas.
The firm’s founder Lisa Kaplan told Bloomberg that the claims by venture capitalists speculating the collapse of the bank that were amplified “propagandists and foreign influencers” contributed to the collapse of the bank.
“We assess that these outlets may have increased online panic and contributed to the broader cross-platform spread of false or misleading content about SVB,” Kaplan said to Bloomberg.
“We also assess that conspiratorial narratives may have accelerated panic, which then posed a risk to the broader financial system,” she said.
“This shut down a bank, and I’m concerned about it happening again,” Kaplan added.
Multiple pundits and websites claimed that the bank collapsed because of the prioritizing of environmental, social, and government initiatives over risk management.
March 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | United States |
Leave a comment
A government-linked academic group pushed Twitter to censor factually correct stories about Covid-19 if they risked “fueling hesitancy” about vaccines, according to the latest batch of internal documents released by the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
Published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday, the documents show that from February 2021 onwards, senior Twitter management – including former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth – signed up to a Stanford University initiative that would alert them to the latest “vaccine-related disinformation narratives” spreading on the platform.
Titled ‘The Virality Project,’ the initiative was led by a former CIA employee and comprised academics from several universities, as well as researchers from organizations funded by the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, and the US State Department. The Virality Project also stated on its website that it “built strong ties” with the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies and departments.
In its briefings to Twitter, the Virality Project recommended that “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy” – such as stories of side effects and certain vaccines being banned abroad – be censored. Posts raising concern about vaccine mandates were viewed as “anti-vax” misinformation, while “just asking questions” was deemed “a tactic commonly used by spreaders of misinformation,” and posting about the “surveillance state” was deemed a bannable “conspiracy” theory.
It is unclear how often Twitter acceded to the Virality Project’s demands, though Taibbi said that within a month, the platform’s staff began using the project’s recommendations when evaluating content to censor.
At the time, Twitter’s rules on Covid-19 “misinformation” required a specific post to be “demonstrably false,” while permitting “strong commentary,” opinion writing, and satire. The Virality Project, however, urged Twitter management to ban “repeat offenders” before they even made new posts.
Sharing the leaked emails of White House coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci could “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci and in US public health institutions,” the Virality Project warned in a June 2021 briefing, while a follow-up report highlighted the spread of “worrisome jokes” about harassing the door-to-door vaccine promoters deployed by the administration of US President Joe Biden.
“As Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success,” Taibbi wrote on Friday. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.”
Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the platform’s new CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously opaque censorship policies. A tranche of files released in December revealed that Twitter censored “legitimate content” on Covid-19 at the direct request of the White House.
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy people’s data from third party companies – SafeGraph and Cuebiq – who are in the business of tracking physical locations.
The CDC did this in a bid to check how citizens were complying with lockdown and other Covid restrictions, reports The Epoch Times, which has had access to the contracts between the parties.
One of these companies received $420,000, while the other deal was worth $208,000. The CDC was allowed to buy this data thanks to emergency rules enacted because of the pandemic.
They were designed to give the government organization the data it deemed necessary in order to properly react.
This included tracking people for the sake of “evaluating the impact of visits to key points of interest, stay at home orders, closures, re-openings and other public health communications related to mask mandate, and other emerging research areas on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”
The data SafeGraph and Cuebiq are able to get hold of and sell on comes from apps installed on phones. In SafeGraph’s case, this information covered points like neighborhood patterns – revealing the frequency at which somebody visited a place “of interest,” as well as where they came to that place from, and where they went from there.
Cuebiq, meanwhile, sold its shelter-in-place index dataset, and that reveals for how long a phone is inside a house, expressed in percentages, as well as the time people would spend in another state. The goal was to assess who was “sheltering in place” as the authorities had mandated.
The contracts were signed only in 2021 but the CDC at first, early into the pandemic, got a taste of the two companies’ location data offer for free.
