Odysee blocks French versions of Russia Today after legal demand
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2022
US-based online video sharing platform Odysee has blocked the French versions of Russian state-run news outlets Sputnik and RT after a legal order out of France.
“If we want to do business in another country we have to abide by their laws or they shut us down. RT FR and its affiliates are illegal in France. If you want to still watch them from France, use VPN, Odysee tweeted.
Several months ago, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Russia, including banning RT and Sputnik from being broadcast in member countries. The two news outlets were accused of spreading Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine.
The channels are not allowed on television or online in EU countries. However, they have been circumventing the sanctions through online platforms that are not based in the EU.
A week ago, France’s President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France is struggling with completely banning Sputnik and RT.
The platform is still broadcasting the English versions of both channels.
Has the Biden regime ‘disappeared’ a potential whistleblower?
An ABC News investigative journalist disappeared six months ago. He seems to have known a lot about US aims in Ukraine.
FILE PHOTO. James Gordon Meek, an ABC News investigative journalist. © Michael Le Brecht/ABC via Getty Images
By Felix Livshitz | Samizdat | October 22, 2022
On 27 April, ABC News reporter James Meek tweeted a single word – “facts” – above another Twitter post from a retired CIA officer, who stated that the 2014-2022 Ukrainian civil war was an eight-year “lab experiment” on Russia’s military “tactics, techniques, and procedures.” It added that US intelligence and “unconventional warfare” experts had “learned a shit ton.”
It was the last time, to date, Meek posted on the social network. In fact, it seems it was the last time he did anything in public at all, both online and in-real-life. Rolling Stone has published an investigation into the veteran journalist’s vanishing act in the months since, revealing how just hours after that tweet was posted, a number of menacing vehicles blocked off roads around Meek’s apartment in Arlington, Virginia, then proceeded to raid the premises.
Neighbors interviewed by the magazine recall a collection of police cruisers, official-looking cars with blacked-out windows, and even armored tactical vehicles frequently used by the FBI, which resemble tanks. Quick as a flash, their occupants exited and rushed into Meek’s apartment complex, “at least 10” of them being “heavily armed.”
The raid was reportedly over very quickly, and Meek apparently didn’t leave the scene with the authorities. To this day, there is no indication of what if anything was seized or why it was conducted, and all records related to the case remain sealed, including the search warrant approved a day prior. While no charges have officially been filed, Meek has dropped off the face of the Earth, and his apartment has remained vacant ever since.
At precisely this time, Meek is said to have resigned “very abruptly” from his ABC News post without warning or explanation, with even close coworkers unaware of the reasons for his departure.
He is also said to have telephoned Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret, with whom he was collaborating on an almost completed book, “Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan,” to tell him he needed to withdraw from the project due to “serious personal issues.” Meek was apparently “really distraught” during the call.
Almost immediately, Meek’s name was scrubbed from the work’s entry on US publishing giant Simon & Schuster’s website, and its cover on various e-commerce sites listing it for pre-order. Several tweets from Meek promoting his involvement in the project have also been deleted.
Tell no tales
It’s remarkable that it has taken six months for anyone to publicly raise the alarm over Meek’s disappearance, and raise questions as to his whereabouts. One might think that a relatively high-profile veteran mainstream US journalist suddenly going missing would stoke concerns among his employers, if not fellow reporters, particularly given Meek’s history of reporting on contentious topics.
He has previously broken stories on foiled terrorist attacks, and military cover-ups surrounding the fatal ambush of four Green Berets by ISIS in 2017, and the accidental death by friendly fire of US private James Sherrett II in 2008. The latter exposure resulted in Meek meeting personally with President Barack Obama.
To source such scoops would have necessitated maintaining close high-level contacts within Washington’s national security apparatus – and there are clear indications Meek could himself have experience in that very sphere. As a 2013 ABC press release announcing the creation of a new investigative unit stated, since 2011 he’d “served as Senior Counterterrorism Advisor and Investigator for the House Committee on Homeland Security, grappling with some of the top threats to our country, including the bombing at the Boston Marathon.”
What this grappling entailed isn’t explained, although Rolling Stone interviews with his ABC peers indicate that despite his background being “shrouded in mystery,” Meek was in close quarters at various times with military and intelligence professionals. One of his coworkers mentioned a photo in his office taken in a desert, featuring Meek posing with a number of people who had had their faces retrospectively blacked out.
These nuggets might suggest not only that Meek had a background in military and/or intelligence work, but that these professional exploits could have overlapped with his journalism career, perhaps up to the present day.
This interpretation is greatly reinforced by an underexplored disclosure in Rolling Stone’s article. It is noted that unnamed sources had said “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” One of Meek’s ABC coworkers further told the magazine: “it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.” Which is true – but was he simply a “reporter or producer,” or something else too?
Even stranger, Rolling Stone fails to put two and two together when discussing how it would be unusual and unprecedented for the FBI to seize a reporter’s documents, as US laws make it illegal for journalistic material to be captured by federal prosecutors without special prior authorization from the US Attorney General’s office, and there is no evidence in the public domain that such an agreement was officially reached.
Again though, such restrictions only apply to documents held by journalists – not regular citizens, or individuals involved in national security work. As such, Meek’s final tweet – despite being posted after a warrant to search his home was secured – might be a highly incisive clue as to the rationale for the mysterious and completely unpublicized FBI raid.
