One of the most powerful lawyers in Germany, currently building a legal case against the WHO for this fraudulent pandemic.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19 |
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It’s easy to laugh when middle-class greenies write about their eco-anxiety, under headlines like ‘Can you drink milk and stay ethical?’, but there’s a deadly serious side to this that threatens to curtail our freedoms.
The world of the eco-warrior is a gloomy one indeed. Just as the rest of us are starting to enjoy the first loosening of government-imposed lockdown and pondering the post-Covid-19 world, they, while drinking their barista-quality oat milk lattes, are preoccupied with highly moral dilemmas most of us don’t have the time or money to think about.
What follows is not made up, but is a shortened version of Guardian columnist Emma Beddington’s moral dilemmas facing the post-Covid-19 world.
While anxious to minimise her part in transforming the Earth “into a flaming wasteland,” she has a major dilemma with milk, well, multiple problems. Why? Because milk is apparently, “bad news for the planet: three times worse in greenhouse emission terms than any plant milk.” (We’ll come back to the moronic concept of ‘plant milk’ below). But her dilemma is that while knowing this for “ages” she has pretended it is not. And why? “Because tea is horrible with oat milk.” Who would have thought? (We’ll come back to this equally moronic concept below too).
According to Beddington, the horror of this complex dilemma is earth-shattering, or scorching, depending on where you place your carbon footprint. Her solution is to seek out what she terms “the least bad dairy”: she gets her milk from “cows fed on seaweed, which reduces bovine belching.” Apparently, research has recently found this can cut methane emissions by up to 82%.
But before you can breathe a sigh of relief (while perhaps pondering whether feeding cows seaweed does not constitute abuse and animal cruelty), it gets even worse. Her ‘good’ dairy comes in plastic bottles, not glass ones, which makes it bad. Because her household finishes two pints of seaweed milk precisely six days after the weekly delivery, ordering another two-pint bottle, would mean “most of it would end up down the sink” – obviously a no-no for sustainability. So, her instinct is to hold out. But this results in an even greater moral dilemma because it means imposing her “eco-guilt” on her younger son, who, bless him, “has the smallest carbon footprint of any of us, and just wants milk on his cereal.” The result? She ends up buying a pint of “Bad Milk from the corner shop.” (The horror!).
At the very least, this suggests her son has something she lacks: namely, the ability to recognise that Bad Milk tastes good while Good Milk is, in her own words, “horrible.”
But who would have thought that living ethically was so complex and difficult? Milk is just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. Every consumer decision is laden with moral dilemmas: how to shop without contributing to “flat-pack landfill waste.” What’s the point in recycling “like a demon, sorting, flattening, rinsing and parsing the council’s opaque and inadequate recycling policy” when no-one “will take plastic takeaway boxes” (an admission that Beddington and her fellow eco-warriors have spent lockdown dealing with their eco-dilemmas while eating takeaway food delivered by people who, in all likelihood, are relying on food banks for their survival, not struggling with the pros and cons of seaweed-fed bovines).
But for the virtual signalling eco-middle class every choice is bad and carries a heavy burden. The weight of having to balance “one harm against another” is causing them mental health problems. So, what is her solution? Well, she says, “as in so much of life…I just want someone authoritative to tell me what to do.”
This is where eco-anxiety ceases to be a source of comedic brilliance and where virtue signalling becomes a serious political issue.
What Beddington and the Guardian are advocating, in reality, is that we should all succumb to the dictatorship of experts – but only the experts that accept misanthropic eco-anxiety, not those who might question it.
The concepts they use, like ‘plant milk’ already indicate the type of conformity they expect and demand. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘milk’ as “a whitish fluid, rich in fat and protein, secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals (including humans) for the nourishment of their young, and taken from cows, sheep, etc., as an article of the human diet.” As such, it reflects human ingenuity and how mankind has transformed nature to meet human ends. This is precisely what nonsensical misnomers like ‘oat milk’ seek to undermine.