The organization was not shy about it at the time, either, and in 2020, used the data to produce two studies, covering metropolitan areas in the US. The subject was how often the people tracked were moving around if distancing restrictions were in place – the result was, less often.
The same is true of movement during radical lockdown measures, and US taxpayers also footed the bill that allowed the CDC to come up with this “revolutionary” result: once states started lifting these measures, people started to move around more frequently.
Related: FBI admits to buying geolocation data
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
UK Government’s favourite polling firm says British public overwhelmingly “supports” 15-minute-cities…
The British government’s favourite pollster has been deployed once again.
Only a few days ago, audaciously declaring Brits should “forget the conspiracy theorists”, YouGov tweeted the results from a new poll about 15-minute-cities. They reported that 62% of all Brits support the schemes. While 23% oppose them and 15% don’t know.
In the survey, they explained how such schemes aim to make everyday amenities like banks, shops, and schools closer to residential areas. The major benefit, proponents argue, is as well as convenience, they will negate the need for driving and thus, reduce carbon emissions.
The only problem is, in reality, 15-minute-cities are vastly more complex urban redevelopment models. Integrated as a part of them is “technology and policy interventions” that create “compact urban cells” – at least according to one of its original proprietors, Kent Larson. Not to mention that they were born from the smart city model, which prioritises “electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data”.
This is where Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) come in. Intending to do exactly what they say on tin, they limit traffic. They seek to do so by limiting residents’ ability to drive in certain areas and at certain times. It is a 15-minute-city precursor designed to purge traffic and free up space.
Now, YouGov contends us desperate conspiracy theorists are over-egging the pudding here. Apparently, conflating 15-minute-cities and LTNs is a mistake. This is despite both sharing a practically identical goal to “improve” accessibility via urban spatial management (or rather dictation).
One could easily argue that without LTNs, 15-minute-cities would not be viable or indeed efficient.
Then, there is the digital surveillance. In order for LTNs to offer “benefit”, there has to be a policing system. London currently possesses seven LTN zones, all of which are monitored via camera. If residents fail to buy the correct permit to drive in a certain area, at a certain time, a camera will capture their license plate and send a fine to the corresponding address. If one ignores that fine, one can be jailed.
According to RAC, almost 7.5 million penalty tickets were issued to drivers breaking LTN rules in London last year. Transport for London (TfL) data further reveals the total number of fines, which cost up to £160, increased by 2.2 million from 2020 — an increase of 41% to 7,472,886.
YouGov failed to notify survey participants of any of this information.
The data they collected amounted to the equivalent of someone asking “hey, do you like the idea of your local shop, bank, or GP surgery being closer to you?” Farcical.
Indeed, YouGov shares a very profitable relationship with the British government. During 2020, the polling firm received a £6,85 million contract to carry out surveys for the Cabinet Office up to January 2023. This equated to a reported 7% of the company’s annual revenue in 2020.
The firm is also directly connected to the government. Nadhim Zahawi, the former jab-passport endorsing vaccine minister, founded YouGov back in 2000 alongside the former owner of Conservative Home, Stephan Shakespeare, an outlet that persistently publishes articles written by various conservative MPs.
It’s well-established as a party-line mouth piece…
These curious conflicts of interest do not stop at the lower levels. British PM Rishi Sunak’s family also runs a company that is actively pushing for further urban digitalisation. The father of Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is the founder of Infosys, an Indian information technology company that aims to develop the technological infrastructure to implement a global “social credit score” system – a scheme directly tied to the smart city initiative.
So we have a dubious survey, distributed by a polling company riddled with various conflicts of interest, partnered with a government whose head would indirectly benefit if these schemes were adopted…
Politicians fully understand the capability of polling. A 2020 study published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research that measured the effect of online polls on voting behaviour found advertising majority opinions can sway voting by 7%. In short, voters can be heavily influenced by percieved support for a cause, even if it is unpopular in reality. The same study further found this effect was not confined to general elections but all sorts of political issues.
YouGov knows what it is doing… they just don’t care.
