It’s been all Canada on Joe Rogan’s popular Spotify podcast of late. First, crinkly rockers Neil and Joni threw their guitars out of the pram when Rogan dared to broadcast a number of different opinions on Covid and vaccines. Then fellow Canadian Dr. Jordan Peterson said climate models compounded their errors, just like interest. Green activists and zealots (often known in the climate change business as ‘scientists’) clutched their responsibly sourced pearls and whined, “Lawks a-mercy, it’s outrageous!” and “Banning’s too good for them!”. The septuagenarian songsters briefly found themselves out of the headlines as the mainstream media rushed to quell a growing sceptical climate debate and rubbish a troublesome competitor.
Dr. Peterson suggested that the climate was too complex to be modelled. Such notions were said to be a “word salad of nonsense,” reported a distraught Guardian. Dr. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick of the University of Canberra added Peterson had “no frickin’ idea”. Professor Michal Mann of Penn State University said Peterson’s comments – and Rogan’s “facilitation” of them – was an “almost comedic type of nihilism” that would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This of course is the same Michael Mann who produced the infamous temperature hockey stick that was at the centre of the 2010 Climategate scandal. The graph was used for a time in IPCC reports and showed a 1,000 year straight temperature line followed by a recent dramatic rise. This startling image was helped by the mysterious disappearance of the medieval warming period and subsequent little ice age. Discussion about the graph led to Mann pursuing a U.S. libel suit against the broadcaster and journalist Mark Steyn. In court filings, Mann argued that it was one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics, but it was quite another to “attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient”. He is not himself a Nobel Prize recipient, but perhaps he was referring to someone else.
Independent minded communicators like Joe Rogan and take-no-prisoner intellectuals such as Dr. Peterson command a worldwide audience and they are difficult to cancel. The battle between Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Joe Rogan, sitting on a $100m Spotify contract, had only one free speech winner – at least for the moment. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s default position when faced with something unsettling like the ‘settled’ science of anthropogenic climate change is to declare it will not “lend” its credibility to its critics by engaging in debate. That was obviously not possible with Peterson’s remarks being plastered all over social media, although it could be argued that the Guardian reporting the vulgar abuse users posted in response is not much of a substitute for the usual lofty disdain.
Dr. Peterson attacked climate models on a number of fronts. In particular, he noted that as you stretch out the models across time “the errors increase radically”. In its way, this refers to the biggest problem that lies at the heart of the 40-year track record of climate model failures. To make a prediction, climate models are fed a guess of the increase in the global mean surface temperature that follows a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Nobody actually knows what this figure is – the science for this crucial piece of the jigsaw is missing, unsettled you may say. The estimates run from 1°C to as high as 6°C and of course the higher the estimate, the hotter the forecasts run.
As they don’t say in the climate and Covid modelling business – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Meanwhile back in the real world, global warming has been running out of steam over the last two decades. Satellite temperatures, which have been available since 1979, provide a more accurate measurement of global warming (or cooling) than flawed and frequently massaged surface measurements.
The graph above from Remote Sensing Systems demonstrates the lack of warming measured by satellites and is displayed by the black line. Forecasts from climate models, contained within the yellow area, started to diverge significantly from the late 1990s, backing Dr. Peterson’s claim that over time they magnify their own errors. As with epidemiological models, there seems little incentive to tone down the inputs – it’s difficult to make a reputation, and secure grants, by saying that few people will die. In the case of climate models, there are also 204,000,000,000,000 reasons to exaggerate – this being the £204 trillion that McKinsey recently said must be spent to achieve the political goal of global Net Zero by 2050.
The ‘pure’ science around climate change is thin on the ground in the fast-growing Earth Science university faculties, more often than not a rebranding of the old Geography departments. The real science surrounds the effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere, where an advanced knowledge of chemistry and physics is essential. Within such academic circles, there are growing doubts about the unproven hypothesis that humans cause all or most global warming by burning fossil fuel. While CO2 has been rising recently from a geologically ultra-low base, there is little correlation between the gas and temperature movement in almost any timeframe. Again Dr. Peterson is right to note that the climate is too complex to model accurately since there are almost countless other natural factors at work in a chaotic atmosphere.
Professor William Happer of Princeton has suggested that CO2 becomes “saturated” once it reaches a certain level, since it reflects heat back to Earth only within certain bands of the infrared spectrum. Increases in CO2 beyond current levels will have little effect on future warming, or cooling. Far from being harmful, the extra CO2 is highly beneficial for plant growth and food.
Recently, a group of physics professors from the University of Massachusetts led by Kenneth Skrable examined the carbon isotope trail released by fossil fuel burning. They found the amount of CO2 released was “much too low to be the cause of global warming”. The German physicist Dr Frank Stefani looked at the effect of the Sun and geomagnetic forces on the planet and concluded that the Sun alone accounted for between 30-70% of recent planetary warming.
About two years ago, 48 Italian science professors wrote an open letter to their Government noting that the “advanced alarmist forecasts” of climate models “were not credible”. Natural variability, it was said, “explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850”. Catastrophic predictions “are not realistic”. The letter was signed by a number of distinguished academics including Antonino Zichichi, Emeritus Professor of Physics, a past president of the World Federation of Scientists and the discoverer of nuclear antimatter. Not that the folks who write for the Guardian would ever “lend” their credibility by talking about the climate with these 48 ‘denier’ scientists.
February 3, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | The Guardian |
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A story run by Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) today claims climate change poses a threat to human health. Disease and mortality data show this is false. During the recent period of modest warming, deaths resulting from extreme heat and weather have declined sharply, and research indicates climate change is not contributing to pandemics or parasite borne diseases.
WPR’s story, titled “Wisconsin health providers say climate change is a medical issue,” features input from the climate activist group, Wisconsin Health Professionals for Climate Action. WPR writes:
“Heat waves, cold spells could harm people, along with dangerous flooding, according to Wisconsin Health News panelists. Last year, top medical journals warned that climate change, not COVID-19, was the greatest threat to public health.”
“In the Midwest, climate change is likely to bring extreme temperatures and flooding, along with more mosquito and tick diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP).”
While many top medical journals and the politically controlled CDCP have claimed climate change is causing worsening health and increasing incidences of premature mortality, hard data presented in peer reviewed literature proves this is false.
Data from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration presented in Climate at a Glance articles disprove claims that heat waves, cold spells, and incidences of flooding have increased during the recent period of modern warming.
If instances of extreme heat or cold, and flooding events aren’t increasing, or are in fact declining, they can’t be causing an increase in adverse health events, which is precisely what the data establish.
As detailed in Climate Realism, here, deaths resulting from climate related events have fallen to a historic low, having fallen by more than 99 percent over the past 100 years.
On July 1, 2021 The Lancet published what is arguably the largest study ever to examine excess mortality associated with temperature. The study’s authors, 68 scientists representing universities and research institutes in 33 countries spanning all regions of the world, came to two very clear conclusions: Cold temperatures contribute to far more deaths each year than warmer temperatures; and deaths associated with extreme temperatures, hot or cold, are declining.
This study confirms what research previously published in The Lancet, the Southern Medical Journal, and other outlets, has consistently shown: Cold is the biggest temperature related killer, not heat, and as he earth warms the number of deaths related to extreme temperatures is falling dramatically.
Also, contrary to the impression given in the WPR story, there is no evidence insect borne tropical diseases are expanding their range or sickening, or claiming the lives of greater numbers of people as the earth has warmed.
The vast body of scientific literature referenced in Chapter Seven of Climate Change Reconsideree II: Biological Impacts and Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels fails find any link between global warming and the spread of Lyme disease, malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases are either grossly overstated or outright false.
For example, a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature:
“[C]compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 2007. They report, ‘even more marked has been the decrease in prevalence within this greatly reduced range, with endemicity falling by one or more classes in over two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission.’ They write, ‘widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.’”
Also, in a 2008 article in the Malaria Journal, Pasteur Institute of Paris professor Paul Reiter wrote:
“Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ‘new’ malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission, [continuing] future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but obsessive emphasis on ‘global warming’ as a dominant parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”
Despite numerous claims to the contrary, claims parroted by WPR without citing any hard evidence, human health is not being threatened by climate change. Indeed, on every health indicator: human lifespan, premature mortality, premature births, infant mortality, hospitalizations linked to extreme temperatures or weather events, hunger, and malnutrition, to name the most often discussed health indicators, humans are living better, longer, healthier, lives than ever before.