The assault on language is just the thin edge of the wedge. ‘Tell me what to do’ is the political rallying cry of the middle class. They have really loved Covid-19 and the lockdown that was imposed by the state on the word of politically unaccountable experts who apparently knew what’s best for the rest of us. And they’re expert at that.
The moral complexity of eco-anxiety, expressed so comically by Beddington, should not lull us into a false sense of security. As bonkers as it is, it serves to strengthen the idea of the need for expert diktat.
This has been the message of the high priest of environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. She has not tired from drawing out the lessons that acting on the advice of scientists “should be applied to the climate crisis.”
As we move haltingly towards freedom in the post-Covid-19 era, eco-anxiety is set to fill the authoritarian expert gap that will follow. The battle over the next global emergency – the environment – will make the Covid-19 battle for debate, contestation and anti-state authoritarianism look like a walk in the park.
But it is not all bleak. As one reader, ‘Donercard’, humorously referring to the ‘Ian Rush Accrington Stanley’ milk advert by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1980s, puts it: “You (Beddington) can drink milk and be ethical but you will never play for Accrington Stanley.”
Exactly!
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights |
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Over time, I have had many posts on the scientific method, most recently in January 2021 here. You posit a falsifiable hypothesis. Then you collect and examine the evidence. If the evidence contradicts your hypothesis you must abandon it and move on. Really, that’s the whole thing.
Then there is woke “science,” most visible these days in the arenas of response to the Covid-19 virus and of climate change. Here the principles are a little different. In woke “science” there is no falsifiable hypothesis. In place of that, we have the official orthodox consensus view. The official orthodox consensus view has been arrived at by all the smartest people, because it just seems like it must be right. The official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted, particularly by the little people like you. Based on the official orthodox consensus view, those in power can take away all your freedom (Covid) and/or transform the entire economy (climate). After all, it’s the “science.”
But what if evidence seems to contradict the official orthodox consensus view? I’m sorry, but as I said the official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted. Today’s news brings a couple of extreme examples of that, one on the virus front, and the other relating to climate. Both of these are from Europe, so you may not have seen them.
On the virus front, we consider the case of Germany. For some reason, Germany has been relatively lightly hit by the virus, at least so far. According to the latest from Worldometers, Germany has had 940 deaths per million population to date. This compares, for example to 2,593 deaths per million in Czechia (worst of all countries), 1,864 in the UK, and 1,732 in the U.S. But starting in about mid-March, Germany has seen a renewed “surge” of cases. Why? Some might say that the virus is just going to get you sooner or later. But on March 23 German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a new three-week “lockdown” of the strictest variety, which included the forced closing of most stores from April 1 – 5. And with that three-week period about to expire, the website No Tricks Zone reports today that even further extensions are under consideration:
The German government is looking to impose even stricter lockdown measures. Liberty has been suspended indefinitely in Europe.
The problem here is that if the proposition that lockdowns work were a falsifiable hypothesis, it would have been falsified by now. The most striking data come from here in the U.S., where strict lockdown states like New York (2642 deaths per million as of today), New Jersey (2800), Illinois (1878) and Michigan (1759) continue to get shown up by wide open places like Florida (1584) and Texas (1705). Try to find any actual data for the efficacy of lockdowns, and you can’t. That is, except for their efficacy in generating an unemployment rate of 13% in New York City versus 4.8% in Florida.
But Germany, like the blue U.S. states, operates by the alternative principles of woke “science.” After all, data or no data, all the smartest people know that lockdowns must work. No Tricks Zone reports today on a news conference that took place on Friday (April 9) in Germany. An independent journalist named Boris Reitschuster got a chance to pose a question to Oliver Ewald, a spokesman for the German Ministry of Health. Here is the question (translation from NTZ ):
Herr Ewald, [a journalist] at the WZ wrote in a report that the German government has no proof of the effectiveness of lockdowns. So my question is: what scientific studies do you have? Thank you.”
And here is the initial response, plus some further back and forth:
Ewald: Herr Reitschuster, you know that as a fundamental rule, we do not assess comments from journalists, and so here I will stick to that.”
