According to research done by We Are Social, the average internet user spends over 6 and half hours online every day.
The internet is both a blessing as a curse. On the one hand, it gives us access to knowledge and technology that improves our lives, but on the other hand, it’s an addictive and dangerous mind-control tool that can be exploited to influence your choices and manipulate your thinking.
The COVID pseudopandemic has seen internet censorship rise to an unprecedented level. The controllers and their minions are scrambling to silence anyone who dares to question the efficacy of vaccines or the existence of Sars-Cov-2.
Let’s recap: In the space of a few months, thousands of YouTube channels and millions of Facebook posts have been deleted. The former president of the United States’ Twitter account was removed, and, Greenmedinfo, a site that aggregates research on natural remedies, had both their Facebook and Instagram accounts deleted losing over half a million followers.
LinkedIn also joined in on the action by deleting the account of Dr. Robert Malone after he questioned the safety of the mRNA vaccines, the technology for which he himself played a huge part in creating.
Parler was removed from the internet and so was the website of America’s Frontline Doctors after they endorsed non-agenda-approved treatments to combat COVID-19. More recently, in a move that’s disturbing yet predictable, Facebook has begun sending users creepy messages relating to “extremist content”.
So content that goes against the mainstream agenda is either censored or outright deleted. We know that. But what about the content that goes against corporate interests but isn’t quite insidious enough to be removed? What does Google, the largest search engine in the world, processing over 40,000 search requests per second, do about such content?
The first thing to understand about Google is that it’s more than just a search engine. Google develops and maintains a network of applications that all work together to collect, analyze, and leverage your data. Each application feeds data into the next, forming a global chain of information exchange.
For example, Google’s driverless car initiative powers Google Maps, which in turn powers Google’s local listings. It is this network effect that has made Google such a powerful and unrivaled force in the search engine space.
As a search engine, Google decides what information you see and what information you don’t. It goes without saying, but any tool with such power needs to be responsibly managed and repeatedly scrutinized.
Anyone who chooses to use such a tool should also be aware that they are seeing the internet through a lens created by Google’s mysterious algorithms and the information they’re receiving doesn’t necessarily come from an objective or neutral source.
Google’s ability to affect people’s thinking was demonstrated by the work of Dr. Robert Epstein when his team found that Google was profoundly influencing the results of elections. Epstein writes that:
Our research leaves a little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidates by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. […] Whether or not Google executive see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giants algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day.”
It would also appear that Google is inherently biased towards pro-drug, pro-vaccine, Big Pharma medicine. In 2019, the search engine made an update to its algorithm that just so happened to shadow-ban health websites not affiliated with billion-dollar corporates.
The websites affected included GreenMedInfo, SelfHacked, and Mercola.com. Some of these sites lost over 90% of their organic traffic, overnight.
When searching for most health-related topics on Google, the first page is almost always filled with content from websites like WebMD, whose history is filled with conflicts of interest and open collaborations with Monsanto, Merck, and other corporates.
In 2017, the search engine blacklisted naturalnews.com, a natural health advocacy organization that reports on controversial health topics including vaccine safety, GMOs, and pharmaceutical experiments, de-indexing over 140,000 of their webpages.
In a 2019 article, the founder of NaturalNews, Mike Adams, had this to say about Google (emphasis in original):
Make no mistake: Google is pro-pharma, pro-Monsanto, pro-glyphosate, pro-pesticides, pro-chemotherapy, pro-fluoride, pro-5G, pro-geoengineering and fully supports every other toxic poison that endangers humankind.”
Google’s ties to Big Pharma are well-known. In 2016, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, partnered with GlaxoSmithKline to create a new company focused on research into bioelectronics – a branch of medical science aimed at fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body. GSK also works directly with Google thanks to a deal between the two companies that allows GSK full control over the data that they use. What data? Whose data? That isn’t disclosed.
Alphabet is also heavily invested in Vaccitech, a UK-based vaccine company founded by researchers at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, the Vatican (vaxxican?) of vaccine research.
Finally, it has recently come to light that Google’s charity arm, Google.org, provided funding for research and studies carried out by Peter Daszak and his charity, EcoHealth Alliance – the same charity that previously worked with the Wuhan lab involved in so-called ‘gain of function’ research.
These conflicts of interest alone should call into question the search engine’s ability to provide an unbiased view of health content on the internet.
Google’s “autocomplete” algorithm is another source of manipulation that works to affect people’s perceptions about the danger of vaccines and the efficacy of natural treatments.
For example, if you type “vaccines cause” into Google, the top suggestion is “vaccines cause adults”. I mean, seriously? In contrast, if you search “Chiropractic is”, the top suggestions are “quackery”, “pseudoscience” and “dangerous”.
Autocomplete is supposedly based on data collected from real Google searches, especially common and trending ones. However, data from Google trends clearly show that ever since 2004, “vaccines cause autism” has been searched far more times than “vaccines cause adults”, and “Chiropractic is good” has received a far higher popularity score than “Chiropractic is quackery”, the top suggestion.
A similar trend can be observed for terms such as “supplements are”, “GMOs are”, “glyphosate is”, “organic is”, “homeopathy is”, and “holistic medicine is”.
Looking at the way Google favours Big Pharma content, it’s reasonable to suspect that their “data lakes” are being poisoned. In fact, this was confirmed in 2019 when former Google software engineer, Zack Vorheis, leaked 950 pages of internal company documents providing evidence that Google was shaping election results, implementing stealth censorship programmes, and maintaining undisclosed blacklists.
Google’s algorithms are shrouded in mystery, based on black-box machine learning models that few people understand.
Machine learning models must be “trained” and as long as Google feeds them data to say “non-drug medicine is bad, Big Pharma is good”, the algorithms will continue to re-bias the internet in that direction, altering people’s perceptions of natural health and presenting drug-based medicine as the shining light in a dark world filled with invisible enemies.
When it comes to psychological manipulation, Google’s “partner in crime” is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
If you’ve ever searched for anything on the internet, you’ve likely seen Wikipedia show up towards the top of the search results. When it comes to questions without any commercial impact, such as “What’s the capital of Turkey?”, Wikipedia does a pretty good job.
But when it comes to multibillion-dollar industries, things get a little murky. Big corporates have big pockets and they aren’t opposed to the concept of “pay-to-play”. This was highlighted in 2012 when British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, was exposed for its involvement in manipulating Wikipedia entries for paying clients.
The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is no saint, either. In 2008 he used the platform as his personal relationship break-up tool by updating his relationship status on his Wiki entry before telling his girlfriend. And in 2010, he was embroiled in a Wikipedia pornography-removal scandal that saw him “voluntarily” relinquish certain editing and admin privileges.