February 3, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Wisconsin Public Radio |
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News show grimly celebrates new form of inhumane tyranny
Unvaccinated parents in Western Australia will not be able to visit their own sick children in hospital, with news anchors discussing the rule celebrating it as an excellent way of forcing the unvaxxed to ‘change their philosophy’.
From yesterday onwards, parents who haven’t received at least two doses of the vaccine will be barred from visiting their own kids, unless on compassionate ‘end of life’ grounds.
In other words, their child has to literally be on its deathbed for unvaxxed parents to be allowed into hospitals in Western Australia.
Almost as odious as the rule itself was how this new level of inhumane tyranny was vehemently welcomed by a host and her two guests on the Sunrise television news show.
One male reporter called the rule “the ultimate test” for unvaccinated parents, asking, “Could that be the trigger to make you change your mind and I guess that’s the force at play here.”
“Would it make you change your philosophy? Maybe it would and maybe that’s what the government are banking on,” he added.
Journalist Susie O’Brien cracked a smile before announcing, “I’m all for this, this is not about the rights of parents, this is about the rights of the sick kids…to stay as safe as possible.”
Yes, because I’m sure children who are sick and alone in hospital will surely love exercising the “right” not to be able to see their own parents.
“If you are unvaccinated without a good reason, without a valid exemption, then you are gonna find your movements curtailed,” O’Brien smugly stated, adding that the government was right to “shock” and “challenge” people into “changing their philosophy, changing their action and get vaccinated.”
“People have had time, I mean really,” the news anchor sardonically stated as she ended the segment.
“The cruelty is the point,” remarked Mike Cernovich.
https://twitter.com/_evelynrae/status/1488412719766118400
February 2, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Russian ambassador to the United States says Washington is telling ‘outright lies’
Russia is strictly adhering to the norms of international law, and suggestions that it is using chemical weapons are “fundamentally false,” the country’s ambassador to the US claimed on Wednesday.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday morning, Anatoly Antonov called the accusation a fantasy, and instead suggested that Washington is trying to “demonize” Russia. His rebuttal came after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told journalists that Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken “aggressive steps” on the global stage.
“This is a country and a leader who has, you know, used chemical weapons, who has invaded multiple countries in the past several years,” Psaki said, at a press briefing on Tuesday.
However, according to Antonov, both these suggestions are untrue, and Washington would be wise to “look in the mirror more often before blaming or lecturing others.”
“The US has not backed up with any credible evidence its fantasies built on outright lies about the alleged use of chemical weapons by our country,” the ambassador said. “The accusations against our country of ‘invading’ other states also have no grounds.”
According to Antonov, Russia has completely destroyed its stocks of chemical weapons, while the US has not.
“Russia adheres to the principle of ‘non-interference’ in the affairs of foreign countries and strictly follows international law – unlike the United States, whose modern history looks more like a chronology of US military operations in different parts of the globe,” the ambassador continued, accusing Washington of conducting “bloody” experiments around the world, which cause “nothing but chaos, instability, and loss of lives.”
The latest statement by Psaki is not the first time that Moscow has been accused of illegally using chemical weapons. Last year, Washington imposed sanctions on a number of Russian officials and businesses for the alleged poisoning of jailed opposition figure Alexey Navalny, in what the US dubbed “the use of a chemical weapon” in an “attempted assassination.”
“The U.S. government has exercised its authorities to send a clear signal that Russia’s use of chemical weapons and abuse of human rights have severe consequences. Any use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and contravenes international norms,” a State Department press release said in March.
In response, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Washington of using Russia as a diversion from America’s internal issues.
February 2, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Russia, United States |
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As you may recall, we secured Debbie’s acquittal at Cheltenham Magistrates Court on the December 20th 2021 for offences relating to organising/being involved in organising a gathering of more than 30 people during a period of national lockdown or alternatively for participating in the gathering.
The relevant gathering was a protest held in Stratford Park in Stroud in November 2020 against the restrictions imposed on the British public under the Coronavirus Regulations. The protest was called the ‘Freedom Rally’ and was attended by more than 50 people.
The Stroud ‘Freedom Rally’ was held two days into the second national lockdown and therefore at the time it was illegal to organise a gathering of more than 30 people or to meet in groups of more than two people. A conviction would have left her liable for a £10,000 fine.
Ms. Hicks was acquitted of both offences after the court accepted our argument that her arrest and prosecution was a disproportionate interference with her human rights – namely the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, given that she was engaging in a legitimate protest.
The court found that Ms. Hicks had organised the ‘Freedom Rally’ and had breached the Coronavirus Regulations in force at the time by doing so. However, she had a reasonable excuse because she was attending a legitimate, peaceful and well-organised protest. The officers on the ground at the protest had been labouring under a misapprehension of the law – that protesting was not lawful under the Regulations – and were essentially imposing a blanket ban on protesting. Therefore, their actions in arresting her were not rational or proportionate.
In complete contrast – and a perfect example of how this contentious piece of legislation is flawed and open to misinterpretation – on the November 16th 2021 the City of London Magistrates Court convicted Debbie of breaching similar coronavirus regulations by protesting in Hyde Park against the imposition of lockdown restrictions during the pandemic. The District Judge in this case found that Debbie did not have a ‘reasonable excuse’ for protesting and found that the interference with her Human Rights was proportionate. Debbie was convicted and sentenced to a financial penalty.
The case raises important issues on freedom of expression and assembly, as well as the chilling of the right to protest. We wish to appeal this case to the High Court in order for the High Court to settle the important questions of law raised.
A fundamental consideration for the High Court is the ambiguity of the right to protest during the Coronavirus pandemic during periods of national lockdown and the operation of the ‘reasonable excuse’ jurisdiction in this regard.
The Government has made it clear, as have the courts, including in Debbie’s case before the Cheltenham Magistrates Court, that protesting during the Coronavirus pandemic was never illegal. Yet that was not always clear from the Coronavirus regulations nor was it the understanding of most police officers. How the reasonable excuse defence is to operate in these circumstances requires clarity and we are confident that the High Court will settle the issue in our favour and set a precedent for future cases and those seeking to appeal against their own convictions.
Debbie Hicks is probably best known for filming within the Gloucester Royal Hospital in December 2020 during Tier 3 restrictions. Debbie did so, exercising her freedom of expression, in order to highlight that Government restrictions were having a devastating effect upon access to healthcare across the board and to investigate mainstream media reports that hospitals were overflowing with patients.
Despite her efforts to avoid confrontation, she was challenged at the hospital by two employees. During the exchange, which lasted less than a minute, Debbie did not film the staff members. She explained the purpose of her visit and her views as to the provision of NHS services during lockdown. Staff members took offence at her comments and subsequently made a complaint to the police. Debbie immediately left the hospital voluntarily and was subsequently arrested at her home in front of her family and charged with using abusive, threatening or disorderly words or behaviour.
Debbie was not at the hospital deliberately seeking an encounter with staff. She has in the past been a vociferous supporter of the NHS and has supported NHS staff in respect of vaccine mandates.
In connection with this episode, Debbie stood trial for an offence under Section 5 of Public Order Act on January 6th 2022 and having adjourned the case in order to hand down his judgement the District Judge convicted Debbie of a S5 Public Order Act offence on January 19th 2022 at Cirencester Magistrates Court.
We wish to appeal this conviction as well and ask that the High Court settle this case on the basis that the District Judge was wrong in law to convict Debbie of this offence. We are firmly of the view that the Prosecution case simply did not cross the threshold of what constitutes abusive, threatening or disorderly words or behaviour. The District Judge’s analysis was flawed and did not properly interpret Supreme Court authorities nor give appropriate weight to Debbie’s rights of freedom of expression and assembly as enshrined in the European Convention for Human Rights, nor give appropriate weight to the political nature of Debbie’s views when the case law makes clear political freedom of expression should be given special protection.
Debbie is trying to raise £10,000 to take both cases to the High Court. She hopes that those who continue to believe in freedom of speech and the the right to protest will continue to support her. Our hope is that if we can get these convictions overturned, it will set a legal precedent for those convicted of similar offences and who may face prosecution in the future.