Reitschuster: There’s a misunderstanding, Herr Ewald, I only brought up a quote and then followed it up with a stand-alone question, and this question has nothing to do with the quote. I’ll gladly repeat the question once again; what scientific study…”
Ewald: When you read one sentence from this comment here and request an assessment without, so to speak, providing further context or basis, I can’t say anything on that.”
Reitschuster: Completely without the sentence, for the third time, what scientific study does the German government have? Thank you.”
Ewald: I’ve said what I have to say say on that!”
NTZ comments: “We all know there is no study that supports lockdowns, and so spokesman Ewald is clearly trapped.” However, you should expect the lockdown to continue in Germany.
Over to the subject of climate change. As you may have read, last week brought record-breaking cold to much of Europe which, given that we are well into April, caused substantial damage to crops in their early stages of Spring growth. Actually, it’s likely that you didn’t read about that at all. That’s because the U.S. mainstream media mostly only report on record warmth, not record cold. As an example, I can’t find any mention of the subject of Europe’s cold snap in the New York Times (although I do find an article in the Washington Post ).
But, particularly given the extensive crop damage, let alone the readership personally experiencing the bitter cold temperatures, the European press can’t avoid reporting on the subject. Doesn’t this extreme cold kind of undermine the official orthodox consensus view that the climate is rapidly getting warmer?
Here is the story from France’s Le Figaro, April 9 (my translation):
A bout of severe frost struck numerous crops this week in France. Temperatures plummeted, in some places, below 0 degrees C (32 F) at a speed never seen since 1947 for the month of April.
Quick, somebody needs to explain how that is consistent with “global warming.” Le Figaro calls in one Thierry Castel, identified as a “climatology researcher.” Here’s his explanation:
This is well linked [to global warming]. The differences in temperatures between the polar zones and the mid-latitudes are decreasing. That process modulates the undulations of the jet stream (the fast winds over the North Atlantic that play a big role in atmospheric circulation). Because of that, we are faced with the descent of cold Arctic air, and the more important northward movement of warm air.
Sure, Thierry. Meanwhile, the UAH guys report another substantial drop in world atmospheric temperature in March 2021. The global temperature anomaly for the month is -0.01 deg C (as against the 30 year average of 1991-2020). That brings us back down to about the same temperature we had back in 1988. Needless to say, Le Figaro was way too polite to confront M. Castel with this information.
Here is the latest UAH chart of global temperatures, going back to 1979:
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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In recent years, Mongolia has received increasing attention in a comprehensive and multifaceted US strategy aimed at dominating the Eurasian continent. To a certain extent, this is due to the colossal amounts of natural resources and economic opportunities the country has, which are of undoubted interest for American industrial and business circles. However, this is even more connected with Washington’s intentions to use the “ancestral home of Genghis Khan” to oppose Russia and the PRC, with an emphasis on the “separation” of the Mongolian people, taking into account the presence in China of Inner Mongolia a very extensive autonomous region bordering with it and with Russia.
Experts have reported that the Americans are clearly striving to establish bilateral ties with Ulaanbaatar and include Mongolia in its closest allies (along with Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand) in the Indo-Pacific region. Analysts think that the idea of cooperating with Ulaanbaatar has become especially relevant for the United States in light of its tense relations with both Russia and China in recent years.
In terms of the total volume of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mongolia, the United States ranks 6th (3.3%), behind China and Japan, but ahead of Russia. To a large extent, US investors are showing interest in the Mongolian mining industry, in particular in the development of the largest coal deposit, Tavan Tolgoi. Although American investors consider Mongolia one of the most promising markets in East Asia, their investment activities in this country are hampered by a cumbersome and ineffective bureaucracy, high levels of corruption and recurring financial conflicts caused by the Mongolian “resource nationalism”.
Recently, in the speeches of American politicians, one can hear more and more “about the pride of the United States that it is Mongolia’s third neighbor”. On the subject, the United States refers to a concept that appeared in the vocabulary of Mongolian politicians after the revolution of the early 1990s. Geographically, Mongolia shares borders with only two countries, Russia and China, but Ulaanbaatar has already repeatedly declared that today it does not intend to close all its military-political and economic contacts on these two states alone. That is why Mongolia is considered a third neighbor to those countries with which the republic maintains its closest relations, naming, in particular, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia and the EU countries, with which Mongolia expects to balance the Russian and Chinese influence in region.
The vector of Washington’s expansion of it’s spheres of influence in Asia has been visible for a long time. Back in 2011, Democratic Party representative Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, announced that the presence of the United States in Asia is a prerequisite for maintaining American global leadership, since it is in Asia that “the bulk of 21st century history will be written.” The key adversary of Washington in the region today remains China, which appears in the doctrinal documents of the United States as one of the key threats.
In the US national security document “Strategic Framework for Engineering and Technology” recently declassified by the White House and adopted in 2018, Mongolia is considered, along with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, among the main partners in containing China’s “economic aggression” by engaging in various American projects. One of the expressions of this policy was the allocation of $ 350 million to Ulaanbaatar to modernize the capital’s water supply system, which became the largest one-time US investment in the region. Meanwhile, Washington systematically seeks to emphasize that the gratuitous nature of American aid supposedly compares favorably with China’s infrastructure programs, which, as a rule, imply the development of connected loans.
In order to increase America’s presence in Mongolia in 2019, the USAID resumed its work, which in early 2021 announced the financing of two programs to promote agricultural development in the amount of $ 4.3 million.
With the active participation of the USAID, there has recently been an active expansion of activities in Mongolia by numerous NGOs, many of which were created in various directions to “expand democracy.” So, according to the Ministry of Justice and Internal Affairs of Mongolia, in 2019 more than 20 thousand NGOs were officially registered in this country (and this is for 3 million of the population!), Most of which are financed from abroad. For example, activists of the Mongolian Youth Union NGO are implementing a project according to which Mongolian politicians are included in the black or white list according to the degree of their corruption. But at the same time, it turns out that the MSM coordinates these lists with the leadership of such American structures as the Peace Corps and USAID! Now it is clear why those Mongolian politicians who are considered to be “pro-Russian” are mainly included in the so-called “black” list. Being put on such a “black” list, it is already unlikely that you will be included in the number of deputies of the Mongolian parliament…
Another example is the active work in Mongolia with local politicians (mainly with parliamentarians) and their electorate of another NGO, the International Republican Institute (IRI), which in 2016 was banned in Russia due to gross interference in internal affairs countries. This NGO regularly organizes trips for Mongolian legislators and other prominent Mongolian political leaders to the United States, which can reasonably be regarded as bribery.
In addition, with the active support of the US Embassy in Mongolia, the Soros Foundation, such a religious sect as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, banned in Russia, and a number of others, are operating today. Judging by the financial statements, money is not spared for Mongolia, especially American structures disguised as NGOs and acting to promote “American-style democracy.” Taking into account their significant number for a modest 3 million population, Mongolia should have long ago become a “world stronghold of democracy and prosperity,” which, however, is clearly not visible… the goals and objectives set for them, primarily in the confrontation between Russia and China.
In order to avoid becoming completely controlled by foreign influence, for Mongolia it is long overdue to adopt a law “on foreign agents”, as, incidentally, did the United States itself, having adopted the FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) law back in 1938. By the way, not only in the United States, but also in many other countries, such activities with foreign participation are strictly controlled, in particular, in Great Britain, Israel, India, Germany and other countries that responsibly approach their security and political sovereignty.
In 2018, the military was added to the political and economic aspect of American policy towards Mongolia. Ulaanbaatar has come to be regarded as one of the leading regional partners of the Global Peace Operation Initiative to support peacekeeping operations, and US-Mongolian cooperation is being built up through UN peacekeeping in Africa and NATO in Afghanistan.
Within the framework of the American State Partnership Program, the engineering and technical staff intensified cooperation between the Alaska Guard and the armed forces of Mongolia, in particular, at the international exercises “In Search of Khan” and “Gobi Wolf” held annually in Mongolia.
Washington’s increased attention to Mongolia and its relations with its two natural neighbors, Russia and China, demonstrates what happened in January this year, expansion of the staff of the US Embassy in Ulaanbaatar by 12 diplomats at once, 4 of whom are specialists in Russia and China. Two more USAID employees arrived in Mongolia last summer.