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
The US Department of Defense funds private internet monitoring firms NewsGuard and PeakMetrics, which then trawl the web for “misinformation” to censor and demonetize, conservative news site The Federalist reported on Friday.
NewsGuard is a private company that rates news outlets by their “reliability” and reputation for sharing “falsehoods and misinformation narratives.” Before a Congressional hearing last week, journalist Matt Taibbi labeled the company a part of the “censorship-industrial complex,” publishing an image of a $750,000 grant award from the Pentagon to the firm. During the hearing, reporter Michael Shellenberger explained that NewsGuard uses its ratings system to drive advertiser revenue away from conservative sires or other “disfavored publications.”
In an email to Taibbi, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz denied receiving government funding, stating instead that the government pays for access to its data. The Pentagon, he wrote, is specifically looking for evidence of “Russian and Chinese disinformation.”
However, NewsGuard received a $25,000 award from the Pentagon in 2020, after winning the military’s ‘Countering Covid-19 Disinformation’ challenge, The Federalist, a conservative news outlet, reported on Friday. A year later, Newsguard was given $750,000 to develop an AI-powered database of “misinformation networks” alongside the Department of Defense.
NewsGuard is one of several such businesses funded by the Pentagon. PeakMetrics was another winner of the Covid-19 challenge, earning a $25,000 grant to develop “social listening” technology for the military. It received a further $1.5 million from the federal government in 2021, but even before that the company had been singled out as potentially useful to the Pentagon.
In early 2020, PeakMetrics took part in the ‘Air Force Accelerator’ program, under which it developed “measuring tools to detect misinformation campaigns.” According to The Federalist, it put these tools to use during the 2020 and 2022 elections in the US. At that point, PeakMetrics solely worked for the US State Department and Pentagon, before later offering its services to the private sector.
It is unclear what the Pentagon aimed to achieve during these election monitoring campaigns. PeakMetrics did not respond to a request for comment by The Federalist.
Aside from paying private companies to develop web surveillance tools, the Pentagon, along with a number of other government agencies and departments, directly engaged in social media censorship in recent years. Internal communications from Twitter published by Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other journalists, showed that the social media giant “directly assisted” the US military’s online influence campaigns and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple intelligence agencies. The platform also received extensive lists of accounts to ban from the US State Department and associated NGOs.
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
America First Legal (AFL) has filed federal ethics and Inspector General complaints and launched a probe into the Federal Trade Commission’s retaliation against Twitter owner Elon Musk and Twitter for exposing the Biden administration and federal agencies for pressuring Twitter to censor content.
Last week, the House’s Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report detailing how the FTC has been harassing Musk and Twitter over the past few months.
Read the FOIA request, IG investigative request, and Senate ethics request here, here, and here.
AFL filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics requesting an investigation into several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, for violating Senate Rule 43, which prohibits partisan communications in an unconcluded federal proceeding. AFL accuses these senators of encouraging the FTC to investigate Musk and Twitter, which further solidifies conservatives’ claims of the Biden administration weaponizing federal agencies.
AFL filed another complaint with the FTC’s Inspector General requesting an investigation into the agency’s chair Lina Khan and other officials for abusing power.
The organization also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records that would reveal the reasons for the FTC’s abuse of power.
“The Biden Administration is steadfastly focused on weaponizing the federal government to advance its radical, left-wing political agenda,” said AFL’s general counsel Gene Hamilton. “Most Americans are now aware of politicization at the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security. And now, the Biden Administration has turned to the Federal Trade Commission to exact harm on those who oppose their radical agenda–particularly regarding free speech on social media platforms. Weaponizing the FTC to retaliate against Elon Musk and Twitter for exposing the truth about Deep State censorship is reprehensible, and we will not stand by idly.”
