Ever heard of Monkey Werx? He hosts a You Tube channel that focuses on tracking U.S. civilian and military flights. Sounds pretty innocuous and boring. No more. Turns out that Monkey Werx provided a video report last September (September 30th to be precise) that confirms part of Sy Hersh’s account of the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
And here is the Monkey Werx report from September 30th (relevant info starts at the 2 minute mark) tracking that P8 Poseidon:
There still are some people in the intelligence community who are patriots and are alarmed by Biden’s lawless behavior. I imagine that the Biden Administration will launch a witch hunt for the intelligence officers who alerted Sy Hersh to this story. According to the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war on another country. Joe Biden has usurped that authority and carried out an act of war against a NATO ally (Germany). The potential ramifications of this act include the heightened risk of the U.S. starting a shooting war with Russia.
Former Twitter executives looked at times uncomfortable, but betrayed their staunch anti-free speech biases during a House Oversight Committee heading on Wednesday.
The hearing was called to investigate the role government played, specifically the FBI, with regards to censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop report by the New York Post.
Former Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Former Deputy General Counsel James Baker, and Former Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth were grilled by Representatives, with Congressman Clay Higgins telling them they could be arrested for interfering with the 2020 presidential election.
“The bottom line is that the FBI had the Biden Crime Family laptop for a year. They knew it was leaking. They knew it would hurt the Biden family. So the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence from being revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 election,” Higgins asserted.
“You, ladies and gentlemen interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election! Knowingly and willingly!” he continued, adding “That’s the bad news! It’s gonna get worse! Because this is the investigation part! Later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.”
“I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come,” the Congressman added.
Elsewhere during the hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace blasted the former executives for also, as highlighted by the Elon Musk’s release of The Twitter Files, working to suppress information regarding COVID.
“I along with many Americans have long term effects from COVID. Not only was I a long-hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine,” Mae declared.
She continued, “It wasn’t the first shot but it was the second shot. I have now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand. And I have the occasional heart pains that no doctor can explain. And I’ve had a battery of tests.”
“I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s suppression spread into medical fields,” Mace told the former execs.
“You’re not a doctor, right?” Mace directly asked Gadde, adding “What makes you think you or anyone else at Twitter have the medical expertise to censor actual, accurate CDC data?”
Gadded pathetically claimed she was not familiar with these particular situations.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re not,” Mace shot back.
Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told them they “got played by the FBI” over the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Roth to admit that the New York Post report didn’t violate any Twitter policies in his opinion, but was censored anyway.
“This to me is the real takeaway,” Jordan said, going on to state “51 former intelligence officials, five days after you guys take down the Hunter Biden story and block the New York Post’s account, five days later, 51 former intel officials send a letter and they say, ‘the Hunter Biden story has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ The information operation was run on you guys, and then by extension then run on the American people. And that’s the concern.”
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert asked the former Twitter executives “Who the hell do you think you are?” for shadow banning people they disagree with on the platform.
Boebert also asked the execs if they had shadow banned her own account.
“I can reach out to Elon and to his staff, and I can see what’s happened ,and I can sit here today and hold you all in account,” Boebert concluded, adding “I am angry for the millions of Americans who were silenced because of your decisions, because of your actions, because of your collusion with the federal government. They can’t reach out to Elon. They can’t sit here today and hold you in account.”
The chair of the Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky highlighted Tweets made by Roth in the past calling Republicans ‘Nazis’.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told Roth “You permanently banned my Twitter account but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.”
The former execs mostly either claimed ignorance and denied any wrong doing.
James Baker said he can’t recall speaking with the FBI while working at Twitter, and denied that he acted unlawfully.
Meanwhile, Roth attempted to argue that censorship on Twitter under his watch helped to create more freedom of speech.
Roth also admitted that he finds it “regrettable” that the conservative account LibsOfTikTok is still allowed to be active on Twitter… More videos
‘Just an ear infection, here’s some antibiotics,’ was my hospital diagnosis after a five-minute assessment; strange, as I couldn’t understand how an ear infection could make my eye swell and deliver an excruciating head pain akin to being hit with a hammer four days earlier.
I had an Oxford University/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine on March 28, 2021. I was 54. The government said it would enable people to get back to some kind of normality, both family and work (I was in the clothing industry). It was implied that it was our duty to protect those around us by being vaccinated. Thirdly, I was the carer for my frail 87-year-old father, living alone since my mother’s death in 2006.
The ‘ear infection’ pain got worse, the symptoms debilitating, I thought at one point I was going to die. I’m not a moaner but I just wasn’t comfortable with what I was told, and so began my road-blocked journey to VITT (vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis) diagnosis.
Once a diagnosis is given, it is nigh on impossible to get it changed, and for three months after I was told I had an ear infection I went back and forth to my GP, writing letters explaining my symptoms, asking for neurological referral, all to no avail.
I was eventually granted eye and blood tests. The eye test result recommended neurological assessment, but the killer was being handed my blood test results without explanation, just some notations stating ‘Abnormal see Doctor’.
Now very worried, I decided to see a private neurologist. I hadn’t even sat down before the neurologist, sizing me up in an instant, said ‘Something’s not right’ and suddenly I was an NHS emergency.
NHS MRI/CT scans and blood tests followed and then silence. All the adrenaline ebbs away and one gets back to life . . . until that moment when the phone rings, you see the word HOSPITAL on the display, and your pulse starts racing. It’s that call, and the calm voice you are hearing is telling you there’s a blood clot in your brain.
I didn’t take it in, I started shaking. I asked the neurologist (who is wonderful) to slow down as I couldn’t understand any of it.