One of the industries where Wikipedia’s bias is most noticeable is healthcare. In an article for the Orthomolecular News Service, Howard Strauss, Grandson of Max Gerson, MD (the creator of the Gerson cancer therapy) states that:
This writer and many others in the field of alternative medicine and natural healing have experienced Wikipedia bias personally when contributing well-documented, carefully researched articles to the site, only to have them be radically altered and deleted, by anonymous “editors,” then being banned from further editing or contributions. This is impossible to reconcile with a free flow of information.”
And this can be verified as Wikipedia keeps a public record of all edits made to an article over time. He goes on to comment on the history of Wikipedia and states that:
At first, it was interesting to see uncensored information flow through the site, and even contribute to it. Then corporate America realized that Wikipedia, and similar sites, were distributing information they had carefully and thoroughly suppressed in the media, and set about correcting that omission. Soon, Wikipedia entries about natural healing, holistic medicine, and other subjects began to resemble publicity blurbs from Monsanto, or Merck, or the NIH. Contributors are supposed to be anonymous, “volunteer” editors were supposed to be both anonymous and neutral. But it was clear that for certain sensitive subjects, this was far from the case.”
If you want to see Wikipedia’s bias for yourself, just search for any medical discipline that isn’t drug-based. And if you want to make things really fun, take a shot of whiskey every time you see the word ‘pseudoscience’.
Here are real snippets from Wikipedia entries on alternative forms of medicine and natural healing, taken from the first few sentences of the entry…
Chiropractic: “Chiropractic is a pseudoscientific alternative medicine…”
Chinese medicine: “Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a branch of traditional medicine in China. It has been described as “fraught with pseudoscience.“
Homeopathy: “Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine.”
Ayurveda: “The theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.”
Acupuncture: “Acupuncture is a pseudoscience.”
German New Medicine: “Germanic New Medicine (GNM), also formerly known as German New Medicine and New Medicine, a system of pseudo-medicine.“
Functional Medicine: “Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments.“
The editors display a shocking level of bias by cherry-picking references, many of which are not peer-reviewed or scientific, and make hollow claims which they portray as facts.
The entry on Functional Medicine is particularly difficult to get through. Functional Medicine is a form of medicine focused on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. It often involves treatments to correct nutritional imbalances and gut dysbiosis.
However, the author claims that functional medicine encompasses a number of ‘unproven’ and ‘disproven’ treatments and cites two articles on sciencebasedmedicine.org, a notorious ‘Skeptic’ publication, both written by the same author.
The articles, far from scientific or scholarly, read as opinion pieces written by an MD with a chip on his shoulder, who clearly has no understanding of what functional medicine really is. The author, Dr. Wallace Sampson, passed away in 2015. Here’s his author bio:
Retired hematologist/oncologist, presumptive analyzer of ideological and fraudulent medical claims, claimant to being founding editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, and to detecting quackery by smell.”
Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, says that it is a discontinued medical journal and that it was evaluated at least three times by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing in MEDLINE, but rejected each time. What a shame.
Furthermore, in 2003, a California Appeals Court found Dr. Sampson “to be biased and unworthy of credibility.” Yet these are the kind of charlatans that Wikipedia endorses as “experts”.
Instead of citing ‘quackbuster’ publications written by biased, outdated, and nutritionally uneducated MDs, the editors would do well to dive into Alan Gaby’s Nutritional Medicine (over 16,000 scientific references), or Dr. Alex Vasquez’s Inflammation Mastery. That’s presuming they have the intelligence to read high-level, academic texts, based on real, unbiased science (not opinions).
If I were an editor at Wikipedia, I may choose to rewrite the article on chemotherapy, claiming it is a pseudoscience by citing this 2004 study which found the overall contribution of chemotherapy to cancer survival to be barely over 2%, or this study in Nature Medicine that found chemotherapy to increase tumour growth and survival.
Wikipedia made its stance on alternative health quite clear in 2014 when founder Jimmy Wales ridiculed an 8,000-signature petition on Change.org calling for a fairer discussion of alternative and complementary medicine on the encyclopedia. The petition stated that:
As gatekeepers for the status quo, they [Wikipedia] refuse discourse with leading-edge research scientists and clinicians or, for that matter, anyone with a different point of view”
Instead of recognizing his lack of expertise in the area of healthcare and re-evaluating the fraudulent and dubious wiki entries, Wales demonstrated his lack of awareness by stating that:
What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of ‘true scientific discourse’. It isn’t.”
Quite frankly, it’s not surprising to hear such a response from the man who heads an organization that serves the interests of the Big Money Machine and its quest to dumb down the populace. As Dr. Vasquez puts it, in a recent critique of a New York Times propaganda piece on the “danger” of nutritional supplements to fight coronavirus:
The scaffolding of our institutionalized ignorance requires structural support from publications and organizations that pretend to inform and empower us while simply leaving us dumber and weaker than before.”
So when did Wikipedia become an extension of Big Pharma? The truth is that the health section of Wikipedia was commandeered by a bitter group of skeptics who live within their own, egoic constructs of reality and health.
This anti-health movement ramped up in 2006 when Paul Lee, then the listmaster of Quackwatch, made a forum post inviting skeptics to come forward and begin writing content on Wikipedia about natural and complementary health topics.
Quackwatch, a “Skeptic” website aimed at “debunking” and smearing non-drug medicine, was founded by Steven Barrett, an unlicensed MD who failed his psychiatric board exam, and has authored zero published research (at least I haven’t been able to find any). During a court proceeding, he admitted ties to the AMA, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FDA (though his sources of funding are likely far more expansive).
Lee was in full violation of Wikipedia’s neutrality policy and knowing this, he stated:
Any coordination of efforts should be done by private email, since Wikipedia keeps a very public history of every little edit, and you can’t get them removed. We don’t need any accusations of a conspiracy.”
Needless to say, a coordinated effort over private email IS a conspiracy. And not a very sophisticated one at that.
Then, in a move demonstrating both the organization’s ethical and moral standards, Wikipedia made Paul Lee a senior editor with special rights and privileges.
The influence that both Google and Wikipedia have is astonishing when you consider that Google receives more than 1 billion health-related questions per day. How many of those people have turned away from effective treatments due to the information Google fed them? How many people wrongly believe that COVID vaccines are safe effective?
But who do we blame for the increasing power and influence that Google and Wikipedia hold? Perhaps we are to blame. Blindly trusting in “authorities” to have our best interests at heart is the kind of infantile thinking that got us into this mess.
As the number one visited website in the world, Google controls ~90% of global search traffic. Our minds, health beliefs, political stances, and world views are inseparably linked to information we read on the internet and neither Google nor Wikipedia is an objective source for this information.
It is time that we take responsibility for our own health. We have to develop the ability to read and assess health knowledge objectively and intuitively.
Do you suffer from depression? Maybe you need to get your vitamin B12 or vitamin D levels checked, maybe you need to cut out processed and neuroinflammatory foods from your diet.