March 16, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | FTC, United States |
Leave a comment
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Have you ever thought that the Bill of Rights was a bit lacking? Did you ever wish there was a list of obligations detailing those things we owe to the government for the privilege of being born into a certain political jurisdiction? Then, boy, do I have the perfect book for you! Join James for today’s dissection of The Bill of Obligations, the latest turgid tome of trash from Richard Haass, the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
DOCUMENTATION
March 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Thanks to German-speakers’ orderliness, we now have written proof of collaboration between gov’t, doctors, and legacy media–time for tribunals!
This is literally ‘hot off the ‘presses’: Austrian alternative media outlet Der Status published leaked documents from the Austrian Chamber of Physicians (Ärztekammer ) that show, beyond reasonable doubt, the grand conspiracy between government, the Chamber, and its protagonists.
Without much further ado, here’s my translation; as always, emphases and bottom lines mine. The below text has been lightly edited for clarity.
The Austrian Medical Association, under the ousted red [i.e., Social-Democratic] president Szekeres and its current president Steinhart, worked closely with the Health Ministers for years. And in doing so, it betrayed the interests of doctors. [to say nothing about patients]
Spring 2020: Collaboration with the Politicians Commences
In April 2020, Szekeres, Steinhart, and Minister Anschober [Greens, since retired] signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding Concerning COVID-19 Vaccinations’. That is, at a time—more than half a year—before the conditional approval of these injectable products, this Memorandum dealt with, among other things, advertising campaigns by doctors for the vaccinations, the vaccination of health-care workers and their family members, vaccinations in homes and schools, and reimbursement agreements.
Yet, secretly, an additional deal was also negotiated: it was literally agreed that ‘clear blanket vaccination recommendations will be made via the National Immunisation Consortium (Nationales Impfgremium, or NlG) on the suitability of the various vaccines and their applicability, esp. for various high-risk groups’.
Explosive: the Minister of Health and the Austrian Medical Association leadership signed a contract in which they go over the head of the National Immunisation Consortium—and they did so long before the injections were even available—to determine what the National Immunisation Consortium will recommend.
[this means, in other words, that the NIG never had anything to say about the data or the underlying clinical trials; this much we already knew, but now we have the receipts: these people have failed the public, betrayed the trust of patients, and soiled themselves]
It was never about Facts or Truth
Until now, the public was not aware of any document that so clearly showed that various ‘expert panels’ and ‘commissions’ obviously only served to obligingly recommend what politicians and the medical association leadership wanted. It was never about expertise, about advice, about objective science, about health.
Long before the beginning of the mass vaccination campaign, when vaccines did not even exist (!), it was only about one thing: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate! The various ‘expert committees’ and doctors served only as Komparsen [extras, in German, one may also use the term Statisten, which literally implies undue influence of the state]. And it is obvious that the medical association leadership was ‘bought’ off with the reimbursement fee agreement [I’ve omitted the screen shots of some original documents, which can be checked out, if you read German, in the original article; it suffices to say that the fees are extraordinarily high, esp. in light of the incidence of injection: 25 Euros for the first jab and 20 Euros for every successive jab; this piece of evidence is reproduced below in the same position as in the original article]. April 2020 thus was the decisive moment in the history of the Medical Association in which its leadership handed the soul of the medical profession to politicians for the equivalent of thirty pieces of silver.
The Persecution of Doctors is Decided Upon
That was not all: in an ‘Amendments to the Memorandum of Understanding on COVID-19 Vaccinations between the Austrian Chamber of Physicians and the Ministry of Health, concluded in April 2020’, dated 2 Sept. 2021, the medical association leadership ‘promised action with respect to the services rendered by the medical profession’. These, too, signed off by both parties:
The Chamber of Physicians will conduct a media campaign as well as a campaign among the medical profession to increase the willingness of the population to be vaccinated. This includes raising the vaccination issue at other medical appointments (e.g., regular health check-ups) and the promise to take stronger action against doctors who spread misinformation.
