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An Impersonal Bureaucratic God

By Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D. | NewZealandDoc | October 1, 2023

I am, admittedly, no expert in artificial intelligence, quantum entanglement, computer programming or computation.

In fact, my enemies would say I am no expert in anything, and they would be mostly right. My domain of self-proclaimed expertise resides in the world of fantasy, illusion and unfathomable mental processes, whose signature and traces I have spent a lifetime teasing out in the intense one-on-one work of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and also in the creative work of poetry and theatre.

No doubt I may be deluding myself even with this allusion to personal talent, but to sum it all up I’d say that my professional training and career, my abiding creative interests, and my own art all meet at a common interface — that border between fantasy and reality, deception and truth, notwithstanding the inherent ambiguities.

Looking back over the Coronavirus Epoch, now in its fourth year, I am struck not only by the savage and slavish devotion of many to the pompous dictates of States, but also by the craven renunciation, by once-honored institutions of health and governance, of accepted foundational principles. Thus Medicine conveniently forgot about natural immunity, treatment and the dangers of new untested interventions, and Medical Institutions, global and national, embarked on a jihad against practitioners who remained faithful to such principles. In New Zealand, I am disheartened to say, the authorities are still harassing doctors who had the temerity to try to help patients by prescribing Ivermectin or suggesting Vitamin D, Zinc, and Vitamin C as promising protective and ameliorating agents.

Governments, empowered by the populations they purport to represent, conveniently seized upon drastic measures to control, while neglecting truly beneficent and sensible measures to mitigate fear and address a threat of illness.

Sacrosanct boundaries have been serially violated throughout, borders have been transgressed, and privacy has been desecrated — all, ostensibly, in the name of our good common cause of safety.

Under the shadow of fear we allowed ourselves to be masked, contained, and inoculated. At times we were prevented from visiting our elderly and sick and beloved, or paying respects to our loved ones’ mortal remains when they died. Coincidentally the line between genders began to be blurred, and the barriers between impulse and action taken down. All because of the putative emergency that ‘necessitated’ a suspension of ordinary safeguards and customs in favor of hastily adopted and inadequately debated dictates and untested procedures that engulfed most of our known world.

The monies we earned and banked, and banked upon — they too became prey to the grasping and lawlessly invasive arm of governmental entities. And those who dared to opine against the prevailing dogma on the ‘commons’ offered by social media found themselves disappeared.

We learned over these past years that our freedoms, our monies, our bodies and our souls were all now ‘fair game’ in this manufactured emergency.  It was quite the trick to convince so many to go so fully along with these sacrifices. And the neatest part of this trick was for the Organizers and Rulers to have created a vast bureaucratic interface that not only did their bidding but also absorbed responsibility for anything that went awry — like sudden deaths and excess deaths and horrific adverse effects of the unnecessary Jabs.

And as for censorship, well, this too could be relegated to AI-mediated algorithms, as if the hand of Man had given way to this novel and peculiar Deity of impersonal computational complexity. It is a marvel of moral sanitizing.

Many of my friends and colleagues continue to be puzzled by these developments as aberrations of rationality, while others have long concluded that these actions have been purposefully deceptive and malevolent.

I believe we have entered a new phase, a phase facilitated by astonishing advances in physics and mathematics, a phase that has given birth to a transcendent technological web that is as vast as it is impersonal, as cold as it is efficient. It is, nonetheless, a tool that has been devised and is wielded by the relatively Few in their ceaseless war against the Many.

Perhaps some of the Few believe and worship at the altar of the False Idol they have created, while others are content simply to profit from their sleight of hand. But both camps are united, I suspect, by the thought that they are cheating Death. Whether it is a transhumanist future and/or the imaginary protection of boundless wealth and power, both parties are vying for an illusionary immortality.

Which brings us back full circle to the sad Achilles heel the propagandists knew to strike so well when they launched their Operation: the universal fear of death. How many of my neighbors accepted the destruction of their rights to save their skins? How many became ogres of apartheid and accused the unjabbed of reckless endangerment?

I’m tired of repeating myself, but repeat I must because the danger — the real one, not the feigned — hasn’t gone away. And it is this: the danger that we refuse to accept our deaths and cling to the wildly absurd quest for living our physical lives forever and ever.

In Plato’s Phaedo, the philosopher and gadfly Socrates, who has been condemned to death by the Athenian democracy, confronts his fate with equanimity. The demise of the physical self becomes the portal to the greater life of the Soul.

The Soul, in our times, resides in a Machine, a gigantic faceless and bureaucratically impartial one — or so would the overlords like us to believe. Perhaps that is why they are so frantically despotic in censoring, quashing, silencing, harassing and persecuting any shreds thereof.

But the harder they try the less they will succeed. They, in their smug sadistic ignorance, don’t truly know what they are really up against.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Have you heard dis information?

MEDIA LIES: Hunter Biden Laptop is “Russian Disinformation”!

Matt Orfalea | September 2022
Extra bonus:

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

CDC Awards $260 Million to Track Disease Outbreaks in Massive Surveillance Scheme

‘A Panopticon of Epic Proportions’

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 29, 2023

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a national “public-private” network to sweep up unprecedented amounts of individual and community data and develop artificial intelligence (AI)-driven models to predict disease outbreaks.

That infrastructure will then help local, state and national health officials identify and implement appropriate “control measures” to manage potential disease outbreaks.

As part of this effort, the agency last week announced an estimated $262.5 million in grant funding over the next five years to establish a network of 13 infectious disease forecasting and analytics centers to coordinate this work across the U.S.

The funding provides roughly $20 million each to 11 universities that were actors in COVID-19 modeling and response. The list includes the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which oversaw the Event 201 simulation and the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health, where Ralph Baric initiated gain-of-function research.

Two of the centers will be private entities — Kaiser Permanente Southern California and a “disaster preparedness organization” called International Responder Systems LLC, whose relevant experience includes running tabletop exercises for weaponized Anthrax outbreaks and helping to manage the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Some centers will work with U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) researchers and bioengineering firms to develop new AI and machine-learning-based modeling tools and platforms to track and predict disease outbreaks across the country.

Others will work with insurance companies, healthcare providers, local health departments and others to collect data from people’s search histories, personal communications, social media posts, wastewater, health records and more.

They will also pilot new tracking and prediction tools in adjacent neighborhoods or among specific demographic groups and scale up “successful” pilot projects.

The grantees will form the Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network (OADM) through cooperative agreements with the CDC, which will be an active partner in the work.

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender :

“What they’re constructing is a panopticon of epic proportions, which will be inescapable in the future and will make for surveillance, not only of people’s behaviors, but also, as they’ve said themselves, of their very thoughts.”

He said the COVID-19 pandemic response provided a paradigmatic example of the dangers of predictive modeling.