Debbie needs to raise funds in order to pay her legal costs and any help is hugely appreciated. Her fundraiser can be found here.
Andrew Rootsey is a solicitor at Murray Hughman.
February 1, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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The media’s found yet another reason you might have a heart attack
In only our second article of this new year, This Year in the New Normal, OffG predicted that a major news story of 2022 would involve predicting and explaining heart problems that hadn’t actually happened yet.
Not even a month later, we’ve already been proven right.
Urgent warning as 300,000 Brits living with stealth disease that could kill within 5 years
That’s a Sun headline from three days ago.
The article is about a recent study, which apparently found that aortic valve stenosis is likely far more prevalent in the community than previously thought.
Aortic Stenosis (AS) is a disease affecting the valve of the heart which connects to the aorta, causing it to never open fully and making it more difficult for blood to flow.
Those with AS can suffer fatigue, chest pains, dizzy spells and even sudden death. Known complications include blood clots, which can lead to strokes or heart attacks.
According to the article…
the overall prevalence of severe aortic stenosis among the over 55s in the UK in 2019 could be almost 1.5 per cent – equal to around 300,000 at any one time.
Just under 200,000 (68 per cent) were symptomatic – meaning they had severe disease that would be eligible for surgery.
The remaining 90,000 (32 per cent) had a “silent” case of the condition and will probably not be diagnosed unless they are being screened for another problem.
Without timely treatment, up to 172,859 (59 per cent of the overall total) will die over the next five years to 2024, it’s estimated.
Are you following?
Let me sum it up for you in neat bullet points:
- Aortic Stenosis is a potentially deadly disease affecting the heart.
- A review has found that it is “under diagnosed”.
- Around 100,000 people in the UK could have the disease and not even know it.
- Many of them will likely die in the next five years.
Thus, any rise in heart attacks or other cardiac diseases is fully explained.
Any heart problems that do occur are totally unrelated to the experimental “vaccines” which are known to cause heart problems and blood clots, they want to be very clear on that.
Now, you could argue this is just a coincidence, a routinely hysterical public health scare story that just happened to land in the middle of the pandemic.
Obviously, we can’t prove that’s not the case, but there is plenty of evidence arguing against it.
For one thing, it is not as if aortic stenosis is a regularly recurring public health talking point, like breast cancer or diabetes. A brief google news search shows that, prior to Covid times, there was scant mention of the condition in the media for the past ten years. Only a handful of articles about celebrities having the condition or academic papers about new treatments.
It’s not a disease that has ever, as far as we can see, been thrust to the forefront of the public consciousness… until now.
It should also not be forgotten that this is not the first time an explanation for future heart attacks has been proferred. We have been hip-deep in pre-emptive explanations of cardiac arrest for weeks.
Remember “post pandemic stress disorder”? It’s a (completely made-up) nervous condition that some doctors predicted would increase the number of heart problems in the UK by 300,000 this year.
Interestingly, that’s 300,000 again. Both scares predicting the same exact number of cases is a funny little coincidence.
There are further examples, earlier this week it was reported that people who have had Covid are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes.
Research papers claim “long covid” can lead to blood clots, heart inflammation and strokes (all acknowledged side effects of the “vaccines”).
It’s not just predictive anymore either, Scotland is in a rush to explain its sharp rise in heart attacks and strokes.
One such story might be a coincidence… but four or five?
The media just keeps coming up with more and more reasons we may see a lot of heart attacks in the near future.
Interesting that.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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https://www.bitchute.com/video/0ryAP7gn11N4/
What a time to be alive! Me & the mister talk all things convoy & show lots of videos, etc from around the country. Get a tissue, you’re going to tear up. ♥ My website is here: https://amazingpolly.net/ God bless the truckers & their families and God bless each and every one of us.
Truckers Demand Letter: https://canada-unity.com/mou/
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).
For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech.” Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.
Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.
When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont’s heating system and Putin’s sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being “Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is “disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID’s origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.
This “disinformation” term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of “disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.
The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.
Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, “the insurrection,” and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have “urged” Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call “disinformation” about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tactics against Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil.
Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.
And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google’s YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google’s overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino’s prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view shared by numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google’s permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.
It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called “disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive,” all caused by Rumble’s “allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particular bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).
The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline. “Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” warned the Post. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be.
This Post attack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world’s richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of “grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform:
This Post-manufactured narrative about Substack instantly metastasized throughout the liberal sect of media. “Anti-vaxxers making ‘at least $2.5m’ a year from publishing on Substack,” read the headline of The Guardian, the paper that in 2018 published the outright lie that Julian Assange met twice with Paul Manafort inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and refuses to this day to retract it (i.e., “disinformation”). Like The Post, the British paper cited one of the seemingly endless number of shady pro-censorship groups — this one calling itself the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” — to argue for greater censorship by Substack. “They could just say no,” said the group’s director, who has apparently convinced himself he should be able to dictate what views should and should not be aired: “This isn’t about freedom; this is about profiting from lies. . . . Substack should immediately stop profiting from medical misinformation that can seriously harm readers.”
The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up. Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported in September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that some of Rogan’s shows be removed from the platform, Rogan invited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.
On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Young’s music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided with Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested $100 million, by removing Young’s music and keeping Rogan. The pressure on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchell issued a similar demand. All sorts of censorship-mad liberals celebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify’s refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtag urging the deletion of Spotify’s app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history’s largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.
Obviously, Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. “Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,” claimed The Daily Mail which, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.
One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it currently seems. “Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week after rock icon Neil Young called out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular podcast, ‘The Joe Rogan Experience,’” is how The San Francisco Chronicle put it (that Spotify’s stock price dropped rather precipitously contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):
It is worth recalling that NBC News, in January, 2017, announced that it had hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News with a $69 million contract. The network had big plans for Kelly, whose first show debuted in June of that year. But barely more than a year later, Kelly’s comments about blackface — in which she rhetorically wondered whether the notorious practice could be acceptable in the modern age with the right intent: such as a young white child paying homage to a beloved African-American sports or cultural figure on Halloween — so enraged liberals, both inside the now-liberal network and externally, that they demanded her firing. NBC decided it was worth firing Kelly — on whom they had placed so many hopes — and eating her enormous contract in order to assuage widespread liberal indignation. “The cancellation of the ex-Fox News host’s glossy morning show is a reminder that networks need to be more stringent when assessing the politics of their hirings,” proclaimed The Guardian.
Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own.
Indeed, it was once assumed that Silicon Valley giants steeped in the libertarian ethos of a free internet would be immune to demands to engage in political censorship (“content moderation” is the more palatable euphemism which liberal corporate media outlets prefer). But when the still-formidable megaphones of The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and the rest of the liberal media axis unite to accuse Big Tech executives of having blood on their hands and being responsible for the destruction of American democracy, that is still an effective enforcement mechanism. Billionaires are, like all humans, social and political animals and instinctively avoid ostracization and societal scorn.
Beyond the personal interest in avoiding vilification, corporate executives can be made to censor against their will and in violation of their political ideology out of self-interest. The corporate media still has the ability to render a company toxic, and the Democratic Party more now than ever has the power to abuse their lawmaking and regulatory powers to impose real punishment for disobedience, as it has repeatedly threatened to do. If Facebook or Spotify are deemed to be so toxic that no Good Liberals can use them without being attacked as complicit in fascism, white supremacy or anti-vax fanaticism, then that will severely limit, if not entirely sabotage, a company’s future viability.
The one bright spot in all this — and it is a significant one — is that liberals have become such extremists in their quest to silence all adversaries that they are generating their own backlash, based in disgust for their tyrannical fanaticism. In response to the Post attack, Substack issued a gloriously defiant statement re-affirming its commitment to guaranteeing free discourse. They also repudiated the hubristic belief that they are competent to act as arbiters of Truth and Falsity, Good and Bad. “Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse,” read the headline on the post from Substack’s founders. The body of their post reads like a free speech manifesto:
That’s why, as we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation. While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.