Therefore, the residents of Mongolia should not relax in the coming months, especially on the eve of the upcoming presidential elections in the country in the summer, in which the United States has already begun to actively prepare for intervention, and not only through the already tested option of using controlled NGOs and the media.
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Timeless or most popular | China, Mongolia, Russia, Soros Foundation, United States, USAID |
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The Arctic tends not to get a lot of headlines. But here in Canada, it’s a big deal. Or at least it is rhetorically speaking. Canadians like to think of themselves as a wintery, northern people – as Gilles Vigneault sang: ‘Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.’ We get all emotional about the north, and pump ourselves up with stirring speeches about defending our sovereignty. After which, we then do nothing – at least until the next time somebody else does something we don’t like in the Arctic. At that point, we make some more stirring speeches, before slinking off back to our local Timmy’s in Toronto or some other place as far from the Arctic as we can get without actually ending up in the United States.
And so it is that the Canadian press was none too happy this week when the Russian Federation deposited its latest submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to advance its claim to a large portion of the Arctic Ocean seabed. ‘That’s our Arctic Ocean seabed, you wretched Russians! How dare you?”
The Commission in question is a product of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), that gives states the right to exclusive exploitation of the seabed up to 200 nautical miles from their continental shelf. To claim such a right, however, states have to provide the Commission with scientific evidence of where the continental shelf extends under the sea. If they can satisfactorily show where the shelf goes, then the UN will approve the claim. If they can’t, then the UN won’t.
This is a well-recognized procedure under UNCLOS, and Arctic nations have been spending the past few years busily surveying the Arctic seabed in order to promote the case that their own continental shelf extends outwards far from the coastline – the further the better, because the further the shelf goes, the more of the seabed can be claimed.
Particularly important is the status of the Lomonosov Ridge, a massive formation that stretches across the Arctic from Russian waters to Canadian ones. Russia, Canada, and Denmark (Greenland) are all seeking to prove that the Ridge is an extension of their own continental shelf. Whoever wins the argument gets the grand prize – control over a huge chunk of the Arctic Ocean.
Russia submitted its first claim to the UN Commission back in 2001, but was told to go away and do more research. Having done so, it submitted its new evidence in 2015, and has now further updated its submission, all backed up with new scientific evidence. The latest Russian bid has some Canadians fuming, as it expands Russia’s claim over Arctic waters by about 750,000 square kilometers compared to the original submission.
“This is a maximalist submission. You cannot claim any more,” complains Robert Huebert, an Arctic expert at the University of Calgary. “In effect, they’re claiming the entire Arctic Ocean as their continental shelf … they’re claiming the entire Canadian and Danish continental shelf as their continental shelf,” adds Huebert.
This is true in the sense that Russia is clearly pushing its claim as far as it thinks the science will allow. But it’s hardly alone in doing so. In 2014, for instance, Denmark submitted a claim to the UN Commission that has been described as “an unexpectedly massive demand … [that] stretch the demand as much as legally possible all to the way to Russia’s exclusive economic zone.”
Canada in turn presented its submission to the UN in 2019. Adam Lajeunesse of St Francis Xavier University noted in response that, “There was [some conjecture] that we would sort of do a quid pro quo and stop our claim at about the pole as a means of facilitating a political settlement. But like the Danes, we’ve gone well over the North Pole and are claiming an enormous chunk of the Arctic continental shelf.”
Russia, therefore, is only following where others have already gone. Furthermore, it seems pretty confident in the validity of the scientific evidence it has amassed. That, though, will be a matter for the Commission to determine. In the meantime, what’s interesting about all this is the manner in which Russia has operated.
For as Whitney Lackenbauer, a circumpolar expert at Trent University, notes, ‘Russia is playing by the rules. And for those of us who are concerned about Russia’s flouting of the rules-based order, I actually take a great deal of comfort in seeking Russia go through the established process in this particular case. … I’m not worried about Russia’s action as an Arctic coastal state seeking to determine the outermost limits of its extended continental shelf.”
Lackenbauer hits the nail on the head. Western leaders regularly accuse Russia of wanting to destroy the international order. But reality is rather different. On occasion, when vital interests are at stake, the Russian Federation flouts the rules, just as other powers do. But most of the time, it operates within them. The Arctic is a case in point. Google ‘Russia, Arctic, aggression’, and you get all sorts of headlines, such as ‘What is behind Russia’s aggressive Arctic strategy?’, ‘Meeting Russia’s Arctic aggression’, ‘Arctic aggression: Russia is better prepared for a North Pole conflict than America is’, and so on. Yet, in practice, the Russian Federation has entirely respected the ‘rules-based international order’ as far as the Arctic is concerned. It’s an example that should give pundits pause to thought.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has declared that Arctic territorial issues ‘can be tackled solely on the basis of international law, the International Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in the framework of the mechanisms that have in accordance with it been created for determining the borders of states which have a continental shelf.’ This is what is happening. It’s an illustration that, for all the talk of the collapse of the international order, international law continues to operate and most states respect it most of the time. Instead of focusing on the few cases when the opposite happens, international affairs analysts might usefully pay a bit more attention to the instances when things work the way they should. If they did, their analyses might be less alarmist, and also rather more realistic.
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Russia |
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Customers wait in line to purchase limited-edition Air Jordan 1 on July 25, 2019, in Yichang, Hubei Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.
But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”
Official publication of the British surveillance agency GCHQ, May 17, 2015
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.
Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE), hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.
It’s so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport to honor and cherish. Like the GCHQ, how menacing can an intelligence agency be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people they routinely spy on, repress and kill?
Again, this does not make the CIA perfect — sure, they make some mistakes and engage in some actions that are worthy of criticism — but to combat real evil, you do not go protest at Langley. They are engaged in important work combating homophobia, racism and misogyny. Thus, real warriors against evil look not to them but instead go searching online for the Boogaloo Boys and boomers on Facebook who post Q-Anon and other problematic memes. That is where your focus should remain if you want to root out the real threats.
Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.
Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their powerful aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.
But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.
One of the very few companies that refused to do so was the Silicon Valley-based cryptocurrency exchange platform called Coinbase — which announced that it would remain apolitical and not involve itself in partisan debates or causes of social justice unrelated to its core business mission. When announcing that policy of political neutrality, the company’s co-founder Brian Armstrong explained that “the reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division.” That once-anodyne announcement — to stay out of politics as a corporate entity — produced instant backlash. And exactly two months after, the notoriously censorious and politicized “tech reporters” of The New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry (the company was also savaged by journalists because of its audacity to reveal and respond to the NYT’s allegations in advance of the paper’s decision to publish).
Ever since, large corporations are diving into numerous other political debates with great vigor and force — provided that their views are in alignment with affluent liberal culture and prevailing social justice pieties (though, like NBA officials and stars, they confine themselves to easy domestic causes and scripted liberal platitudes while they steadfastly avoid commenting on any injustices that may implicate their business interests, such as debates over labor abuses in China or Amazon’s abuse of its workers). The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that “dozens of chief executives and other senior leaders gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under way in Texas and other states.” The campaign against these laws includes not just corporate giants but also the nation’s largest and richest corporate law firms.
Part of the motive may be self-serving strategy. With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the Executive Branch — all of the instruments that can legislate and regulate their businesses — they may be calculating that using their massive weight to serve the Democratic Party’s political agenda is wise. Doing so could curry favor with powerful lawmakers and regulators and result in rewards or, conversely, allow them to avoid punishment and recrimination for the crime of refusing to engage in activism. That motive at least partially explains why they have been so generous with their donations to Democratic candidates. “Wall Street is putting its money behind Democrat Barack Obama for president,” reported Reuters in 2008, while they did the same overwhelmingly in 2020 to support Biden over Trump (just as Democrats have increasingly become the party of affluent suburbanites, they are also increasingly supported by the wealthiest corporate and tech power centers).
The farcical nature of all of this is obvious. Just as it is laughable that the CIA and GCHQ care about social justice, feminism, and racial diversity as they bomb and subvert the rest of the world in ways that contradict all of those professed values, the idea that corporate giants who use sweatshops, slave labor, mass layoffs and abuse of their workforce care about any of these causes would make any rational person suffocate on the stench of their insincerity.
New York Times, Nov. 20, 2020
But whatever the motives, the dangers of growing corporate involvement in U.S. political debates are manifest. In its healthiest form, the way democracy would function is that citizens vote for the representatives they believe will best serve their interests, and those representatives then enact laws they believe their constituents favor. But when giant corporations use their unparalleled economic power to override that process — by forcing state and local governments to rescind or reject laws they would otherwise support due to fear of corporate punishment — then the system, by definition, far more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Rod Dreher, writing on Monday in The American Conservative, advanced arguments and concerns that were once the province of the left:
This is progressive oligarchy. Woke Capitalism is a threat to democracy. As I write about in Live Not By Lies, these same people are eventually going to eagerly collaborate with government to create the Social Credit System necessary to make this country controllable.
When is it going to occur to people on the Left that Big Business is doing all this because it knows that if it makes the right moves on cultural issues that matter to the Woke, it will be able to do whatever it wants to workers? It has never had to worry about Republicans. That may be changing soon, if we elect a crop of populists who know how to do more than tweet and make belligerent but empty speeches. I’d like to see Republicans like this get elected, and get active to remind Big Business of its proper place. . . .
Big Business is already quite powerful in our society. Do we really want a society in which Big Business reserves to itself the right to tell polities what their laws and policies are going to be, at the risk of punishing that polity economically if it resists? Does this sound like the kind of country you want to live in? If you are pro-choice, imagine that Big Business decided to threaten your state’s legislature with economic consequences if it doesn’t pass pro-life legislation. One expects the business lobby to engage itself on legislative questions pertaining to its own sphere, but beyond it? Big Business already has a lot of power over our lives — and now it wants more. The only force powerful enough to reign it in is the State. Whatever else you might say about the State, at least it is democratically accountable — unlike Big Business.
Residing beyond the dangers of even greater corporatist control over our lives and politics is the deceitful branding and distractions that this exploitation of social causes, by design, engender. If large corporations are crusading for voting rights, why would anyone regard them as a menace? The contrary is true: we should be grateful for their noble activism.
When it comes time to identify the root causes of social pathologies, we will look elsewhere. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the corporate class and the ways they abuse and eliminate labor, control government, and destroy the working and middle classes will be impossible to see, as we are all blinded by the glare of their virtuous Instagram posts about racial justice and their unified campaigns against voter suppression. In an instant of swooning over their benevolent devotion to social justice, we will forget what they actually exist to do. When we work to harness their power to support our own political causes, we forget about how out of control and menacing that power is, and what it is most often used for. And that is exactly the way they want it.
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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Joining us today is Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory, Michael Yeadon, here to discuss his expert opinion on the topics of COVID-19, mRNA vaccine technology, as well as suppression and outright censorship of medical and scientific experts.
(https://www.rokfin.com/TLAVagabond)
(https://odysee.com/@TLAVagabond:5)
(https://www.bitchute.com/channel/24yVcta8zEjY/)
Video Source Links:
https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/03/13/how-worried-should-we-be-about-the-new-variants/
https://doctors4covidethics.medium.com
Doctors & Scientists Write to European Medicines Agency Warning of COVID-19 Vaccine Dangers
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-former-pfizer-vp-your-government-is-lying-to-you-in-a-way-that-could-lead-to-your-death
April 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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Rule by brute force.
That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our nation.
SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Homeowners finding their homes under siege by police out to confiscate lawfully-owned guns. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong.
The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly.
We are approaching critical mass.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
In effect, you will disappear.
Our freedoms are already being made to disappear.
We have seen this come to pass under past presidents with their use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements.
President Biden’s long list of executive orders, executive actions, proclamations and directives is just more of the same: rule by fiat.
Now the Biden Administration is setting its sights on gun control.