“The use of modeling is a very poor predictor of infectious disease, and it has been abused in the past, in particular with reference to COVID-19.”

Rectenwald, who is also a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, cited the work of Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who, along with his team, created the epidemiological model in early 2020 that predicted the catastrophic global death toll from COVID-19.

Ferguson’s model was used to justify social distancing, masking and lockdowns.

But his predictions — which were criticized at the time by experts such as Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D. — turned out to be wildly exaggerated in real-world tests.

“I would anticipate further abuses with this CDC modeling network being set up,” Rectenwald said.

‘A National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases’ 

The network is spearheaded by the CDC’s new Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), set up by the Biden administration to model, predict and control the course of disease outbreaks across the country.

“We think of ourselves like the National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases,” Caitlin Rivers, Ph.D., a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist and associate director for science at CFA told The Washington Post last year when the White House formally launched the initiative.

“Much like our ability to forecast the severity and landfall of hurricanes, this network will enable us to better predict the trajectory of future outbreaks, empowering response leaders with data and information when they need it most,” the CDC said in its funding announcement for the initiative.

Just as the weather forecast helps people to decide whether to take an umbrella with them when it predicts rain, for example, a disease forecast can help people decide if they should bring a mask, or have a birthday party inside or outside, Rivers told the Post.

In July, Eric Rescorla, former chief technology officer at Mozilla who was tapped to be chief technologist for CFA, told Politico it is “a startup in government” that will need a lot of government funding and that will work very closely with private industry.

The surveillance ‘the American people want and deserve’?

CFA was formally established as part of the CDC in January of this year, but it has been in the works at least since January 2021, when Biden announced plans for the agency in the administration’s first national security memorandum.

CFA received its first $200 million in August 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who consistently pushed for legislative and other changes to “modernize the public health data policy framework” when she was in office, said at the time:

“This new center is an example of how we are modernizing the ways we prepare for and respond to public health threats. I am proud of the work that has come out of this group thus far and eager to see continued innovation in the use of data, modeling, and analytics to improve outbreak responses.”

CFA began making grants in Oct. 2021, awarding $21 million to five academic institutions — including Johns Hopkins and Harvard — and $5 million to the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to develop disease modeling capabilities.

CFA worked with academic partners to model, predict and “warn” the government of the omicron spread from November to December 2021.

In December 2022, the CDC renewed its partnership with Peter Theil’s CIA-linked data mining firm Palantir, signing a $443 million contract “to employ scalable technology to plan, manage, and respond to future outbreaks and public health incidents” — an award meant, in part, to “help support innovation” for CFA.

Earlier this year a GOP House subcommittee tried to cut funding to the center, but CDC Director Mandy Cohen told STAT News she was fighting for the funding. She said:

“Folks want us to be ready to know of threats and to respond quickly. Well, we need data and visibility to do that. And so that is money that will help us to see threats and respond to threats faster. And that’s what I think the American people want and deserve.”

But Rectenwald warned that rather than protecting people this system will be a threat to anyone who doesn’t comply with coercive public health directives. He said:

“The surveillance that they’re unrolling here has great potential for infringement on privacy and also for targeting individuals and groups for non-compliance, and as such, abuses of their civil rights and liberties.

“This system will be capable of locating individuals and communities that are not abiding by the coercive measures being ‘recommended.’ And then they can impose even harsher restrictions on these same people. So this is a very, very pernicious prospect.”

CFA reveals ‘a revolving door’ between biotech, government health agencies and the DOD

Rectenwald told The Defender that the CFA collaboration reveals a revolving door phenomenon that we see in government more generally.

“We have government officials being drawn from the private sector and then granting awards that go back to the companies for which they worked, or to which they’re headed. There’s a lot of collusion underway here,” he said.

CFA is headed by Dylan George, Ph.D., who has spent his career moving between U.S. government health agencies, and the DOD and just prior to being tapped to head up CFA, he had a five-month stint at biotech firm Ginko Bioworks.

Ginkgo Bioworks is one of the only private firms explicitly named as a partner on one of the CFA grant awards, with Northeastern University. It is also a key partner in developing other global pandemic surveillance and predictive programs, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.

Besides Ginko and Palantir, CFA’s website indicates it partners with “many” public and private organizations. In April 2022, CFA convened a conference called “CFA: 101 for Industry.”

At the conference, George, along with representatives from Databricks, Peraton, Microsoft, RTI, Dell Technologies Redhat/Carahsoft, Optum Serve and Maximus Public Health Analytics, gave presentations on the importance of “public-private partnerships” to CFA’s work.

The industry representatives also discussed their current and past collaborations with CDC to develop the tracking and analytic tools and platforms CFA hopes to ramp up.

Panelists included Michelle Holko — formerly of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), principal architect scientist at Google Cloud for healthcare and life sciences at the time of the conference in 2022, and currently chief strategist for Defensive BioTech — who spoke on the origins of CFA’s disease forecast research in DARPA.

Holko, also a former fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins Center for Biosecurity, talked about the value of Google search histories and personal digital interaction data to affect public health outcomes.

They provide key information, she said, “because, you know, a person’s desire and willingness to get vaccinated has a huge impact on what’s to happen with a public health crisis,” she said.

‘A new age of public health’: example data collection, prediction and control projects

Data can be used to understand people’s desire, but also “everything that’s going on in their environment, and in their thoughts and in their circle,” Holko said, which has serious implications for public health.

To illustrate how such data could be used, she explained how Google collaborated with the state of California during the COVID-19 pandemic to mine people’s search data and other personal data. They developed a “vaccine willingness score” for each individual person whose data they analyzed.

Then they positioned mobile vaccine vans in neighborhoods with low vaccine rates but some willingness to be vaccinated.

“They were able to take a 25% gap between the lowest quartiles of the Healthy Places index and the highest quartiles and just flip that right upside down,” she said, adding that such targeting addresses a health equity issue.

Holko also talked about the value of wearables in capturing biological data, which, she said, might make it possible to detect a pathogen inside of a person’s body even if they aren’t experiencing symptoms.

Rivers added that it would be important for public health agencies like CFA to get the things they need — like the ability to go out and swab anyone whose data they need directly — rather than having to depend on other adjacent data sources like biometric data, social media data, etc.

Researchers at RTI presented their RTI Synthetic Population project where they have modeled a “synthetic population” of over 300 million individuals, each representing a U.S. person, with their attributes, age, race gender, income, education attainment, job and whatever other data they can glean, which they then use to project epidemiological events.

There were many such presentations.

The overall takeaway was that the contemporary availability of massive amounts of data has created a “new age of public health” and a mandate for new tools to capture and analyze data using novel applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

George said many of the people in the room had been dreaming of a forecasting network like CFA for almost a decade, and they had been “right to be opportunistic” about the “window of opportunity” that presented itself for them to finally set it up.