The internet is not a miracle worker. The internet doesn’t know what’s best for you, no one does. Your body is different from mine. Treatments that work for you may not work for me. But as long as we learn to listen to our bodies, to understand our own, unique inner landscape, we can begin to seek treatments and practitioners that truly make a difference.
The lesson is this: You are the authority. Read, learn, understand, and don’t take anything at face value. We need to learn to develop our intuition in parallel with our critical thinking skills.
Discernment is our secret weapon. We’re fighting an information war. Arm yourself with knowledge and be free.
Ryan Matters is a writer and free thinker from South Africa. After a life-changing period of illness, he began to question mainstream medicine, science and the true meaning of what it is to be alive. Some of his writings can be found at newbraveworld.org, you can also follow him on Gab.
For some years now, Wikipedia has had a libellous smear entry on me that cannot be edited to be less of a smear. So, imagine my surprise to learn a co-founder of the site accuses it of not being neutral.
In February 2021, Larry Sanger, one of the founders of the online encyclopedia, said, “The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone.” This was not his first time speaking out against Wikipedia. Personally, I was surprised to learn that Wikipedia was ever neutral.
In his more recent post, ‘Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever’, Sanger wrote:
“Wikipedia, like many other deeply biased institutions of our brave new digital world, has made itself into a kind of thought police that has de facto shackled conservative viewpoints with which they disagree. Democracy cannot thrive under such conditions: I maintain that Wikipedia has become an opponent of vigorous democracy.”
I would extend his criticism to note that it is not only conservative views that are censored, but anti-Imperialist views, health care, and, specifically in the case of Syria, voices who have reported extensively from on the ground and contest official narratives about the country. These include myself and British journalist Vanessa Beeley. Not coincidentally, we have both been subjected to relentless smear pieces from the Western media and the self-proclaimed fact checkers of Snopes, branding us cheerleaders for terrorists in Syria.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the wiki-smears on us consists of those character assassination articles.
There are of course many more voices who have reported honestly on Syria but, for some reason, I couldn’t find smear entries on them. On the contrary, some have what appear to be glossy PR entries of a more biographical nature, lauding their work.
But for Vanessa Beeley and I, although much biographical information on each of us is widely available online, the Wiki entries remain devoid of the usual bios and instead are just designed to discredit us.
Sanger noted that, “All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia,” declares a policy page, “must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV).”
He went on to detail what this “neutrality” means or should mean.
“From a truly neutral article, you would learn why, on a whole variety of issues, conservatives believe one thing, while progressives believe another thing. And then you would be able to make up your own mind.
Is that what Wikipedia offers? As we will see, the answer is No.”
He went on to give numerous examples of Wikipedia’s stark lack of neutrality on critical issues. For the sake of brevity, I would encourage readers to check out Sanger’s article for the full list.
However, let’s look at the entries on myself and Vanessa Beeley.
Mine refers to me as “a Canadian activist and blogger who is known for promoting conspiracy theories about Syria.” Relegating me to a “blogger” was clearly intended to dispute my credentials as a journalist. Credentials which the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club deemed journalistically credible enough to award. Likewise, award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger more recently deemed my latest article on the Douma chemical hoax an “outstanding report.”
The Wiki smear also states that I “write op-eds for the television network RT.” For a while, that line read, “She blogs for the Russian-controlled outlet RT”, a bogus claim that many journalists (including the fact checkers of Channel 4) have copy-paste repeated without bothering to see that, like tens of other journalists, what I write is actually for the op-edge section of RT’s website.
The entry goes on to cite from the litany of smear articles against me since 2016, smears which I have refuted, and which always read the same: copy-paste character assassinations that whitewash terrorism in Syria.
Then, there is the clear instance of libel: Wikipedia’s assertion that I, “went on a government-sponsored trip to North Korea.”
In fact, my August 2017 trip to the DPRK was not paid for by any government, but by myself, with some support from a colleague who knew I lived on a shoestring.
This lie was most recently regurgitated by British journalist (and I use that term generously) Brian Whitaker.
Any defamation lawyers out there?
Similarly, the Wiki smear entry on Vanessa Beeley relegates her to mere “blogger” status (although John Pilger thinks highly enough of her, and myself, to have highlighted our “substantiated investigative work”) and in 2018 she was included on a list of the most respected journalists in the UK.
It includes the same“conspiracy theories and disinformation” line that mine does, as well as the usual, predictable anti-Russia rhetoric.
But even I was shocked to see Wikipedia’s claim that Beeley has, “been a frequent guest on InfoWars.” When I asked her about this, she replied: “This is an outright lie. I have never been a guest of Infowars. I challenge Wikipedia to publish the multiple interviews they claim exist. They can’t.”
So there we have it. Not only are the entries not even close to neutral, each contains outright fabrication in addition to the character assassinations.
At some point in 2018, I shared an email I had received from a Wikipedia editor, which noted:
“Dear Eva, I’m writing to inform you that we have taken action against a banned user who evaded their ban to create an article about you. The article has been removed. I do not have the full context here, but the content seems to have been extremely problematic and from your Twitter and the flood of supporter emails we received yesterday, I gather this has been an issue for some time.”
And indeed, supporters told me they had contacted Wikipedia to challenge the smear entry on me and were successful in making changes to read more fairly. Yet, in short time, the entry returned to nearly exactly as it had originally been.
The Wikitalk portion of the smear entry on me points out: “Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.”
But no, that hasn’t happened in my entry.
On the same page, supporters called Wikipedia out: “It’s bordering on WP:ATTACK. Nothing about her early life, education or volunteer activities etc, which you’d expect to find in a Biography. It’s just a monologue of critical opinion pieces, with a couple of lines thrown in at the end to cover her response & with a selective focus on the usual slanted key words used to disparage.”
Another critic of the entry pointed out the sources used were “questionable”, including noting that one source, Al Jazeera, is, “owned by the Qatari Royal family… and Qatar has been funding some of the Salafi rebels in Syria. Seriously, does anyone think they will report even remotely fairy on Eva Bartlett?”
In his June post on Wikipedia, Larry Sanger wrote:
“Democracy requires that voters be given the full range of views on controversial issues, so that they can make up their minds for themselves. If society’s main information sources march in ideological lockstep, they make a mockery of democracy. Then the wealthy and powerful need only gain control of the few approved organs of acceptable thought; then they will be able to manipulate and ultimately control all important political dialogue.”
Similarly, Vanessa Beeley had this to say on the matter: “The Jimmy Wales Wikipedia enterprise is little more than a McCarthyite echo chamber that is weaponized to discredit journalists and academics who are influential in challenging US or UK Imperialist policies. There is virtually no redress for the targeted individuals, ‘editors’ scrub any corrections almost immediately. Wikipedia is effectively a gatekeeper for the ruling class.”
In any case, for those interested in a fairer rendition of who is Eva Bartlett, someone created an entry on a site called Everpedia, and otherwise I have an about me section on my blog.