A few days later I’m talking to a haematologist, again a wonderful person, and with pills and blood tests under way I had gathered myself and was able to ask questions.
I later wrote to my hospital and GP telling them of my diagnosis. I’ve got the ‘Sorry about that’ letters, the ‘we learned a lot/the MHRA didn’t tell us’ etc reasons. And I still have the blood clot I first told them I thought I had as a consequence of my vaccine.
Today, I feel if I’d been admitted on first presentation I’d have recovered. Instead, my NHS-diagnosed VITT blood clot and head pain are a constant reminder, my walking stick an embarrassment, and all the rest: my drooping eye, the vision fluctuation, the increased cranium pressure and broken teeth from my falls, the loss of my driving licence, PTSD, the lumbar puncture, blood thinners and the other procedures/appointments I now have after taking a ‘safe and effective’ vaccine – I can’t even work any more.
The impact has been just as bad for my father. I was pretty much his only link with the outside world, but because of my injury and all that goes with it (not being able to drive, for example) I can’t provide care for him. His health and well-being have suffered greatly. Now he has full-time live-in care, which he has to pay for, and has been in and out of hospitals since.
It’s all dreadfully sad. I have apologised to him and my family for my taking the vaccine. I wish I could turn the clock back and be a normal husband, dad and son again, but all that’s been ripped away from me. Everyone in a family suffers when it’s a vaccine injury, not just the vaccinated.
If you are vaccine injured, or know someone who is, you can contact or read about the the Covid-19 vaccine injury support group, UK CV Family, here.
The Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed last September by the US in a covert operation, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed. The legendary reporter made the bombshell revelation in an article posted to his newly launched blog on Substack on Wednesday.
The explosives were planted at the pipelines back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise, Hersh reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The journalist noted he had reached the White House and the CIA for comment, with both firmly rejecting the claim as“utterly false.”
The bombs were detonated three months later on September 26 with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy. The buoy was dropped near the Nord Stream pipelines by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane, according to the report.
The operation came to fruition following months of back-and-forth between the White House, the CIA and the military, with the officials focusing on how to leave no trace of the US involvement in the attack. The planning process began back in December 2021, when a special task force was created with the direct participation of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report read.
The source told Hersh that everybody involved understood the operation was not some “kiddie stuff” and was actually an “an act of war.” Throughout “all of this scheming” certain officials urged the White House to drop the idea entirely. “Some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out,’” according to the source.
Originally, the explosives were to have a 48-hour-timer and were set to be planted by the end of BALTOPS22, Hersh reported citing the same source. The two-day window, however, was ultimately deemed to be too close to the end of the exercise by the White House, which ordered the task force to come up with an on-demand method of detonating them. The latter ultimately turned out to be the sonar buoy idea.
The Joe Biden’s administration has been “focused” on jeopardizing the Nord Stream pipelines – initially through sanctions, and, ultimately, with direct sabotage – seeing it as a key to swaying Europe under its cause amid then-looming conflict in Ukraine, Hersh noted.
“As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he wrote.
Moscow has provided a similar take on the incident shortly after the blasts, branding them a “terrorist attack” and stating that the US was the nation that benefited most from it, by speeding up Europe’s attempts to wean itself off the Russian gas.
Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq.
The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care.On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media:
“He’s [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don’t work, inspections can’t work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell’s presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame.”
I was 100% correct in my assessment.
I was in Japan at the invitation of Japanese activists to generate political opposition to America’s looming war on Iraq. I addressed the Japanese parliament and spoke with several major Japanese media outlets. Shortly after Powell finished speaking, I gave an interview with Kyodo News, where I dismissed Powell’s assertions that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction as “unsubstantiated.”
“There’s nothing here that’s conclusive proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” I told Kyodo News. “Everything in here is circumstantial, everything in here mirrors the kind of allegations the US has made in the past in regard to Iraq’s weapons program,” I said. “He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people – and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people.”
Powell’s iconic moment was when he raised a vial of white powder – a proxy intended to simulate dry powder anthrax, a potent biological weapons agent, in an effort to link Iraq with the terrorist attacks in the US in October 2001 where dry powder anthrax was sent through the US postal system in envelopes. Ironically, the anthrax in question was actually produced by the US. Iraq is only known to have produced liquid bulk anthrax, which has a shelf life of only three years, and the last known batch of liquid bulk anthrax was produced in 1991 at a state-owned factory which was destroyed in 1996.
“Colin Powell holds up a vial of dry powder anthrax and he makes allusions to the attack in the United States through the letters. That was US government anthrax! It had nothing to do with Iraq,” I said. Powell, I explained, was engaging in “classic bait-and-switch” in his presentation. “Iraq, anthrax, vial, dry powder – what connection do they have? None!”
During my February 4 media event in Japan, I made the following prediction about the consequences of Powell’s UN presentation:
“The United States will seek to compel the Security Council into passing a new resolution, if the Security Council fails to do so the United States will go it alone with its narrow coalition and I see a massive aerial bombardment beginning by the end of February, I see ground troops in significant numbers crossing over into Iraq by early March, and I don’t see this war finishing anytime soon. While we may occupy Baghdad sometime in June, we’ll be occupying Iraq for months, if not years. It will be an occupation that will be carried out with the violent opposition of the Iraqi people, and I see an increase in the acts of anti-American terror abroad. I think an American invasion of Iraq is the best recruitment poster that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda will ever have.”
I challenged Powell’s assertions until I was blue in the face, including at a public forum held at the University of Tokyo the day after Powell spoke, February 6.
It was to no avail.
“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more,” Powell told the Security Council, “and he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.”
All lies. But the US mainstream media repeated his words as gospel, and the American people ate it up as if it were Manna from heaven. My country went to war based upon a foundation of lies told by someone who, up until that moment, was seen as one of the most credible individuals in American public service ever.
The Powell presentation set a precedent of public lies which haunts the US and the world to this day. The United States, it seems, is incapable of telling the truth about anything, especially when it deals with national security and foreign policy.
The current manifestation of this precedent is playing out before the world when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As was the case with Iraq and Anthrax, the US leads a coalition of compliant partners in spreading similar lies about Russia, whether to ignore history when labeling the Russian decision to intervene an “unprovoked act of aggression”, backing the Ukrainian version of the Bucha massacre, or misleading the Ukrainians and the world about the ability of US-led injections of military equipment to change the tide of battle against Russia – it won’t.
It is virtually impossible for Russia to even begin to contemplate negotiations when the party sitting at the other side of the table, the United States, incorporates lies into every aspect of its argument. The Powell Precedent is pure poison, and the world, especially Russia, would be foolish to accept any drink from a chalice offered by the United States.
Colin Powell may no longer be with us, but his legacy lives on in the bodyguard of lies he helped build around everything the US has said and done since that fateful day 20 years ago.
Updated boosters and annual Covid shots mirroring session flu shots are the orders coming out of the recent FDA VRBPAC meeting. What data is supporting these ideas? Was this the plan all along? The HighWire gives their analysis.
One dose of Pfizer, just one! Within 30 minutes, while I was still driving home, I had a sudden feeling of the worst flu. My throat, eyes, lips and neck swelled to double their size and I couldn’t breathe. Within an hour welts appeared on my legs, arms, chest and even in my hair. I was taken by ambulance to A&E and given an epi-pen. Twenty-four months on and I have a formal diagnosis of chronic angioedema and urticaria. I’m no better, every day my lips and face swell. I have drooping eyelids, blurred vision, tremors, uninvestigated and untreated spikes in heart rate for no reason, and protruding veins all over my body. Then there is the horrendous tinnitus and 60 per cent loss in hearing. Sinus problems (lesions in the nasal cavity), pain at the back of the head, stomach pain and an intolerance to more than 200 foods. I can’t go out in sunshine because it literally burns the scalp and skin. This is now my life.
The doctors’ advice is to have the second jab! I don’t think so. It was 18 months and 21 visits to A&E before my GP surgery finally got to see me face to face, and then declared that I was too much of a specialist case for them to treat.
I am no anti-vaxxer. I had the jab in good faith thinking that it would mean life returning to normal, to see my children and grandchildren. The lack of medical care and investigation on any symptoms other than the urticaria and angioedema is both criminal and despicable along with their constant texts and letters telling me to get a second dose.
It’s an emotional journey and a very visual one. I have lost all confidence in socialising; the constant swelling has meant my skin has aged ten years in 24 months. I can no longer see well enough to drive, and that is a loss of independence.
The UK CV Family group https://www.ukcvfamily.org/ is a lifeline for me. I can’t thank the creators of the group enough for giving me the simple realisation I am not alone. Daily we see new members. I welcome them with the same message: welcome and so sorry you have to be here.
The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.
The dim and eternally concerned Twitter epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo (who would be a disgrace to her field, if the field of public health weren’t already a disgrace) posted a hilarious nineteen-tweet thread that gathers all the typical excuses and cries to the heavens for more studies, because the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Intriguingly, as others have noted, Nuzzo used to think totally differently about the utility of masking. In 2006, our epidemiological luminary co-authored a paper on Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, which flatly admits that “the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets” and that no data support using N95 or FFP2 respirators outside of healthcare settings. Like all pandemic authorities, Nuzzo had sensible ideas right up until the moment her ideas became important.
Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, has added to the pain and embarrassment of Team Mask by granting this interview to Maryanne Demasi, in which he reiterates bluntly that “there’s no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” no evidence that respirators do anything even in healthcare settings, blames misguided mask mandates on bad governmental advisers, and criticises the masking “craziness” that took root in 2020, in which “strident campaigners” – “activists, not scientists” – like “academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks.” He also makes an observation that is often aired at the plague chronicle, namely that the failure of masks to do very much indicates that virus transmission itself is poorly understood, and far more complicated than we tend to assume. You should read the whole thing for yourself.
Here, I want to highlight one crucial point. Jefferson explains that he and his co-authors were ready to publish a review on the evidence for masking and other physical interventions in April 2020, but that Cochrane held up its appearance by “inexplicably” demanding a further peer reviewer. This effectively delayed publication by months, in precisely the period that novel mask mandates were emerging all across the world. When the review was finally cleared for publication in November – long after its chance to influence mask policies had passed – the authors were directed to insert all manner of language softening their conclusions, and Cochrane included an accompanying editorial on why “Policy makers must act on incomplete evidence in responding to COVID-19.”
Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.
In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.
Other than a few dead-end doom addicts on social media, most people agree that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. SARS-CoV-2 has entered a stage of endemicity, similar to that of common cold coronaviruses, where there will be sporadic, seasonal outbreaks of cold and flu-like illness as immunity wanes in recovered and vaccinated individuals.
The pandemic was a worldwide disaster, claiming the lives of millions of people. It wasn’t a war against an enemy, as the virus didn’t surrender or sign any peace agreements. SARS-CoV-2 was contained by population immunity, just as similar pandemic viruses have been in the past.
The origin of the virus is still in dispute. Some virologists have tried to shut down any debate while pushing a zoonotic origin as the only possibility. However, a lab leak is no longer a wild theory, it’s a plausible explanation based on evidence from a variety of independentsources.
Yet there was another parallel disaster that was certainly man-made, and that was the US pandemic response. Panicked health officials and politicians failed to implement measures that would protect those most vulnerable to severe COVID-19, including elderly in assisted living facilities, which comprised one-third of all COVID deaths. Instead, leaders insisted on harmful and unfocused measures such as shutdowns, school closures, and universal masking, with little evidence of their benefit.
Attention to other medical issues, such as cancer screenings and diagnosis and treatment of other diseases, as well as childhood vaccinations, all disappeared in a wave of COVID monomania. The consequences of this ill-advised singular focus will be with us for many years. It is of paramount importance that the mistakes that led to this man-made disaster are not repeated.
The governments of European countries have begun to conduct public inquiries into their COVID responses, including Norway, Sweden,The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. It is past time for the United States to join this list, and critical given the worldwide influence of the CDC, FDA, and NIH/NIAID.
Members of the US Congress are conducting such an inquiry, and their efforts require the help of physicians, scientists and public health policy experts to identify key policy decisions and provide a rationale for investigating those policies and the officials and government agencies that devised and implemented them, with the ultimate goal of meaningful reform.
With help from Brownstone Institute, the Norfolk Group was organized in May, 2022, with the goal of providing a blueprint containing key questions for a congressional inquiry into the public health aspects of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The group consists of eight scientists, physicians and policy experts, and seven of us met in person in Norfolk, Connecticut over Memorial Day weekend. All eight members continued to meet virtually over the summer, fall, and winter as the document was written and continuously revised.
Because the group was comprised of individuals from diverse backgrounds, without oversight from any public or private institutions (including Brownstone), we chose to name ourselves The Norfolk Group, and publish our document independently on the website www.NorfolkGroup.org.
The eight members of the Norfolk Group are:
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD; epidemiologist, health economist, and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom.
Leslie Bienen, MFA, DVM; veterinarian, zoonotic disease researcher, and faculty member at Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (through December 31st 2022). She left in January 2023 to work in healthcare policy.
Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD; emergency room physician and computational engineer for medical decision making; associate professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD; physician and PhD epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California-San Francisco, clinical researcher in healthcare policy and practicing Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation physician.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, FDhc; epidemiologist and biostatistician; professor of medicine at Harvard University (on leave); founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom.
Marty Makary, MD, MPH; surgeon and healthcare policy scientist; professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Margery Smelkinson, PhD; infectious disease scientist and microscopist whose research predominantly focuses on host/pathogen interactions.
Steven Templeton, PhD; immunologist; associate professor at Indiana University School of Medicine.
The document provides questions and supporting information regarding ten areas of the US pandemic response, including:
Protecting High Risk Americans
Infection Acquired Immunity
School Closures
Collateral Lockdown Harms
Public Health Data and Risk Communication
Epidemiologic Modeling
Therapeutics and Clinical Interventions
Vaccines
Testing and Contact Tracing
Masks
In preparing this document, we did not conduct any interviews or unearth any previously unseen documents. All the information contained in the document was and is publicly available, and we have provided links to each source throughout.
We have detailed evidence that was available at each time point during the pandemic, and have documented instances where the US health agencies, officials, and politicians ignored or suppressed discussion of that evidence. We ask questions that attempt to discover why key individuals failed to consider all aspects of public health instead of engaging in a damaging singular focus on community-wide suppression of an age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified infectious disease. Why was the uncertainty of evidence supporting the effectiveness of mitigation measures not acknowledged? How was pressure from pharmaceutical companies, teachers’ unions, and other special interests related to the abandonment of evidence-based policies? These questions broadly apply to all of the ten areas covered in our document, and together with specific questions and supporting data, resulted in eighty pages. This was no small effort, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.
Our document focuses solely on the public health-related aspects of the US pandemic response. Although the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may be in dispute, our document does not ask questions related to this active area of investigation. Separate committees have been and will be organized to address that issue. We have also avoided the topics of economic mismanagement and the role of media in creating or exacerbating pandemic response crises. A media-focused document was released in July, 2022, and an economics-related document was released in December.
Critics will no doubt reflexively label our document as a partisan effort funded with a secret pile of Koch money. Other than the initial efforts of Brownstone Institute to bring us together, there was no outside influence. Our website is self-funded. Understandably, many of our questions and supporting evidence could and likely will be used for partisan purposes, as one party will lead any COVID-19 response commission while the other may be reluctant to cooperate. It is our hope that despite this messy and partisan process, the truth will emerge, individuals will be held accountable, and an opportunity will emerge for serious reform of dysfunctional government agencies.
An inquiry into the US COVID-19 pandemic response cannot be avoided, and we are trailing other countries in efforts to identify mistakes, demand accountability, and propose solutions. It might be an ugly process, but it is a necessary one. We hope our document will move US leaders and policymakers toward the goal of ensuring that the mistakes of our pandemic response are never repeated.
Steve Templeton is a Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute. His research focuses on the immune response to the human opportunistic pathogens. He is currently writing a book on infectious diseases and pandemics.
Tehran – In a lecture and Q&A with foreign journalists last night, strategic analyst Dr. Mostafa Khosh-Cheshm summarized the history and current state of what he described as the US hybrid war on Iran. He asserted that the American campaign has stalled due to Iran’s successful counterattacks and deterrents, but anticipates possible escalation into new battlegrounds despite the American side’s failure to make any progress toward achieving its objectives.
The apparent failure of the Israeli-inspired US hybrid war on Iran comes at the worst possible time for the US empire, which faces impending military catastrophe in Ukraine as even The New York Times has belatedly admitted. Future historians may look back on the neoconservatives’ decision to simultaneously target Russia, China, and Iran as one of the biggest blunders in history, on the scale of those analyzed in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Writing of the foolish Goth king Recared, who inadvertently opened Spain to Muslim conquest, Tuchman notes that “for a ruler opposed by two inimical groups, it is folly to continue antagonizing both at once” (p.16). True enough; and how much more foolish to simultaneously antagonize three such groups!
The biggest mistake, from a US geo-strategic perspective, is making an enemy of Iran. China and to a lesser extent Russia are, due to their size and resources, peer competitors whose aspirations the US has reason to wish to contain. Iran, for its part, is a large and important country blessed with significant natural and human resources, but is not a natural peer competitor of the US. But since it occupies a critically-important strategic location at the crossroads of the Eurasia-Africa world island, and has historically suffered from Russia’s southward expansion, Iran and the US have every reason to maintain friendly relations and make win-win deals. The problem, from Iran’s perspective, is that the US seems incapable of making win-win deals (and sticking to them) while respecting the sovereignty of its partners. Instead, it arbitrarily shreds its own solemn agreements and aggressively insists on economically and militarily subjugating other nations, while exporting its own decadence in the form of “woke” obsessions with deviant sexuality, attacks on traditional family structures, nihilistic Soros-funded revolts against all forms of traditional authority, and other bizarre fetishes that the non-Western world wants no part of.
According to Dr. Khosh-Cheshm, the US is attacking Iran with a multi-point hybrid war. He listed the following battlegrounds:
War of perception. The US and its vassals, especially Saudi Arabia, maintain and lavishly fund Farsi-language propaganda media, which work in tandem with Zionist-owned Mockingbird mainstream media to wage psychological war on Iran. Among their mendacious perception-management ops, these weaponized media have created false impressions that “Iranians are rising up against their government,” which leads us to the second category:
Instigating riots/ color revolutions. The CIA and its allies (Soros, etc.) regularly try to overthrow governments they don’t like by fomenting riots and trying to escalate them into bloody civil wars. The trick is to find a way to get a crowd into the street to protest against the targeted government. It’s easy enough to create such a crowd of “protestors” using paid agents (rent-a-mobs) while trolling for dupes on social media. (Note that almost all major social media are controlled by the CIA, as the Twitter Files has revealed.) Once a crowd has taken to the street, paid agents instigate violence by smashing windows, burning shops and cars and police stations, attacking police, and generally inciting mayhem. When the police respond by trying to control the crowd and arresting perpetrators of violence, snipers on rooftops and/or or infiltrators with handguns shoot both police and protestors, with the intention of making each side blame the other. Additionally, knife attacks on police are a new wrinkle the CIA is apparently experimenting with in Iran. 60 police officers were murdered by CIA assets in three months, using the weapons that Mike Pompeo bragged about smuggling to US-supported terrorists in Iran. According to Dr. Khosh Cheshm, protestors facing police were frequently shot from behind with handguns with silencers. Other random people unrelated to the protests, sometimes six blocks or more away, were murdered by the same CIA-trained Operation Gladio professionals. Western media reports falsely blamed these murders on Iranian police. “It’s called ‘taking the toll,’ Dr. Khosh Cheshm explained. Alongside a smaller number of actual victims of the rioters-vs.-police clashes, the Gladio victims inflate the toll and contribute to the impression of outlandish government repression, when in fact it is the government’s restraint, in the face of the murder by CIA terrorists of 60 police in three months, that is outlandish.
The real-life CIA riot campaign in Iran has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The largest crowd of “protestors” anywhere in Iran numbered only around 600, while vastly larger marches have supported the government. (Annual commemoration of the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, including this weekend’s, always draw millions of people.) But CIA-organized protests in dozens of Iranian cities, despite drawing smallish crowds, have provided images, soundbites, and other fodder for the concocted media war.
Iran is vulnerable to these tactics because it bends over backward to protect the right to peacefully protest. Under the CIA-asset Shah’s regime, protests were banned and routinely met with extreme violence by police and soldiers. Protestors were dragged to CIA-built torture chambers and tortured by CIA-trained torturers. The Islamic Republic reacted against this sad history by enshrining the right to protest in the constitution. So protests are constantly happening in Iran, and always have been since 1979. The normalcy of protesting makes it easier for the CIA to get crowds of at least a few hundred people, many of them sincere protestors duped by social media propaganda, into the streets to provide cover for the Operation Gladio operatives’ violence.
Iran’s government has neutralized the CIA color revolution primarily through flexibility and mercy (though the “Iranian war on terror” has unfortunately included a degree of extrajudicial violence as all such efforts do). Several months ago the government ordered police to stop enforcing mandatory hijab, and it is now normal to see a few women in public with fully-uncovered hair. But the vast majority, well over 90%, still cover—showing that there is no mass support for the CIA’s anti-hijab campaign.
The government’s “mercy and flexibility” approach also includes Monday’s announcement by the Supreme Leader pardoning tens of thousands of prisoners, a fraction of whom are protestors. All protestors except paid CIA-Soros agents and terrorists are being pardoned, alongside a much larger number of common criminals. It’s worth noting that Western media reports of protestors being executed are misrepresentations. In reality, the “protestors” who were executed were murderers who stabbed or shot police officers. Their executions came after murder convictions.
Funding separatist terrorist groups. Alongside astroturf protests focusing on the headscarf and economic issues, the US, Saudis, and Israelis have armed, funded, and incited separatist terrorists in Kurdistan and especially in Arabic-speaking Khuzestan. The latter region harbors ISIS-style groups propagandized, recruited, and paid by the Saudis to commit mayhem. Though a nuisance, and a tragedy for individual victims and their families, these groups are too small, and their appeal is too limited, to make a decisive contribution to the hybrid war.
Cyber wars. The US and Israel, not necessarily in that order, have launched what Dr. Khosh Cheshm calls “vast cyber-attacks” on Iran’s infrastructure. Last spring, dozens of Iranian entities were targeted. Shortly thereafter, the Albanian government’s entire data base “vanished into the cloud.” In its place, a message appeared: “We love the people of Albania, but the MEK (the biggest US-supported anti-Iran terrorist group) is there doing cyber and physical terrorism. We are sorry your data has been removed.” NATO threatened retaliation but did nothing effectual. Meanwhile Israel routinely launches anti-Iran cyber-attacks, but Iran’s ability to retaliate in kind, and its increasing reliance of nearly-unhackable homegrown software, has limited the effectiveness of anti-Iran cyber-warfare.
Foreign currency meddling: The US government and its oligarch owners, notably people like George Soros, are experts at attacking the value of targeted nations’ currencies. They have had only modest success at sending the message that Iran’s refusal to surrender in negotiations with the US will be punished with such attacks, which inflict economic pain on ordinary Iranians.
Assassinations: A significant number of Iranian scientists and government officials have been assassinated, chiefly by Israel’s Mossad, but also by the US, as in the case of General Soleimani. Iran’s policy is normally tit-for-tat payback. For example, in response to the murder of Iran’s top physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Israeli rocket scientist Aby Har-Even, the founder and head of Israel’s rocketry and space programs, “succumbed to wounds sustained when rioters torched Efendi Hotel (owned by Israel’s aerospace agency) at the peak of Arab-Jewish violence” according to the Times of Israel. The precisely one hundred stab wounds that ended the life of Har-Even sent a message about the excessiveness of Israel’s murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and Netanyahu’s threat against Iran of “death by a thousand cuts.” Note that such presumed Iranian tit-for-tat assassinations are deniable and have not been publicized by either side.
In the case of General Soleimani, Iran is exacting multipronged revenge, consisting of the well-known rocket attack on the US base at Ain al-Assad, Iraq; threatened assassinations of every major US official involved in the murder, with bounties on all their heads (including a one million dollar bounty on Trump); and the eventual termination of the Zionist entity occupying Palestine, and expulsion of the US from the region.
Sabotage. After Israel’s second attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, the center of Israel’s ballistic missile program mysteriously blew up. The mushroom cloud was visible for miles around. An Israeli leader of the program was cited in the media begging “please stop, we’re losing more than the Iranians.” That media story was in fact a covert message asking Iran for a truce.
Shipping war. The US and especially Israel are bent on disrupting Iran’s oil exports and have attacked and seized various Iranian ships, and even non-Iranian ships allegedly containing oil sourced to Iran. Iran has responded, as usual, tit-for-tat retaliation. For instance, after one such ship was seized off the coast of Greece last spring, Iran seized two Greek ships, which were held until the Iranian ship was released. Iran’s ability to retaliate has led to a change in tactics: Now captains are being offered bribes to renege on their delivery agreements. But few if any are doing so, perhaps because making Iran a lifelong enemy is just not worth it.
Sanctions/Economic pressure. Iran is buried beneath layers upon layers of sanctions and has responded by learning how to evade them. During the past year, virtually the whole world, with the exception of a handful of ultra-compliant US vassals, is joining the sanctions-evading game, thanks to the counterproductive sanctions on Russia. Many are asking Iran for advice. Though sanctions have negatively affected the Iranian economy, they have not even come close to damaging it badly enough to make a difference.
Pressuring the IAEA UN, and other international bodies. The US is pushing the IAEA to charge Iran with noncompliance and take it to the UN. But that is a two year process. It would only take two months to achieve similar objectives by invoking the trigger process in the JCPOA nuclear deal. So once again, the US is trying to increase psychological pressure on Iran, but lacks the means to enforce its wishes
Abraham accords. The US has attempted to ramp up pressure on Iran by weaponizing the Arab signatories of the so-called Abraham Accords, a phony Palestine-Israel peace plan that is despised by virtually the entire population of the region. Not only is the Arab public strongly pro-Palestine, as this year’s World Cup in Doha showed, but even the supposedly pro-Zionist Arab leadership is giving the Americans the cold shoulder. Saudi leader Bin Salman, for example, has refused to take Biden’s and Blinken’s phone calls, humiliated Biden with “second-rate guest” treatment, and generally made it clear that Saudi Arabia is no longer taking American orders.
Failure of the Hybrid War
The Israeli-American hybrid war on Iran has stalled, as Iran fights the aggressors to a stalemate on each battleground. Iran has successfully sent the message: “For each wound you inflict, we will retaliate with an equivalent or worse.” As a result, the US is in no position to force Iran into the kind of agreement the Americans want: A renewed “JCPOA” that would not provide Iran with any significant sanctions relief. The Americans want the promised “relief” to only last for three years, after which it would be canceled if Iran doesn’t succumb to American demands unrelated to the nuclear remit. Since no US or European companies will invest in Iran unless they are guaranteed a two or three decade time frame in which they won’t be sanctioned and forced to pull out at a loss, the US proposal as it stands won’t help Iran’s economy and thus offers Iran no incentive to join.
So the hybrid war’s purpose is to bring Iran to its knees and ultimately force it to dismantle its (non-nuclear) rocket program, abandon its ties to Axis of Resistance allies, and thereby deeply compromise its national security and its sovereignty. For Iran, of course, that’s a non-starter. Iran would be happy to comply with the original JCPOA, severely limit its 100% civilian nuclear program, and enjoy genuine sanctions relief. But that’s not enough for the Zionist-run US. Why not? The real underlying issue is Iran’s commitment to the liberation of Palestine. As long as Iran stands by the Palestinians, the US, dominated by Zionist oligarchs, will do everything it can to hobble Iran and ultimately subjugate and enslave it.
The problem is that Iran, like Russia, can match any feasible escalation. Just as the Russians have rough nuclear parity with the Americans, Iran has a formidable non-nuclear “nuclear option”: shutting down oil traffic from the Persian Gulf. With its highly maneuverable navy, a mountainous shoreline bristling with formidable anti-ship missiles, and the ability to easily (and deniably or non-deniably) take out the docks at Ras Tanoura, Saudi Arabia’s only deepwater port, Iran can blow up the world economy any time it wants to. Short of that non-nuclear nuclear option, Iran has every US military installation in the region in its crosshairs, and can lay waste to Israel with its rockets, in response to enemy escalations. The upshot is that Atlantic Magazine’s expert simulation of a US-Iran war showing that Iran would win is even more relevant today than it was in 2004.
The smart move would be for the US to call off its hybrid war. To do that, though, it will have to remove the neocons from power and radically reformulate its policies. That may be easier said than done. But the only alternative is writing a new chapter for the next edition of The March of Folly.
Whenever I go online, I see people posting pictures of plane trails in the sky and asking why we see so many of them. Some argue they are con (densation) trails whilst others say they are chem (ical) trails. Whilst there are very convincing arguments on both sides it is impossible to ascertain the truth. However, we can look at what has happened in the past to give a theory more credibility.
In a previous post, I looked at previous, documented and declassified examples of governments, via the military, spraying their own citizens. All in our best interest of course, until it isn’t.
Today I will look at a tragic story that happened in a North Devon village called Lynmouth in the 1950s.
Lynmouth is a beautiful village on the edge of Exmoor in England.
The river West Lyn and East Lyn flow down from the village of Lynton above and discharge into the sea. If you ever visit the villages and don’t fancy the steep walk up the hill between the two, you can ride in comfort on a water-operated funicular that has been in operation since 1890.
In the early 1950s, the UK government, together with an international team of scientists, decided to start meddling in weather manipulation. Project Cumulus was initiated and was operational between 1949 and 1952. Its purpose was to experiment with various cloud seeding techniques and therefore control when and where it rains.
Between 4 August and 15 August 1952 flights were flown conducting further weather manipulation experiments. However, Project Cumulus abruptly stopped on 15 August 1952. Coincidentally, on the same day a tragedy in Lynmouth unfolded.
Within a number of hours, the biggest flooding event for 300 years hit Lynmouth, destroying hundreds of buildings, bridges, cars and sadly killing 35 people. A further 420 villagers were made homeless. Bodies washed out to sea were never found. One girl who was interviewed at the time lost six family members and spoke about her mother identifying her grandmother’s body. “Mum identified her by this huge wart on her back because she hadn’t got no head, or arms, or legs when they found her.”
90 million tons of water, together with thousands of tons of rock hit the village, destroying everything in its path. Overall that month, North Devon, where the village is situated experience 250 times more rainfall than was normal for August.
Soon afterwards, the remaining villagers called for an investigation and discussed rumours of planes circling before the deluge.
However, the government and the Ministry of Defence denied any “cloud-seeding” experiments had taken place and the tragedy was labelled as a ‘hand of God’ event. Any talk of weather manipulation was considered a conspiracy theory and even to this day it is labelled as such on Wikipedia.
That was until 2001 when the BBC conducted an investigation into the floods and confirmed that secret experiments were causing heavy rainfall. Many of the classified documents had gone missing but the Document team tracked down RAF logbooks and personal testimony.
One pilot described how, as part of Operation Cumulus, he sprayed salt into the air causing a heavy downpour 50 miles away. Other flights using silver iodide are also likely to have taken place.
“The rain was the heaviest for several years – and all out of a sky which looked summery … there was no disguising the fact that the seedsman had said he’d make it rain, and he did.
“Toasts were drunk to meteorology and it was not until the BBC news bulletin [about the Lynmouth tragedy] was read later on, that a stony silence fell on the company,”
The Guardian also reported on the findings, although they now categorise the story in their “silly season” section. They quote a RAF navigator who said “we flew straight through the top of the cloud, poured dry ice down into the cloud. We flew down to see if any rain came out of the cloud. And it did about 30 minutes later, and we all cheered.”
The British Geological Survey examined soil sediments in the district of Lynmouth to see if any silver or iodide residues remain. The testing was limited due to restrictions in place because of foot and mouth disease, and it is inconclusive. However, silver residue has been discovered in the catchment waters of the river Lyn.
The BBC investigation was turned into a Radio 4 programme called “The Day They Made it Rain” in which they suggest that the Air Ministry and Treasury were aware that the experiments were causing damage to civilians.
According to declassified minutes, the war office was interested in increasing rain and snow by artificial means for a number of reasons including:
bogging down enemy movement;
incrementing the water flow in rivers and streams to hinder or stop enemy crossings;
clearing fog from airfields; and
to explode an atomic weapon in a cloud to produce a far wider area of radioactive contamination than in a normal atomic explosion.
But remember, these types of experiments only happened in the past. Your government loves you now and would never do anything like that nowadays.
Without much fanfare, earlier this week Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-Prize winning former New York Times investigative reporter, dropped a thorough and damning four-part article dissecting the media’s obsessive reporting on Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. Even more surprising, Gerth’s report, “The press versus the president,” appeared at the in-house organ of America’s most prestigious journalism school, Columbia Journalism Review, which has long been regarded as something of an unofficial ombudsman for the media industry.
If CJR is finally comfortable admitting that the media’s Russiagate reporting was so scandalously bad that it damns the entire industry, that seems like a remarkable admission.
On Twitter, Glenn Greenwald, a left-leaning reporter who made some significant career sacrifices for calling out the media’s bogus reporting on this topic, declared Gerth’s reporting “absolutely devastating on how casually, frequently, recklessly and eagerly the press lied on Russiagate.” Gerth lays out what happened so clearly that it’s hard to imagine fair-minded readers who make it through all 24,000 words of Gerth’s report would conclude any differently. Personally, I’m proud to say that the work of RealClearInvestigations – and my colleagues there, Tom Kuntz, Aaron Mate, and Paul Sperry – are all cited favorably by Gerth as one of the few media outlets that consistently got the story right.
However, as someone who spent much of his time during the Trump years engaged in substantive reporting that questioned and debunked the Russia collusion narrative, my reaction was, well, anger. It’s an emotion not directed at Gerth, who has done courageous work. But the fact that this piece is appearing two years after Trump left office and nearly five years after special prosecutor Robert Mueller failed to substantiate years of anonymously sourced speculation about Russia collusion is a searing indictment in itself.
To start, Gerth demonstrates the media still won’t grapple with the truth. His piece is peppered with big-name reporters and major publications refusing to comment on basic errors or dubious or unethical judgments. Gerth did manage to get Bob Woodward, the dashboard saint of journalism, on the record condemning the media’s failures here. While that’s a notable concession, if respected figures such as Woodward harbored doubts about the media’s conduct, they should have been a lot more vocal – and much earlier.
It’s also understandable why Gerth would want to keep his report narrowly focused on the facts of what transpired. But without any substantive discussion of the media’s motives it’s hard to draw any important lessons from this sorry saga. Gerth does point out that Russiagate has led to an erosion of trust in the media and offers a pallid warning that the media’s “failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.”
But this is inadequate. Devoid of any broader context about the long history manipulations of America’s national security state or the corporate media’s evolution into ham-fisted left-wing ideologues, one can read Gerth’s dry reporting as a comedy of errors: A bunch of well-intentioned reporters, faced with the challenge of covering a problematic president – and disingenuous Democrats and partisan law enforcement officials – kept bungling the reporting, by getting key facts wrong and committing serious sins of omission.
However, the missing motive suggests something far more sinister. The media’s Russiagate coverage hinged on being extremely trusting of officials in national security and law enforcement agencies that have historically undermined the press and been hostile to civil rights. There’s a saying in traditional journalism – “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Yet, when “deep state” actors with an obvious animus for Donald Trump pushed the narrative that a sitting U.S. president was compromised by a foreign power, a story so explosive it demanded to be thoroughly vetted every step of the way, the mainstream media instead decided to become stenographers.
The blizzard of details necessary to explain the Russia collusion story might also make it seem like discerning the truth was more difficult than it was. If your willingness to believe that Trump was compromised by Russia started out as a political Rorschach test, it quickly became an IQ exam.
Starting before Trump was even inaugurated in January 2017, it was reported that the Logan Act was being used as a predicate to investigate Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The Logan Act is to national security laws what phrenology is to medical science – it’s a never-enforced 1799 statute that says it’s illegal for private citizens to negotiate with foreign governments. Laughed at by constitutional scholars, it’s routinely violated and invariably ignored.
Except that several major media outlets credulously reported on Flynn’s alleged Logan Act violations as if they were a potentially serious transgressions, when it should have been obvious that invoking this ancient and discredited statute was a desperate attempt to justify a politically motivated investigation. What happened to Flynn is just one example out of many where the press inexcusably disregarded glaring truths.
Gerth, to his credit, does a fine job unpacking the story of how Flynn was railroaded by the Justice Department, as well as the absurd credulity of the press regarding the so-called “dossier” on Trump, an obviously untrustworthy document produced by partisan political enemies of the president. Nonetheless, most of Gerth’s examples of questionable interactions between the press and government sources require reading between the lines to assess just how willfully blind the press was to the possibility of law enforcement officials abusing their power.
And given that the key players of the story were Democratic partisans, current and former spies, and shady opposition researchers, it’s also worth asking to what extent the press was being overtly manipulated and deliberately fed bad information. Although Gerth’s reporting suggests a conscious conspiracy, he doesn’t really go there.
Finally, no accounting of the media’s faulty Russia reporting would be complete without seriously evaluating the consequences. Once again, much of this discussion is outside Gerth’s narrower focus on how the sausage was being made in newsrooms. However, he gets close to identifying the gravity of the problem when he notes a fateful coincidence. The FBI’s dubious White House briefing to Trump and Obama on the dossier’s absurd allegations involving Trump and Moscow prostitutes – a made-up event that was promptly leaked to CNN, catalyzing the Russiagate hysteria – occurred on Jan. 6, 2017, four years to the day before the infamous riot at the U.S. Capitol.
These two events aren’t unrelated. Obsessively gaslighting tens of millions of Trump voters with a transparently false narrative that the president was a traitor who pundits openly agitated to remove from office didn’t just badly erode trust in the media. It also made it impossible for the media to summon the institutional trust necessary to persuade Trump supporters – and Trump himself – that Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 election victory was legitimate.
The result is that the shoddy reporting during Trump’s presidency contributed heavily to the frenzied and distrustful atmosphere that undermined Americans’ faith in elections, shook the very foundations of the Republic, and has left us all worried about political stability in the future.
So while Gerth’s careful reporting is noted and appreciated, it is unlikely to produce the kind of self-examination and reckoning necessary to restore trust in the media and the vital role they play in the democratic process. By getting away with it, the media learned all the wrong lessons. My fear is that when asked about the media’s colossal failures in the Trump years, Gerth’s article will be used an excuse instead of an indictment. The members of the press still seeking to dodge accountability will simply be able to point to his article and say, “It’s old news.”
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 