The ‘extremely ironic’ list of grantees

The OADM is the first major initiative by CFA and sets up its infrastructure across the country. The 13 centers in the network will act as networks themselves.

As the CDC put it:

“In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC has worked collaboratively with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments, public health organizations, academia, and the private sector to improve and scale outbreak response and provide support to leaders to prevent infections and save lives.

“This national network will build on these collaborations and improve outbreak response using data, modeling, and advanced analytics for ongoing and future infectious disease threats and public health emergencies.”

Awardees include:

  • Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security received $23.5 million for its project, “Toward Epidemic Preparedness: Enhancing Public Health Infrastructure and Incorporating Data-Driven Tools.” It will create partnerships with “public health stakeholders” and it will train students, practitioners and modelers — including meteorologists — to use modeling and analytic tools.
  • The University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health was awarded $22.5 million to support the creation of the Atlantic Coast Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Analytics, which will develop methods, tools and platforms for disease modeling and coordinate them among the 13 funded partners in the network.
  • Northeastern University won $17.5 million for an “innovation center” called “Epistorm: The Center for Advanced Epidemic Analytics and Predictive Modeling Technology.” Epistorm will coordinate efforts among ten healthcare systems, research organizations and private companies to use data from wastewater surveillance, social media, and hospital admissions and apply AI and machine learning tools and other predictive analytics. The consortium’s academic members include Boston University, Indiana University, the University of Florida and the University of California at San Diego. Other members include Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, MaineHealth, Northern Light Health and Concentric Ginkgo Bioworks.
  • The University of California at San Diego (UCSD) won $17.5 million to “develop innovative tools and networks” that analyze data sources to determine their predictive power. Data sources will include molecular epidemiological data, wastewater and air surveillance; exposure notification systems (smartphones and contact tracing), internet searches and posts, “legally available clinical data,” and scenario-based simulations. The team will pilot test their innovations among vulnerable populations in San Diego, including homeless people and drug users. UCSD will also partner with other California universities and LANL.
  • A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and University of Massachusetts Amherst was awarded $27.5 million to scale up decision-support tools that have been used in previous outbreaks. They will partner with two dozen other entities, including local public health agencies. Northwestern University received $1.7 million in funding to support these efforts.
  • Carnegie Mellon University will receive $17.5 million to expand on work it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, gathering daily data “from health care systems, technology companies, medical test results, insurance claims and surveys” to steer policy and public health decisions by applying machine learning and AI tools. It will work with public health agencies and with healthcare providers like Optum to make healthcare data available to researchers.
  • The University of Michigan School of Public Health won approximately $17.5 million to establish the Michigan Public Health Integrated Center for Outbreak Analytics and Modeling, which will develop modeling and data analytics tools and pipelines to be integrated into the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services systems.
  • The University of Minnesota School of Public Health and the Minnesota Department of Public Health (MDH) will receive $17.5 million to develop predictive tools by surveying individual community interactions and developing machine-learning algorithms to identify symptom clusters. They will work closely with the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium, a partnership between the MDH and the 11 largest health systems in the state.
  • A team of researchers at Emory University will receive $17.5 million to “innovate” new analytical methods, tools and platforms to inform public health decisions.
  • Clemson University will work with the University of South Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina, Prisma Health, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, Clemson Rural Health, and South Carolina Center for Rural and Primary Health Care to integrate forecasting and decision-making tools.
  • The University of Utah received $17.5 million for its new ForeSITE (Forecasting and Surveillance of Infectious Threats and Epidemics) center, which will “provide data and tools” to guide decisions about emerging public health threats. It will do this through partnerships with the national Veterans Affairs health system and hospitals and health departments in Utah, Washington, Idaho and Montana.
  • Kaiser Permanente Southern California will work in partnership with academic modeling teams based at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, using its 4.7 million members as a basis to “develop and test strategies to improve use of public health data.”
  • International Responder Systems will work with the University of California, Los Angeles, and Primary Diagnostics “to deliver an enhanced outbreak analytics diagnostic system and a continuous education program to upskill our public health workforce.

Rectenwald said:

“It’s extremely ironic that these universities and institutions have been chosen to undertake the research and modeling. For example, the University of North Carolina Gilling School of Global Public Health initiated gain-of-function research, which was then undertaken in Wuhan, but funded by the NIH through EcoHealth Alliance.

“So isn’t it ironic that this school, the university research center that had a great deal to do with the gain-of-function research that led to COVID-19, is now getting 4.5 million annually for five years?

“It’s an outrage.

“And the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is receiving $23.5 million from the CFA to conduct its project. Curiously, the same center was also the host and organizer of two major events, the CLADE X simulation and the Event 201 simulation, both of which forecasted, in advance of COVID-19, almost the exact scenario that unfolded.

“I wouldn’t trust that Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins with this kind of money and this kind of power to direct the behavior of governments, health organizations, localities, and states in response to anything because they forecasted the kinds of draconian lockdowns, masking, and forced vaccinations that took place in response to COVID-19.

“Likewise, in this scenario, I would expect them to advocate the exact same kinds of measures.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Supreme Court to Weigh in on State Laws to Prevent Tech Giants From Censoring Social Media Content

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 29, 2023

The U.S. Supreme Court today said it will hear cases challenging Texas and Florida laws that prohibit social media companies from censoring content posted on their platforms, in what The New York Times said will lead to “a major ruling on how the First Amendment applies to powerful tech platforms.”

The two laws, both passed in 2021, and the Supreme Court’s decision to consider them, “could have nationwide repercussions for how social media — and all websites — display user-generated content,” CNN reported.

If upheld, the laws could open the door to more state legislation with similar obligations for social media sites.

Texas House Bill 20 (HB 20) and Florida Senate Bill 7072 (SB 7072) allow users to “sue social media platforms over allegations of political censorship” and “restrict companies from taking down or demoting certain kinds of content even when the platforms may decide it violates their terms of service,” according to CNN.

The laws also could make it harder for platforms to remove what they determine is “misinformation, hate speech or other offensive material,” CNN added.

According to USA Today, the laws “limit” platforms’ ability to regulate content, “even if those posts spread a foreign government’s misinformation or provide false medical advice.”

Two tech industry trade groups, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, challenged the laws in 2021, saying that tech companies enjoy First Amendment protection which prevents the government from telling them “whether and how to disseminate speech,” the Times reported.

Both states’ laws were temporarily blocked by federal courts pending the completion of the appeals process.

According to The Associated Press (AP), the court’s announcement came three days before the start of its new term. A decision is expected in 2024, according to USA Today.

W. Scott McCollough, an Austin, Texas-based technology attorney, welcomed the news.

“I’m glad the Supreme Court picked up the case, because what both Texas and Florida were doing is, they required individualized protection — a consumer protection measure,” he said. “It required them to inform the parties that ‘we’ve done something to you.’”