Unfortunately, many will first come across the wiki entries on myself and colleagues, and many will stop there. But, after all the smears, my skin has grown thick and I’m at peace with the fact that I know I’ve reported honestly.
I highly doubt the editors behind such Wiki smears can say the same of their edits.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
Congressional committees recently passed two bills that contain provisions to disburse a total of over $7 billion on behalf of Israel in the year 2022. This works out to almost $20 million per day.
These provisions were included in the bills despite the fact that Israel just committed another onslaught against Gazan men, women, and children; despite Israel’s many actions that harm Americans; despite the fact that most Americans think the U.S. already gives Israel too much money; and despite the fact that aid to Israel is illegal under U.S. laws.
On June 30th, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense approved a bill that gives Israel half a billion dollars, and on July 1st the House Appropriations Committee advanced a bill that disburses nearly $6.4 billion on behalf of Israel.
In addition to this $3.3 billion, the bill includes the following funding that benefits Israel:
• An additional $58 million on related programs for Israel, which AIPAC points out in a series of proud tweets that list them.
• The bill provides $1.65 billion to Jordan and $1.4 billion to Egypt stemming from previous agreements with their governments to desist from advocating for Palestinian rights.
• It also contains a section to provide $225 million for alleged assistance to Palestinians. In reality, such funding is largely intended to benefit Israel, and is often proposed and/or receives support from Israel partisans such as Nita Lowey.
Rationales given in the bill for this funding are that it would “advance Middle East peace” (i.e. lead Palestinians to accede to Israeli demands); “improve security in the region” (be used by the Palestinian Authority to continue to round up resistance fighters – the Palestinian Authority is known as Israel’s “day-to-day partner in governing the West Bank”); and to “address urgent humanitarian needs” (but doesn’t mention that these needs are caused by Israel’s ongoing military attacks and financial policies against Palestinians).
Portions of the aid are used as a combination threat and bribe; the money will not be provided if “the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof” or if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”
Such ‘humanitarian’ funding for Palestinians is considered important for Israel, as two prominent Israel advocates explain:
“Funding for Palestinian assistance programs has always flowed with bipartisan support because it was determined to reinforce Israel’s security and provide a measure of U.S. leverage and influence.
This logic was ratified by the support of the Israeli government for these programs. Israeli authorities understood that a breakdown in security, an economic collapse or a humanitarian crisis in the West Bank would place an enormous burden on Israel.”
These additional provisions bring the total amount of Americans’ tax money to be disbursed on behalf of Israel in the Appropriations Committee bill to at least $6.7 billion.
Added to that is the half billion in the defense subcommittee bill passed on June 30th, making the total amount of money to be disbursed on behalf of Israel approximately $7.2 billion.
These provisions were passed despite the fact that most voters would likely oppose them, since, as mentioned above, surveys indicate that the majority of Americans don’t support such large funding to Israel. However, very few Americans know about the proposed funding, since mainstream U.S. news companies almost never report on such legislation (unlike Israeli and Israel-focused U.S. media).
EVEN MORE MONEY FOR ISRAEL…
And there are numerous additional expenditures on behalf of Israel throughout the bill that are not included in the above tabulation.
Among these are funding for operations to dismantle the Arab League boycott of Israel; millions of dollars provided for Jews resettling in Israel; portions of the $20 billion to “Democracy Programs” and the $4.5 billion to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that are used to oppose support for Palestinian rights as allegedly ‘antisemitism’; funding to countries such as Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, and others resulting from enticements to procure their ‘normalization‘ policies with Israel, etc. A thorough examination of such additional programs could quite possibly add another billion dollars to be disbursed for Israel.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before House Appropriation Subcommittee hearing on 2022 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill on June 7, 2021. (Blinken had helped give Israel millions of additional dollars during its 2014 massacre of Gazans.) (C-Span)
AIPAC IS PLEASED
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – possibly the most famous of the hundreds of pro-Israel groups in the U.S. – applauded Congressional leaders for their action in passing the measures:
This money to and for Israel is not new. Over the years, Israel has received far more U.S. tax money than any other country on earth: on average over 7,000 times more per capita than anyone else.
And in addition to all of this are the lives destroyed and the multi-trillion dollar cost of the Iraq war, a tragic and disastrous quagmire promoted by Israel and its American partisans.
And on top of this are the costs, in both lives and treasure, of Israel-influenced policies regarding Syria, Iran, and others.
It’s time to end Israel’s strangle hold over American politicians. To tell your Congress members to vote against this massive funding for Israel, go here.
(And to tell them to enact legislation that protects Palestinian children, go here.)
Yacoub Odeh is 81 years old but he can still remember his childhood in the Palestinian village of Lifta as if it were yesterday. Children playing together in the gardens, swimming in the pools and laying in the grass.
Today, Lifta remains as a frozen time capsule. While the residents were expelled during Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing campaign (Nakba), the ruins of their homes still stand. These ruins carved into the lush hillside are perceived as a symbol of the Palestinians’ right of return. This is the only town Israel did not demolish after the Nakba, but a government plan may soon change that.
In May, the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), the government agency in charge of managing public lands, issued a new tender for construction in Lifta. The development scheme, known as Plan 6036, seeks to build 259 housing units along with a commercial and business space and a luxury hotel on top of and around the existing houses. Daphna Golan-Agnon, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and part of the Save Lifta Coalition’s board, explained that while the homes may not be demolished, “the village will disappear behind walls of concrete needed to hold new construction.”
The bid was supposed to be held on July 4, but significant public opposition delayed it to July 29.
The ruins in Lifta, a Palestinian village ethnically cleased in 1948. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News
Attempts to demolish Lifta have been ongoing for years. The ILA first published a tender for Plan 6036 in 2010 after the Israeli state approved the construction plan for Lifta in 2006. A 2012 Jerusalem District Court ruling found Plan 6036 insufficient and requested amending it in accordance with a conservation survey on Lifta from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
The IAA survey was completed in 2017 and found that Plan 6036 could not be executed without making significant adjustments in order to preserve the ancient village. Plan 270b was drawn up to fit the survey’s findings but in 2017 the Local Planning and Building Committee of Jerusalem temporarily halted the initiative for further examination.
The recent ILA announcement was met with hundreds of letters to Jerusalem’s mayor rejecting the sale. When reached for comment, the Municipality of Jerusalem told MintPress News that it “wasn’t informed about the publication of this tender and didn’t approve it. The mayor of Jerusalem asked all the relevant authorities to reconsider the construction plan.” The Israel Lands Council, which operates the ILA, did not respond to a request for comment.
‘In one hour, we became refugees’
Lifta’s strategic location at the edge of Jerusalem has made it a prime target for land grabs. Acting as a suburb of Jerusalem, Lifta’s placement next to the Jerusalem-Jaffa Highway makes for an easy trip to the Mediterranean while still being tied to the city of Jerusalem.
Lifta, often referred to as the entrance to Jerusalem, was a wealthy, agricultural community supported by olive presses and flour mills and situated atop the Wadi al-Shami spring. Homes made of limestone were cut into the hillside and Lifta’s roads wended through the valley.
Prior to the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias like the Haganah saw seizing Lifta as necessary to cement Jewish control over all of Palestine. According to the Haganah Historical Archives, “[s]ecuring the western exit of the city [of Jerusalem] entailed the eviction of Arabs.” Israeli historian Benny Morris said the Haganah fired the first shots in 1947, setting off the mass expulsion of Lifta’s 2,960 residents.
In December 1947, the Haganah killed a Palestinian business owner in Lifta. Later that month, one of Lifta’s two coffeehouses was ambushed with gunfire and grenades. The attack killed six and wounded seven. Two months into 1948, the Jewish Agency chairman and future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, boasted of the ethnic cleansing’s success, telling his political party members: “From your entry into Jerusalem through Lifta — Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King George Street and Mea She’arim — there are no strangers. One hundred percent Jews.“
Odeh, head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission, was 8-years-old when Lifta came under siege by Zionist forces.
Yacoub Odeh, Nakba survivor and head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News
“I remember one day my mother was preparing the fire to heat our room, and then [the Zionist miltiias] began to shoot. My brothers began to cry, ‘Mama, mama! They’re shooting us!’ My mom took us inside the room in the corner and under a table to protect us,” Odeh said, recalling two stories of Lifta — the town’s beauty and charm and then its tragic fall.
“There is the beautiful life and then began the miserable life because of the occupation.”
Toward the end of February 1948, Odeh’s father put him, his siblings and his mother into a truck heading to Ramallah to escape the violence in Lifta. Odeh’s father stayed behind to defend the village from the Zionist gangs.
“We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.” Odeh took a deep sigh and said, “In one hour, we became refugees.”
Today, 55 buildings out of approximately 450 remain in Lifta, including a club, mosque, cemetery and school, which now operates as a school for Israeli Jews. Liftawi refugees are estimated at around 30,000 and live in Jerusalem, the Occupied West Bank and the Diaspora. Most of the homes are empty, but a few are occupied by Israeli settlers. According to Zochrot, the Israeli nonprofit seeking to raise awareness of the Nakba, the “settlements of Mey Niftoach and Giv’at Sha’ul were built on village lands and now have become parts of the suburbs of Jerusalem.”
Saving Lifta
The Save Lifta Coalition orchestrated the campaign to the mayor and has been organizing since 2010 against Plan 6036. The organization spent five years working with scholars, activists, conservation specialists and higher education professionals to develop an alternative to 6036.
Their proposal aims to “expand the area of the national park and turn the village into a natural urban space for the adjacent neighborhoods,” while preserving Lifta’s cultural landscape.
The World Monuments Fund added Lifta to its list of endangered sites in 2018 and UNESCO added the village to its tentative list of world heritage sites.
‘Not something we can discuss now’
When asked about the plan’s responsibility regarding the right of return for Palestinians, Golan-Agnon said, “our plan is a plan to save Lifta as it is for the future generations to decide upon its fate.” She explained:
Many of us [in the coalition] do think there should be a right of return for Palestinians but we know it’s not something we can discuss now. So we say, it’s beautiful, keep it open, and then one day there can be a decision about what happens and who’s coming.
Dana Amawi’s grandmother grew up in Lifta and was expelled from the village in 1948. Now the family lives in Amman, Jordan. The 20-year-old said she was shaken to her core upon hearing the news of the sale. “Lifta symbolized a tiny, very small bit of hope that maybe we will be able to return to it,” Amawi told MintPress. “And now to think that other people might live in the house that I have the right to be in, it’s very sad.”
A Palestinian woman holds a partially eaten fig picked from a tree in Lifta. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News
Amawi said that her grandmother fell ill after learning of the auction. “She got sick. She had a fever and she was really, really sad because to her, this is where she grew up. This is where her earliest memories are and this is where she has the right to be,” Amawi said.
Stone houses like the one Odeh spent his early childhood in now crumble from neglect. The walls are sprayed with graffiti and piles of trash line the floors. On Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath), you’ll often find Israelis bathing in the spring’s waters.
Aseel AlBajeh, advocacy officer and legal researcher at the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, visited Lifta in 2018. Her grandmother, who lives in Ramallah, is from Lifta. “It was a painful experience,” AlBajeh said of her time in Lifta. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come back to Lifta in this situation.”
‘You are here as a visitor’
During her visit, AlBajeh tried recalling her grandmother’s memories of a flourishing Lifta, but she said those stories were disrupted by the fact that she’s only in Lifta because of a permit she received from the Israeli government to enter 1948-occupied Palestine or modern-day Israel from the West Bank. “You are here as a visitor. It’s like it’s not a place where you belong, or this is what [the Israeli government] intends for refugees to feel like,” AlBajeh said. “Settlers were swimming in the spring of the village and they were blasting loud music, and it also disrupted my ability to even imagine Lifta as Palestinian.”
Israeli settlers in Lifta hold a middle finger to a group of Palestinian children. Blekh | MintPress News
To help her reclaim Lifta, AlBajeh took a small piece of the village’s remains during her visit. She collected a broken tile painted with traditional designs from one of the house’s floors, knowing this might be the last physical object she can have of Lifta.
“Lifta is a witness of what happened during the Nakba,” AlBajeh said, explaining:
We have this connection as Palestinians, and when we see the cactus plants, we connect this as evidence that displacement happened here. And if you go to Lifta, you’ll see the huge amount of cactus. So even if the houses remain and [Israel] tries to remove the cactus, it’s still painful… It’s not about the stones or about the trees. It’s about the whole identity of Lifta and the Palestinian history, which we still connect to. “
‘We were kings in our village’
Odeh’s memories paint Lifta as an idyllic place, an oasis carved into the steep slopes of Jerusalem where life was carefree and bountiful. “We were kings in our village,” Odeh said. “Everything we need, we had — a life so simple. We didn’t need cinema or computers, no, everything we needed came from our land.”
But the minute Odeh and his family became refugees, their resources became scarce. “At that time there were no charitable associations or agencies ready to help,” Odeh recalled. “You know what Nakba means? Nakba does not mean to destroy homes. No, Nakba means to destroy the life — economic life, social life, educational life, political life. They destroyed our life.”
Upon reminiscing about Lifta, Odeh said his dream is to go back home:
I miss my childhood. Palestinian children have lost their childhood life to play like children, to go to the theater, to concerts, to football. No, until now we have house demolitions, we have arrests, we have land confiscation and killings. Every day we have events like these — if not my family, my neighborhood.”