Meek’s tweeting about the situation in Ukraine since 24 February was fairly sparse, but on 4 March, he revealed that America’s Germany-based 10th Special Forces Group had “spent a decade training Ukraine’s special operations forces in unconventional warfare, almost exclusively. They are seeing those tactics being used very effectively against the Russian Bear.”
In exposing this secret schooling, Meek was notably ahead of the curve – it is only since late September that Western news outlets have acknowledged the decade-long 10th Special Forces Group training provided to Kiev. This indicates he knew something the rest of the media didn’t, or maybe wasn’t allowed to mention at the time.
Meek’s other posts on Ukraine suggest that while far from a Russian apologist, he was very critical of US policy in the region, particularly plans to ship endless weapons to Ukraine, believing it would be difficult for the cargo to reach the frontline, let alone be used very effectively by local troops. Both obvious outcomes have been subsequently admitted, leading to online backlash, and official denials.
The ABC journalist’s knowledge of that covert training, and the US intelligence community exploiting the post-Maidan regime’s brutal war on the Donbass civilian population as a petri dish for prepping war with Russia, strongly suggests insider access. Combined with public skepticism over Washington’s war effort, could it be that Meek planned an expose of inconvenient hidden truths about the Western proxy war in Ukraine, or alternatively knew too much, and was dangerously well-positioned to publicize it?
Declassified documents reveal that the rule change protecting a journalist’s possessions from seizure contain massive loopholes. If the FBI is trying to identify an individual who leaked documents to a reporter, or attempting to surveil someone they believe to be an intelligence operative, those protections evaporate, and the bureau can monitor privileged private communications without the Attorney General office’s approval.
Were it the case that Meek was both a journalist and intelligence professional, by receiving sensitive briefings on US involvement in the war in Ukraine, he could have walked into a series of traps of his dual career’s own making, with no legal protections, and no need for official sign-off on a massive spying and raid operation targeting him.
It is unknown quite what information he could have possessed that the US government wanted to suppress, although the White House is so desperate to maintain official narratives on the Russia/Ukraine conflict that it’s giving direct briefings to Tik-Tok stars on the subject.
Of course, it’s entirely conceivable that someone who could blow the whistle on how Russia’s intervention was provoked, or what the US is trying to get out of prolonging the fighting, would need to be silenced as a matter of urgency.
Israeli regime brings in strict rules on West Bank visitors amid international criticism
Press TV – October 21, 2022
The Israeli regime has implemented strict rules on all foreigners or Palestinians holding dual nationality who intend to come to the Occupied Palestinian territories, where it limits their ability to enter and stay in the occupied West Bank.
A 90-page authoritative order came into effect on Thursday despite international criticism, as reported by The Guardian, which will create complications for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families who hold dual nationality and are already having a hard time maneuvering a complicated permit system.
COGAT, the Israeli body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs issued the rules, which are to be allegedly implemented over a two-year pilot period. The strict rules are expected to suffocate the Palestinian economy and academia and the work of aid agencies, where all foreign internationals coming to volunteer, study or work in the West Bank will be granted a single-entry visa valid for only three months.
There are no guarantees they will be granted a visa again, and they will have to leave and wait between visas in some cases for more than one year before they are able to reapply for entry. In most cases, residency is limited to a 12- to 27-month period, making family life and long-term employment almost impossible.
Palestinian academics, business leaders and rights groups expressed outrage over the policy when it was first outlined in February.
“This is going to cause major issues. Some of our board members come here frequently and they need to be able to see their investments. They are destroying Palestinian businesses,” said Bassem Khouri, chief executive of a pharmaceutical company in the West Bank, adding, “Who can live and work here is supposed to be a Palestinian decision. This is designed to isolate us.”
Meanwhile, Jessica Montell, executive director of HaMoked, an Israeli human rights group that has challenged the rules in court slammed the ordinance, saying, “The Israeli military is proposing new restrictions in order to isolate Palestinian society from the outside world and keep Palestinian families from living together.”
In a move that controls the lives of foreigners and Palestinians as well, the rules stipulate that only 150 foreign students a year may register at Palestinian colleges and universities. The major they chose to study must be pre-approved, and there is a quota of 100 foreign “distinguished” lecturers that will be determined by the Israeli occupation regime.
Also, Palestinians holding dual citizenship will have to hand the Israeli apartheid regime a list of names and ID numbers of family and friends they plan to visit beforehand, even before they travel.
Students, teachers, journalists working for Palestinian media outlets, tourists, and Palestinian family members including siblings, grandparents or grandchildren will all have to undergo these new rules.
The rules also read that if a foreigner starts a relationship with a Palestinian, “the appointed COGAT official must be informed as part of their request to renew or extend the existing visa.”
According to Montell, none of the rules have any legal ground. “Under international law, the Israeli military is only allowed to work for the interests of the occupied population, or its own security needs. These restrictions obviously advance neither.”
The new procedures apply only to Palestinians, and not Israeli settlers living across the area in violation of international law. Nearly 700,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
Fauci forced to testify on social media censorship
Samizdat | October 22, 2022
The White House’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, and other senior officials are set to be deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit claiming the government worked alongside social media platforms to create a “massive censorship enterprise” throughout the Covid-19 outbreak.
In a Friday ruling, Judge Terry Doughty granted a joint request from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to compel several current and former officials to testify in the suit, among them Fauci, ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and two high-level figures from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the [Joe] Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement. “It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth.”
While the defense insisted that senior officials can only be called to testify about their actions in office under “extraordinary circumstances,” Judge Doughty said the personnel in question met that standard. He added that the two GOP-led states “have proven that Dr. Fauci has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to Covid-19,” ordering him to cooperate with a deposition.
Requests to depose the other officials were granted on similar grounds, as the judge concluded all either held direct meetings with social media firms about the purported censorship, or had close knowledge of those discussions.
Jen Easterly, who heads up the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was also ordered to testify. She played a “central role” in “flagging misinformation to social-media companies for censorship,” the plaintiffs argued, describing the cyber agency the “nerve center” of “the federal government’s efforts to censor social media users.” The same official was said to be involved in the DHS’ now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – dubbed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ by critics – which would have created a new mechanism to facilitate cooperation between the White House and social media sites.
Initially filed last May by Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lawsuit claims the federal government encouraged online platforms to censor, delete or ban certain speech about the pandemic, including discussion of the “lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin,” as well as questions about the effectiveness of face masks, vaccines or lockdown policies, among other issues. The two AGs have largely relied on documents obtained through subpoenas of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook’s parent firm Meta, which detail regular communications between the government and social media sites.
The White House, as well as the eight officials ordered to testify, have yet to comment on Friday’s ruling. The depositions must take place within 30 days of the order, though it remains unclear whether the defense intends to appeal the decision.
The crushing of dissent throughout the covid era
Orwellian parallels worsen by the week
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | October 8, 2022
The recent actions of the financial technology company, PayPal, to close the accounts of subscribers expressing political opinions of which they disapprove, represents the latest example of censorship within so-called liberal democracies. Their strategic decisions to block the online monetary activities of the Free Speech Union, the Daily Sceptic website and the Us For Them campaign group – although later reversed – signal the willingness of powerful global big-tech companies to collude with governments in the crushing of activities that challenge the dominant narratives. But no one should be surprised; we have all been manipulated by top-down censorship and state propaganda for many years, a dystopian process that accelerated during the covid era.
Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus in early 2020, there has been widespread censorship of views that do not support the two mantras of covid-19 orthodoxy: namely that, ‘Lockdowns and other restrictions were appropriate responses’ and ‘The mRNA vaccines are safe and effective’. Indeed, the unprecedented and non-evidenced covid restrictions could not have been so successfully imposed without propaganda in all its forms. Contrary to popular opinion, techniques of manipulation do not only characterise recognised totalitarian regimes, but are now endemic within contemporary liberal democracies. And three, overlapping, forms of non-consensual persuasion have been widely deployed throughout the covid era to control the narrative and subsequent behaviour of citizens:
1. Control through emotional manipulation
The covert influencing of people’s emotions via use of behavioural-science ‘nudges’ has been well documented. Based on the advice of state-employed psychological experts, the covid-19 communication strategy has relied heavily on evoking uncomfortable feelings in the populace as a way of inducing them to ‘do the right thing’, where what is ‘right’ is solely determined by government-appointed officials. In particular, the manipulation of fear, shame and scapegoating – or ‘affect’, ‘ego’ and ‘norms’, to use the euphemisms of behavioural science – has been conducted for this purpose via the broadcasting of selective statistics, alarming images and emotional messaging. Furthermore, the decision to impose mask mandates was most likely informed by the knowledge that face coverings enhance the power of each of these three nudges, thereby increasing people’s compliance with government diktats.
Despite escalating concerns about the ethical basis of the state’s deployment of behavioural science, there has been a stark reluctance of anyone in authority to accept responsibility for this form of manipulation. The British Psychological Society (the formal guardians of ethical application of psychological interventions) is of the view that covertly inflicting emotional distress on people so as to promote compliance with covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout is acceptable as it is encouraging ‘social responsibility’, thereby colluding – along with other professional bodies – with the state’s mission to silence dissent and eliminate contrary behaviour. Meanwhile the Government show a reluctance to explore the ethics underpinning their deployment of nudges as evidenced by their ‘Public Administration and Public Affairs Committee’ ignoring a request for an independent inquiry and the omission of any mention of behavioural science in the draft terms of reference for the Inquiry into the covid-19 pandemic.
2. Control through modulating the flow of information
A second way of controlling dissent – used at unprecedentedly high levels throughout the covid event – has been via the regulation of information flow within our TV, radio, newspaper and social media outlets. Ease of access to facts, data and opinion (including that of scientific experts) has been mainly determined by the degree to which the information corresponds with the dominant narratives: write or speak words supportive of lockdowns, masking and vaccination and they will typically receive preferential treatment within the media’s editorial processes, gaining prominence and ease of access; in contrast, say or print something contrarian and it will most likely be submerged in the quagmire of daily media output.
The seeds of this system of selective information flow had been sown prior to 2020 with the formation of the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ (a coalition of mainstream media, publishers and big-tech companies) aspiring to ‘create a global alliance of integrity in news’ by countering ‘misinformation’ and ‘bias’. Furthermore, at the start of the pandemic, Ofcom – the UK’s communications regulator – instructed broadcasters not to cover anything that went against the Government’s narrative. This censorial alliance ensured that voices expressing dissent about covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout were disadvantaged, displaced to the inaccessible fringes of media output.
In the UK, there has even been military involvement in the form of the 77th Brigade with their explicit mission to create and spread material ‘in support of designated tasks’ while also ‘supporting counter-adversarial information activity’. Internationally, the WHO has effectively modulated the flow of information via the use of fact-checking organisations and collaborations with Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube, so as to guarantee that ‘science-based health messages from official sources’ (aka the dominant narrative) appear first when one searches for covid information.
Specific examples of the impact of this – seemingly global – operation to control information flow are numerous. They include: Professor Gupta (an epidemiological expert) being instructed not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration prior to appearing on a BBC discussion programme about lockdowns; academic journals blocking the peer-reviewed covid research of Dr Peter McCullough and the suppression of trial findings that had concluded that Ivermectin was an effective treatment; the removal of Dr Robert Malone (the inventor of mRNA technology) from Twitter; and the removal of MPs Sir Christopher Chope and David Davies from YouTube for, respectively, raising concerns about vaccine damage and vaccine effectiveness.
One fundamental consequence of this selective regulation of information was that our Western media – a supposed pillar of democracy – failed us all in their refusal to scrutinise and evaluate the actions of public officials.
3. Control through erasing dissenting voices
Presumably based on the assumption that eliminating people before dissent is expressed is a more effective censorial method than controlling their information output, throughout the covid era there appears to have been a systematic state-driven attempt to discredit or cancel those brave individuals expressing views that are inconsistent with the dominant restrict-and-jab narrative.
Since March 2020, anyone who has expressed a contrarian covid opinion in a public space will likely have attracted criticism involving accusations of being ‘right wing’, fascist or a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Efforts by powerful players to destroy reputations and livelihoods through smearing and character assassination have been commonplace. Arguably the most high-profile example of this egregious practice is in regards to the targeting of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a multi-signatory document arguing for an alternative to the blanket lockdowns. In leaked emails between Anthony Fauci (Chief Medical Advisor to the US president) and Francis Collins (the Director of the US National Institute of Health), these powerful state officials refer to the illustrious authors of the document as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ while describing the need for a ‘quick and devastating public takedown’ of their arguments. Furthermore, the extremely popular US podcaster, Joe Rogan, was smeared as a transphobe and racist in the aftermath of him giving a platform to experts expressing views at odds with the dominant covid narrative.
A threat of imminent loss of earnings – actual or implied – is another tactic that has been commonly deployed to cancel those criticising the approach of Western governments to pandemic management. Many academics have suffered in this way, including Canadian professor Julie Ponesse who lost her job after she challenged the vaccine mandates. Of course, such a draconian sanction serves as a warning to many other university scholars who might also be considering expressing dissent.
The recent actions of PayPal suggest that our medico-technocratic powerhouses are not satisfied with inflicting emotional distress, censorship and character assassination on the Western population, but now seek to control how we spend our money. Manipulation by means of regulating access to our finances may be the new front in the war on freedom of verbal and behavioural expression. It raises the spectre of the imposition of a totalitarian social credit system, mediated via a Central Bank Digital Currency, a world where unelected global bureaucrats determine our monthly spend based on the degree to which our behaviour conforms to their version of what constitutes the ‘greater good’.
In the words of Piers Robinson (an expert on global propaganda), ‘That the censorship, smearing and coercion … has come to be tolerated is a clear indicator of how far our democracies have slipped into an authoritarian abyss’. And the imminent Online Harms Bill, with its ‘legal but harmful’ category, may further restrict our basic human right to freedom of expression. But there is still hope. As more and more people become aware of the associated collateral damage, the dominant narratives on the benefits of lockdowns, school closures, masks and ‘safe-and-effective’ covid vaccines are beginning to crumble. As awareness of ubiquitous state-funded manipulation and censorship grows, increasing numbers of citizens are turning to independent sources of expert information – such as HART and PANDA – for reliable covid updates. The basic human right of freedom of expression within Western democracies must be protected; once lost, it is unlikely to be restored within our lifetimes.
The majority of Americans are against Big Tech’s plan to censor before the election
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 20, 2022
A survey conducted by Susquehanna Polling and Research, on behalf of The Federalist, found that two-thirds of voters oppose Big Tech’s censorship of political content ahead of the midterms.
Respondents of the survey were asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google censoring news stories and preventing users from sharing articles and information related to the upcoming election in November?”
66% of the respondents said they oppose the censorship of political content by social media companies. Only 24% said they approve of the censorship, while the rest were undecided or had no opinion.
44% of those who identified as Democrats disapprove of the censorship while 39% support it.
51% of those who approve of Joe Biden’s performance oppose the censorship, while 35% support it.
The survey also asked respondents if they “trust the corporate news media to tell the truth” or if the media “misrepresent the facts to push a political agenda.”
77% said they think the media do not tell the truth, with only 13% saying they believe the media. Along political affiliation, 59% of Democrats, 79% of independents, and 91% of Republicans said they do not think the media tells the truth.
AOL Reviews and Accepts “Israel Killed JFK” Comment
Then Re-Reviews and Rejects It Four Hours Later
BY KEVIN BARRETT • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 19, 2022
Earlier today, NBC News published a surprisingly fair and informative JFK assassination story. Headlined “‘What are they hiding?’: Group sues Biden and National Archives over JFK assassination records,” Mark Caputo’s piece details the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s lawsuit demanding that the federal government comply with the JFK Records Act and release the 16,000 records that, by law, it was required to release back in 2017.
Since the headline asked “what are they hiding?” I was happy to answer the question in a succinct comment:
Israel killed JFK, using its CIA assets like James Angleton and mob assets like Meyer Lansky, to eliminate an obstacle to its nuclear weapons program, and put its man LBJ in the White House in preparation for the 1967 land grab. Free online book: https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/
I was not surprised when my post didn’t immediately go through, but instead elicited a warning: “Sure about this? Your post is more likely to get published if you keep the conversation civil.” My post was perfectly civil, so I clicked on “post anyway” which elicited “your comment is under review.” About an hour later, I received an email stating that the post had been approved. It appeared beneath the article, garnered a couple of “likes”—and then was taken down shortly before 8 pm. (See screenshot at the top of this article.)
I am reasonably certain that if I had blamed the JFK assassination on Oswald, Ruby, the CIA, the mob, fascists, militarists, the military-industrial complex, Russia, Cuba, French intelligence, Oliver Stone, aliens, or the man in the moon, AOL would not have seen anything less than civil in my comment. But blaming the nation whose intelligence services actually did it is taboo. Why is that? Who made those rules? Who enforces them?
As the headline says: What are they hiding?
Obviously the people who killed both Kennedys (and did 9/11) couldn’t have executed either coup d’état without controlling the media. So ask yourself: What group controls the media to the extent that you can’t even post a comment casting aspersions on their favorite nation?
Agree with Us or Hold your Tongue
BY RAMESH THAKUR | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | OCTOBER 19, 2022
Every crisis, they say, is an opportunity. Governments, health bureaucrats and drug regulators all over the world have exploited the Covid-19 crisis to grab power and gain control over our lives. Predictably, rather than to most people’s surprise, many are proving singularly resistant to relinquishing their extraordinary powers, instead extending the emergency and broadening its scope to embrace other issues.
Efforts to control the pandemic narrative began with a systematic suppression of any suggestion that it might have originated in a research lab of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then moved on to denigrate, silence and smear critics of lockdowns, masks and vaccine efficacy and mandates.
Australia’s Amended Health Practitioner Regulation National Law
The latest iteration in Australia occurred on October 13 when the Queensland Parliament amended the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act to fundamentally reshape the relationship between doctors, patients and health regulators. As per an existing intergovernmental agreement, the Queensland change will be replicated in cascading legislative amendments in other states and territories to ensure a uniform National Law.
On February 22, Australian federal and state health ministers had approved the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Amendment Bill. The updates to the guiding principles included “an increase in the regulatory responses available to protect public safety.” At best, this is vague and ambiguous.
At worst, it shifts the balance decisively from the individual-centric in liberal democracies to the collective safetyism of technocrats and experts, justifying restrictions on individual rights and agency for the greater good as determined by government agencies. Doctors will be prohibited from expressing their opinion and using their experience, training, education and knowledge of the patient, if this contradicts what the health bureaucrats say is in the interests of “public confidence in safety.” The latter will remote-control how doctors should approach treatment recommendations for patients.
There were several submissions arguing against various elements of the amendment. The Australian Medical Association queried what a “main guiding principle” means “in practice” and argued that the “concept of public confidence is not always clear cut.” The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners submitted that the amendments would imbalance the system even further away from the protection of patient safety and toward “the prosecution of practitioners,” to the detriment of doctors’ confidence in the National Law.
The most substantial submission came from the Australian Medical Professionals Society and the Nurses Professional Association of Australia representing more than 10,000 health professionals. They expressed concern that “the broad and discretionary nature of claims to ‘public safety and confidence’” can be abused “as a mechanism to enforce compliance with government directives.” On the one hand, these could be disconnected from science and evidence.
On the other, they could be used to control health practitioners in direct “conflict with their ethical duties and code of conduct obligations.” They weren’t confident that the provisions for public health and safety would in fact either “improve public protection from clinical misconduct” or “increase confidence in the public health system.” Instead the proposed powers would “serve to conveniently silence voices of expertise that wish to correct health authorities” and prove counterproductive by preventing “necessary information and communication from entering the public sphere.”
Everything done by health bureaucrats and regulators since March 2020, in the name of ensuring public safety and stopping disinformation, indicates we should fear the worst and would be naive to hope for the best. This includes psychological manipulation of emotions and feelings to nudge people into compliance with health directives.
Long-standing principles that have guided Australian doctors and ensured its health system is second to none will be undermined: the Hippocratic Oath’s duty of “Do no harm,” informed consent of the patient based on a harm-benefit evaluation of different treatment options, the risks associated with them in the best professional judgment of the doctor, and the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship.
People’s faith in their GPs could collapse once they realize doctors are barred from questioning putative benefits or pointing to possible risks of recommended treatments. Instead, they must stay within the boundaries laid down by bureaucrats and regulators, the latter often subject to industry capture.
California has passed a similar law empowering the state’s medical board to revoke the license of physicians who express opinions “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to the standard of care.” Or, as helpfully translated by the New York Post sub-editors: “California makes it illegal for doctors to disagree with politicians.”
The Debate on the Harm-Benefit Balance of Covid Vaccines
For health bureaucrats and regulators, the latter often with compromising links to industry, to claim a monopoly on scientific truth is scandalous. The effort to shut down legitimate debates on pain of excommunication from the medical profession represents a clear and present danger to public health.
Having overturned a hundred years of science and policy orthodoxy on pandemic management with Covid, we are intent on revolutionizing the everyday practice of medicine by subordinating the professional judgment of doctors on the best treatment options for their patients, to the directives of bureaucrats and health regulators. With public esteem for politicians at all-time lows, this is not likely to inspire confidence in the health service.
Consider globally contested opinion on the benefit-harm balance of Covid vaccines for children. Their risk of severe illness or death from Covid is tiny, of serious adverse reactions is higher and the long-term effects are unknown. On October 7, Florida issued a press release recommending against mRNA Covid vaccines for 18–39 year-old males. Their analysis had found an 84 percent higher risk of cardiac-related death within 28 days of vaccination in this group. Over-60s have a 10 percent increased risk.
This complements Florida’s guidance on paediatric vaccine guidance issued in March which recommends against Covid vaccines for healthy under-18s. They note the limited risk to infants and children of severe illness due to Covid, the high prevalence of existing immunity among them, reduced vaccine efficacy and “higher than anticipated” severe adverse events, including myocarditis.
Florida thus joins Denmark, Norway and Sweden in ending vaccine recommendations for 12–17 year-olds and also, in two of these, for under 50s and 65s. Albeit contested, there is a substantial and growing body of scientific studies that support their skepticism toward the net benefits of Covid vaccines for infants, children and adolescents.
Florida’s guidance includes three recommendations that are directly relevant to Australia’s National Law:
- People are encouraged to discuss all potential vaccine benefits and risks with their health care provider.
- The risk associated with mRNA vaccination should be weighed against that with Covid infection.
- Doctors should inform patients of the possible cardiac complications that can arise after receiving an mRNA vaccine.
Yet Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved vaccines for children aged 6 months-5 years. Meanwhile, many of the claims advanced in support of the vaccines – they stop infection and transmission and prevent severe illness and death – have had to be abandoned one after another but were never “fact-checked” by social media platforms, while the early critics of these claims were assessed by the self-styled fact-checkers to be spreading disinformation and promoting conspiracy theories – until they aren’t any longer.
Moreover, people who die inside 14 days of a vaccine dose are wrongly classified as “unvaccinated.” This distorts the statistics on the net harm-benefit balance to an indeterminate degree. In a particularly egregious example, an article in Nature on September 23 explained that the authors (1) had classified unvaccinated and single-dose vaccinated into the one catch-all category of unvaccinated, and (2) unvaccinated individuals with previous infection had been classified as “fully vaccinated” (Supplementary Table 2).
This in a study whose main objective was to assess the comparative susceptibility to infection by the Omicron variant of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated within Danish households in December 2021. They concluded that the vaccinated are less susceptible. I can empathize with the reaction of Julian Conradson that after such analytical legerdemain in a leading peer-reviewed journal, “Academia Is Dead.” Little wonder that a poll by the Pew Research Center in February mapped falling confidence in medical scientists since 2020.
Examples of Off-Limits Topics
Examples of studies that doctors could not discuss without fear of investigation and repercussions include:
- In a new study in preprint that looked at 31 pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies to estimate the infection fatality rate (IFR) stratified by age, John Ioannidis and his team found that the average IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, and 0.035% at 40-49 years. The median for 0-59 year-olds was just 0.035%. These are well within and often lower than the seasonal flu range for the under-60s. The last sentence would be ruled out as disinformation, or misleading, or at the very least missing context.
- In the weekly report for August 14–20, NSW Health said: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly overrepresented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19” (p. 2). Two pages later, the same report gives us the data for hospital and ICU admissions by vaccination status. The number of unvaccinated is exactly zero for both. Now, this makes it mathematically impossible for the unvaccinated to be “overrepresented” among hospital and ICU Covid patients. There is an important conceptual distinction between the statement on page 2 and the statistics in Table 1 two pages later. The first is part of public messaging by the health department of Covid vaccines being “safe and effective.” The second is actual data. The way I read the amended National Law, and therefore the way that some AHPRA (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) official could read it at some time in the future against any doctor, the latter must conform to the public message and not mention the actual data.
- Imagine a family of 45-year-old parents with three young children aged 5-12 who visit their family doctor to discuss vaccination for their kids and boosters for themselves, both to protect themselves and their parents in turn as they take the kids to spend quality time with grandparents. In the name of public safety, will Australian doctors have to promote the mRNA vaccines to children, boosters to grown-ups and be forbidden to mention advice to the contrary in Scandinavia and Florida? In New South Wales, of the 2,311 Covid-related deaths since May 22, only 3 have been under 20 and 34 under 50. Has any healthy under-20 died of Covid in Australia through the pandemic? If children are at virtually no risk and vaccines don’t stop transmission, why expose children to the risk of serious adverse events?
- What of the startling revelation that Pfizer had never tested its vaccines for transmissibility and therefore the entire vaccine passport requirement was built on a conspiracy of lies? In an NBC interview on February 26, 2021 Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla clearly says “there are a lot of indications right now that are telling us that there is a protection against transmission of the disease” provided by the vaccine. In a CBS interview on May, 26, 2021, Anthony Fauci said: “when you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community … you become a dead end to the virus.” Australian data too confirm that while vaccines and boosters continue to provide protective benefits against severe disease and deaths, despite 95 percent adult vaccination they do not provide immunity against infection, hospitalization, ICU admission or even death (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Covid-19 statistics for New South Wales (NSW) by vaccination status, May 22–October 10, 2022. Source: NSW Health, Weekly Surveillance Reports.
In an article on news.com.au, Frank Chung has done Australians a great service by compiling a list of statements from Australian ministers and health bureaucrats repeatedly stating their firm conviction that vaccines stop transmission. Michael Senger has done us all a service with a similar look back at the demonization of the unvaccinated by various public authorities, only too eagerly amplified by the media, and all predicated in the false belief that vaccines stop transmission.
For readers with an interest in Australia, Richard Kelly provides a review of many head-shaking edicts and enforcement actions – such as fining a delivery man for washing his van at an empty car wash at 1.15 a.m. and a teenage learner driver for going for a lesson with her mum – that were issued by public health officials. Their ignorance about the disease was exceeded only by their arrogance and hubris about their ability to control the behavior of a coronavirus. Would Australian doctors be at risk of deregistration for mentioning any of this?
Oliver May of News UNCUT wrote an open letter to 20 British news editors on October 12, asking them to explain why they had failed to run a story either on the powerful documentary on vaccine injuries called Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion, or on Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s painfully honest peer-reviewed study calling for a pause in Covid vaccination because of serious adverse events until all the raw data has been subjected to fully independent scrutiny. Both would be interesting to the public and both are very much in the public interest. We shouldn’t hold our breath for an answer. Maryland School of Pharmacy’s Peter Doshi, senior editor of the British Medical Journal, is right to call out the legacy media for their lack of balanced coverage of Covid vaccines.
Remarkably, the Pfizer admission has been studiously ignored by the Australian MSM. In case I had missed the coverage of the bombshell interview in the Australian media, I did a search on the website of ABC (Australia’s version of the BBC), Age, Australian and Sydney Morning Herald papers. I got zero hits for Robert Roos, the Dutch MEP who asked the question in the European Parliament of Pfizer director Janine Small, and for the latter who confessed to lack of testing for transmissibility. Fading trust in our principal institutions is contributing to the multipronged global crisis of democracy.
The lack of media interest and coverage means there is little pressure for public accountability. Absent that, there will not be any punishment meted out to ministers and bureaucrats for the extensive range of malfeasance in inflicting cruel and inhumane harms on millions of their citizens; no prospect of emotional closure for the people for the trauma they have suffered, including deaths of despair and desolation born of loneliness; delayed prospects of the masses shedding their sheer dread of a virus that for most healthy people under 70 or 65 is not really a severe illness; and a refusal to institute the most powerful deterrent of all for any repeats of public criminality on a grand scale.
Instead we can all look forward to endless cycles of rinse and repeat of surveillance, compulsion and coercion of the masses on the whims of their technocratic betters.
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
French journalist loses her job after reporting situation in Donbass
By Lucas Leiroz | October 19, 2022
The West continues to persecute journalists whose work reveals the reality of the Ukrainian situation. Recently, French filmmaker Anne-Laure Bonnel reported that she received threats and lost her job as a result of her work in the Donbass. Bonnel recorded two documentary films showing the situation of the ethnically Russian people in the regions attacked by Kiev. In response, she was “cancelled” in Europe. The case shows how the West no longer has any commitment to media freedom and is willing to take dictatorial measures to silence journalists who expose the crimes committed by NATO allies.
Anne-Laure Bonnel first came to Donbass in 2015, shortly after the conflict in the east began. At the time, she witnessed the horror of the genocide committed by the Ukrainian authorities and filmed impactful scenes from the lives of Donbass’ residents. In 2016, Bonnel presented the film “Donbass” during a film festival at the Sorbonne University. At the time, her work had been applauded by critics – a situation very different from what would happen some years later.
In February 2022, just a few days before the start of the Russian special military operation, she returned to Donbass in order to continue her project to document the humanitarian crisis in the region. In this recent trip, she filmed the scenes that composed a new film, called “Donbass: eight years later”. As in the first film, the work was not permeated by any political or ideological content, being just a documentary focused on exposing the local situation in a neutral and impartial way. However, this time her work was not welcomed in Europe.
Bonnel’s film was simply banned from all major European events. She was barred from participating in the festivals she used to work at. More than that, in a recent interview to RIA Novosti on October 18, Bonnel said that she was fired from her job at the University of Paris, where she taught for more than 15 years, and that she even received threats from pro-Kiev activists.