McCollough added:

“The two states here recognize that these platforms have immense power. They purport to have the right to act unilaterally and subjectively to restrict posts as part of content moderation. So, the states are requiring them to give notice to the people they are censoring and tell them why they did it. This is reasonable at its face.

“If nothing else, I’ve always believed that these aspects of these two state statutes, in theory, should not have a First Amendment problem. States have forever engaged in consumer protection matters. Every state has consumer protection statutes.”

Laws intended to ‘combat Silicon Valley censorship’

Texas HB 20 regarding “censorship of or certain other interference with digital expression, including expression on social media platforms or through electronic mail messages,” passed on Sept. 9, 2021, and was set to take effect on Dec. 2, 2021.

According to Politico, HB 20 “would allow both the state of Texas and individual Texans to sue companies if they ‘censor’ an individual based on their viewpoints or their geographic location by banning them or blocking, removing or otherwise discriminating against their posts.” It would apply to platforms with at least 50 million active users.

Florida SB 7072, Social Media Platforms, also known as the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, was to take effect July 1, 2021. It sought to regulate the content moderation policies of social media platforms, barring them from banning users based on their political ideology.

According to the Times, “The sites in question are largely barred from removing posts based on the viewpoints they express, with exceptions for the sexual exploitation of children, incitement of criminal activity and some threats of violence.”

Supporters of the Florida and Texas laws “argue that the measures are needed to combat what they called Silicon Valley censorship,” including on issues like COVID-19 and claiming election fraud, the Times also reported.

Challenges to both laws resulted in conflicting rulings in federal courts.

In May 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit largely upheld a preliminary injunction freezing enforcement of the Florida law.

Also in May 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked enforcement of the Texas law pending completion of the appeals process. However, in September 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed earlier court rulings that had blocked the law.

Judge Andrew S. Oldham of the 5th Circuit wrote, “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say. The platforms are not newspapers. Their censorship is not speech.”

McCollough agreed, saying that prior legal precedent holding that “newspapers don’t have to post everybody’s letter to the editor” was based on the rationale that “there is not enough space in a newspaper to post everybody’s letter.”

The 5th Circuit is considering two other cases with First Amendment and free speech implications: Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. and Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al., in which Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is a plaintiff. The 5th Circuit heard oral arguments in Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. last month.

In July, the two cases were consolidated.

Legal experts said the consolidated case is likely headed to the Supreme Court after Associate Justice Samuel Alito earlier this month lifted an injunction that temporarily blocked certain Biden administration offices and officials from contact with social media giants.

The injunction, requested in the Missouri v. Biden case, on July 4 was granted by Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division and was later upheld under a Sept. 8 ruling by the 5th Circuit.

Justice Alito paused it after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted an emergency filing asking the Supreme Court to stay the injunction while the high court considers whether to hear the case.

The Supreme Court’s alignment in its 5-4 vote temporarily blocking the Texas law, was “unusual,” according to the AP, with liberal justice Elena Kagan joining three conservative justices — Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — in the dissenting opinion that would have allowed the law to remain in effect.

In the dissent, Justice Alito wrote, “Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a groundbreaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD’s acting general counsel, highlighted the significance of the constitutional issues the Supreme Court will consider:

“We will be watching the two First Amendment cases out of Texas and Florida carefully. In these two cases, the social media companies are claiming their First Amendment rights are violated by these laws.

“In several cases in which CHD is involved, we argue that the social media platforms and the U.S. government violated the First Amendment rights of those posting to social media and the consumers of the posts.”

U.S. government claims First Amendment protects its ‘bully pulpit’

One of several legal matters at hand in the two cases pertains to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Passed in 1996, Section 230 gives internet providers legal protections for hosting, moderating and removing most user content.

According to the New York Post, Section 230 was designed to prevent internet companies from being treated as publishers by shielding them from lawsuits by anyone claiming to be wronged by content posted by another user — even though the platforms typically engage in moderation of user-posted content.

In his dissent, Justice Alito wrote, “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”

Social media platforms have long argued that they are not publishers, in order to avoid legal liability for content posted by their users. However, in other instances, these same companies have claimed, in court, that they are publishers and have the right to exercise editorial control over content on their platforms.

For instance, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, recently argued that a subpoena from the District of Columbia’s attorney general interfered with its ability to exercise editorial control over content on its platform.

“Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry: it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company,” as the Guardian reported in 2018.

But in legal arguments, Facebook has repeatedly argued, it’s “a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the First Amendment.”

Social media platforms “claim that they are not publishers and that they should not be liable for the information that shows up on their platforms,” McCollough said.

“You’re either a publisher or you’re not a publisher, and they’ve always said they’re not publishers. So why are they saying they’re publishers now? Are they publishers for the First Amendment and not publishers for Section 230? Explain that one,” he added.

Social media platforms’ First Amendment rights are also at issue. In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court, the State of Texas argued that HB 20 does not affect social media platforms’ free speech rights because “no reasonable viewer could possibly attribute what a user says to the Platforms themselves.”

“Given the Platforms’ virtually unlimited capacity to carry content, requiring them to provide users equal access regardless of viewpoint will do nothing to crowd out the Platforms’ own speech,” the brief also stated.

According to McCollough, “the big sexy issue” in this case involves content moderation. “Can a state basically prohibit discrimination based on viewpoint? And it ultimately comes down to whether, when these platforms are engaging in so-called content moderation, whether that is them ‘speaking’ — if that is a form of speech,” he said.

“We have always contended that that is not speech. It’s conduct. It’s the consumer, the one who is doing the posting, that is engaging in speech. By taking down speech that the platform may not approve of, that is not speech by the platform,” he added.

A policy principle known as common carriage is also implicated. The Communications Act of 1934, for instance, classifies telephone companies as “common carriers,” requiring those companies to make their services available to the public at affordable rates and regardless of viewpoint or other factors.

In a previous legal brief, Texas argued that social media platforms are “the twenty-first century descendants of telegraph and telephone companies: that is, traditional common carriers” — that must generally accept all customers without viewpoint discrimination.

In 2021, Justice Thomas compared social media platforms to communication utilities that are regulated under common carrier laws, on the basis that concentration in the industry gives these companies “enormous control over speech.”

McCollough said, “When you hold out to indiscriminately serve the public on uniform terms and conditions — in other words, if you say I’ll cover it if you just accept my pre-published terms and conditions, then that basically makes you a common carrier.”

The federal government has also asserted its own purported First Amendment rights.

Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argues that lawsuits challenging government attempts to regulate social media content violate the First Amendment on the basis that the office of the president has a “bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans … to act in ways that the President believes would advance the public interest.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Supreme Court asked the DOJ for its views regarding the Florida and Texas laws “as is typical in cases involving federal interests.” In a brief, Prelogar urged the court to hear the cases.