A lengthy Twitter thread from Substack’s Vice President of Communications, Lulu Cheng Meservey was similarly encouraging and assertive. “I’m proud of our decision to defend free expression, even when it’s hard,” she wrote, adding: “because: 1) We want a thriving ecosystem full of fresh and diverse ideas. That can’t happen without the freedom to experiment, or even to be wrong.” Regarding demands to de-platform those allegedly spreading COVID disinformation, she pointedly — and accurately — noted: “If everyone who has ever been wrong about this pandemic were silenced, there would be no one left talking about it at all.” And she, too, affirmed principles that every actual, genuine liberal — not the Nancy Pelosi kind — reflexively supports:
People already mistrust institutions, media, and each other. Knowing that dissenting views are being suppressed makes that mistrust worse. Withstanding scrutiny makes truths stronger, not weaker. We made a promise to writers that this is a place they can pursue what they find meaningful, without coddling or controlling. We promised we wouldn’t come between them and their audiences. And we intend to keep our side of the agreement for every writer that keeps theirs. to think for themselves. They tend not to be conformists, and they have the confidence and strength of conviction not to be threatened by views that disagree with them or even disgust them.
This is becoming increasingly rare.
The U.K.’s Royal Society, its national academy of scientists, this month echoed Substack’s view that censorship, beyond its moral dimensions and political dangers, is ineffective and breeds even more distrust in pronouncements by authorities. “Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online.” “There is,” they concluded, “little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms” and “such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.”
As both Rogan’s success and collapsing faith and interest in traditional corporate media outlets proves, there is a growing hunger for discourse that is liberated from the tight controls of liberal media corporations and their petulant, herd-like employees. That is why other platforms devoted to similar principles of free discourse, such as Rumble for videos and Callin for podcasts, continue to thrive. It is certain that those platforms will continue to be targeted by institutional liberalism as they grow and allow more dissidents and heretics to be heard. Time will tell if they, too, will resist these censorship pressures, but the combination of genuine conviction on the part of their founders and managers, combined with the clear market opportunities for free speech platforms and heterodox thinkers, provides ample ground for optimism.
None of this is to suggest that American liberals are the only political faction that succumbs to the strong temptations of censorships. Liberals often point to the growing fights over public school curricula and particularly the conservative campaign to exclude so-called Critical Race Theory from the public schools as proof that the American Right is also a pro-censorship faction. That is a poor example. Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools. Liberals crusaded for decades to have creationism banned from the public schools and largely succeeded, yet few would suggest this was an act of censorship. For the reason I just gave, I certainly would define it that way. Fights over what children should and should not be taught can have a censorship dimension but usually do not, precisely because limits and prohibitions in school curricula are inevitable.
There are indeed examples of right-wing censorship campaigns: among the worst are laws implemented by GOP legislatures and championed by GOP governors to punish those who support a boycott of Israel by denying them contracts or other employment benefits. And among the most frequent targets of censorship campaigns on college campuses are critics of Israel and activists for Palestinian rights. But federal courts have been unanimously striking down those indefensible red-state laws punishing BDS activists as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech rights, and polling data, as noted above, shows that it is the Democrats who overwhelmingly favor internet censorship while Republicans oppose it.
In sum, censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heydey of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | CIA, FBI, Human rights, United States |
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Remember the good old days at the beginning of the COVID coup – before the new dogmas started to tangle themselves into self-contradictory knots?
Back then, if you wanted to know what to think, the Infallible Ones always had simple answers.
What was the enemy? A virus called SARS-CoV-2. Where did it come from? Chinese bats and pangolins. When would it end? After a few weeks of “lockdown” and the introduction of “vaccines.” How did you protect yourself from it in the meantime? By isolating yourself at home, wearing a muzzle, obsessively washing your hands, leaving your shoes outside the door, avoiding other human beings, scrubbing the walls and counters – above all, by obeying whatever orders the Infallible Ones gave you.
And if you didn’t obey? You would die.
But “oh, what a tangled web we weave,” as the poet said, “when first we practice to deceive.” The Infallible Ones’ teachings were soon mired in baffling inconsistencies. A “few weeks” of lockdown gave way to months, which in turn gave way to threats of recurring confinements whenever the authorities deemed it expedient. Summertime assurances of the “success” of the national incarceration – which had upended the health care system, educationally crippled a generation of children, and tossed away the livelihoods of millions of innocent people, though the Infallible Ones seldom mentioned any of that – were succeeded by “expert” scoldings to the effect that we Americans had been too selfish to be confined at all.
When randomized clinical trials proved that face masks were useless, the Infallible Ones told us to wear two masks instead of one. When the Infallible Ones abandoned the canard of “asymptomatic transmission” – after it had fulfilled its function of stoking public hysteria – they adopted the equally silly canard that “the unvaccinated” were unique breeding grounds for viral mutations.
Even the virus itself, which the Infallible Ones had originally pronounced so unique, became the very opposite of unique as the Infallible Ones translated it into an ever-enlarging ensemble of similar viral “strains” in which new ones appeared just often enough to offset the gains supposedly made by the “vaccines.”
And meanwhile – most important of all – what was supposed to be a temporary suspension of constitutional government became a “new normal”; the law, or what had always been the law, turned out to be as obsolete as the idea of dealing with an infectious disease by giving medical treatment to the genuinely sick. In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all.
That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.
The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended.
That’s why the COVID coup began, in my own country, with declarations of an “emergency” in four-fifths of the states – and why, with very rare exceptions, those “states of emergency” remain in effect to this day, nearly two years later. Again, this cannot be explained away as a response to a respiratory virus. When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm – and this is even more emphatically true when virtually no one in the political opposition, the civil rights bar, or the mainstream media so much as mentions this fundamental fact.
My point is that those of us who recognize what is happening are going to have to shift our tactics. We can no longer attack COVID-19 propaganda in piecemeal fashion, challenging one medical falsehood at a time. That approach, I’m afraid, is likely to be self-defeating. As long as we focus on disproving each particular COVID “narrative,” the Infallible Ones can continue to manage the debate in mass media as a conflict between the interpretations of “experts” and those of “conspiracy theorists.”
And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must be resisted accordingly.
Still, if we aren’t going to debunk every lie swirling through mass media or dished out by the “experts,” how can we be sure that we stand on solid factual ground as we resist the coup unfolding all around us – particularly if, as I’m arguing, we must begin by asserting that our struggle is about regaining our freedoms, not about correcting a medical policy?
Actually, there are many reasons we can be sure. And now, as we approach the third year of the coup, I want to offer a short list of them.
1) The COVID coup has consistently relied on unconstitutional methods
The first and most unmistakable clue about the real nature of the coup is its aggressive destruction of constitutional government. Right from the start, it involved suspensions of the legislatures; from there it moved quickly to arbitrary rule by executive fiat (mask “mandates” followed by “vaccine passports”), and then indulged head-on in violations of constitutional rights, as in the imposition of mass “quarantines” without a court order – an illegal act even under “emergency” dispensation.
I have argued this in print for over a year and a half, so I won’t belabor the point now except to stress the complicity of mass media in the unprecedented assault on our basic rights. The most important lie, of course, has been one of omission: the press simply never mentions the absence of any constitutional basis for the repeated attacks on freedom.
But I would like to call attention to a small but very revealing lie that crops up every time the press reports a new COVID-related “order.” Last month’s story about sweeping new muzzling requirements in California was a case in point. “California is ordering a statewide mask mandate for indoor public spaces,” blared the Los Angeles Times. But “California” does not and cannot issue a “mandate.” Promulgations of legal requirements belong to the appropriate organs of government – and that means that an honest report would have necessarily told readers how the mandate in question came to be. What body passed the law? Who signed it? Which agency issued the regulation, if it was a regulation, and what was the statutory authority for it to do so? In my opinion, it was no accident that the Times never informed its readers that the new California “mandate” was a unilateral edict signed by Tomas Aragon, the head of California’s Department of Public Health – an edict that did not even attempt to identify any authority for such an action in California’s statutes or regulatory code.
I repeat: in a constitutional government, health regulations are always grounded in such authority; “mandates” that ignore this are violations of law at best, dictatorial usurpations at worst. And the propagandists in the media, though they know this, obviously do not want you to know it.
The same story – political crime furthered by media complicity – emerges just as clearly from New York’s latest assault on the Nuremberg Code. The fiat recently issued by the state’s dictator – officially, Governor Kathy Hochul – claims to acquire authority for a statewide “vaccine mandate” from New York’s Public Health Law, section 225. But that statutory section does not address vaccination policy at all – and since the COVID-19 “vaccines” do not even prevent person-to-person transmission, there is no legal way the section’s general language about “the preservation and improvement of public health” can be construed to give the state’s governor the power to force 5-year-old children to be injected with experimental drugs, as Ms. Hochul has ordered.
