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Retraction of paper saying there is no climate emergency illustrates dependence of climate activists on scaremongering

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 29, 2023

The recent cancellation of Alimonti et al shows clearly that catastrophising bad weather events and attributing them to a collapse of the climate is now the main weapon deployed to scare populations into embracing the Net Zero agenda. Of course, reference is still made to global warming, but most recent rises seem to owe more to frequent upward retrospective adjustments of temperature, rather than any significant natural boost. Perhaps we should not be surprised by this turn of events. In a short essay titled ‘The New Apocalypticism’, the science writer Roger Pielke Jr. noted: “For the secular millenarian, extreme events – floods, hurricanes, fires – are more than mere portents, they are evidence of our sins of the past and provide opportunities for redemption in the future, if only we listen, accept and change.”

The climate is collapsing all around us, shout the headlines – they require we ignore the data, the historical record, even common sense. When all is said and done, the Earth is not actually boiling! Well Professor Gianluca Alimonti and three other Italian scientists didn’t ignore the past data, much of it in fact from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they found little change in extreme weather events. They published a paper concluding that there was certainly not enough to justify the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’. A year later, the publisher Springer Nature bowed to the demands of a group of activist scientists and journalists led by the Guardian and Agence France-Presse and retracted the non-conforming paper. An addendum was proposed and sent to four reviewers for comment. Three reviewers argued for publication. The fourth stated that typical readers were not climate experts and “editors should seriously consider the implications of the possible publication of this addendum”.

We own climate science, boasted UN communications flak Melissa Fleming at a recent World Economic Forum disinformation seminar, and we partner with Google to keep our version at the top of the search list. What a great service these climate experts provide in telling us what to think and see as we unsophisticated rubes struggle towards the path of true enlightenment!

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said we are on a pathway to climate hell, with our foot on the accelerator. Steve Koonin, President Obama’s Energy Under-Secretary for Science and the author of Unsettled, recently charged that climate scientists were negligent for not speaking out and saying Guterres’s comments were “preposterous”. Koonin is not very impressed with mainstream media click bait weather stories. “I can take current media and almost any climate story I can write a very effective counter,” he recently told Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge. “It is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

The mainstream media has an agenda to set, namely the de-carbonisation of society. Noting the influence of green billionaire-funded operations like Covering Climate Now, Koonin said the mission was to promote the narrative. The MSM will not allow anything to be broadcast or written that is counter to the narrative. And the narrative is: “We have already broken the climate and we are heading for hell.”

You just need to look out of the window, claim the politicised alarmists. These days any half-decent storm, or scorchio summer’s day, gets them going. This year some unusual weather patterns are put forward as Exhibit A for Thermogeddon. Such deception depends upon the rubes failing to spot the difference between weather and long-term climate trends. Nobody should ask why carbon dioxide has been up to 20 times higher in the atmosphere in the past and life on Earth thrived. CO2 might gently warm the atmosphere up to a certain point, but temperatures naturally go up and down, ocean currents get warmer and cooler, change direction and melt and freeze polar ice. The idea that single events can be linked to any long term effects of CO2 is not just unproven, it’s unprovable. Computer models that ‘attribute’ single events to 30-year trends are laughable pseudoscience.

That wise sage Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, who’s spent decades trying to figure out how the atmosphere works, summed up all this fraud and corruption:

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

For the distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, the Alimonti affair is “why I no longer publish in peer-reviewed papers”. She described the behaviour of the journal editors as “reprehensible” in retracting a widely read climate paper just because it contained “politically inconvenient conclusions”. She is right of course – the Alimonti affair is another shocking scientific scandal that casts further doubt on the climate science peer-review process. But then, Dr. Curry is merely a scientist in all this – she doesn’t own the science.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

August 30, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Another Soros-Funded Group Pushes For Social Media Platforms To Censor Election “Disinformation”

Election season will soon be in full swing. And so will censorship demands

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 30, 2023

An organization under the financial umbrella of outspoken billionaire George Soros is mounting a brazen bid to implement a perilous cap on free speech in America’s digital public square. Today, the battle lines are being drawn with Common Cause, a group bankrolled by Soros, gleefully trumpeting its success in nurturing a potent alliance with Big Tech to quash election “disinformation.”

Expounding on its tactics in a recent press release titled “Election Disinformation in 2022 and What We Learned for 2024,” Common Cause masterfully revealed its ironic contradiction: a group professing to be a champion of democracy while vigorously advocating for restrictions on free speech.

The last time social media platforms pushed for election related censorship, we all know how that turned out.

Proudly recounting its successful call for Big Tech to suppress political content it disagrees with, Common Cause outlined its anti-free speech strategy, stating that the “continuing threat of election disinformation” necessitated the silencing of certain voices via Twitter and Facebook.

The group proposed a timeline to moderate and downrank online discourse, especially focusing on the suppression of what they believe to be “false statements” two months ahead of an election, and showed glaring bias by repeatedly accusing Republicans of purveying election untruths.

In the document, the group points a finger at the January 6 event as evidence of misplaced election integrity concerns, attributing this to right-wing misinformation.

Common Cause detailed how it unilaterally flagged and removed alleged “election disinformation” across social media platforms, with no regard for the principle of open discourse.

While the boast is loud about influencing Big Tech’s actions for now, Common Cause ominously remarks that these platforms still need to increase their censorship efforts ahead of future elections, chillingly suggesting that the present censorship should be just the tip of the iceberg.

Elon Musk has pledged to initiate lawsuits against NGOs financed by philanthropist George Soros, claiming they violate free speech rights. This comes on the heels of Musk filing a legal case against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), alleging that the organization is spreading inaccurate and deceptive information about X content with the aim of driving away advertisers through a manipulative “fear campaign.”

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

Latest Biden coverup — 5,400 emails he sent under secret names

By James Bovard | New York Post | August 29, 2023

In Washington, conning the American people is always considered a victimless crime. The latest DC shellshocker is the National Archives blocking release of 5,000+ emails Vice President Joe Biden wrote using a pseudonym to shroud Biden family graft.

In ancient Rome, the consul Scipio was accused of abusing his power. He stood in front of the Senate, pulled out the written records of his reign and tore them to pieces. Scipio’s reputation was so impeccable that the audience cheered him, regardless of his destruction of evidence.

Bizarrely, this is the same template the liberal media use to whitewash President Biden. Americans don’t need to know the facts of how Biden has used his power because his intentions are good.

But the only reason his intentions appear good is because we don’t have the facts.

Consider the latest wacky revelations on the nom de crook. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Archives admitted there are 5,400 emails Biden apparently sent under fake names including robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov.

A few of those emails have trickled out from other sources, revealing messages tied to Hunter Biden’s Ukraine hustle. But the Archives is refusing to reveal thousands of other messages despite disclosure demands from the House Oversight Committee.

Biden declared in 2019 that there was “an absolute wall” between Biden family foreign schemes and his own role as vice president. Apparently, the “absolute wall” only applied to the specific name “Joe Biden.”

Did Biden take a class in law school on Incognito Influence Peddling or what?

This is the second Biden scandal recently exposed. In 2018, Biden bragged to a Council on Foreign Relations audience that he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid to Ukraine unless that government immediately fired its chief prosecutor in December 2015.

Biden claimed the prosecutor was corrupt, yet State Department and other documents released last week reveal that the Ukrainian prosecutor had Washington’s trust. But that prosecutor was closing in on Burisma, threatening the million dollars a year in payoffs pocketed by Hunter Biden.

If those documents had surfaced during the first Trump impeachment case in late 2019, Donald Trump’s behavior would have appeared less conniving and Biden would have looked more conniving. (Both of them would still have looked like hell.)

Two years after Biden finagled that firing to purify the US ally, Ukraine was ranked the most corrupt nation in Europe except for Russia.

Biden owes his 2020 presidential election victory to pervasive, perpetual federal coverups. The Hunter Biden laptop coverup was only the tip of the bureaucratic iceberg.

How many other Biden scandals are scattered like unexploded cluster bombs throughout federal filing cabinets inside the Beltway?

How many other FBI memos exist on potential Biden bribes that we have not heard about?

How many Treasury Department Suspicious Activity Reports on massive wire transfers from squirrely foreign entities to Biden Inc. have not surfaced?

Are there other IRS investigations that were squelched without a trace?

Federal secrecy and coverups switched more votes in 2020 than Trump’s antics in Georgia and elsewhere ever could have flipped. Biden’s yammering about how his election was “the will of the people” looks more deranged with each new exposé of his pre-election abuses.

Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson declared in 2019, “If people don’t have the facts, democracy doesn’t work.” Why bother having a national election if the result merely reveals how many voters were hornswoggled by secrets the feds kept from them?

Politics has rarely been an honest business, but the combination of pervasive secrecy and perpetual deceit makes a mockery of every high-school civics-class lesson.

Will the National Archives go to the barricades to defend the privacy interest of Joe Biden’s imaginary friends? Will dogged investigators, congressional committees and whistleblowers obliterate the tattered remnants of Team Biden’s credibility? Will the liberal media cease invoking the president’s good intentions to expunge his crimes?

August 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Elon Musk to Sue George Soros-Linked NGOs For Spreading ‘Misinformation’ to Stifle Free Speech

BY DR FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 28, 2023

Elon Musk has announced that his company, X (formerly Twitter), will sue partner organisations of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (OSF) after the NGO network was accused of spreading ‘hate misinformation’ to justify an unprecedented crackdown on lawful free speech.

Musk made the statement in response to an article by journalist Ben Scallan, in which he claims that OSF-linked leftist NGOs are manipulating the statistics to show a steep rise in hate crimes across Ireland – despite the government’s own data indicating the opposite is true – and helping to usher in a new hate speech law that will restrict free speech and open up new pathways for political persecution.

The article was reposted on X by Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who added: “The reason politicians and Soros-funded NGOs are spreading hate misinformation is to justify a draconian crackdown on freedom of speech.”

To this, Elon Musk simply replied, “Exactly. X will be filing legal action to stop this. Can’t wait for discovery to start!”

It’s unclear which OSF-linked groups Scallan is referring to exactly or which NGOs will be the target of Musk’s suit – although interestingly the self-styled “free-speech absolutist” has recently threatened to sue the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), having accused the U.K.-registered NGO of using flawed methods to promote “misleading narratives” and of running a “scare campaign” that has driven away advertisers from the platform. Although the CCDH – which is listed in journalist Matt Taibbi’s report into the organisations comprising the “censorship-industrial complex” – doesn’t declare its funding on its site, Companies House information shows it received almost £1 million in 2022.

Despite an Ipsos survey commissioned by Ireland’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth showing that over eight in 10 Irish people feel “very comfortable” living next door to people with different nationalities, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, religious beliefs (and non), or marital statuses, the most up-to-date Garda Síochána data suggests the country has actually seen a 29% increase in reported ‘hate crimes’ in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Of course, an increase in reporting is not necessarily the same thing as an increase in actual hate crimes or incidents. As Scallan points out, the discrepancy between these two data sets is partly if not entirely explained by the fact that Soros’s NGO network has for many years been running campaigns to lower the threshold for hate crime reporting in Ireland, while encouraging citizens to report hate crimes and hate incidents to the police.

In fairness, the Garda does at least acknowledge this, having conceded that a “very low threshold of perception” currently applies to hate crime reporting. Yet methodological sophistication of this kind has been curiously absent from proposals put forward by Ireland’s governing classes that argue for a new, allegedly desperately needed, hate crime law. In those proposals the distinction between perceived and actual hate crimes has all but collapsed: ‘increased reporting’ is breezily conflated with ‘increased crime’ such that for politicians like Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Senator Pauline O’Reilly the need for intensified state censorship of perfectly lawful speech that certain sub-sections of Irish society happen to regard as ‘hateful’ now seems entirely unproblematic.

This confusion isn’t just to be found in the debating chambers of the Dáil and Seanad Éireann. It constitutes the underlying philosophy of the country’s draft Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, in which a hate crime is defined as an episode “perceived by the victim, or any other person, to have been motivated by prejudice, based on actual or perceived age, disability, race, colour, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender”.

As Scallan points out, under this definition, you don’t even have to be the victim of an alleged crime to report it. “A random bystander who has nothing to do with the event can say, ‘I think it was based on prejudice,’ and it will be categorised as such.”

By and large, of course, it won’t be “random bystanders” with a priggish manner, flapping ears, and a little too much time on their hands that end up weaponising this definition of what constitutes a ‘hate crime’. The real damage will be done by activist groups and George Soros-funded NGOs bent on criminalising perfectly lawful views that they happen not to like for doctrinaire ideological reasons.

“Will mocking memes be tolerated?” asked independent senator Ronan Mullen during a debate on the proposed legislation in the Senate earlier this year. “Will carrying a placard stating, ‘Men cannot breastfeed’ warrant a hate-speech investigation or up to five years’ imprisonment, a lifelong label as a criminal hater, and all of the stigma and life limitation that goes with that? Nobody actually knows.”

Nobody actually knows, no. But each of Mr Mullen’s hypothetical scenarios could potentially lead to a reported ‘hate crime’, which would then feature in the Garda’s annual reporting dataset, which would then perpetuate the myth that Ireland is becoming less tolerant, which would then lead to calls for even more draconian hate speech laws, which would then… and so on and so forth, in an endless cycle of intensifying state censorship.

Perhaps the most shocking of all the authoritarian provisions in the Bill that flow from this vague, entirely subjective definition of ‘hate’, is one that will make it a criminal offense to possess material on one’s person or in one’s home likely to “incite hatred”.

With regard to the obvious question of how something saved on, say, a mobile phone could possibly “incite hatred”, the Bill simply reverses the usual burden of proof in criminal cases, presuming “that the material [is] not intended for personal use”, and that a suspect must be planning to disseminate it, unless they can prove otherwise.

If passed, this provision will allow police to raid homes and seize devices, with a potential penalty of a year in prison and a €5,000 fine just for refusing to give up your passwords. Possession of hateful material will carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Despite many critics calling the law “Orwellian” and campaigning against it, the Irish parliament’s lower house adopted it by a vote of 160 against 14 earlier this year. The legislation now only needs the approval of the upper house in October to become law.

Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officers of the Free Speech Union.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

The Washington Post Calls For Reducing Free Speech To Improve Democracy

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 28, 2023

In very post-2016 fashion, The Washington Post last week published an article implying democracy might require curbs on freedom of speech. This unsettling approach suggests concerns around “misinformation” on social networks supersede freedom of speech, a move that has elicited intense debate and, rightly so; criticism.

In what appears to be a shift in public discourse towards further censorship, the widely-read Washington Post article critiqued Elon Musk’s reinstatement of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform, X, previously known as Twitter.

The article suggested that the proliferation of what it calls “political misinformation” disturbs democracy, sparking concern amongst proponents of free speech.

The perspective is reflected in the reporting by The Washington Post journalists Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison. However, their piece lacks critical analysis of the ambiguity surrounding the term “misinformation” and fails to address the consequential question of how to moderate content in situations where politicians’ statements are arguably false or misleading.

The article’s glaring omission of any mention of the First Amendment – a core pillar of American democracy fostering media freedoms – also raised eyebrows amidst media and legal circles.

The Washington Post reporters worryingly suggest the retreat of social media companies from combating online falsehoods could impact the 2024 presidential election. They fault Musk, along with Facebook and YouTube, for taking a step back from reining in what they call misleading claims and conspiracy theories.

Nix and Ellison also critique X for permitting Tucker Carlson’s President Trump interview, which they deem as a platform for Trump to reiterate his allegations about the 2020 election. They contend that social media should only host political content if its accuracy can be proven, posing an unrealistic expectation that conceals underlying issues of censorship under the pretext of curbing “misleading” or “hateful” speech.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Cyberattack on Strategic Culture Foundation… Now available at new url

SCF | August 25, 2023

The Strategic Culture Foundation’s online journal was this week hit by a massive cyberattack. The assault resulted in the forum being shut down on its regular internet site. Readers who normally access the journal were informed that the site was no longer available.

The online journal has safely migrated to strategic-culture.su and, in addition, we continue to post articles via SCF’s Telegram channel in order to exercise our inalienable right to freedom of speech.

The SCF online journal has been up to now accessed via the “.org” domain. The domain is operated by an organization called Public Interest Registry (PIC) based in the United States. PIC proclaims to be a “trusted” non-profit company “dedicated to the integrity of the internet” and free speech.

The outrageous action to obliterate SCF is a sign of the sinister times. There can be little doubt that the sabotage was carried out by state agencies: those of the United States and its NATO allies. This should not be seen as some kind of petty hacking by cyber vandals, but rather as cyber-warfare at the state level.

This is not the first time that this journal has been subjected to cyberattack. In recent years, SCF’s publishing business has been forced offline on several occasions by malicious attacks. The latest incident this week seems to have been the most serious endeavor to eliminate our publishing forum.

For over 12 years, Strategic Culture Foundation has been publishing articles by authors from all over the world. The forum has earned widespread acclaim for providing a diverse range of intelligent commentary and analysis on international politics. It has gained respect among many readers from a worldwide audience for its open-minded perspectives on geopolitics. In particular, we have provided in-depth critical reporting and analysis of how the United States government and its Western allies have systematically abused international law and the United Nations Charter in their unlawful pursuit of strategic interests in various parts of the globe, from Asia to Africa, and from the Middle East to Latin America.

As the United States and its NATO partners have become increasingly reckless and lawless over recent years in their imperialist depredations, the SCF forum has likewise becstraome increasingly critical. Consequently, the attacks on our journal have apparently intensified.

The U.S. State Department three years ago smeared our journal as a Kremlin propaganda outlet. The U.S. authorities have vilified writers for SCF as “Kremlin agents” even though our writers are based in different parts of the world and have nothing to do with the Russian government.

Subsequently, all our American-based authors were approached in person by U.S. state security agents knocking on their doors and threatened with prosecution and massive financial penalties if they did not stop publishing articles with SCF. All of our former American colleagues were compelled to break off what had been fruitful relations of intellectual exchange.

None of this unprecedented harassment prevented us from continuing to exercise our right to free speech and critical thinking.

However, since the U.S.-led NATO proxy war against Russia escalated with armed conflict in Ukraine 18 months ago, the SCF site has come under intensifying cyberattack.

This proves that Washington and its Western allies are indeed waging a determined proxy war. As the old adage goes: the first casualty of war is the truth.

We have provided trenchant commentary and analysis on the conflict in Ukraine. Our writers have exposed the bigger picture of geopolitical motives behind the confrontation including: NATO’s decades-long expansionism, the desire by Washington to maintain its global hegemony, the U.S. strategic need to exert control over its European vassals, Washington’s objective to displace Russia as an energy provider to Europe, the paramount importance of militarism to Western capitalism, and the imperative objective for the West to thwart the emergence of a multipolar world as advocated by Russia, China and many other nations associating with the BRICS and the Global South.

As the stakes grow higher for Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine so too has the West’s desperation to shut down all critical voices that undermine the West’s bogus posturing as a “defender of democracy”.

Russia-based media have been heavily censored by the United States and European Union. It has become increasingly difficult for an international audience to access Russian media and, more significantly, any media that publishes critical voices and thinking about Western policies.

The internet domains controlled by U.S. companies have shut down many American and European-based alternative media simply on the grounds that such alternative media provide an intelligent and informed critical analysis of the policies of Western governments. Sometimes the censorship is not so overt, conducted by algorithms that relegate accessibility for readers.

Critical thinking and truth-telling are intolerable for liars and despots, which the Western regimes are increasingly devolving into, absolutely discarding their pretensions of virtue, democracy, legality and integrity. The charade of “Western liberal democracy” is increasingly threadbare as Western states become ever more warmongering, authoritarian, dictatorships of economic austerity and elitist, unaccountable rule. In a word, fascist. The Western powers’ full-on association with the Nazi regime in Ukraine is entirely consistent with their own political degeneration.

In the case of SCF, the West’s censorship has degenerated to the level of outright sabotage of our forum.

Here it is appropriate to pay special tribute to Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks. He has paid for his truth-telling about the crimes of the U.S. empire and its vassals with the loss of his personal freedom, incarcerated for years in solitary confinement in a British dungeon on wholly fabricated spying allegations.

At such a perilous time in history when all-out war between nuclear powers is a dreadful danger, the world’s public needs more than ever open access to information and understanding of what are the causes of conflict. Western corporate media have increasingly shown themselves to be nothing but propaganda tools that promote risible pro-war narratives, such as the West “defending Ukraine from Russian aggression”. The Western media are misleading the public with false propaganda that distorts and conceals the real causes of conflict. Thus, making all-out catastrophic war a real danger.

Nevertheless, despite this propaganda onslaught and execrable dereliction of journalistic duty, the international public and the Western public, in particular, have shown an admirably healthy resistance and skepticism towards the Western media and their so-called governments. What is becoming more apparent is the toxic propaganda and the hypocrisy of Western governments and their servile media. This public resistance is fatally undermining the authority of Washington and its NATO allies.

This is reflected in growing public awareness and criticism around the world but in particular in the United States and across Europe leveled at the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. People are increasingly critical of how the Western powers are reprehensibly fueling the war with endless weapons while the Western public’s own social and economic needs are unconscionably neglected.

So-called leaders like America’s Joe Biden are ridiculed as decrepit clowns while European non-entities like Germany’s Olaf Scholz and France’s Emmanuel Macron are routinely booed in public.

Strategic Culture Foundation has empowered Western public knowledge and critical thinking through its open forum of intelligent and independent articles.

That is why it has become essential, from the point of view of the Western regimes, to shut us down with a vengeance. This, in turn, only exposes all the more the hypocrisy of Western states who claim to respect free speech and democracy.

It needs to be more widely appreciated what is going on at this time. The Western states, under the sway of ruling elites and corporate propaganda services, are at war. Not just against Russia, China and other dissenting nations. They are at war against their own public who are growing increasingly discontented and angered by the despotism that is the real, inherent condition of Western rulers and their bankrupt capitalist system.

Truth may be an early casualty of war. But that casualty can be repaired with more supportive truth and time. What might be said to be the last casualty of war are liars and their despotism.

And they can’t be repaired – when the damage to their deception is finally done.

August 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Google buries websites of Trump, RFK Jr, Republican challengers

RT | August 26, 2023

Google is suppressing the 2024 campaign websites of all serious challengers to Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden, a report from the Media Research Center claimed on Thursday.

Searching the web for ‘presidential campaign websites’ using Google returned results that did not include a single Republican candidate on the first page the day before the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 season, according to the MRC.

Not even former US President Donald Trump, who is polling neck-and-neck with Biden, appeared in the first few pages of results, the media watchdog observed.

Nor did Democratic challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief threat to Biden’s candidacy from within his own party, appear in the results at all, even though a recent poll had him at nearly 20% in a matchup against Biden.

Indeed, the only non-Biden Democrat to feature on the first page was lifestyle guru Marianne Williamson, who has never polled above the low single digits.

However, the websites of prominent Democrats who are not running for president in 2024, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, were more prominently featured at 29th, 12th, and 9th place in the results, respectively.

“Google has erased every threat to Joe Biden,” MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider said on Thursday, recalling how Google had “pulled out all the stops to put Hillary Clinton in the White House” and “has continued to interfere in our elections ever since.”

As of Saturday, the phenomenon appeared to have actually worsened. While Biden’s site was the fourth listed on the search engine and Williamson’s the fifth, Sanders remained at 12th, while Clinton had actually moved up to 13th.

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s site was the highest-ranked Republican in a search run on Saturday morning – though even his page was listed several places behind an Atlantic article informing the casual browser that 1996 Republican candidate and now-deceased former Senator Bob Dole’s campaign website “is still online.”

Kennedy has been widely disparaged by the media establishment and online factcheckers for his work on vaccine safety. He sued Google earlier this month for violating his First Amendment rights, arguing its subsidiary YouTube had blocked his content on orders from the Biden administration.

Trump also sued Google in 2021 for infringing on his free speech after he was deplatformed from YouTube along with most other mainstream social media platforms following the January 6 Capitol riot.

Over a dozen government agencies were found to be issuing content-based censorship orders to social media platforms last year in Missouri v. Biden, leading a judge to issue a restraining order forbidding the administration from contacting the platforms.

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

Biden administration sought control over TikTok

RT | August 26, 2023

The Biden administration sought to gain control over nearly every aspect of the inner workings of social media behemoth TikTok as part of negotiations allowing its continued operation in the US, according to a draft agreement obtained by Forbes last week.

The agreement, which runs to nearly 100 pages, would reportedly give the White House a level of control over the Chinese-owned platform even greater than that which it was found last year to be exercising over US-based competitors like Facebook and Twitter, allowing government officials to not only monitor and influence the conversation on the platform but also to interfere in the day-to-day operations of TikTok in the US.

Government agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense would have full authority to examine TikTok’s servers, equipment, records, facilities, and other properties, according to the draft. They could also block changes to the app’s US terms of service, privacy policy, and moderation policies and veto the hiring of any individual involved in data security for the US.

The agreement would also force TikTok and its parent company ByteDance to submit to outside audits, assessments, code inspections, and cybersecurity checks by supposedly independent entities chosen by the US government. The company would be required to foot the bill for these intrusions.

The platform’s US staff could even have been required to exclude ByteDance’s executives from security-related decisions, instead deferring to an executive security committee whose actions would also be concealed from ByteDance. This committee’s primary responsibility would be maintaining US national security first and TikTok’s profitability second.

The draft seen by Forbes, dated last summer, is the product of months of exchanges between ByteDance and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which oversees foreign involvement in business deals that could potentially impact national security and has been investigating ByteDance for four years.

TikTok has repeatedly been threatened with a blanket ban or forced sale of its US assets to an American competitor as both President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump claimed the platform is used by Beijing for information warfare.

CFIUS renewed the call for a ban or sale in March after the DOJ launched an investigation into ByteDance employees using TikTok to spy on American journalists. A spokesperson for ByteDance confirmed the surveillance but attributed it to rogue employees who have since been fired.

TikTok has over 150 million American users spending 90 minutes or more on the platform. While the company pledged in 2021 to isolate US user data on servers owned by tech giant Oracle to assuage spying concerns, Biden prohibited its use by federal employees in December and dozens of state and city governments have followed suit.

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

Will Scientific Evidence Ever Silence the Pro-Mask Cult?

Facial equity mask
BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 24, 2023

It is a long-established conclusion from the scientific world that face masks achieve no appreciable reduction in viral transmission. We knew this in 2015-16 with regard to surgeons and their patients (here and here). We knew this in 2020 from a gold-standard Cochrane review, an analysis of 14 studies on influenza and a healthcare investigation that concluded that masks “may paradoxically lead to more transmissions”. We knew this in 2021 based on the Danish mask study and two comprehensive evidence reviews (here and here). We knew this in 2022 in relation to primary schools and universities, and a debunking of premature pro-mask conclusions drawn from the Bangladesh study. And – as if more evidence was needed – at the start of 2023 we had the latest Cochrane review, yet again concluding that covering our faces with cloth and plastic does not significantly reduce the likelihood of contracting respiratory viral infections. Yet, despite this collective scream from the scientific community that the ‘MASKS DON’T WORK’, it seems that nothing will muzzle the strident protestations of the mask disciples, such as those at Independent SAGE.

A recent article in the Daily Mail led with the scary headline: ‘Scientists raise alarm over new Covid variant and call for return of face masks.’ Two of the scientists raising concerns were Professors Trish Greenhalgh and Stephen Griffin, the former announcing, “It’s, once again, time to mask up”, while the latter concurs – albeit more cryptically – with his recommendation of the re-imposition of a “mitigation-based approach”. Both Greenhalgh and Griffin are members of Independent SAGE.

When Independent SAGE was formed in May 2020, as an alternative to official SAGE, it claimed to be a group of multi-disciplinary experts whose mission was to offer the Government scientific advice on how to minimise deaths during the Covid crisis. In reality, it constituted a group of zero-Covid fanatics pushing extreme counter-pandemic measures: whatever non-evidenced, human-rights-infringing restrictions the Government proposed, Independent SAGE typically called for them to be longer and harsher.

A cursory inspection of the group’s membership explains a lot. The previously-mentioned Trish Greenhalgh is, undoubtedly, the most extreme spokesperson for the pro-mask cult, previously asserting that the search for rigorous scientific evidence was the “enemy of good policy“. The founding Chairman of the group, Professor David King, was the senior scientific advisor to the Government of Tony Blair, currently an influential advocate of globalist agendas promoting top-down control of the population. Another core participant is the lifelong member of the Communist party – Professor Susan ‘let’s-wear-a-mask-forever‘ Michie. Also, the current co-Chair of Independent SAGE is Anthony Costello, a Professor of Global Health and Sustainable Development at University College London and a former director at the World Health Organisation. Given the histories and affiliations of these group participants it was predictable that they would grasp the next available opportunity to call for the return of community masking.

Clearly, the use of the term ‘independent’ in relation to this group was a misnomer. In stark contrast, Dr. Ashley Croft – the independent expert commissioned by the Scottish Covid Inquiry – appears to be a much better fit for the role of supplier of impartial information, free from the shackles of groupthink and mainstream ideology. Dr. Croft is a Consultant Public Health Physician and Medical Epidemiologist. In his report he lists his conclusions about the  physical measures taken against COVID-19 as follows (emphasis mine):

In 2020 there was scientific evidence to support the use of some of the physical measures (e.g. frequent handwashing, the use of PPE in hospital settings) adopted against COVID-19. For other measures (e.g. face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings, lockdowns, social distancing, test, trace and isolate measures) there was either insufficient evidence in 2020 to support their use – or alternatively, no evidence; the evidence base has not changed materially in the intervening three years.

It has been argued that the restrictive measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in individual, societal and economic harm that was avoidable and that should not have occurred.

This genuinely independent voice was not well-received in some quarters. Unused to the expression of viewpoints that deviate from the dominant Covid narrative, the mainstream media predictably squealed disapproval about Croft’s perspective and resorted to attempts to smear him for his “vaccine scepticism”. And no doubt those ideologues at Independent SAGE will – as I write – be doing likewise.

As the year advances, the evidence against mass masking continues to accumulate. In April, researchers at London’s St. George’s Hospital reported that a mask mandate in 2020-21 in their healthcare settings “made no discernible difference to reducing hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections”. And – lest we forget – we purportedly live in a free and open society where coercive restrictions should only be imposed where there is unequivocal proof of a pronounced and widespread benefit from adoption of the behaviour targeted; we are a million miles away from that scenario, and that is even before we consider the harms of community masking.

But will this quieten the pro-mask cult? It seems these perpetual advocates of face coverings are driven by some supra cognitive construct that trumps the empirical evidence. Mass concealment of human faces appears to signify something sacred to groups like Independent SAGE: is it equality, egalitarianism, altruism? Or could their persistent pushing of masks be simply due to cognitive dissonance: they have stridently trumpeted the practice for so long that it would now be too psychologically painful, and damaging to their status and self-image, to admit their previous energies have been woefully misplaced? Whatever the underlying reason, we can expect escalating appeals from the muzzle mafia over the coming months.

Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign.

August 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The Digital Services Act Will Give the EU Sweeping New Censorship Powers, Forcing X and Facebook to Remove Content that Challenges Mass Migration, Transgender Ideology or Net Zero

BY DR FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 25, 2023

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) comes into force today, obliging “very large online platforms” to swiftly take down what unelected European Commission bureaucrats decide to define as ‘disinformation’.

As Laurie Wastell points out in the European Conservative, the DSA obliges online platforms to swiftly take down so-called disinformation. From today, the EC has at its disposal an aggressive enforcement regime, such that if Big Tech companies fail to abide by the EU’s ‘Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation’, which requires swift censorship of mis- and disinformation, then they can be fined up to 6% of their annual global revenue, investigated by the Commission, and potentially even prevented from operating in the EU altogether.

So, who is to say if something is misinformation? In the case of social media platforms operating within the EU, the EC is the arbiter of that, since it is the Commission that will decide if platforms like X and Facebook are doing enough to combat it. (It is the EU’s executive body, the EC, that is invested by the DSA with the exclusive power to assess compliance with the Code and apply penalties if a platform is found wanting.)

And what kind of speech is the DSA expected to police? The Code defines disinformation as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm”. That sounds innocent and apolitical enough. Yet the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), which was launched by the EC in June 2020 and aims to “identify disinformation, uproot its sources or dilute its impact”, appears to adopt a much broader, deeply politicised understanding of the term “misleading content”.

Consider, for instance, some of the key “disinformation trends” listed in the EDMO’s recent 2023 briefing on disinformation in Ireland. They include “nativist narratives” that “oppose migration”, “gender and sexuality narratives” that touch on drag queens and trans issues as “part of a wider ‘anti-woke’ narrative that mocks social justice campaigns”, and “environment narratives” that criticise climate-change policies and Greta Thunberg.

Clearly, what is common to such narratives is not that they constitute disinformation in the sense outlined in the Code — that is, “false information intended to mislead”. Rather, they represent opposition by members of the public to unpopular policies favoured by European elites — in this case, mass migration, transgender ideology and Net Zero.

In the words of EC President Ursula von der Leyen, it is vital that companies censor disinformation of this kind to “ensure that the online environment remains a safe space”. Safe for whom, one wonders — politicians or citizens?

Well worth reading in full.

Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.

August 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Free Speech Union Highlights New Risk to Free Speech in the Workplace: Carbon Literacy Training

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 25, 2023

The Free Speech Union has just published a briefing on carbon literacy training by Thomas Harris, its Director of Data and Impact. The FSU is concerned that it will have a chilling effect on free speech in the workplace in the same way that unconscious bias training and anti-racism training does, with employees reluctant to challenge the ideas behind it for fear of jeopardising their careers.

Carbon literacy training is spreading rapidly across UK offices and places of study, with over 67,000 citizens certified as ‘carbon literate’ according to the Carbon Literacy Project (CLP), the main organisation behind the initiative. (Between financial year-end September 2021 and September 2022, CLP’s income grew from £183.8k to £637.7k, an increase of nearly 250%.) The training takes it for granted that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and recommends that employees embrace various radical solutions, including net zero.

The Free Speech Union is concerned that this training is embedding a particular orthodoxy about climate change in British workplaces, leaving employees feeling unable to challenge it. While it’s indisputable that average global temperatures have increased since the mid-19th Century people hold a range of views about the causes and severity of climate change and that in turn influences their opinion about the best way to tackle it – or, indeed, whether tackling it is possible or necessary. Different solutions to the problems created by climate change are informed by different values and recommending one approach over another inevitably involves making a political choice. There is no-such thing as an apolitical, ‘scientific’ solution. Consequently, employees should not be put under pressure to endorse a particular approach or threatened with disciplinary action if they fail to adjust their behaviour to follow this approach, particularly in their private lives.

In those companies seeking accreditation as a ‘Carbon Literate Organisation’ (CLO), up to 80% of staff are expected to become ‘carbon literate’. Carbon literate accreditation requires employees to embrace a particular view about climate change and identify at least one action they can take to reduce their own carbon footprint, as well as at least one action involving other people. The FSU fears that employees may be penalised if they refuse to comply with these requirements because they do not share a particular point of view.

The FSU first became aware of this new threat to free speech in the workplace when it was contacted by a member who is concerned about his career after he challenged the carbon literacy training provided by his employer. The FSU believes he was right to be concerned. To secure CLP’s platinum, gold, and silver CLO accreditation, companies are expected to embed carbon literacy in the annual targets of staff members and evaluate their performance accordingly. This means that employees who don’t subscribe to a particular view on climate change could find themselves missing out on pay awards or promotion unless they self-censor or pretend to hold convictions they don’t have.

If you’re being forced to undergo carbon literacy training in your workplace and are worried you might get into trouble for challenging the climate activist agenda behind it, you can contact Thomas Harris at the Free Speech Union here. And if you’re not already a member of the FSU, you can join here.

August 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

New York City Mayor seeks to incorporate Israel police drone technology into NYPD

MEMO | August 24, 2023

The Mayor of New York City is looking to potentially incorporate Israeli drone technology and methods to aid in law enforcement and emergency efforts, in the latest example of cooperation between American and Israeli police forces.

Eric Adams, the New York City Mayor, visited Israel this week in order to assess the country’s law enforcement technology and the possibility of incorporating it into the New York Police Department (NYPD), telling reporters during an online briefing in the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv, yesterday that the Israeli police forces “are a little bit more advanced”.

Adams praised the drones used by Israeli law enforcement as being more durable and being able to fly for much longer than NYC’s current technological devices, clarifying that “the method in which they’re using them, the methods in which they are training to use them, is what caught my interest”.

Referring to himself as “a great fan of technology and all it can do to make our lives easier and safer”, the Mayor proclaimed that “Israel is on the cutting edge of exciting developments in technology that will benefit all of us.”

He also referred to Israeli police’s use of drones in coordination with police motorcycles, saying it could potentially be a tactic utilised by the NYPD to help response times for accidents or other emergencies.

The utilisation of drone technology by Israeli police and wider authorities has increased throughout the past year, with officials in the central Israeli city of Modi’in-Maccabim-Reut having begun deploying drones as first responders in traffic accidents last October.

Despite his praise for the NYPD’s Israeli counterparts, Adams acknowledged that a significant part of the drone technologies’ utilisation is directly opposed to laws practiced within the United States, making full implementation an issue. The NYPD “will not use any tool that is not in alignment with the laws of our city, in our state and in our country.”

One such method it will reportedly refrain from using is the facial recognition technology which is notoriously used by Israeli authorities to identify Palestinians. “So many police forces across the globe, they use various methods that are not suitable in our city, and we’re not going to use any methods that do not conform with our rights and the laws of our country”.

The Mayor praised some aspects of Israeli policing tactics, however, such as their ability to “strategically and successfully deal with a large crowd”. He claimed that “some methods we may not use, but there are other methods that they use that they’re really humane in nature.”

Such tactics like crowd control may be incorporated by the NYPD, he said, seemingly referring to recent riots that rocked the city last month. “As when we had a similar incident in our city, how do we do it in the correct way? And they’ve [Israelis] learned how to do it correctly. And we walked away with some of those tactics.”

Related article:

Data collected by Israel’s electronic wolves helps to terrorise the Palestinians

August 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

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