“When a social-media platform selects, edits and arranges third-party speech for presentation to the public, it engages in activity protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote, adding that “the act of culling and curating the content that users see is inherently expressive, even if the speech that is collected is almost wholly provided by users.”

Chris Marchese, litigation director for NetChoice, said “Online services have a well-established First Amendment right to host, curate and share content as they see fit.”

And Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said, “It is high time that the Supreme Court resolves whether governments can force websites to publish dangerous content. … Telling private websites they must give equal treatment to extremist hate isn’t just unwise, it is unconstitutional, and we look forward to demonstrating that to the court.”

Tech companies, government using variation of ‘too big to fail’ argument

McCollough told The Defender that what the parties will be briefing and arguing is whether the two state statutes’ content moderation restrictions comply with the First Amendment — in other words, each state’s prohibition against viewpoint discrimination and whether that violates the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court will also hear arguments related to the “individualized explanation requirements” and the extent to which they “comply with the First Amendment.”

“What the solicitor general argued is that these platforms are just way too big,” McCollough said. “They have so many posts that it would be so burdensome on them to be reasonable with their consumers, and that this violates the First Amendment.”

McCollough called this “a variation of the ‘too big to fail’ argument … They’re too big, they do so much, that they just can’t be bothered with an individualized explanation.”

According to McCollough, the Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for contemporary understandings of free speech and First Amendment rights.

“If you look at the position of the solicitor general and, therefore, the U.S. government, they are saying that the government has a right to free speech, the platforms have a right to free speech, but the people do not have a right to free speech.”

“From a policy perspective, what is the message being sent to Americans? Sit down, shut up, there’s nothing you can do about it, there’s nothing the state legislature can do about it,” he said. “And if they are right about the First Amendment, there’s nothing Congress can do about it.”

“Don’t sit down, don’t shut up, and yes, there is something you can do about it,” he said.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

NATO’s 77th Brigade’s Set Their Legal Attack Dogs on Russell Brand

By Declan Hayes | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 29, 2023

Not content with conspiring with the British Parliament in throttling Russell Brand’s voice, NATO has set the entire British legal establishment against him.

Victoria Prentis KC, Britain’s attorney general, has warned the nation’s editors that any pertinent coverage about either Russell Brand or any criminal case that may be taken against him “may amount to contempt”, even though no arrests have yet taken place or cautions to Brand issued and no warrants have yet been issued against him. Legally, even in NATO’s corrupt British heartland, Brand should be free as a bird to go about his business, as should we be to make reasonable comments about him.

That is not now the case. Having been traduced at the behest of the 77th Brigade by the British media, Prentis has now decreed that any salient comments on Brand’s as yet non-existing case is in contempt of court, despite the fact that Brand has not yet got his day in court and no jury of his peers has yet been appointed to adjudicate on the case which, to repeat, as of yet does not exist.

Although the British Contempt of Court Act 1981 makes it illegal for newspapers to publish anything that could prejudice a criminal trial once a suspect has been arrested or a warrant issued, because this is Perfidious Albion we are talking about, laws exist to shut everyone up with or without either a bullet or a judge’s gavel.

As those rarely used laws are now being deployed against Brand, one must wonder why Brand is being singled out for this treatment and why, for example, political prisoner Julian Assange, currently being interned in Belmarsh high security prison, has been spared this further cudgel.

Writing in, of all places, the lifestyle section of Ireland’s regional Cork Examiner newspaper, reformed alcoholic Suzanne Harrington puts NATO’s case as well as any other randomly hired NATO scribe could. Suzanne begins by telling us that she feels “a crushing sense of weariness. Exhaustion, disgust. Fury, obviously, but smothered in a heavy blanket of disillusionment” and asks if we feel the same way about how Brand has betrayed us all.

Suzanne was one of those who went to hear Brand “speak in 12 step meetings.” But now, there is Brand’s “slide to the right. The alt-right. The yoga-Nazi alliance, heightened during lockdown when the entire world went a bit mad. What on earth? Conspiracy theories, rants, dubious company. It felt like he’d started smoking crack again — loony right wing crack, in the company of loony right wing crackheads. Globalist masterplans, great resets, Bill Gates, ivermectin — why? For the clicks? For the millions of followers? Because that’s how you make money away from the mainstream media. You dog-whistle the loonies.”

Although non-loony Suzanne opines there may be an off chance Brand is innocent (of what precisely?), she goes on to say “you only have to look at those who have come out in Brand’s support to see where he has positioned himself politically. He’s way over there, at the extreme toxic end, supported by the shrill voices of Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and — oh the shame — Donald Trump Jr. Lower down the rung, voices of hate speechers like Alex Jones, Katie Hopkins, and Tommy Robinson. Sad gits like Laurence Fox. And Piers Morgan, obviously. Imagine having that lot standing up for you.”

One of the reasons such “voices of hate speechers” may be amplified in arrays of obscure corners is because the lifestyle columns of the Cork Examiner and the Irish Independent, Irish Times and the Guardian where this “journalist, TEFL teacher, dole claimer, backpacker, youth worker, painter, wardrobe assistant, washer-upper, pen pusher, house cleaner, comic bagger, market stall holder and cake maker” also opines bring no light to this or any other matter.

And that is not primarily the fault of “mainstream media” grifters like Suzanne but of newspaper proprietors like Rupert Murdoch, who have been destroying the quality of the broadsheets ever since the Sunday Times Insight Team was first eviscerated almost 50 years ago.

But what would I know as I am only a potato eating Irish peasant, who aced Australian legal exams experienced Australian lawyers failed. Not much but I do know this. There are times, as in the notorious Stephen Lawrence murder case or the gangland killing of Irish journalist Veronica Guerin when the media sailed as close to the libel law winds as is possible. And let’s not forget ageing mega pop star Cliff Richard, who was witch hunted by the 77th Brigade’s BBC in a manner that would have appalled even the lynch mobs of America’s Wild West.

And nor should we forget the Bloody Sunday Widgery Tribunal, the Ballymurphy massacre, King Rat, Robin the Jackal Johnson, the Glenanne Gang, the Pat Finucane murder, Stakeknife, the sabotaged Stalker Enquiry, the ongoing 1981 Stardust Inquest and countless more where the entire British and Irish judiciary should be in the dock if not on the gallows.

And then there is this nonsense of a jury of one’s peers, which the great Zsa Zsa Gabor once famously ridiculed. Although NATO’s Parliamentarians are generally exempted from jury service, most of them would be debarred anyway. As over 40% of serving British MPs have criminal convictions and as not one of them has been demonetised as Brand has, one must conclude that the 77th Brigade has one law for those who slavishly collaborate with it and another for the Russell Brands of this world.