As is well known, what constituted ‘misinformation’ was left to the arbitrary whims of the leadership of the Chamber of Physicians. This disgraceful agreement formed the basis for the persecution of critical doctors, which continues to this day. The medical disciplinary law was, in fact, misused for intimidation and propaganda purposes. In doing so, the leadership of the Chamber of Physicians had turned against its paying members [membership is mandatory in Austria as the Chamber also certifies physicians, much like these boards and associations in the U.S.], which cemented into place the persecution of doctors in the style of the Inquisition.

Disciplinary Proceedings by the Medical Association Were (Are) Illegal
The behaviour of the leadership of the Chamber of Physicians’ leadership in recent years is now coming back to haunt them. For months, the medical association has been attacked, ridiculed, and had its very existence openly questioned by politicians. Having done their duty for politicians in the last three years without a peep, the Chamber is apparently no longer needed and may well be let go of. The Chamber of Physicians is sinking more and more into political insignificance. According to insiders, it is now even regarded as a political opponent, a situation that can also be seen in legacy media. After having served as a ‘doormat’ for politicians of all stripes for years, the Chamber of Physicians is now also being treated as such. Various scandals internal to the medical association reinforce this tendency. [talk about Karma, eh? Those who don’t have self-respect will have a hard time getting others’ respect… ]
In the meantime, the Regional Administrative Courts of Vienna, Lower Austria, and Vorarlberg have petitioned the Constitutional Court to repeal parts or the entire Disciplinary Law in the Physicians’ Act [Ärztegesetz, these parts of the Act permit the Chamber of Physicians to enforce standards] on grounds of their suspected unconstitutionality; it is possible that the Constitutional Court will rule even the entire Physicians’ Act unconstitutional. The Chamber of Physicians is a self-governing body. All its committees are to be selected from among its members, i.e., from medical professionals. However, the Disciplinary Commission consists of two medical assessors and a ‘judicially competent chairman’ who is appointed by the Minister of Health in agreement with the Minister of Justice, i.e., someone who must not be a trained physician and who does not come out of the Chamber of Physicians. Thus, the composition of the Disciplinary Commission is a violation of the Federal Constitution. This is the unanimous legal opinion of three state administrative courts [Verwaltungsgerichtshof] and countless jurists.
[I’ll have more to say about this particularity below, for time being: this is potentially huge—and it would be akin to completely re-writing the rules of medicine]
The Chamber of Physicians has unintentionally awakened sleeping dogs with its wave of ill-advised disciplinary hearings against critical doctors. The consequence may be that it now has to be completely re-imagined. But this could also be an opportunity for the medical profession after all the repression of doctors in recent years. For in its current form, the Chamber of Physicians is a politically superfluous enemy and, for its members, the doctors, a very expensive mandatory association whose dues are used to finance the functionaries’ luxury salaries.
From time immemorial, we’ve all known that a man’s—or woman’s—price is about, in purely monetary terms, 30 pieces of silver, to say nothing about the amorality and, yes, cowardice of most physicians everywhere.
The notion of buying off support has been well-established in the U.S. (see, e.g., here).
Here, we’re talking individual doctors who are paid handsomely for jabbing people.
Yet, this isn’t even the worst part of this.
The Three Axioms of Governance-by-Bureaucracy
You’ve gotta love them German-speakers for being so stupid to actually put these things into writing.
We now have definitive proof that the subsequent shenanigans—first and foremost the obnoxious Covid Passports — were based on the unholy trinity of questionable medical ethics (ahem), government coercion, and arbitrary definitions.
Remember that ‘fully vaccinated’ used to be two injections? Now it’s at least three, with the fourth jab ‘optional’ (haha, see above), and the Covid Passports come with expiration dates varying from 3-6 months, irrespective whether you’re ‘vaccinated’ or ‘recovered’.
Thus, we may formulate whatthe first axiom of governance-by-bureaucracy is: everything leaks.
In other words: arbitrary categories by government fiat, arrived at with the collaboration of the overwhelming majority of the medical profession.