In short, the “governor” – the word really must be put in quotation marks at this point – is acting outside her legal powers. And if we had a political opposition and a functioning court system worthy of the name, she might be facing impeachment instead of routine accolades from the tame “liberal” press, which calls this democracy-wrecking child poisoner “a moderate Democrat.”
Consider, by contrast, the intense debate over the 1985 decision of New York State’s public health council to rewrite its regulations so as to force the closing of gay bathhouses. That decision – taken at the height of the AIDS outbreak – was denounced by liberals at the time and is sharply criticized by students of political history to this day. Imagine the reaction if New York’s governor had simply written a unilateral order closing all gay bathhouses in the state, thumbing his nose at New York’s legislature and the whole existing regulatory system on the grounds that, in his view, New York faced an “emergency” that justified the suspension of democracy!
But that is exactly what has happened in states across the country – New York and my own state of New Jersey among them – for nearly two years: state executives have issued fiats suspending legal processes on the grounds of a hazily-defined “emergency,” and have followed them up with a series of unilateral decrees that drastically altered the lives of their citizenry – in direct defiance of their states’ constitutions. You cannot support that and support constitutional democracy at the same time. The propagandists may not like to admit it, but when they sing the praises of mask “mandates,” they are celebrating dictatorship.
And the democracy-busters are everywhere. In New York City, outgoing Mayor Bill DeBlasio slapped a “vaccine mandate” on all municipal employees, topping off the outrage by extending the same requirement to 184,000 private business and organizations. The mayor’s constitutional authority to order this assault on bodily integrity was so obviously shaky that a local judge promptly stayed his order. But that didn’t bother DeBlasio, who said, “I hope [this measure] will be emulated all over the country because it’s time to get even tougher to end the COVID era.” Got it? When you’re being “tough,” who cares about the law?
2) The one thing no one in the mainstream wants to mention is the biggest thing of all: that our civil liberties are evaporating
DeBlasio and Hochul are both Democrats, and it’s tempting to focus on the hypocrisy at the leftward end of the mainstream political spectrum. But it’s not just the “liberals” who have betrayed the Bill of Rights. We’re constantly told that the U.S. Supreme Court is dominated by “conservatives,” but when New York’s rampaging governor decreed that healthcare workers must submit to COVID-19 vaccination – even if they have religious objections to the experimental drugs (she claimed personal knowledge that God doesn’t support exemptions for these particular drugs) – only three justices out of nine were prepared to offer any relief. I don’t always agree with Neil Gorsuch, but the ominous conclusion of his dissenting opinion in that case (Dr. A. v. Hochul) deserves to be committed to memory:
[I]n America, freedom to differ is not supposed to be “limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” [Citation omitted.] The test of this Court’s substance lies in its willingness to defend more than the shadow of freedom in the trying times, not just the easy ones…
Still, it seems the old lessons are hard ones. Six weeks ago, this Court refused relief in a case involving Maine’s healthcare workers. [Citation omitted.] Today, the Court repeats the mistake by turning away New York’s doctors and nurses. We do all this even though the State’s executive decree clearly interferes with the free exercise of religion – and does so seemingly based on nothing more than fear and anger at those who harbor unpopular religious beliefs. We allow the State to insist on the dismissal of thousands of medical workers – the very same individuals New York has depended on and praised for their service on the pandemic’s front lines over the last 21 months. To add insult to injury, we allow the State to deny these individuals unemployment benefits too… [H]ow many more reminders do we need that “the Constitution is not to be obeyed or disobeyed as the circumstances of a particular crisis… may suggest”? [Citation omitted.]
How many, indeed?
Business elites are pursuing the COVID agenda as viciously as the politicians, if not more so. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has stated publicly that he will fire every employee in New York who doesn’t submit to the “vaccine” experiment, even those who attempt to work from home. Wouldn’t it be nice if the erstwhile champions of “free enterprise” actually stood up for freedom when it’s being robbed from the people who work for them? But I don’t see any criticism of Dimon from the business press, which has fallen as silent as the civil-rights crowd.
And please don’t let anyone tell you that these “vaccines” aren’t experimental, or that pressuring people into taking them doesn’t violate the Nuremberg Code’s prohibition against human medical experimentation without informed consent. The case for applying the terms of the Code is simply overwhelming. As we all know, the drugs in question were rushed through privately-administered trials that did not include the animal testing protocols normally required by the Food and Drug Administration. The data from those trials – the only ones ever conducted – remain sealed from public view, and we already know from Brook Jackson about serious irregularities in the limited tests performed by the manufacturers while they were conveniently insulated from public view. That means that these drugs remain untested, and their massive use is the first real experimental trial they have ever had.
In fact, the manufacturers insisted on – and received – blanket legal immunity before they would issue their drugs to the public. This unprecedented action – one that protected the drug makers rather than the public – resulted directly from the manufacturers’ awareness that, given the lack of prior testing, no one could predict the results of the drugs until they had actually been tried out on large numbers of people. You cannot have it both ways. If you insist that you haven’t safety-tested your products before issuing them – and that’s what Pfizer, Moderna and J&J all did insist when they developed the drugs in 2020 – you can’t deny that the people you inject with them over the following year are participating in an experiment.
Besides, the propagandists themselves are giving away the game: they openly refer to the massive vaccination program now under way as “proof” that the drugs are safe. But this means that they are relying on the results of actual use as a substitute for a clinical trial.
“The vaccine does work,” Dr. Mark Sawyer, who served on the FDA advisory committee that approved the drugs in 2020, told CNBC. “[T]hat’s been clearly shown by both death rates and hospitalization rates when comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people.” Mind you, the propagandists really have no choice about saying this; the United States, like other countries, is actively vaccinating whole groups of people – pregnant woman and young children – who were completely excluded from the manufacturers’ trials. But to cite that experience as evidence of the drugs’ safety means – again – that people now getting their jabs are actually being herded into an enormous human medical experiment. And of course they’re not being told the truth about this.
Human medical experimentation without informed consent is not just another legal lapse. It is a crime against humanity. Think of that when you read the next op-ed singing the praises of the “vaccination” campaign.
3) The “facts” fed to the public are manifestly worthless
Yes, I know: I began this essay with the statement that we can’t fight COVID fascism one lie at a time. But even a quick sampling is enough to confirm – for anyone who still needs proof – that we’re all eye-deep in propaganda so deceitful that none of it can be taken seriously.
Take the latest fear porn to emerge from New York, always a reliable bellwether for gathering trends in COVID-19 propaganda. The day after Christmas, a deafening chorus of mass media belted out a claim of the New York State Health Department that “the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 is rising” in New York, adding some gloating if irrelevant details about the police-state measures to be imposed on anyone reckless enough to attempt the traditional New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. (For the record, the official harassment included: mandatory muzzles outside as well as inside; required proof of “vaccination” plus personal ID for everyone over 5 years old; a police blockade around the area which banned people from entering until after 3:00 p.m.; and a sharp limit on total crowd size even afterwards. Must have been a delightful party.)
The ghouls responsible for this “alert” clearly wanted us to believe that New York’s children are keeling over in droves from the “deadly virus,” and that if we don’t immediately get every single kid injected with experimental drugs they’re all going to die.
But what does the evidence actually show? Well – nothing.
First, although the headlines made it sound as though all “children hospitalized with COVID-19” were hospitalized because of COVID-19, the fine print in the database linked from the articles told a different tale. In fact, the figures reflected the “number of patients hospitalized, and number of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) among patients with lab-confirmed COVID-19 disease”: in other words, they included all hospitalizations, due to any cause, for patients who had merely generated one positive test result for COVID-19 during the relevant period. Since those tests usually consist of a PCR assay at an unspecified amplification cycle threshold, and since such “tests” are notoriously unreliable, the number of “positive” test results in children hospitalized for causes that included, for all we know, broken arms, strep throat, measles, concussions, etc., tells us virtually nothing about how COVID-19 has been affecting New York’s children.