And how could we get a jury of our peers from the Nazi worshipping Parliament of Canada, whose dictator, Justin Blackface Trudeau, lies that the standing ovation the Canadian Parliament gave a decorated Waffen SS war criminal is a result of the old reliable Russian disinformation canard. Just what kind of high heel wearing moron is Trudeau?

And what about the moronic Ya’ara Saks, Canada’s clearly unhinged “Jewish” Minister for Mental Health, who tried to distance herself from her collusion in welcoming the Waffen SS to the Canadian Parliament on the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday before finishing her grovelling non-apology with the Nazi Azov Slava Ukraini salutation. This, incidentally, is the same “Jewish” moron who contended that Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers honking their horns were doing so in secret tribute to Hitler, whose Waffen SS volunteers she gladly venerated.

There is, in intellectual terms, no difference between those Nazi worshipping Canadian Parliamentarians and the hundreds of Germans who gather at Berlin train stations and howl up to the moon for their right to live their lives as “Canine Beings”, as dogs and bitches in plain English.

Plain English, however, cuts no ice in the British courts where one must hire a word wizard, who is totally familiar with its rabbit warren array of quirks, which exist to perpetuate the King’s arbitrary, ad hoc writs. Here is one such barrister expertly talking us through common law contempt as it applies to the Brand (non-) case and cautioning those, like Britain’s newspaper editors who believe they have a dog in this fight or in any other such circumstance as the King’s 77th Brigade may decree is verboten.

The situation with regard to Brand is that the 77th Brigade, working primarily through Caroline Dinenage, has prejudiced Brand’s defence (against what precisely?) and has warned hosting companies like Rumble that, thanks to the Online Safety Bill and the (BBC-Approved) Trusted News Initiative, they are next for NATO’s abattoir.

Although NATO’s British media would claim that they used American journalist Heather Brooke to break their Parliamentary expenses scandal scoop, critics have opined that that was just a ploy to remove some troublesome Parliamentary pebbles from the jackboots of the 77th Brigade and their MI6 body in a bag colleagues. As Brooke disparages political prisoner (and truth-teller?) Julian Assange “a supposed campaigner for truth, manipulated information to build up a cult of personality around himself – and also to see how many people fell for it”, she would, a priori, seem a low level CIA cretin best avoided, lest she morally corrupts us.

But who is to judge her or Pfizer’s track record in Africa? Not us, if the 77th Brigade and their MI6 and CIA colleagues have their way. If you or anyone you know has an opinion on Russell Brand and if your opinion diverges from that the 77th Brigade enforces, you and any site like Rumble that might give you a platform best watch out as Trudeau and his high heeled Nazi worshipping collaborators are clumsily goose stepping their way to morally corrupt and physically destroy you, wherever you may be.

September 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The Newspaper Revolution – #SolutionsWatch

Corbett • 09/27/2023

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The BBC and their fact checker brethren want you to be deathly afraid of the latest scourge threatening to tear apart society at its seams: the newspaper! That’s right, it seems that the establishment is freaking out at the crop of independently published and distributed newspapers that activists are printing in various countries around the world. In this week’s edition of #SolutionsWatch, I talk to two of the thoughtcriminals engaging in this activity and find out what’s behind the newspaper revolution and how people can pitch in.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble  / Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES

Episode 450 – Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers? I Will!!!

BBC ‘disinformation’ correspondent busted spreading disinfo on her own bio

The Light: Inside the UK’s conspiracy theory newspaper that shares violence and hate

Episode 357 – Language is a Weapon (info on Stuart Chase and The Tyranny of Words)

Marianna in Conspiracyland: *FULL UNEDITED INTERVIEW* with Darren Nesbit Editor of The Light Paper

TheLightPaper.co.uk

The Covid Protesters — Where Are They Now?

Druthers.net

HRS comment

September 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

RT surges after X (aka Twitter) removes censorship – ‘disinformation’ lobbyist

RT | September 27, 2023

NewsGuard, a self-proclaimed disinformation watchdog, has lamented the rise in popularity of RT and 11 other news outlets after Elon Musk relaxed censorship on X (formerly Twitter).

Among 12 media accounts analyzed, RT experienced the highest engagement growth in the 90 days following Musk’s decision in April to remove ‘government-funded’ and ‘state-affiliated’ labels from certain outlets, NewsGuard said on Tuesday. The number of ‘likes’ and reposts for RT’s account increased to 2.5 million in the period studied, up from 1.3 million.

The analysis focused on Chinese, Iranian, and Russian media outlets, which NewsGuard branded “state-run disinformation sources” and purveyors of “propaganda.”

NewsGuard cited political memes posted by Iranian news accounts as purported examples of disinformation. Another instance was supposedly a link shared by Iran’s PressTV to an article on remarks made by US presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who argued that Americans “created” the Islamic State terrorist group. Kennedy made the claim during an election rally in Boston, where he accused Washington of decades of misguided foreign policy.

The self-described disinformation watchdog advocates imposing strict moderation on online platforms to protect users from supposed foreign influence. NewsGuard’s rating of news outlets generally labels mainstream Western media as trustworthy, while outlets linked with governments opposed by the US are branded deceitful.

Among NewsGuard’s advisers is Michael Hayden, a former head of the CIA and the NSA. He was notably one of the more than 50 former intelligence officials who claimed in 2020 that the factual New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Others include former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, and former US Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel. The latter stated publicly that his job in the Obama administration was jokingly described as “chief propagandist” by others.

The Pentagon and Microsoft have contracted NewsGuard services.

The report heavily implied that the lack of X labels for the likes of RT was to blame for the rise in engagements, as it is now “impossible for users to know whether an account is government-affiliated” simply by looking at posts.

NewsGuard claimed that the 12 accounts in question are attempting to conceal their associations, such as when RT rebranded from its previous name Russia Today. The report described the move as taking place “several years ago,” although the rebranding was implemented in 2009.

Musk, who formally stepped down as CEO of X (then Twitter) in June, ordered the ‘government-funded’ and ‘state-affiliated’ labels to be removed amid a row with America’s NPR, which exited the platform after being branded. Around the same time, X ended its ‘shadow-ban’ on RT and others, lifting a restriction imposed under the previous executive leadership.

The subsequent publication of the ‘Twitter Files’ has detailed extensive US government oversight and pressure on the social media company to amplify Pentagon talking points over dissenting voices.

NewsGuard conceded that Musk’s move to end restrictions on X, which it described as “pushing” undesirable accounts, may have benefited them.

In August, NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence blamed Musk for a “dramatic rise” in the visibility of Russian government and media accounts.

September 28, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Media and Architects of Online Censorship Law Heap Pressure on Rumble After it Defends Principle of Neutrality

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

Media outlets and architects of the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Bill, are increasing the pressure on neutral video sharing platform Rumble after it refused to bow down to the UK Parliament’s pressure to demonetize comedian Russell Brand.