If history is any guide, the Covid Passports are the functional equivalent of the Aryan Certificate deployed by Nazi Germany: both documents were clearly politically motivated and based on sham ‘The Science™’.
Yet, Covid is revelatory: we’ve seen the abject lack of integrity, morality, and compassion on part of the political caste, its willing executioners in legacy media, and its perpetrators among medical professionals.
Don’t ask what’s wrong with individuals. It’s the bloody ‘system’ that stands exposed.
Thus, we may formulate the second axiom of governance-by-bureaucracy: everyone has his or her price.
We’ve known this for quite some time; sure, I could cite the Nazi and Stalinist atrocities here, but I’d like to point you also to the Asch Conformity, the Milgram, and the Stanford Prison Experiments. Or the book The Wave.
And yet, despite all of this, there’s also a bright spot in all of this: contrary to the claims of postmodernist woke-fied agents-provocateurs, not everything in human society and relations is ‘socially constructed’ or about ‘power’.
A sizeable share of people everywhere has resisted the pressure to ‘get vaccinated’.
A group of doctors have resisted the pressures and temptations—remember the 30 pieces of silver—of collaboration and compliance with government tyranny.
If ‘booster’ uptake is any guide, more and more people are realising that they’ve been had.
Thus the third axiom: incentives and coercion work, until they don’t.
Our highly complex societies are, of course, more than the sum of their moving parts. Yet, given the highly integrated structures, it would be far-fetched to believe that anyone is able to control everything.
True, a lot can be dominated, but in the end, the ‘normative power of the factual’ (Georg Jellinek), in combination with individual experiences, is a powerful antidote to tyranny.
Still, this ain’t over yet, far from it.
If history is any guide, all that humans have ever been able to do is punish the perpetrators in the (vain) hope of establishing deterrence.
It has happened before, it is happening again, and it will happen again.
The next step is to see this through, re-establish the rule of law, and hold these people to account.
This is the moment. This is the time.
March 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Austria, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
WASHINGTON – The US House of Representatives passed a bill to prevent federal government employees from censoring speech in their official capacity, amid hearings by congressional committees on the collusion between tech companies and the government to “moderate” content online.
House lawmakers passed the Protecting Speech From Government Interference Act along partisan lines on Thursday in a vote of 219-206.
The bill prohibits employees of executive agencies or those otherwise in the competitive service from using their official authority to influence or advocate for a third party, including private entities, to censor speech.
“Government agencies such as the FBI and the State Department have been working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to silence American citizens expressing conservative views online,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement on the bill. “Americans have the right to express themselves lawfully online without the government controlling the narrative.”
Earlier on Thursday, a House select subcommittee held a hearing with authors of the so-called Twitter Files to hear testimony on the collusion between Big Tech, government agencies and private organizations – dubbed the Censorship-Industrial Complex – to moderate, suppress and censor online content.
The Twitter Files have revealed how the US government collaborated with Big Tech companies such as Twitter to suppress information related to COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop story, among others.
March 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Katie Couric, Prince Harry, et al. recommended restrictions on free speech
Matt Taibbi continues his Twitter reporting on what he calls the CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. His report yesterday on the Aspen Institute’s activities caught my eye. As he put it:
14. The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute – which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID – held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
16. Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area,” and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
In other words, a group of extremely wealthy, privileged, half-educated, self-important people assemble in North America’s swankiest mountain retreat, at an institution heavily financed by taxpayer money, to discuss censoring and correcting the plebs’ “information disorder.” A naive outsider might wonder if this sort of activity was conceived as an intentional insult of the middle class, taxpaying citizenry.
The mental habits of the participants are perhaps best expressed by their choice of Prince Harry—a descendent of King George III, who once publicly characterized the U.S. First Amendment protection of free speech as “bonkers”—as a Commissioner. How strange that a young man who seems unable to manage his personal and family affairs was commissioned with making recommendations to U.S. policymakers about governing the American people.
Matt Taibbi’s Twitter reporting on censorship is very interesting and illuminating.
March 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment