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Canada passes its duplicitous online censorship bill

The bill affects independent voices while suggesting it doesn’t

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 28, 2023

Canada’s controversial Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11, will become law.

Bill C-11 reforms the Broadcasting Act to apply to online content. Streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix will be forced to follow the same rules that apply to traditional broadcasters and will be regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Streaming services will be required to invest in and prioritize Canadian content. Critics of the bill have warned that it would negatively impact individual content creators and give the government control of the content Canadians see online.

“Liberal” politicians have said that it’s worth it.

Online platforms also criticized the bill, with YouTube running a campaign to warn content creators that the bill could affect their income.

The Senate proposed several amendments that were rejected by the lower chamber. However, the passed bill included “public assurance” that it “will not apply to user-generated digital content” because it doesn’t regulate the independent content uploaders themselves. However, it does apply to the platforms that these users upload their content to and so the independent creators are affected.

The government insisted that the bill contains adequate safeguards to protect individual content creators and rejected amendments with further protection because they would affect its ability to “publicly consult on, and issue, a policy direction to the CRTC to appropriately scope the regulation of social media services.”

The bill gives the CRTC discretion to determine how to enforce it.

Only moments after the passing of the bill, groups that say they’re representing Canadian culture demanded more action. The lobbyists called for the CRTC to establish social media rules.

The Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE), said it “applauds the passage of Bill C-11,” but wants more.

“The CDCE celebrates a great day, but notes that the real work has just begun,” the lobbyists said, calling for more rules for social media.

“In the coming months, the government will issue a policy direction to the CRTC, and the latter will then have the important responsibility of developing the rules that will apply to each of the new services that are now clearly under its jurisdiction, i.e. audiovisual and audio streaming services and social media,” the group wrote in a press release.

The group then added that: “The CRTC will thus ensure that everyone makes a significant contribution to the creation, production and promotion of Canadian music, programs and films, while taking into account Canada’s unique diversity.”

In a statement, People’s Party of Canada leader, Maxime Bernier, said: “In the case of Bill C-11, it’s unfortunate that the majority of Senators caved in and voted for the bill even after the government had rejected a crucial amendment proposed by senators Julie Miville-Dechêne and Paula Simons to clarify that it would not be used to regulate independent creators on YouTube and other platforms, which would be a clear violation of free expression.”

Bernier added: “In the first place, there is absolutely no need for the government and the CRTC to tell platforms to modify their algorithms to promote Canadian content. Canadians can decide what they want for themselves without the government holding their hands. This is a first step in creating a wall around the Canadian internet like the Chinese government does in China.”

The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) said that it would repeal the bill if it forms a government.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said that, “the power-hungry Trudeau Liberals have rammed through their censorship bill into law. But this isn’t over, not by a long shot.”

Poilievre said that, if elected, his government would, “restore freedom of expression online & repeal Trudeau’s C-11 censorship law.”

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

Did the CIA and the Pentagon Put the Quietus on Tucker Carlson?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 27, 2023

One hypothesis for why Fox News fired popular television commentator Tucker Carlson is because he had been badmouthing company officials. But are top executives for a major U.S. corporation so sensitive to personal criticism that they’re willing to ditch their most popular commentator for saying some bad things about them? That’s hard to believe.

Another hypothesis is that Carlson was also saying bad things about Fox News colleagues. That too doesn’t make much sense to me. Doesn’t that sort of thing go on in most large companies? It’s called human nature. Again, it doesn’t seem serious enough to can the network’s most popular commentator. 

Let me weigh in on another possibility — that the Pentagon and the CIA may have been the ones who put the quietus on Tucker and possibly signaled to Fox executives that he had to go.

Last December, Carlson broadcast a program on the assassination of President Kennedy in which he accused the CIA of having participated in the assassination. In doing so, Carlson violated a taboo that has existed within the mainstream media since November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. 

It’s considered permissible for the mainstream press to run articles and programs that analyze the assassination in an “objective” way, or that support the official lone-nut narrative, or that analyze why people subscribe to conspiracy theories. But what has been verboten since the assassination is the running of articles and programs that point to the Pentagon and the CIA as the orchestrators of the assassination or that feature evidence pointing to their criminal culpability. 

By violating that sacred taboo, Carlson put himself at risk of being subjected to the omnipotent power and influence of the national-security establishment. As New York Congressman Charles Schumer candidly and succinctly put it, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

In upcoming episodes of my new video/podcast series “The JFK Assassination: Sixty Years Later,” I point to specific examples of where the mainstream press steadfastly and scrupulously avoided confronting clear and convincing evidence of criminal culpability by the national-security establishment in the Kennedy assassination. 

Let’s examine one of those examples. (I’m covering several others in my new series.)

In 1992, the Assassination Records Review Board was brought into existence to enforce The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that the Pentagon, the CIA, and other federal entities release their long-secret assassination-related records to the public. 

The ARRB discovered the existence of a man named Roger Boyajian, who told the agency a remarkable story. He said that on November 22, 1963, he was a Marine sergeant stationed at the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center. After JFK’s assassination, he was ordered to the facility where the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body was to be conducted by the military. He told the ARRB that a team brought JFK’s body into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m. on that evening.

Boyajian’s statement presented problems for the military. That’s because the official narrative has always been that JFK’s body was brought into the Bethesda morgue only one time — at 8 p.m. — by an official honor guard consisting of the members of the armed forces. Boyajian’s statement meant that the military had lied — that there were actually two different entries of JFK’s body into the morgue on that evening.

Was there any corroboration for Boyajian’s extraordinary claim? Actually there was. Boyajian had kept a copy of his “after-action report” that he had submitted to his superiors the week following the assassination. The report, which he shared with the ARRB, confirmed that the president’s body was brought into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the Pentagon never disclosed that report to the ARRB, which the JFK Records Act required it to do.

Further corroboration came in the form of statements and testimony from several Navy enlisted men who said that they met a large black hearse outside the morgue and carried the president’s body from the vehicle into the morgue. They said that the president’s body was in a shipping casket rather than the heavy, ornate casket into which the president’s body had been placed in Dallas. The enlisted men said that there were men with suits in the hearse whose identities are still unknown to this date.

The ARRB also discovered a memorandum from Gawler’s Funeral Home in Washington, D.C., which performed the embalming of JFK’s body after the autopsy. The memorandum stated that the president’s body had been brought into the morgue in a shipping casket.

In 1969, Col. Pierre Finck, one of the three military pathologists who performed the autopsy on Kennedy’s body, testified in a criminal case in New Orleans that had been brought by a district attorney named Jim Garrison against a man named Clay Shaw. During the trial, Garrison questioned the official lone-nut narrative of the assassination and charged that the assassination was actually a national-security state regime-change operation, one that was no different in principle from such other U.S. national-security regime-change operations as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1964), and Congo (1961).

During the trial, Finck testified that he received a telephone call at 8 p.m. on November 22, 1963, from Navy Commander James Humes, a pathologist in charge of performing the autopsy on Kennedy’s body. Humes invited Finck to come to the Bethesda morgue to assist with the autopsy. During that 8 p.m. conversation, Humes told Finck that they already had x-rays of the president’s head. 

That’s what the law calls an “admission against interest.” It’s not exactly a confession but it’s similar to a confession, which is why the law places tremendous weight on it. With his sworn testimony, Finck was inadvertently confirming that the president’s body was, in fact, sneaked into the morgue almost an hour-and-a-half before the official entry time of 8 p.m. After all, at the risk of emphasizing the obvious, the only way they could already have x-rays of the president’s head at 8 p.m. is if the president’s body had already been in the morgue before 8 p.m. — i.e., at 6:35 p.m. (No x-rays were taken at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where JFK was treated after being shot.)

Now, wouldn’t you think that this set of facts would be a dream-come-true for any investigative reporter within the mainstream press? After all, sneaking the president’s body into the morgue and then lying about it and covering it up would obviously be a fairly big story, especially if the press could discover what the military was up to.

Keep in mind something else: Someone had slipped a provision into the JFK Records Act prohibiting the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the assassination. Thus, the ARRB could not investigate the early introduction of the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue and, equally important, what was done with the body in the one-and-a-half hours before the second introduction of the body into the morgue — the official one that took place at 8 p.m.

But the law certainly did not prohibit the mainstream press from investigating the matter. Moreover, in the 1990s, many of the people involved in the autopsy were still alive. An investigative reporter could have contacted everyone involved and gotten to the bottom of the military was up to. 

By the 1990s, when Boyajian shared his story with the ARRB, it was clear that the Pentagon and the CIA did not want the mainstream press to investigate any of the sinister aspects of the Kennedy autopsy. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy, The Kennedy Autopsy 2, and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.) Thus, the early sneaking of JFK’s body into the morgue was simply “airbrushed” out of the mainstream press. The standard response to the sinister aspects of the Kennedy autopsy became “Conspiracy theory!” which was the term that the CIA early on advised the mainstream press to employ against those who challenged the official lone-nut narrative of the assassination.

Did Tucker Carlson pay a price for violating the JFK taboo? It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. 

April 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Ex-US Army Psyops Expert: Fox News Fired Carlson to Maintain “Semi Lobotomized Quasi Retarded Population”

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | April 27, 2023

A former US Army psychological warfare officer says that Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News because of the regime’s agenda to maintain an “uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population.”

The remarks were made by US counter-terror expert Scott Bennett.

Carlson and Fox News “parted ways” on Monday with speculation still raging as to the specific reason why the network canned its highest rated and most popular host.

According to Bennett, Carlson posed too much of a threat to institutional power because he turned Americans into proper “researchers and thinkers”.

Carlson offered an “intellectualism, truthfulness, and an analytical depth that no other news personality has ever done in the history of the United States as far back as I can remember,” said Bennett.

Tucker needed to be “silenced” because he represented too big a threat to the “powers and principalities, institutions and agendas that seek an unenlightened uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population that do not question, do not research, do not analyze but simply digest and follow instructions,” according to Bennett.

“Tucker Carlson also exposed the fraud and money laundering racketeering crimes of FTX and the Democrat Party in Ukraine involving the United States government. He exposed the US biochemical labs in Ukraine and their connection to the Democrat Party, President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other US government agencies and pharmaceutical companies,” Bennett told Sputnik.

The ex-host’s anti-regime rhetoric “could no longer be tolerated by the corrupt American media and political establishment,” said Bennett, adding that his exit signals “the death of American media”.

The former US army psyops officer suggested that Senator Chuck Schumer had threatened to utilize the CIA and the FBI to deploy secret government operations against Tucker to get him off air unless he was fired.

Schumer previously called for Carlson to be taken off air after he broadcast footage showing the January 6 ‘riot’ leaders were actually allowed into the Capitol and chaperoned around by authorities.

As we highlighted earlier, one of the reasons behind Tucker’s dismissal is a lawsuit fired by former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claims she was bullied and subjected to sexist and anti-semitic harassment.

However, Grossberg’s own lawyer revealed that she has never even met Carlson.

April 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Moscow responds to EU call for Serbia to ban Russian media

RT | April 27, 2023

The European Parliament’s insistence that Serbia censor RT Balkans and Sputnik in order to “harmonize” with the EU is absurd, evil, and a manifestation of imperialism and colonialism, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has claimed.

On Wednesday, the parliament’s foreign affairs committee adopted the report by Slovakian MEP Vladimir Bilcik, criticizing Serbia for not joining the EU sanctions against Russia and demanding Belgrade shut down Russian “disinformation” outlets just as the bloc has done. The US State Department has also called for a ban on RT Balkans.

“It’s an absurd situation,” Zakharova told reporters at the daily briefing in Moscow on Thursday. “These statements speak for themselves. The West isn’t even hiding, but saying the quiet part out loud.”

The US and the EU are now openly saying that Russia, Russian culture and language, or Russian media and journalists, simply shouldn’t exist, Zakharova noted. She compared the European Parliament’s demands to calls by Ukrainian officials to “exterminate” the Russian population in Crimea and Donbass, saying they can only be described as “evil.”

“The only possible thing to say is that this is an imperialist point of view, a manifestation of neo-colonialism. Some countries, without any moral grounds, illegally arrogate to themselves the right to model the world and its development at their own discretion: who can live, speak, trade, produce, have children, and who cannot,” Zakharova told reporters. “This is a modern version of slavery, in which the colonial powers claim the right to be considered masters, and others – their slaves.”

“Those who like these rules of the game have the right to play by them. We don’t. This is what we rebelled against.”

The US and its allies, Zakharova argued, want Russia to have no opportunity to speak, because the very existence of Russian media threatens the Western plans for narrative manipulation.

“Our media, journalists and outlets report from the epicenters of world events, based on facts, encourage people to critically evaluate reality (as they should),” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said. “Apparently, this goes against the plans that the American rulers have to ‘zombify’ their own population.”

American television, Zakharova noted, presents a “a one-sided, practically sterilized, filtered and adjusted picture of the world,” having reached an “ideological dead end.” Any airing of alternative viewpoints threatens to expose this media ecosystem as biased and contradictory.

RT Balkans began operations in November 2022. The EU reportedly plans to blacklist the outlet as part of its 11th package of sanctions against Russia. The bloc had banned all broadcasting activities by RT and Sputnik in March 2022, calling them “Russian propaganda” that endangered Ukraine. Major social media platforms have blocked RT accounts in the bloc, while YouTube extended the ban globally.

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

EU’s Věra Jourová says she’s “uncomfortable” on Twitter, wants more censorship

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 27, 2023

Vice President of the European Commission, Věra Jourová, said that she is “more and more uncomfortable on Twitter” because of what she said was the rise in Russian propaganda.

She added that Twitter was likely going to violate the upcoming censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), once enforcement begins later this year, because of the “unregulated Russian aggressive propaganda”

The DSA requires platforms to remove “harmful” content or risk heavy fines.

Jourová said that the employees who were fired when Elon Musk took over last October meant staff responsible for content moderation were fired.

“We were already disappointed by the data they delivered in January and of course, we are also watching what they are doing with the capacities left,” Jourová told reporters on Wednesday.

Earlier, she tweeted that she felt “Twitter is falling short of its commitments to the anti-disinformation code,” a currently voluntary rulebook for online platforms that will become a firm benchmark when the DSA comes into force.

“I would compare the situation with driving on the highway.

“You drive on the highway and overstepping that speed, you get a penalty, and one day you might be deprived of your driving license.”

She insisted that platforms should, “intensify their work against Russian propaganda.”

“There is still space for dialog. And I would really do wish to explain to Mr. Musk our philosophy that we are protectors of freedom of speech, protectors of freedom of expression… But freedom of speech in the EU is not unlimited.”

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

Meet the VLOPs! The EU Extends its Censorship Powers

By Robert Kogon | Brownstone Institute | April 28, 2023

On Tuesday this week, the European Commission announced its first list of designated Very Large Online Platforms – or VLOPs – that will be subject to “content moderation” requirements and obligations to combat “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As VLOPs, the designated services will be required “to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools.”

Or as a subheading in the Commission announcement pithily puts it: “More diligent content moderation, less disinformation.”

As discussed in my previous articles on the DSA here and here, the legislation creates enforcement mechanisms – most notably, the threat of massive fines – for ensuring that online platforms comply with commitments to remove or otherwise suppress “disinformation” that they have undertaken in the EU’s hitherto ostensibly voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation.

Unsurprisingly, the list of designated VLOPs includes a variety of services offered by all the most high-profile signatories of the Code: Twitter, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok.

But, far more surprisingly, it also includes several platforms that are not signatories of the Code and to which the Commission appears now to be extending the Code/DSA requirements unilaterally. The latter include Amazon, Apple (in the form of the App Store), and even Wikipedia.

The Commission has even designated the favorite messaging service of every filter-crazy preteen, Snapchat! Curiously, however, WhatsApp is not named.

Since many of the newly designated platforms are not publishing platforms per se, it is unclear how exactly the “content moderation” requirements will apply to them.

What will “content moderation” mean for Amazon, for example? That user reviews containing alleged “disinformation” will have to be removed? Or will books or magazines that the European Commission deems to be vessels or purveyors of “disinformation” have to be purged from the catalogue?

The inclusion of the Apple App Store is perhaps even more ominous. Will its subjection to the Code/DSA requirements provide an indirect route for the EU to demand the removal of apps of non-designated platforms that the Commission, however, deems channels of disinformation? Telegram, for example?

And what about Wikipedia? The DSA invests the European Commission with the power to impose fines of up to 6 percent of global turnover on VLOPs. But Wikipedia is a non-profit that is funded by donations. It does not sell anything, so it does not have any turnover. But presumably the Commission plans to treat its fundraising income as such.

Furthermore, Wikipedia is not a publishing platform, but a user-edited collaborative encyclopedia. If it is to be subject to the EU’s “content moderation” requirements, what can this possibly mean other than that Wikipedia will have to remove user edits that the European Commission deems to be “mis-” or “disinformation?” The European Commission will thus become the very arbiter of encyclopedic knowledge and truth.

The European Commission’s list of designated entities, comprising 17 Very Large Online Platforms as well as 2 Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), is reproduced below.

Very Large Online Platforms:

  • Alibaba AliExpress
  • Amazon Store
  • Apple AppStore
  • Booking.com
  • Facebook
  • Google Play
  • Google Maps
  • Google Shopping
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Snapchat
  • TikTok
  • Twitter
  • Wikipedia
  • YouTube
  • Zalando

Very Large Online Search Engines:

  • Bing
  • Google Search

Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe.Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.

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

Vaccine sceptics – the modern-day martyrs

By Liz Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | April 25, 2023

Whenever I get off the bus at Oxford city centre, I see the monument to the Oxford martyrs, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, who were burned at the stake in Broad Street in 1555, and Thomas Cranmer, who suffered a similar fate the following year. The three refused to renounce their Protestant beliefs during the reign of Catholic Mary Tudor, and died the most horrific deaths as a result.

I have often thought, when passing the monument and the commemorative plaque set in the wall of Balliol College opposite, that these men could have saved themselves simply by recanting, an option that was open to them and indeed, Archbishop Cranmer did recant before reaffirming his belief in Protestantism.

Now, I see more clearly that, whatever the consequences, they could not in all conscience revert to a faith they no longer believed in. We like to think we live in more civilised times and no longer burn people at the stake for not conforming to the religious orthodoxy of the time – but do we? The history of the last three years has been an updated version of martyrs being consigned to the flames for their beliefs, but this time the rejected articles of faith are the Covid vaccines.

They have become the new religion, with fervent advocates even among church and spiritual leaders. Instead of enjoining us to believe in God, they have urged us to save ourselves by having the vaccine. Their sermonising on the matter has even acquired the status of holy writ as, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Jesus would have wanted us to have the vaccine. The Dalai Lama urged his many followers to ‘be brave and come forward to be vaccinated’ after having the jab himself.

So, as the faithful line up for their sixth jab, the vaccine can be considered the secular equivalent of Holy Communion. The point of Holy Communion is to partake of the body and blood of Christ to absolve us from our sins, and the mRNA vaccine is supposed to protect us against bodily ills. In both cases, the idea is to keep the devil out by a ritual and oft-repeated observance.

Those of us who have done our research, and cannot in all honesty believe in the magical power of the vaccine to ward off the devil of Covid infection, are the heretics of today who deserve to be burned at the stake, or in today’s equivalent to be cast out of polite society and ridiculed as anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, tinfoil hat wearers and covidiots. Doctors have lost their jobs for refusing to accept the supremacy of the vaccine and the (very) few politicians who have spoken out against it have been ostracised and marginalised.

Of course, when it comes to Protestantism or Catholicism, it is a question of belief. Yet we know how the vaccines work, and have proof that they are harmful and can set up a variety of adverse reactions in the body. As such, those of us who know the truth cannot recant whatever the cost, as to do so would be to accept the lie that the mRNA vaccines have been a wonderful success story the world over, saving millions of lives.

But even as evidence of severe damage and sometimes death from the vaccine mounts up, as reported on TCW, this continues to be brushed aside, discounted and even denied. Indeed, those who question the holiness of the mRNA to protect us from all ills do so at our personal and professional peril. Whenever a vaccine-related serious side effect or death is reported, it is dismissed in the media as ‘extremely rare’ and insignificant compared with all the good the rollout has accomplished.

And when a fully-vaccinated individual catches Covid anyway, the believers’ standard response is to allege that, but for the multiple jabs, their illness would have been much worse. Vaccines have become, one might say, the holy water of our times.

We may live in a largely secular age, but we have substituted belief in God for a belief in science, and most especially medical science, or what passes for it these days. We have come to worship Big Pharma with the kind of adoring reverence we used to reserve for God and Jesus, and this persists even when the so-called science fails us.

The religious fervour goes even further. The ever-increasing number of vaccines administered to babies can be considered analogous to a holy baptism. For just as baptisms and christenings were supposed to cast out original sins before the baby had time to commit any, so today the many vaccines are supposed to cast out devils in the shape of measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, or prevent them from entering. Once again, the supposedly protective substances are injected long before the baby has had time to develop any of the infections.

Belief in the efficacy and safety of vaccines is so devout that nobody is allowed to raise a dissenting voice, and anybody who dares to do so, such as Dr Andrew Wakefield, risks not only being discredited, but struck off the medical register and not allowed to practise. More recently, Dr Sam White was suspended for ‘spreading misinformation’ about the efficacy of the Covid vaccine. Robert F Kennedy Jr, a challenger for the American presidency, is routinely attacked for promoting anti-vaccine propaganda. Yet to their eternal credit these people will not be silenced.

The search is now on to find a vaccine for every ill that flesh is heir to, including cancer and malaria. Living in Oxford, I am always getting alerts from the Oxford Vaccine Group to be a volunteer for one of their new studies. If vaccines cannot actually deliver eternal life, they can, we are led to believe, confer the next best thing, which is eternal health.

At one time, those who did not believe in God were considered wicked. Nowadays, you are labelled an apostate if you don’t believe in the almighty power of the vaccine.

So I wonder whether I would be prepared to concede, under extreme torture, that the mRNA vaccine was safe and effective. Thankfully, my conviction that it is neither has not been put to such a severe test but pondering on the issue has given me a new understanding as to why Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were prepared to die horribly for what they believed was true, rather than recant.

We know now that it was the sacrifice of these men, and particularly that of Cranmer, which made England a Protestant country. By the same token, I can only hope that those who have had the courage to speak out against the mRNA vaccine, and who because of this have been marginalised, ridiculed and in some cases lost their livelihood, will enable the tide to be turned at last.

Note: I hold no particular brief for either Protestantism or Catholicism but am just pointing out that the ultimate sacrifice from a few brave people can change beliefs – and society.

April 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

FDA chief spruiks misinformation while vowing to fight misinformation

BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD  | APRIL 25, 2023

Robert Califf, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is hell bent on ridding the internet of misinformation.

In a series of public appearances, Califf has claimed that “misinformation is now our leading cause of death.”

When I asked the FDA for evidence to support his claim, the agency drew a blank, admitting that Califf’s statement “cannot be proven.”

Califf has since made attempts to tweak his public statement.

This week, CBS News reporter Alexander Tin pressed him for an explanation, to which Califf replied, “I want to modify my statement. And I’ll keep working on this, to try to get it right. I would say I actually believe it is the leading cause of premature death…”

Jessica Adams, an expert in drug regulatory affairs said, “It’s ironic. Califf is spreading misinformation about the leading cause of premature death in the US, while promoting the need to counter misinformation.”

“It’s unbelievable for him to make these assertions with no scientific backing,” she added.

Adams said it’s not the FDA’s job to police medical misinformation online.

“The FDA should be assessing drug approvals, overseeing post-marketing studies and ensuring product labels are up to date – not promoting vaccines and antivirals as if it’s the marketing arm of the drug industry,” said Adams.

The FDA sent me its website providing Califf’s reasoning for why he believes misinformation is the leading cause of premature death. It states:

“Most of the COVID-19 deaths since vaccines and antivirals became available were preventable if people had gotten updated on their vaccination status and, if high risk and infected, had they been treated with an authorized antiviral.”

“He’s failed to cite any sources to substantiate his claims and Califf keeps saying that it is just his ‘belief’…Are we supposed to just accept that?” said Adams, criticising his “obsession” over the boosters.

“It’s as if the FDA thinks that people don’t want the vaccines because they are misinformed, when it might just be that they are not persuaded by the data,” she added.

Adams also said the FDA is misinforming the public by “over-inflating” the benefit of the more recent bivalent vaccines.

“They’re now promoting the bivalent boosters which are based on much less data than the original [monovalent] vaccines and authorised on the basis of antibodies, which is not a fully validated correlate of protection,” said Adams.

This is not the first time the FDA has made misleading scientific claims to the public.

In August 2021, the FDA attempted to dissuade people from using ivermectin as an off-label, early treatment for COVID-19 by suggesting it was a livestock drug. The agency tweeted “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

But critics were quick to condemn the misinformation by pointing out that ivermectin is not only a medicine used to deworm livestock, it is also FDA-approved for parasitic treatment in humans.

Califf also spread misinformation in a Nov 2022 tweet which stated, “preliminary epidemiological findings point to the distinct possibility of the bivalent vaccines and antivirals reducing risk of long Covid.”

Vinay Prasad, Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and a practicing Haematologist Oncologist at San Francisco General Hospital wrote a scathing criticism of the tweet.

“For bivalent vaccines, he’s making things up. There are no relevant clinical data in human beings for bivalent vaccines, certainly not for the end points of long covid symptoms. Ergo that claim is 100% false; essentially a lie,” wrote Prasad.

“For antivirals, such as Paxlovid, this endpoint has not been assessed in randomized control trials. There are some poorly done observational studies that conflate ICD-10 codes with long covid symptoms and make bold, unsupported claims, but there is no robust evidence,” he added.

Traditionally, the FDA has regulated health misinformation to protect consumers from misbranded and adulterated products, but this new proposed “misinformation oversight” seems to extend to overseeing any online health-related issue.

“The FDA has always maintained that it does not want to regulate the practice of medicine, but lately it’s behaving as if it’s the Surgeon General – America’s doctor – making drug recommendations and promoting vaccines,” said Adams.

If the FDA wants to curb the spread of misinformation, it should start by looking at its own behaviour.

Despite the criticism, Califf remains defiant. Recently, he boasted to a crowd of journalists that he is “relatively impervious to critique.”

Perhaps, that’s where he is going wrong.

April 26, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

RFK JR: “there is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys”

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 26, 2023

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the censorship of speech arguing that, “there is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys.”

In an interview with Breitbart News host Joel Pollak, Kennedy discussed censorship of alleged “misinformation.” Kennedy has experienced censorship first-hand for questioning measures taken during the pandemic.

“I’m wondering if you can make a pitch to our audience about a common cause that you, running as a Democrat, may have with many conservatives who feel that they’ve been canceled or otherwise censored or marginalized in public discourse,” Pollak asked.

“It’s more than a personal aggrievement. It’s really just a direct assault on our democracy,” Kennedy said.

According to Kennedy, when the founding fathers drafted the Bill of Rights, they “put the right to free expression in the First Amendment because all the other rights depended on it—because the government that has the power to silence its critics has license for any kind of atrocity.”

“They also understood just theoretically that the whole basis for democracy was the free flow of information,” he continued, adding that one great benefit of democracy over dictatorship is that “through the free flow of information, the best policies can triumph in the marketplace of ideas.”

“We’re now in this situation where without free speech, democracy just withers and dies. Free speech is the fertilizer; it’s the sunlight; it’s the water for democracy,” he added. “There is no time in history where the people who were censoring speech were the good guys. They’re always the bad guys because, of course, that is the first and last step of totalitarianism: silencing critics.”
Kennedy further noted that misinformation and falsehoods are protected speech.

“There are certain kinds of speech that are not protected. But, you know, those things are.

“What we really ought to be looking at is why? What is the cause of this blizzard and tsunami of misinformation that everybody is worried about? And if you look at why this is happening, it’s clear that it’s happening because people don’t trust the government anymore, and they don’t trust it because the government lies, and the media lies.

“Twenty-two percent of Americans now trust the government, and about 22 percent trust media. That’s the lowest level in our history. And the reason they don’t—there’s a very good reason—is that the government and the media, the mainstream media, the corporate-owned media, they are now lying just as a matter of course. And because of that, people are looking for other sources of information. And when those other sources challenge government orthodoxies, the government’s response is to censor them or to label them as misinformation and say that they’re dangerous.”