Second, there’s the question of absolute as opposed to relative numbers. How many actual pediatric hospitalizations had occurred in New York when the Health Department sounded its alarm? The ghouls never told us that – and once again, the fine print contradicted their arm-waving headlines. The Health Department’s press release noted parenthetically that a total of 30 children between 12 and 17 had yielded a positive COVID-19 test result in New York hospitals during the preceding week, and that “roughly half” of the total number involved children under 5. True, that left open the question of how many were between 5 and 11, but I think it’s safe to assume that if children between those ages had been admitted to hospitals in larger numbers than their older contemporaries, the Health Department would have said so.
So let’s say, for argument’s sake, that we’re talking about 60 hospital admissions for children over 5, yielding a week-long total of about 120. Given that there are nearly 4.2 million children in the state of New York, 120 positive tests for COVID-19 (via dubious methods) in New York hospitals over a seven-day period hardly seems cause for panic.
And this was just one of a whole string of similar fabrications.
The CDC has been claiming for months that “unvaccinated people who had previously recovered from a coronavirus infection” are “five times as likely to get Covid as people who had received both shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.” Because this result directly contradicted a much-publicized study from Israel, I took the trouble to review the actual data. And it turned out that the numbers not only don’t support the CDC’s claim; they demonstrate the exact opposite of what the “experts” claim they do.
Setting to one side the methods used to determine who had “previously recovered” from a COVID-19 infection, and to ensure that “vaccinated” subjects had not also previously recovered from such an infection (both of which are questionable), the paper’s authors recorded 6,328 hospitalizations “among fully vaccinated and previously uninfected patients,” while among unvaccinated patients who had previously recovered, the total number of hospitalizations was only 1,020.
Even the small proportions of those patients who subsequently tested “positive” for COVID-19 were heavily weighted in favor of the vaccinated: 324 as opposed to 89. Now, take a moment to consider how devastating those numbers are for the claim made by the CDC: namely, that vaccination alone gives you far more protection from COVID-19 than natural immunity. The study’s own data prove this to be a lie. In fact, if the numbers are taken seriously, they suggest that you are more than six times as likely to be hospitalized after being “vaccinated” than after recovering from a COVID infection – and that you are more than three times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. When was the last time you heard that explained in mainstream media?
So don’t waste your time on the latest COVID-19 “study” touted in the New York Times to bludgeon more gullible citizens into compliance. Just assume you’re being lied to, and you’ll be right often enough that the exceptions won’t matter.
4) The “experts” cannot be taken seriously
And then there are the “experts.” How many times do these mouthpieces of the Infallible Ones have to contradict themselves before we stop listening to them? At first they told us (correctly) that face masks offer no real obstacle to the spread of a respiratory virus. Then, reversing themselves without explanation, they insisted that wearing a mask – any sort of mask – provided an essential layer of protection. (Right on cue, the media set up a howl about “maskless” people being sighted at Trump rallies – or similarly disreputable places – as if they had been caught cavorting down Main Street without any clothes on.)
Now the “experts” have outdone themselves by telling us that if we want real protection, we’ve got to “upgrade” to N95 or KN95 respirator masks. Doesn’t that mean that they’ve been lying to us for over a year and a half when they assured us that wearing a cloth or paper mask was the submissive citizen’s way of “doing his part”? Of course it does, but don’t expect the mainstream press to raise that uncomfortable question.
And what about the “vaccines”? When those experimental drugs were first released, I was one of many critical writers who observed that the two-shot regime demanded by the authorities was only the beginning: that soon we’d be ordered to have a third shot, then a fourth, and that eventually we’d be told that “real” vaccination was an unending process, like the “new normal” itself. Nonsense, scoffed the Infallible Ones.
But now Anthony Fauci himself is saying that the very definition of “fully vaccinated” is up for grabs, so that “it’s going to be a matter of when, not if,” that definition changes. Take a moment to wrap your mind around the enormity of this idea. In the future, your medical status won’t be based on objective facts but on the arbitrary pronouncements of the powers that be. No matter which shots you’ve had, or how many, or how recently, or whether you’re sick, or likely to become sick, or what sort of antibodies you’ve got, or what medical treatments you have or haven’t undergone in the past, if Dr. Fauci and his fellow ghouls decide to rewrite the definition of “vaccinated” you may find yourself suddenly among that demonized underclass that, according to the editorialists of the New York Times, are responsible for all the world’s troubles.
And when that happens, there won’t be anything you can do about it except to obey the latest orders of the Infallible Ones. Not even your “vaccine pass” will help you.
So it’s not even a matter of the experts constantly contradicting themselves, feeding us one false story after another – though of course they’ve done that. Now they’ve taken Newspeak to an altogether different level, arrogating to themselves the power to change the meanings of actual medical terms. In the future there won’t be any contradictions from the experts because, whenever they find it convenient, the experts will simply redefine a word or two in order to render their past pronouncements consistent with their current ones.
And who are these “experts”? Most media reports about COVID-19 statistics cite the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, directly or indirectly, as their key source of information. But they rarely mention that Johns Hopkins’ coronavirus information arm is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, both of which have significant ties to the pharmaceuticals industry – a fact that should have disqualified it long ago as a source of “objective” data.
As for the Center for Health Security itself, I have pointed out in a previous article its close links with the American Enterprise Institute, the folks who led the way to the Iraq invasion of 2003. The lies behind that invasion unraveled pretty quickly. But that was because the propagandists at AEI were careless enough to make claims – mostly about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” – that could be publicly verified. Their partners at Johns Hopkins have been more discreet: when they claimed there would be “no summertime lull” in 2020, insisting that COVID-19 deaths were not seasonal and that lockdowns would continue, off and on, for “several years,” those lies could be explained away afterward as over-pessimistic projections – projections that might still come true, for all we know, if everyone doesn’t obey Big Brother.
(By the way, I’m not the only one to notice the disturbing history of the blandly-named Center for Health Security. The German lawyer Paul Schreyer has detailed its long-term involvement in bioterror “simulations” at which subjects like the imposition of martial law and other police-state tactics have often been discussed by the high-level participants.)
So these high-profile “experts” are nothing but the lying professional mouthpieces of a lying political class.
Do you really need to know more about them?
5) The COVID coup involves a radical redefinition of human value
Finally, we must realize that the perversions of the past two years have not only been political and legal. The Infallible Ones have been tampering with basic terms of humanity and morality – and that should have all of us up in arms.
Let’s start with the obvious. A policy that deliberately discourages doctors from treating sick patients – that, in fact, causes the deaths of countless people who could otherwise have been saved – is not a medical policy at all; it is a crime.
Yet this was exactly the policy pursued by Fauci, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, which for nearly two years did their level best to prevent the use of empirically-proven therapies for COVID-19. As a result, according to Dr. Scott Atlas (whose dissenting voice on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force was generally buried under noisy media slanders), “urgently needed clinical trials by the NIH and FDA were never performed,” while “[i]n another unprecedented move, doctors were blocked from prescribing [hydroxychloroquine], even though prescribing any other approved drug for an off-label use was routine.” And anyone who tried to tell the truth on social media about drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin was likely to run head-on into social media censorship.
But the evil runs even deeper than that. Today we are being sold a premise never before embraced by a civilized society: the notion that every human being is a public menace by definition, that people are sick until proven healthy and dangerous until proven otherwise, that the mere act of breathing – that is, of living – requires some sort of moral and political justification. And the terms of that justification can only be determined by the powers that be; you and I are not given a say in what relieves us of the status of a public danger.
Just consider how radically incompatible such an idea is with any sort of open or democratic society. If people are defined as public menaces, how can they simultaneously constitute the ultimate public authority – a status that is the defining characteristic of a democracy? How can enemies of the people be “the people”? If a human being’s right to breathe (unless he’s been injected with experimental drugs, wears a muzzle and doesn’t write anything objectionable on social media) may be arbitrarily curtailed, what rights can a human being possibly be said to possess? It hardly needs to be said that the traditional notion of “citizenship” is no longer intelligible in such a context.
Meanwhile, we must be honest with ourselves. No political party is going to save us from the COVID coup. In the U.S., with rare exceptions, Republicans are sniping at their rivals about “cultural” issues and ignoring the most massive attack on freedom in modern American history. And even when the incumbent Democrats do badly at the polls, they stubbornly refuse to get the point.
A “half-dozen Democratic governors” recently told Politico what they thought the trouble was: “The party,” they said, “needs to find a message that acknowledges voters’ exasperation with the virus and its economic and societal impacts.” Such comments tell us all we need to know about these professional frauds, who still hope we’ll believe that “the virus” closed our businesses, stole our performing arts, wrecked our health care, tortured our kids and turned loose a batch of untested drugs on our immune systems, with more mandatory shots on the way even as the death toll of this ghastly experiment rises and rises. But of course “the virus” didn’t do any of that. The bosses did. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll go right on doing it.
And if we needed any more evidence of just how much is at stake, we got it this month from a major life insurance company in Indiana, which announced as the new year began that “the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people” between 18 and 64 years old. This “unheard of” increase cannot be attributed to COVID-19; the insurance executives themselves say that death rates have sharply declined for that illness.
What then? Might the soaring death rates have something to do with the “vaccines” that have been foisted on hundreds of millions of Americans? Or the health consequences of police-state tactics that have ravaged our society? It’s high time we demanded answers to those questions.
With what methods? Addressing fellow academics on December 8, Giorgio Agamben questioned whether it made sense any longer “to fight or act in the name of principles and concepts such as democracy, the constitution, law” and so forth; after all –
What sense would it make to invoke rights to Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini?… We are facing a government that has abandoned all legality. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the situation we are in….
What we have before us is an adversary, an uncivilization at its end, and this seems to be confirmed by the extreme measures this adversary has chosen. How could a government choose such infamous, extreme, destructive measures as this government has done?… Therefore, I believe, we have to invent new strategies; facing such an adversary we have to invent new strategies.
“New” in this context does not have to mean unprecedented. We are accustomed to limiting ourselves to a secular political vocabulary. But when the essence of humanity is under assault, we need to think of other and more basic sorts of expression. What we’re engaged in is a spiritual struggle. It’s a battle for the survival of the human soul, and in that battle our main weapons are likely to be spiritual ones: courage, hope, self-sacrifice, faith.
Remember, the enemies of humanity have a weak point: they do not believe in human beings, and consequently they do not understand the power contained in each soul that refuses to be duped. Listen to any of their recent pronouncements, and you will notice at once that the Infallible Ones think that they are talking to children. “How to Think About Covid Data Right Now,” reads an actual headline in the New York Times for January 7 – as if it were perfectly natural for the Times to teach its readers “how to think.”
But I suspect that far more people are offended by such condescension than the Times and its fellow propagandists have yet realized. And woe to the swindler who underestimates his mark! The propagandist who believes he is lying to children might do well to recall one famous man’s warning to the effect that “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” But I will leave my readers to draw their own conclusions about this.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, Human rights |
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State-owned CBC suggests that ‘Russian actors’ may have instigated massive protest convoy that shut down nation’s capital
A cross-country convoy of truckers that has jammed the streets of Canada’s capital in protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates might seem like grass-roots pushback against government overreach, but broadcaster CBC Television has offered a more sinister explanation: Russia did it.
Speaking in an interview on Friday with Canada’s public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, CBC host Nil Koksal suggested that possible Kremlin meddlers might have brought about the massive “Freedom Convoy.” “Given Canada’s support of Ukraine in this current crisis with Russia, I don’t know if it’s far-fetched to ask, but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating it from the outset,” she said.
Koksal didn’t offer any evidence to back up the theory or say who has raised such concern. Mendicino replied, “I’m gonna defer to our partners in the public safety, the trained officials and experts in that area.”
The interview came just before disgruntled truckers began to arrive in Ottawa on Friday night. Thousands of convoy participants and other protesters massed in the city on Saturday, bringing traffic to a standstill and sending Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into hiding. State-owned CBC said Trudeau and his family had been moved from his official residence to a “secure location.”
As many as 50,000 trucks were reportedly expected to flood into Ottawa, and traffic was snarled through much of the city. Some trucks were emblazoned with “F**k Trudeau” signs across their trailers, while other protesters demanded, “Mandate freedom.”
Government restrictions that went into effect on January 15 require unvaccinated Canadian drivers to quarantine for 14 days when they cross the border back into their country. Trudeau has condemned the angry truckers as holding “unacceptable views.”
Prior to floating the theory of a Russian bogeyman, Canadian media outlets have made other claims that appeared to smear the protesters, such as suggesting they are racist or extremist.
The Toronto Star said the convoy became a “magnet” for such undesirable elements as “conspiracy nuts, Western separatists, far right-wingers and worse.” Others have suggested that some participants want to carry out their own version of last year’s US Capitol riot.
A counter-protester was seen on Saturday saying, “F**k your white nationalist agenda,” while Canadian television reporter Mackenzie Gray was quick to post a Twitter message proclaiming “our first Confederate flag of the day here on Parliament Hill.” Multiple observers replied that Gray had spotted the “first fed of the day,” meaning a federal agent seeking to discredit the protest.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Canada, CBC, Human rights |
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
You’ve been waiting for it all year. So stop waiting. It’s here! The 5th Annual Fake News Awards! Bringing you the worst in dinosaur media lies, smears and outright fiction from the past year. Join your host Bent Krockman for a whirlwind tour of fake photos, fake fact checks, fake politicians and of course the fake story of the year. Also, stay tuned for a musical performance by the new pop hit supergroup, KABAAL . . . and a word from our corporate sponsor!
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
Fakest Photo or Video of the Year
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
The photoshopped photo from Norwegian newspaper Sunnmørsposten of a “masked” Olav Mestad, the chief medical officer of Ålesund, who was in fact maskless
Biden “driving” an electric F-150
Fake videos of the Kabul evacuation, including a video of a man allegedly hanging out on the engine of a departing plane (although massive props to the Vietnamese graphic designer who originally posted the video, including a whole series of such fakes)
AND THE LOSER IS…
“Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says” a September 2021 article from Rolling Stone that manages a rare triple play: not only is all of the information presented in the story factually incorrect, and not only did they fail to retract the story when it was debunked (instead opting for the lying “update”), but even the picture they used to illustrate the article was fake news!
See “The Media Fell for a Viral Hoax About Ivermectin Overdoses Straining Rural Hospitals” for more on this truly galling display of faux jounalism.
Fakest Politician or Health Official
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
AOC showing up maskless among a sea of masked servants in a “tax the rich” dress to the $35,000 a ticket Met Gala, a dress designed by a tax evader
Justin Trudeau for “anti-vaxxers are racist misogynists”
Trump for calling the Warp Speed MAGA jabs his “greatest achievement” and bragging that “I’m boosted”
AND THE LOSER IS…
Fauci for “attacks on me are attacks on science.”
Is this real life? Did he actually just say that? That is straight up, comic book, Palpatine-level “I am the Senate!” energy right there.
See my episode on Science Says! for a point-by-point deconstruction of this fundamentally anti-scientific idea and read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for a point-by-point takedown of Fauci’s entire career.
Fakest Fact Check of the Year
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
PolitiFact for their “Pants on Fire” “debunking” of the laboratory origins of SARS-COV-2 . . . which they later had to update with a note to say that since the “experts” they relied on for their “fact check” had changed their mind, they were “removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review” (…we’re still waiting, Poynter!)
CTV News for No, COVID-19 vaccines do not violate the Nuremberg Code, which incorrectly states that the COVID vaccines are “long past the experimental stage”
IFLScience (a website with a checkered history of stealing other people’s work, for “Fact Check: Will We Be Microchipped With Vaccine Passports?” which uses the very real story of how a Swedish company has devloped a mircrochip that can showcase your vaccine passport status to argue that it’s a “public relations nightmare for scientists and a gift to anti-vaxxers,” who are obviously still crazy even when they are demonstrably right.
AND THE LOSER IS…
ALL OF THEM! That’s right, in a bombshell story late last year Facebook admitted that ‘fact checks’ are nothing more than opinion
Fakest Climate Change Story
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
The Lancet for “The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy future” which was immediately picked up and regurgitated by the lying corporate media despite the fact that its central assertion that rising temperatures are leading to rising death tolls is directly contradicted by the published research demonstrating that deaths caused by non-optimum temperatures are declining by tens of thousands of people each year.