Bonnel also emphasizes that she suffered high psychological pressure with all these problems she has encountered since her return from Donbass. For her, the situation became truly unbearable, as her life changed completely just by the fact that she continued to do her work in the Donbass even with the start of the Russian operation. Suddenly, all the critics and fans who praised her in Europe started ignoring her films and trying to “cancel” her. All this left her deeply terrified and led Bonnel to remain silent for the last few months, only now coming to the public to denounce the persecution she has unfairly experienced.
These were some of her words during the interview:
“When I (…) came back [to France], I had to show my recordings to several people, and then I encountered the first problem: people who were interested in my recordings stopped showing up. That was the first problem (…) Once the film was released, I encountered other issues – they may or may not be related, it’s hard to say. But I lost my job at the University of Paris, where I taught for 15 years (…) My contract was not renewed (…) In an email from the university, I was told that I no longer met the values of the university, so they could not allow me to continue to work (…) Psychological pressure was put on me, I received threats. That’s why I lived in the shadows for a long time. It’s not easy”.
It is curious to note how an institution as prestigious and traditional as the University of Paris acted in a rude and authoritarian way when firing an employee just for having done exactly what a journalist is supposed to do: expose reality. Bonnel’s case reveals the real face of the current liberal West, which increasingly violates its own democratic principles just to support an illegitimate neo-Nazi regime.
The Bonnel case is just another sad episode in the persecution of journalists that has been promoted by the West and its Ukrainian proxy since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation. Sincere reporters have become one of the main targets of Kiev and the West.
While in Western “democracies” attempts are made to “cancel” independent journalism or classify it as “spreader of disinformation”, in the Ukrainian dictatorship the persecution is carried out by military means. It is not by chance that neo-Nazi terrorists killed Daria Dugina and bombed the hotel where the RT staff was staying in Donbass. It is also important to remember that hundreds of journalists are included on “Myrotvorets”, the infamous Ukrainian kill-list.
In fact, on several occasions, the West has made it clear that it is willing to do anything to prevent the reality about Ukraine from being revealed.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on Telegram.
Canadian intelligence reported ‘no concerns’ about Freedom Convoy on day Trudeau invoked Emergencies Act
By Anthony Murdoch – Life Site News – October 17, 2022
OTTAWA – Documents show that the Canadian federal government received regular updates indicating the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa were non-violent in nature, despite the Trudeau administration’s claims otherwise.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Internal Department of Public Safety reports show that on the same day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau enacted the Emergencies Act (EA) to clear out the protesters, a report stated the protests were peaceful.
“No concerns at this time,” noted a February 14 report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Trudeau on the same day, however, claimed to reporters that the protests were “illegal and dangerous,” saying they could not be allowed “to continue.”
Multiple daily reports from the Department of Public Safety leading up to Trudeau enacting the EA show that there were no major concerns that the Freedom Convoy protests were violent.
A January 27 report said, “The Freedom Convoy so far has been peaceful and cooperative with police.”
Blacklock’s Reporter listed five such statements asserting there were no issues.
A January 29 report stated there were “No major incidents,” while a report from February 1 said, “no violence took place.”
A February 6 report concluded that disruption to “government activities is so far minor.”
A report from February 10 said that there was a “minimal” amount of people on Parliament Hill, while an update from the next day stated the “situation remains stable and planning is ongoing.”
Canada’s Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino also claimed the Freedom Convoy might be violent in nature, despite the internal reports stating otherwise.
Government staff even wrote that the “majority of the events have been peaceful,” noting that as most people were working from home, there was very little disruption to “government activities.”
Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs in a memo said that it had “not observed any significant indicators of foreign state involvement related to the truckers’ convoy.”
Canada’s draconian COVID measures were the catalyst for the Freedom Convoy, which took to the streets of Ottawa to demand an end to all mandates for three weeks in February.
The EA gave the Trudeau government unprecedented powers such as the ability to freeze bank accounts without a court order and deploy police at will.
While Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23, many who supported the Freedom Convoy were targeted by the federal government and had their bank accounts frozen without a court order.
Canada’s Public Order Emergency Commission began public hearings last Thursday into Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act.
The hearings are open to the public livestream and will call forth at least 65 witnesses over six weeks.
Video footage showed police using what many said was disproportionate force
Many claims by government officials and mainstream media pundits that the Freedom Convoy would lead to violence never came to light.
After Trudeau had enacted the EA, scuffles only broke out after police directly intervened in the protests.
Video footage of police on horseback trampling an elderly protester went viral, as well as videos showing non-violent protesters being physically assaulted and pepper-sprayed by police.
Also, an independent journalist said she was beaten and intentionally shot at with a tear gas canister.
Just recently, former Ottawa Police Service (OPS) chief Peter Sloly testified that Freedom Convoy protesters were permitted by the cops to park their vehicles outside Canada’s Parliament in the early days of the protest.
OPS interim chief Steve Bell recently acknowledged his department did not request that Trudeau invoke EA to take down the Freedom Convoy.
Even Sloly said he did not request the use of the EA. He resigned as OPS Chief on February 25.
Trudeau had made claims that the Freedom Convoy protesters were funded by foreign entities with ties to terrorist-linked financing. This reasoning was used as justification for Trudeau to use the EA against the Freedom Convoy.
Canada’s state broadcaster the CBC in March had to retract a story that falsely claimed most support for the Freedom Convoy came from foreigners.
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Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
Blog Roll
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- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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