Listen to the full interview here.

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

Twitter Received 16,000 Information Requests From Over 85 Governments at Start of 2022

Sputnik – 25.04.2023

WASHINGTON – Twitter said on Tuesday that it received more than 16,000 government information requests for user data from over 85 countries in the first half of 2022 alone.

“Twitter received over 16,000 government information requests for user data from over 85 countries during the reporting period. Disclosure rates vary by requester country,” the social network said in a press release.

The United States, France, Japan, Germany and India were the top five requesting countries for the period, the release said.

Twitter also received about 53,000 legal requests from governments around the world to remove content, with the majority of requests coming from Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and India, the release added.

In the first half of 2022, Twitter required users to remove 6,586,109 pieces of content that violated the company’s rules – an increase of 29% from the second half of 2021, according to the release.

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

Fox News Decision to settle Dominion lawsuit for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars makes no sense

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | April 26, 2023

Something fishy here.

First, corporate executives don’t give away $787 million of shareholders’ money without a test of the claim in court. The uncontested amount is so large that one wonders if Fox News itself paid it or whether this almost $800 million was a gift funneled through an uncontested lawsuit to fund Dominion by our ruling elites. Once elections are determined by how voting machines are programmed, the people are disenfranchised.

Second, it is not defamation to report the news. Tucker Carlson reported the claims of experts. That is news reporting. Dominion’s defamation lawsuit should have been filed against the experts. It wasn’t, because the experts had the evidence.

Third, Experts supplied evidence that the Dominion voting machines could be programmed to count votes differently from how the votes were cast; experts supplied evidence that the machines could be hacked; experts supplied evidence that the voting machines were connected to the Internet. Fox News could have called these experts as expert witnesses. By agreeing to settle, Fox News refused the evidence its day in court. Why?

A possible explanation is that Fox News, voluntarily or involuntarily, participated in an orchestration that established the precedent that reporting news different from the narrative, or news that is unfavorable to a person, company, or government institution, is defamation. Think about what this means. A prosecutor who charges a person with a crime has defamed the person. Truth becomes unreportable. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh could be charged for defamation, and for being a Russian agent, for reporting that the US government destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline.

When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned–Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas, President Trump charged under a non-existent law, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange imprisoned for a decade without due process, we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth. We are experiencing the completion of The Matrix in which expressed doubt or even unspoken suspicion of official narratives are criminal offenses.

Truth-tellers receive almost nonexistent support. The inescapable conclusion is that in the Western world truth has no future.

Tyranny is upon us.

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

EU demands more online censorship

RT | April 25, 2023

The European Commission has designated 19 online platforms under its Digital Services Act, a move that opens them up to hefty fines if they target advertisements at certain users, publish illegal content, or fail to “address the spread of disinformation.”

In an announcement on Tuesday, the commission named 17 “Very Large Online Platforms” and two “Very Large Online Search Engines,” defined as those reaching at least 45 million monthly active users. Among the platforms cited are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, while Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two designated search engines.

The decision means that as of August, these platforms must be in compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that came into force in November.

To avoid fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover, the commission stated that these platforms must label all advertisements as such and avoid targeting ads at users based on “sensitive data” such as their ethnicity, sexuality, or political orientation.

Targeting ads toward children will no longer be permitted, and platforms will have to “redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety of minors,” the commission said.

Regarding content moderation, platforms will be required to restrict the “dissemination of illegal content” and “address the spread of disinformation.” The entire text of the DSA mentions the word “disinformation” 13 times without defining it. Free speech activists have argued that the term is often used by governments to silence factually correct yet politically inconvenient narratives.

The commission also warned that platforms and search engines will need to address “negative effects on freedom of expression,” a requirement that could clash with the demand to tackle “disinformation.”

While the DSA was being drafted last year, EU officials singled out Twitter as a company that would be forced to comply with its requirements. Immediately after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform and set about rolling back some of its restrictive speech policies, EU industry chief Thierry Breton declared that “in Europe, the bird will fly by our European rules.”

Two months later, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova warned that Twitter would face “sanctions” if it breached the DSA. Jourova cited Musk’s banning of several prominent journalists – who shared information on his whereabouts – as potential DSA violations.

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

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