The Victoria Times-Colonist for “B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from ‘climate change’
,” in which they fall for the transparent publicity stunt of Dr. Kyle Merritt of Kootenay Lake Hospital in Nelson, B.C. who clinically diagnosed a patient with diabetes and heart failure with “climate change.” Not only did the Times-Colonist “reporter” not seek any alternative viewpoint to Dr. Merritt’s nonsensical non-diagnosis, it neglected to inform its readers of University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass’ exhaustively documented work showing that the “Great Northwest Heatwave” last summer was not climate change but merely weather (because, as we all know, Weather is not Climate!…except when it suits the narrative).
The usual gaggle of climate hypocrites who flew their private jets to the COP26 conference in Scotland to lecture the little people about how they need to reduce their carbon footprint
AND THE LOSER IS…
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero for their scheme to get the world’s population on board with the creation of a $130 trillion investment trough to be stewarded over by the organized crime syndicate of crooks, criminals, con artists and eugenicists in international finance in the name of “saving the earth!”
For more on this supergroup of evildoers, see:
Whitney Webb Exposes How Green Finance is Monopolizing the Planet
Absolute Zero: The Global Agenda Revealed
Welcome to the New Economy
FAKE NEWS STORY OF THE YEAR
“100% safe and effective!”
Because we HAVE to go with a single story, we’ll give this dino to … ohhh, I dunno …
Rachel Maddow for “the vaccines will get us to the end of this.”
. . . but to be fair, she wasn’t the only one spreading that fake news.
Of course, none of this was surprising to anyone who was paying attention. Viewers of The Future of Vaccines already knew the truth about these non-vaccines way back in December of 2020.
To be sure, there are any number of ancillary fake news stories that deserve to share in this award:
Like the NBC opinion piece, “The Covid vaccine is safe, whatever anti-vaxxers say. Here’s why we can trust it,” which dovetails with the Milken Institute talk on a “universal flu vaccine” that took place in October of 2019 and featured Tony Fauci and Rick Bright discussing the need for a crisis to speed up development of mRNA vaccines (2019). (More on that aspect of the scam from the Unlimited Hangout series on Moderna: Part I and Part II.)
Also, there was the fake news narrative about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That propaganda fairy tale has been utterly smashed over the past year by Ryan Cristian of The Last American Vagabond, who has amply demonstrated that the truth is the polar opposite. In fact, there is a pandemic of the injected.
Then there are the “mystery heart attack” stories, like “Mystery rise in heart attacks from blocked arteries,” which miraculously fails to even mention the word “vaccine” despite the fact that the experimental mRNA injection are scientifically proven to “dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle” and “Up to 300,000 people facing heart-related illnesses due to post-pandemic stress disorder, warn physicians,” which cites “two London physicians” claiming (without evidence) that “as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder” before bizarrely pivoting into the one and only health condition they attribute to the disorder: heart related problems . . . without ever once mentioning (you guessed it!) the scientifically-proven link between the experimental COVID injections and the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis among otherwise healthy young men. (And that’s not even mentioning the 278% increase in heart attack deaths among soccer players this past year.)
There’s also Brianne Dressen and all the other people with life-altering injuries from the injections who have been censored, suppressed and marginalized over and over this past year.
And then there’s the Noam Chomskys of the world saying that the unvaxxed will have to be segregated from society and starve to death if necessary and the Neil Youngs of the world clamouring for the suppression of information on this subject.
Truly, many many people have contributed to this, the fakest story of the year (if not the century) and the largest ongoing uncontrolled medical experiment in the history of the human species.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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After several years in being at the forefront of Western mainstream media’s coverage of the war on Yemen, describing it as being between the Saudi-led coalition and the “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels”, the news agency Reuters appears to have stopped using this phrase, and even ceased referring to the Houthis as “rebels” altogether.
With the exception of some image captions, the last time the news agency used the phrase in a body of text was as recent as a month ago, with subsequent articles now referring to the group as the Iran-aligned “Houthi movement“(formally the Ansar Allah). Though they have on occasion previously referred to the group as such, throughout the course of the seven-year war the dominant narrative has been that of troublesome “rebels”. Reuters, of course, is not alone in this regard as a plethora of news sites and agencies continue with this slant, including the Associated Press. Leading news services such as Reuters influence other news organisations and therefore how we perceive events, in effect acting as “wholesale news providers”.
While this slight editorial amendment may not seem like that much of a big deal, for those of us who have been monitoring the developments of the conflict over the years, including its coverage in the media, this is quite a significant step forward in how members of the international community perceive and understand the war in Yemen. Crucially, this also could be a nod towards the eventual recognition of the Houthi-led National Salvation Government (NSG), which has been the de facto revolutionary government for most of the densely populated north of the country since it was established in 2016.
The shift away from the framing of the Ansar Allah movement as a rag-tag bunch of rebels is important, because contrary to what has often been stated, the conflict wasn’t sparked by the mere seizing of the capital Sanaa by Houthi militiamen alone in 2014. They had the support of most of Yemen’s armed forces – once long-time former foes following six round of wars since 2004 when the Houthis were indeed a rebel faction. Many of these armed forces were loyalists to the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh and have remained in this alliance despite Saleh’s demise at the hands of Houthis over attempts to return to the Saudi fold.
This event, the fall of Sanaa, is referred locally and popularly at least in the north, as the September 21 Revolution and itself was ignited by the failures of the so-called Gulf Initiative whereby President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi was to serve as an interim leader for two years (which was extended to the present after he won an uncontested election), and the fateful decision by Hadi to cut fuel subsidies, which the Houthis and other oppositionists united against in mass protests.
This was actually the region’s sole genuine “revolution” in so far as post-Arab Spring political upheavals are concerned, despite being incomplete and not supported in the south, which has its own complex history and political aspirations. The potent mix of military support and alliances with the majority faction of political elites of the old order belonging to Saleh’s former ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) party has helped explain and maintain the Houthis’ hold on power over the capital and elsewhere in the north, with most of the media attention focused on an exaggerated role of Iran, which recognises and supports the NSG authorities.
However the fact that Yemeni armed forces are fighting against the Saudi-led coalition and its disparate mercenary and militia forces on the ground is more often than not overlooked or omitted from reports by press agencies who tend to simplify the conflict as being one between the Saudi-led coalition – which was called upon by the Saudi-based, exiled President Hadi – against an Iranian-backed rebel group. While it could be that the average consumer of these reports are not looking for in-depth, political analysis, which of course can be found elsewhere, it certainly doesn’t help in our comprehension of who is who, and therefore obscures the political reality and helps prolong the conflict.
The obfuscation caused by painting the joint military and Houthi “popular committees” forces as mere “Houthi rebels” in the mainstream media is an issue I have raised and have written about on several occasions since writing for MEMO and it is promising to finally see this being corrected.
What really caught my attention recently on this change, was a Reuters explainer piece on the war in Yemen, which has also been republished on the MEMO site. It states: “In late 2014, the Houthis seized Sana’a with help from pro-Saleh army units, initially forcing Hadi to share power, then arresting him in early 2015”, which as far as I’m aware is the perhaps the closest the agency has come to acknowledging the Yemeni military’s role in the revolution.
It has only been a month since Reuters has dropped the “Houthi rebels” trope and is still early days, but there is a chance that discontinuing this unhelpful and inaccurate narrative will be replicated in other news sites and international organisations. The recent retaliatory attacks against coalition partner the UAE – an important global hub, by Yemen’s Houthi-aligned armed forces, has brought the world’s attention back onto the movement and their increasingly sophisticated military capabilities. They are clearly being taken more seriously, with further warnings that the Dubai Expo could be targeted if the Emiratis continue their war efforts against Yemen, which includes occupying Socotra and backing the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC). Strategically and a major escalation for the Houthis, the UAE is also supporting the formidable Giants Brigade forces who have been undermining the Houthi advance onto Marib city, the last pro-Hadi stronghold in the north.
This all contributes to the renewed interest in the Houthis, who they are and where they stand in this war. As the NSG wields the most power and authority in the country, and most of the armed forces are fighting with the Houthis against foreign aggressors amid continued war crimes and a humanitarian crisis, it becomes more imperative than ever for the world to be more informed and at least get a better idea of the conflict. Moving on from the idea that this is a war against a group of rebels is a start in the right direction, albeit long overdue.
January 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Ansar Allah, Human rights, Yemen |
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