Israeli forces detained 17-year-old Palestinian teenager Mohammad in solitary confinement for 35 days in total for interrogation purposes. In this video, he describes his experience at the hands of the Israeli military and shares the lasting effects his time in solitary confinement have had on his mental health.
Covid-19 vaccine propaganda is everywhere, and particularly shrill in the sanctified NHS. Reluctant care workers are given a chance to see the error of their thinking, through a teaching session attended with compliant colleagues. Take for example the webinar Vaccination Myth Busting Session for Care Staff, used for NHS and other health and social care staff in Hertfordshire.
The slides begin with results of an Ipsos MORI poll, which asked ‘how convincing are arguments for taking a coronavirus vaccine?’ Of the several items, ‘to protect other people from catching the coronavirus’ and ‘because it will reduce my risk of catching the coronavirus’ got 77% and 76% support respectively. This use of a public opinion poll is manipulative, enabling the educators to make a point without recourse to scientific evidence. In fact, the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. As Peter Doshi explained in the British Medical Journal, trials could only measure mild symptoms, because hospitalisations and deaths were too few for statistical significance.
Also scoring 77% was ‘because vaccines have been very successful against other diseases’. This may be true, but would you agree to take an experimental pill because drugs work for other diseases? Trust in medicine is being exploited. While 66% agreed with the statement ‘because I trust scientists and other medical experts if they say I should take it’, there was also 45% support for following the advice of pharmaceutical companies, and 39% on government recommendation. This is troublingly naïve.
The next slide is on the World Health Organisation’s steps in vaccine development. No mention is made of the need for long-term safety assessment in the trial stages, as would normally be required. Instead, this is left to post-marketing surveillance. Yet the danger of insufficient time for testing was shown by the thalidomide scandal.
The purpose of vaccines is herd immunity, a state that is only reached ‘when most people in a community are vaccinated against a disease’. Naturalistic herd immunity has been conveniently forgotten. According to the slides, ‘vaccines train your immune system using a harmless form of the virus’. Fact check: false. The mRNA type, described in the slides as ‘genetic vaccines’, instructs cells to produce spike proteins. The adenovirus vector type does not use SARS-CoV-2 either, as the virus has never been properly isolated.
‘Single dose is not single dose’ is the illogical title of the next slide. Although there is ‘high efficacy after first dose’, the second dose gives more lasting protection. However, there is clearly not much confidence in immunisation because the webinar instructs staff to ‘behave as if everyone you meet outside your home is infected and you are too’. The status of sick until proven healthy, apparently, persists for the double-jabbed.
Thus everyone should wear face coverings I guess that ‘2 layers min, preferably three’ means the thickness of cloth rather than the number of masks, although Tony Fauci was telling people earlier this year to wear two masks. As with the vaccines, masking is presented as part of a package. Amusingly, a block of Swiss cheese analogises the various interventions: all slices are riddled with holes, but no hole goes through the entire block. None of these are optional: ‘if you want to get out of lockdown, your only real option is compliance’.
The threatening tone continues with the assertion that unvaccinated people will cause new variants to arise, and ‘vaccine escape’. Reference is made to the ‘Green Book’, which makes almost no exceptions to the vaccine regime. Based on advice from the British School for Allergy and Clinical Immunology, anyone who had an anaphylactic shock after a previous jab should be given the Astra Zeneca vaccine rather than Pfizer, and should have half an hour of monitoring afterwards.
The slides were produced before the authorities gave the green light for jabbing pregnant women, but there is little caution: expectant mothers ‘should be reassured that the vaccine does not contain live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and therefore cannot cause COVID-19 infection in her or in her baby’. So that’s all right then. The impact on fertility cannot be known, but the webinar glibly states: ‘current guidance is that the vaccination is safe for women of childbearing age’.
Lastly, the session considers side effects. It is accepted that all drugs can cause adverse reactions in some people. However, the covid-19 vaccine is not a treatment but an experimental intervention on the healthy. Thus the risk-benefit ratio is different from a medicine used to treat illness. The teaching session describes the common side effects of ‘a painful arm, feeling tired, headache, general aches and mild flu-like symptoms’, which disappear over a few days.
Then comes a leap of faith: ‘these symptoms are a sign that your body is building immunity’. Such information may explain why people experiencing adverse reactions say ‘at least I know it’s working’. But the reality is that many vaccine recipients feel very poorly after the jab, as known to healthcare providers due to the high level of staff sickness.
It is unethical and against the principles of the Hippocratic Oath to tell people that adverse reactions are normal. But this seems to be the message of the vaccine regime. A Guardian article this week advised people who are suffering nasty side effects: ‘don’t think of this as a bad sign – it’s exactly what’s expected from an effective but imperfect jab’. In this Orwellian newspeak, harm is safe.
The most egregious economy of truth in this teaching session is on the most serious adverse reaction of all – death. By the time that the slides were produced (27th January), millions of Britons had been jabbed. But this bold claim is made:
‘Nobody has died following having the vaccine in the UK or anywhere else in the world’.
In January covid-19 mortality surged, a pattern seen in most other countries after vaccine rollout. The likely reason is weakened immunity for two or three weeks after the jab. In the frail elderly, recovery of the immune system takes longer, exposing them to infection in the winter peak. This correlation is not proven, but numerous care homes had a spate of covid deaths after all residents were jabbed.
The blood clotting problem was also well known, with several reports of people dying shortly after vaccination. Again, causation has not been fully determined (although belatedly the authorities have added cardiovascular risks to the vaccine marketing information). But why have a Yellow Card system if reported adverse reactions are simply ignored?
The producers and presenters of this misinformation should be held to account. As the ‘no jab, no job’ mandate looms, it is time for professional practitioners to speak out. Indeed, their code of conduct demands they do so.
I HAD the pleasure of interviewing Dr Robert Malone, an industrial scientist and the authoritative voice on mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) technology since he invented it when he was a graduate student at the Salk Institute in 1988.
US-based Dr Malone is not a conspiracy theorist and he’s not an anti-vaxxer. He’s spent the past three decades building vaccines and vaccine technology.
He has more than 20 years of management and leadership experience in academia, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as in governmental and non-governmental organisations.
The fact that he is now being ‘ghosted’ for speaking about the adverse effects of the mRNA vaccines reflects the dark era of censorship that we’ve been experiencing for far too long.
Even my interview with him was pulled off YouTube in the space of just three hours. Fortunately, I posted it on alternative video-sharing platforms, such as Rumble and BitChute.
Here are some of the highlights he revealed in the interview. Firstly, Dr Malone stated: ‘In the Security and Exchange Commission filings for both Pfizer and Moderna, there’s explicit statements that acknowledge that these are gene therapy-based (vaccines) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) perceives them as such.’
He brilliantly explained the science behind the vaccines by using the metaphor of an industrial robot used to build cars. The RNA in this metaphor is the code that a hacker is inserting into the bit stream to make these robots (your cells) make something they would not have otherwise made. In this case, it’s the spike protein that’s recognised by the immune system triggering a response.