The pressure to demonetize Brand came after anonymous sexual assault allegations were made against him. Brand has denied the allegations and has not been arrested, charged, or convicted of any of the allegations made against him.

Several companies, including YouTube, took action against Brand after the allegations surfaced, despite Brand having no content violations on YouTube. But Rumble stood up to the pressure and rejected the UK Parliament’s request to cut off Brand’s monetization, with CEO Chris Pavlovski noting that the allegations against Brand have “nothing to do with content on Rumble’s platform.”

Now, several media outlets and people who helped craft the UK’s online censorship law, the upcoming Online Safety Bill, are targeting Rumble’s stance.

Lord Allan of Hallam, a former Facebook executive who advised on the Online Safety Bill, branded Rumble a “crazy American platform” and expressed disdain at Rumble’s philosophy of allowing free expression.

He and internet law expert Professor Lorna Woods, an architect of the Online Safety Bill, also complained about Rumble’s refusal to bow down to pressure from UK officials and framed it as “grandstand[ing] before the press.”

The Times also took aim at Rumble by noting that under the Online Safety Bill, Rumble will have to “prevent children from seeing pornography… material that promotes self-harm, suicide or eating disorders… violent content… material harmful to health, such as vaccine misinformation” and “take down material that is illegal, such as videos that incite violence or race hate.”

However, Bryn Harris, the Chief Legal Council for The Free Speech Union, pointed out that The Times’ article doesn’t actually provide examples of any of the alleged illegal or harmful to kids content on Rumble.

Additionally, the Associated Press piled in on Rumble after it stood up to the demands of UK officials by claiming that Rumble is a “haven for disinformation and extremism.”

This mounting pressure comes days after the UK passed the Online Safety Bill — one of the most sweeping censorship laws to ever be introduced in the UK. The controversial censorship and surveillance bill is set to come into law next month.

The censorship provisions in the Online Safety Bill can be aimed at both citizens who post speech that’s deemed to cause “harm” and companies that fail to censor this so-called harmful content. The harms in the bill extend beyond physical or direct harm and into the realms of “psychological” harm and “potential” harm. Certain types of “false” communications are also prohibited under the bill.

As UK officials heap pressure on Rumble, reports have revealed that several UK politicians have ties to the pro-censorship Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the UK politician that pressured Rumble to demonetize Brand received a donation in kind from Google.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Scotland To Set Up New Police Unit To Tackle “Hate” and “Misgendering,” Ignites Free Speech Concerns

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

On the brink of implementing Humza Yousaf’s highly contentious legislation early next year, a specialized hate crime unit has been announced by Police Scotland. With the unit scheduled to be operational by November, a comprehensive training of about 16,400 law enforcement officers will follow in December.

This is all in anticipation of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, expected to be ratified early in 2024. This Act expands upon the existing law, offering a broader protective net for “vulnerable” groups and introduces the notion of “stirring up hatred”.

However, some critics and free speech advocates have raised concerns that the Act, which holds potential to elevate sentencing if prejudice is based on factors such as age, race, disability, religion, transgender identity or variations in sex characteristics, may invigorate the increasingly toxic culture wars surrounding gender issues. It is posited that the law may sidetrack police resources from tackling violent conduct to address “harmful” words.

The thought of free speech being stifled by the new laws is particularly horrifying for some, with warnings that women’s rights advocates may find themselves entangled in allegations of transphobia.

Critics argue that a significant portion of police time may now be geared towards a subjective concept of hate crime, such as “misgendering,” instead of dealing with tangible violent acts.

Helen Joyce, part of the human rights group Sex Matters, asserted her alarm at the creation of this specific hate crime unit. She voiced concern for those who stand for the rights of women and children, warning of a “chilling effect” on free speech, as reported by The Scottish Express.

Police Scotland remains tight-lipped about the size of the proposed unit plus the financial implications of the new laws – a cause for concern for many.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers? I Will!!!

Corbett • 09/25/2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

So we all remember the rhetorical question I asked three years ago, right? Who will fact check the fact checkers? Well, guess what. It isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s a real question with a real answer: I will! That’s right, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work dismantling the dissembling disinfo dissertations of the would-be fact checkers and make fun of the clowns on the front lines of the infowar.

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES

Episode 381 – Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers?

SCARY POPPINNina Jankowic, Our Mary Poppins of Disinformation!

Nina Jankowicz RESIGNS, Good Riddance To Partisan Disinfo HACK: Robby Soave

Watch the moment BBC reporter is ‘destroyed’ by Elon Musk in trainwreck interview

Marianna Spring on disinformation, conspiracies & dealing with trolls

BBC’s chief fact-checker Marianna Spring accused of lying on CV | Headliners

Deconstructing Marianna in Conspiracyland Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

BBC ‘disinformation’ correspondent busted spreading disinfo on her own bio

9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon

$2.3 Trillion Missing Money – Here’s How “Fact Checking” Works

9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money (Follow this link for the hyperlinked transcript of all sources cited in this clip)

Misinformation in the media: global coverage of GMOs 2019-2021

Peer-reviewed critique published of Mark Lynas’s article in which he accused GMO critics of spreading “misinformation”

Agricultural GMOs and their associated pesticides: misinformation, science, and evidence

Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review Promotes Its Own Misinformation

Fact-Checking Is Ineffective Where It Counts

The Psychology of Fact-Checking: Fact-checkers aim to get closer to the truth, but their biases can shroud the very truth they seek

PolitiFact gave Obama “Lie of the Year” for 2013 for the EXACT SAME statement they rated as “half true” in 2009 and 2012

Snopes gisve the EXACT SAME claim about the Titanic submersible True / Unproven / False ratings

ALWAYS trust the science! (man-made meteor hole)

Facebook suspends RMIT FactLab after voice no campaigners criticise factchecker

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Canada’s Envoy to Defend Apartheid gets Israel Medal

By Yves Engler | Dissident Voice | September 23, 2023

Canada’s special envoy to combat antisemitism is actually a government emissary to promote Jewish supremacy. In a stark example of the Liberals’ anti-Palestinian policies, they have given public resources and prestige to an aggressive apartheid proponent.

Last Friday foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly tweeted, “I spoke with Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism Irwin Cotler today, where I congratulated him on his Israel Presidential Medal of Honour. Irwin, Canada is stronger because of your work to advance human rights everywhere.”

Cotler was one of 13 individuals recently given a prize by President Isaac Herzog for making “an extraordinary contribution to the State of Israel, the Jewish people, and all humanity.”

The apartheid state is right to celebrate Cotler. Married to a “close confidant” of Likud founder Menachem Begin, Cotler has committed his adult life to promoting colonialism. The former Liberal justice minister continues this work even as fascistic, Jewish supremacist extremists, have taken the reins of power in Israel.

In a sign of his devotion to apartheid, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism recently co-wrote a National Post commentary in support of blocking the World Court from releasing a legal opinion on Palestine. In “Canada must continue to defend Israel against baseless United Nations attack”, Cotler responded (indirectly) to criticism of the Trudeau government submitting a statement opposing an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion as per a UN General Assembly resolution titled “Israeli Practices Affecting the Human rights of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”. The resolution requested the UN legal authority deliver an advisory opinion on “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” Cotler and the Trudeau government don’t believe the ICJ should assent to the General Assembly’s request to provide its legal opinion!

Previously, Cotler pressed the International Criminal Court to ignore Israeli war crimes and for Ottawa to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem. He’s attended events put on by the racist Jewish National Fund and met with far-right colonists seeking to cleanse occupied East Jerusalem of Palestinians. In May 2021 the former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress rallied behind Israel’s violence and earlier defended its shooting of ‘march of return’ protesters in Gaza as well as the 2014 and 2009 attacks on Gaza that left nearly 4,000 dead. Just after Israel killed 1,200 Lebanese in the summer of 2006 Cotler spoke to a conference of top Israeli military officials on the importance of managing the message in modern war.

As part of his government’s multifaceted contribution to Palestinian dispossession, Justin Trudeau made Cotler Canada’s inaugural special envoy three years ago. The envoy has $1.1 million to spend annually promoting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism and protecting Israel from growing criticism. (A recent Ekos poll found that 38 per cent of Canadians with an opinion believe Israel maintains a system “similar to apartheid” and 20 percent labelled it a state that “restricted minority rights” while only 11 per cent consider it a “vibrant democracy.”). In a sign of his comfort with crying victimhood to enable supremacism, Cotler took on probably the only Canadian named by an official university inquiry to have fabricated claims of antisemitism to smear Palestine solidarity activists. Despite a 2017 McGill University inquiry concluding as much about Noah Lew, Cotler hired Lew as a policy and program analyst.

A Canadian Jewish News article about Cotler receiving the Israeli presidential prize offers some insight into Cotler’s commitment to denouncing human rights violations by enemies of the US empire. “I am feeling delighted at the recognition of my father for his tremendous work advancing human rights and doing so while making it very clear that it is synonymous with upholding the right of the State of Israel”, said Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a former member of the Israeli Knesset. Recently made Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, Cotler-Wunsh’s comment suggests her father’s human rights campaigning is designed to build establishment credibility to better promote Jewish supremacy in Israel.

In a concrete example, Cotler’s Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights invited the new Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, to deliver its 2023 Elie Wiesel Distinguished Lectureship in Human Rights. According to the information available online, the May meeting wasn’t specifically about Israel. But does anybody believe the lecture wasn’t partly designed to influence the ICC prosecutor as part of the apartheid lobby’s aggressive campaign to have the court ignore Israel’s war crimes?

Another example of Cotler using his ‘human rights’ standing to advance Jewish supremacy is his response to calling Israel an apartheid state. Prior to all the major human rights groups finding that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid, Cotler repeatedly responded to activists’ claims that Israel was an apartheid state by invoking his role in challenging the “real” version in South Africa.

Cotler has succeeded in getting the dominant media to relay the idea he was central to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s lawyer, which is a distortion well detailed in “Irwin Cotler And The Mandela Effect”. As being against South African apartheid has taken on greater mainstream status, Cotler has increasingly sought to identify as a leader in that struggle despite the fact he has a well-known association with the party that refused a House of Commons request to condemn Mandela’s imprisonment (Lester Pearson in 1964) and opposed taking action to lessen Canadian complicity with the racist regime (Pierre Trudeau 1968 – 84).

Cotler’s tale about struggling to oppose South African apartheid garners him moral standing to deflect criticism of Israeli apartheid. It also helps obscure the links/similarities between Israel and the South African regime.

When Cotler received the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice prize – named after arch Zionist former Democrat Congressman Tom Lantos who promoted both US invasions of Iraq – the Globe and Mail published a story headlined “Canadian Irwin Cotler, who helped free Mandela, given prestigious human-rights award.” Even though the August article had nothing explicitly to do with the Middle East, Canadian for Justice and Peace in the Middle East pushed the Globe to correct their headline. CJPME understands that Cotler’s Mandela tale serves his anti-Palestinian agenda.

Israel has great interest in developing ‘human rights’ activists and groups that defend it (or at least ignore its crimes). Liberal minded supporters of Israel don’t want to feel that they are backing oppression and Cotler is among those who help do that.

Objectively, Cotler’s human rights campaigning in service of US imperial aims has helped defend Israeli apartheid. Any honest person who agrees that all human beings have equal rights, including Palestinians, will understand that.

September 25, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Hungary issues ultimatum to Ukraine

RT | September 25, 2023

Hungary will not support Ukraine “on any issue” until Kiev restores the rights of ethnic Hungarians on its territory, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in parliament on Monday. Budapest’s backing is vital to Ukraine’s bid to join the EU.

“We will not support Ukraine on any issue in international life until it restores the laws that guaranteed the rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians,” Orban said, adding that “for years [the Ukrainians] have been tormenting” Hungarian schools.

Since 2017, successive laws mandating the use of the Ukrainian language have resulted in the closure of around 100 Hungarian schools in Ukraine. These laws have been harshly criticized by the Council of Europe and by human rights organizations.

According to Orban, the situation has deteriorated with the beginning of a new school year, with management at a school in the city of Munkacs forbidding the singing of the Hungarian national anthem or the wearing of Hungarian national colors on the first day back in the classroom.

Around 156,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, most of them in the region of Transcarpathia. Once a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this region fell under Soviet control after World War II. It remained in Kiev’s hands when the Ukrainian SSR became modern Ukraine after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is also home to around 150,000 ethnic Romanians and more than 250,000 Moldovans, and Bucharest has joined Budapest in demanding that the language laws be revised.

Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto warned in March that Budapest would not support Kiev’s applications to join the EU and NATO until these issues are resolved.

Hungary does not provide any military aid to Ukraine or allow weapons to enter the country via its territory. However, Hungary will have veto power over whether Ukraine can join the EU and NATO due to both bodies requiring the unanimous consent of existing members before admitting new states. The dispute over language rights is just one of several points of contention between Budapest and Kiev.

Orban’s government has also condemned the Ukrainian military’s efforts to conscript ethnic Hungarians into military service and blocked EU military aid to Ukraine over Kiev’s sanctioning of one of its banks due to its lending activities in Russia. More recently, Hungary has blocked the import of Ukrainian grain to protect its farmers from being undercut, prompting Ukraine to threaten a lawsuit at the World Trade Organization.

September 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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