‘In a conventional vaccine you can precisely calculate how much protein goes into your shoulder because it’s fixed and predictable, but in the case of these genetic vaccines you can’t,’ he warned.
‘You can’t calculate how long it produces this protein and how much protein it makes and exactly what cells in your body the protein goes into. Conventional vaccines go around your cell, but for these gene therapy-based vaccines the target is your cell.’
When I asked whether he thought the UK (which was the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer vaccine on December 2, 2020) rushed through their approval of it, Dr Malone quickly responded: ‘I wouldn’t say maybe, I would say they did. You can’t take a process that normally takes a decade and push it down into nine months and not cut corners.’
He explained that regulatory agencies such as America’s FDA and Britain’s MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) have different safety check lists for vaccines and gene therapies. Typically, genotoxicity and reproductive toxicity studies are not done with vaccines, but are done with gene therapy products.
Dr Malone revealed that in the face of the crisis, apparently there was a global consensus with these regulatory agencies that they were going to suspend their gene therapy checklist, or if they were done, they were not done in a ‘vigorous’ way. He said this was the biggest mistake of the regulatory agencies.
Children are at very low risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid-19, Dr Malone confirmed. In their age group, the risks overwhelmingly outweigh the benefits from the vaccine.
The risks are the cardiotoxicity events (pericarditis and myocarditis) being recorded in the adverse event databases coming out of Israel, Norway and the Netherlands, to name but a few.
Given that the MHRA and FDA have approved the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds and have been actively encouraging the use of it across multiple age groups, Dr Malone likened this application to the situation where ‘if you give a three-year-old a hammer, everything becomes a nail’.
He talked intently on bioethics and whether it’s ethical to encourage the young (including children) who are currently healthy to take on the responsibility of being exposed to the risks associated with the vaccines in order to protect the vulnerable (the elderly and those with a compromised immune status).
For him, the answer was a categorical, no – it’s not ethical. When I asked him why there’s such a push to get children vaccinated, he answered: ‘A cynic might mention the financial compensation at stake.’
He raised more alarm bells by suggesting there’s bias in the data stating there’s no effect of the vaccine on pregnant women, causing spontaneous abortion. In fact, many of the women in those studies were in the third trimester, where the risk of miscarriage is much lower.
Dr Malone said if you took out the third trimester data and reanalysed it, just looking at those women in the first and second trimester, then the risk of spontaneous abortion jumps to above 50 per cent.
The topic of censorship was raised, as at the time of the interview the doctor had been ‘erased’ from LinkedIn and his full interview with Brett Weinstein and Steve Kirsch had been removed from YouTube.
One of the reasons LinkedIn gave him was because he mentioned that a chairman on the board at Reuters had links to Pfizer.
Dr Malone stressed that Reuters is a member of the Trusted News Initiative, led by the BBC, which was first formed to combat the spread of misinformation during the US presidential election, but now its attention is on combating vaccine misinformation.
Its other members include AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, the Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, Microsoft , Twitter, and the Wall Street Journal.
Dr Malone warned that ‘the only version of scientific truth that’s allowed to be discussed are those truths endorsed by large bureaucratic public health agencies’. He was very concerned about ‘this integration between Big Tech, government and biopharma’.
On a final note, he raised the insidious question of whether ‘there is a group of people that could be exploiting this window for their own purposes, whether it’s financial, political or power.’ That, he said, would be ‘a huge travesty’.
“Only the vaccinated died” That is the lesson from the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918 which killed more people than died from bombs and bullets throughout the entire First World War (1914-18).
Many lies and half truths have been spun about the deadly pandemic of 1918 which killed over 50 million. However, as recently as 2008 Dr Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the US President during the COVID19 pandemic, admitted that bacterial pneumonia, not a flu virus, was responsible. As Fauci and his co-authors concluded:
“the majority of deaths in the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory-tract bacteria.” [1]
The Unmasked buried the Masked during the Spanish Flu Pandemic 1918
Watch this informative video and realise that history as told to us, is a Big Lie. For generations we have been merely the disposable pawns of a self-serving elite.
Fort Riley in Kansas, not Spain, was the where the deadly 1918 pandemic began after an experimental vaccine was given to soldiers about to leave for Europe to fight in the trenches. Soldiers and the civilian population were told they needed the vaccine because of the likely spread of disease from the sodden, filthy trenches where the soldiers spent most of their war.
The parallels between then and now are frightening. The source of the 1918 vaccine was the Rockefeller Institute and the outcome of mass death was the likely intended consequence because, then as now, a globalist elite are preoccupied with ‘culling the herd’ of humanity due to their avowed eugenicist beliefs that people are a plague on this planet – ‘their’ earth, not ours.
If the 1918 pandemic was truly an influenza virus then it would have killed the elderly and weak first. But, in fact, it was more deadly among the young and healthy and those who had been vaccinated!
The Rockefeller Foundation Funded the Eugenics Movement in America
Did you know the Rockefellers are staunch eugenicists?
“In 1975, CONGRESSMAN LARRY P. MCDONALD, said the following words about the Rockefellers; “The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining super-capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control… Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
The Rockefeller Foundation’s Legacy Of Funding Eugenics
According to Edwin Black of Cleveland Jewish News, “More than 27 [to be exact, by 1936, 35] states joined the shameful, decades-long utopian campaign to medically engineer racial supremacy.”
“Their eventual goal was to eliminate as much as 90% of the population from the reproductive future of America.””[2]
Those prophetic words from Congressman McDonald from 1975 should sound a chilling warning to us all today.
By a process of “shedding” the vaccinated infected the unvaccinated to cause the most deaths from 1918-1920. This is entirely what appears to be occurring today with the COVID19 experimental ‘vaccines.’ Coincidentally (or not!) the head medical expert then was Frederick Gates working to implement the Rockefeller vaccine plan. Today, it is billionaire, Bill Gates implementing the latest Rockefeller vaccine plan. Are you worried yet?
About John O’SullivanJohn is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI). John is a seasoned science writer and legal analyst who assisted Dr Ball in defeating world leading climate expert, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann in the ‘science trial of the century‘.
A new poll on the public’s views of Covid restrictions has been doing the rounds this week, and the results may come as a shock to many. They find that, of the people surveyed, 40% wished to continue with masks permanently, 26% were in favour of shutting casinos and clubs forever, and an astonishing 19% were in favour of a permanent 10pm curfew. Has Britain become a nation of authoritarians?
NEW: @ipsosmori polling for The Economist shows some Brits support anti-covid restrictions *permanently*, regardless of covid risk. Inc:
We’ve seen results like this before. Over the last 16 months, poll after poll has shown high levels of public approval for lockdowns and restrictions, which feels hard to square with the scenes of people emphatically celebrating the England victory on the streets this week.
That may be because, as a new study shows, the polling data is not all that it seems. Examining public attitudes towards restrictions, researchers at the Royal Society asked a sample of the public about their opinions on lockdown, twice over a 6 month period, first in June 2020, then again in December. Beyond standard questions about approval for lockdown and restrictions, they dug a little deeper, and asked participants what their views were on topics such as the side effects and trade-offs of restrictions, how they judged the threat of covid, and whether they felt this threat was mostly an individual threat, or a societal threat.
As anticipated, participants were in favour of lockdowns and almost all restrictions suggested. But when they were asked about their feelings about side effects (e.g. depression, obesity and abuse) of these policies, the picture changed. In fact, a majority of people appreciated that there were significant side effects and were generally unsure if the trade-offs were worthwhile. Essentially, a picture of ambivalence emerged.
There were some other interesting findings: public assessment of the risk of Covid was generally not related to individual threat, but to the threat to society as a whole. The fact that lockdown was considered necessary by the Government itself increased perception of the threat Covid posed to society. This in turn fed into public approval of lockdowns, essentially making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The researchers also found that this applied to support for restrictions. Due to the “apparent moralisation” (just this week, a WHO member accused the Government of “moral emptiness” for loosening restrictions) of the issue, there was more support for tighter measures. This then fed into participants’ responses, who in wishing to give socially acceptable answers, voiced support for restrictions.
It would therefore seem that public attitudes towards restrictions are far more complex than the headlines and polls suggest. Public feelings on restrictions are nuanced, and multifaceted — as one would expect, given the benefits, risks and huge trade-offs. Distilling complex issues into soundbites and simple figures only muddies the water further. So next time you see a poll claiming that nearly one-fifth of the population supports a permanent curfew, treat it with a heavy dose of scepticism. Journalists and politicians, that applies to you too.
Amy Jones is an anonymous doctor working in the NHS, who has a background in Philosophy & Bioethics.
John McAfee’s wife claims that Spanish authorities are engaged in a “cover-up” of the software tycoon’s death by withholding information.
McAfee was found dead in his Barcelona jail cell last month after a Spanish court ruled that he would be extradited to the U.S., where he faced the rest of his life in jail for tax evasion.
Widower Janice McAfee continues to insist that foul play could have been involved, tweeting that authorities are dragging their feet on releasing information.
“There has been no since (sic) of urgency from the various Spanish authorities involved in the investigation into John’s death and there is clearly a cover up happening here concerning the events surrounding his death,” wrote McAfee.
“We have not received the death certificate, the official autopsy report or the official report from the prison,” she added. “I understand that things take time but the lack of cooperation from the Spanish authorities only confirms our suspicions that they have something to hide.”
Both Janice McAfee and the tycoon’s lawyer previously claimed there was no indication McAfee was suicidal before he allegedly took his own life.
McAfee repeatedly insisted in tweets and public statements that he was not planning on killing himself, asserting that he was “whacked” if that happened.
He also claimed on several occasions that he had gathered over 31 terabytes of data implicating deep state and CIA officials in criminal activity.
No longer associated with Wikipedia as it now operates, its co-founder Larry Sanger called its original “neutral point of view” (NPOV) dead in a 2020 op-ed, explaining:
Its unacceptable new policy “endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what (Wiki) call(s) “false balance.”
The notion drove a stake through the heart of truth and full disclosure on all issues, especially on most important cutting-edge ones.
One of many political examples is Wiki material on Trump — a figure I sharply criticized for legitimate reasons, not invented ones.
One-sidedly bashing him, Wiki excludes supporting views, Sanger explained.
In stark contrast, “glowing Hillary” material extols the unprosecuted war goddess, racketeer, perjurer — a member of the notorious Clinton crime family with husband Bill and daughter Chelsea.
Sanger stressed the importance of neutrality, saying the following:
It’s vital on all things “political and many other topics because we want to be left free to make up our own minds” based on unfiltered facts, adding:
“Reference, news, and educational resources aimed at laying out a subject in general should give us the tools we need to rationally decide what we want to think.”
“Only those who want to force the minds of others can be opposed to neutrality.”
Corrupted by abandonment of neutrality bias, Wiki failed the test.
It falsely calls alternative medicine information based on science “pseudoscience (sic),” saying:
“Alternative medicine describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility (sic) and is untested (sic), untestable (sic) or proven ineffective (sic).”
The above claim turned scientific truth-telling on its head in support of anti-science.
It’s notably true on all things related to flu/covid.
State-sponsored/media and Wiki-supported Big Lies and mass deception back the mother of all scams — genocide on an unparalleled scale. More on this topic below.
Sanger called for Wiki “to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV” in favor state-approved bias and suppression of what’s most important for everyone to know, adding:
“Wikipedians are unlikely to make any such change.”
“They live in a fantasy world of their own making.”
What’s needed is “an independent and decentralized encyclopedia network, such as I proposed with the Encyclosphere” — free from bias and suppression of contrary views and dissent from the official fabricated narrative.
Days earlier, Sanger called Wiki “more one-sided than ever,” saying:
There’s “a crucial difference between propaganda and information that supports individual deliberation. The difference is neutrality.”
“So does Wikipedia meet its own ideals of neutrality? Hardly!
It fails dismally on all issues mattering most.
It defied reality by calling toxic flu/covid jabs “95%” effective (sic) — while slamming science-based views otherwise as “misinformation.”
It calls legitimate concern about their hazardous side effects “overblown.”
“(I)nformation from the many skeptical physicians and medical researchers” explaining otherwise is suppressed, said Sanger, adding:
Wiki “openly repudiates neutrality…”
Its “editors embrace their biases sometimes so fervently that their articles emerge more as propaganda than as reference material.”
Operating as “a kind of thought police,” unbiased truth and full disclosure is banned on its pages.
The official narrative message is featured exclusively on all issues mattering most.
A Final Comment
On Tuesday, Joseph Mercola reported that “Wikipedia scrub(bed) inventor of mRNA… technology (Robert Malone’s) scientific contributions” in response to its mass-jabbing dangers he explained on a YouTube posted podcast, now deleted.
He expressed concern “about government not being transparent about risks, and that people are being coerced into taking these experimental injections, which violates bioethics laws,” Mercola explained, adding:
Through mid-June, his “contributions were extensively included in the historical section on RNA vaccines’ Wikipedia page.”
They’re now deleted, along with his other scientific accomplishments.
Mercola explained that officially reported deaths from flu/covid jabs — the tip of an exponentially greater total — exceed numbers from “more than 70 vaccines combined over the past 30 years…”
They’re “about 500 times deadlier than the seasonal flu vaccine…”
Flu/covid jab drugs were designed to harm health, not protect and preserve it as falsely claimed by US/Western dark forces, their press agent media and Wikipedia.
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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