Mark my words: gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats, will become yet another means by which to subvert the Constitution and sabotage the rights of the people.
These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, are yet another stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
Nineteen states and Washington DC have red flag laws on their books.
That number is growing.
In the midst of what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings (the statistics suggest otherwise), these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws, which don’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.
Anything—knives, vehicles, planes, pressure cookers—can become a weapon when wielded with deadly intentions.
With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats… to “stop dangerous people before they act.”
While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police the authority to preemptively raid homes in order to neutralize a potential threat.
It’s a powder keg waiting for a lit match.
Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.
The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.
Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.
So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?
According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”
Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.
This is the blowback from all that military weaponry flowing to domestic police departments.
This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.
This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, which Maryland did in 2018, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally where the burden of proof is reversed and you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
All you need to do is end up on a government watch list.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
April 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States |
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A man who spent last year believing everything the Government and media said about Covid-19 and Lockdowns, only to find out that none of the things he’d believed are true, has announced his continued belief that they must be acting out of purely altruistic motives. Brian Sprocket, a 38-year-old teaching assistant from Barnsley, spent most of last year staying home, wearing a mask on the few occasions he ventured out, and ensuring he stayed away from all human beings, whom he regarded as walking virus carriers.
But at the beginning of this year, he was forced to think for the first time about what was going on, after his television stopped working. With nothing to watch, Brian decided to look at an email sent to him by a friend last autumn, which he had previously dismissed as a conspiracy theory:
“The email claimed that Asymptomatic transmission was a myth, based almost entirely on one false case in Germany. To my amazement, when I actually did a bit of research for the first time in nearly a year, I realised that this claim, which Governments around the world had used as the pretext for Lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and, well everything, wasn’t actually true.”
From there, nothing could hold Brian back from his new found quest for the truth. Having previously believed that the quarantining of millions of healthy people for months on end was a normal health policy that had been used since time immemorial, he was shocked to find out that this wasn’t the case at all, and that normal practice was to quarantine the sick:
“I must admit, I felt a bit of a numpty when I found that out. I suppose it’s obvious when you think about it, but I suppose at least I wasn’t the only one who fell for it.”
From there, Brian entered a whole new world of truth discovery. For instance, he was amazed to find out that the authorities had been lying about PCR testing, which even its inventor said should never be used as a clinical diagnostic tool. He was also shocked to find out the truth about the lethality of Covid-19, which he had been convinced was roughly the same as Bubonic Plague, which had killed up to 60% of the populations it infected:
“All through 2020,” he said, “I’d been sending angry and sneering Tweets to those claiming Covid-19 was not much different to a bad seasonal flu, calling them names like Covidiots and Covid Deniers, that sort of thing. But back in February, I came across a paper by one of the world’s most cited epidemiologists, Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, who found that the Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 is around 0.23% — roughly the same as a bad flu. This was accepted by the World Health Organisation. You’d think finding out that Covid-19 isn’t the Plague would be reassuring, but I must admit I found it all a bit unnerving.”
After going on to discover that the vaccines aren’t really vaccines, but experimental gene therapies that haven’t completed their clinical trials, Brian started to write a stern letter to his MP, telling her he’d never vote for her again if she didn’t start holding the Government to account, oppose Vaccine Passports, and demand our freedoms back. However, just as he was completing it, his TV was returned from the repair shop, and after turning it on to watch the latest Government briefing, he forgot everything he’d found out over the past few weeks, and instead expressed his anger at those who refuse to wear masks, who don’t wish to be “vaccinated”, and who are sounding the alarm about Vaccine Passports:
“I can’t believe those stupid tinfoil hat wearing Covidiots and Vaccine Deniers,” he said from under his triple mask. “Don’t they realise there’s a deadly virus about and the Government is just trying to do its best to keep us safe. All we need to do is keep following the rules, stay apart from each other, keep your distance, keep masking up, make sure we don’t mess it up now, get the vax, follow the science, behave responsibly etc etc.”
April 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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The cadence is increasing of jurisdictions introducing, normalizing and expanding laws allowing doctors to help people commit suicide.
Is this purely in the service of relieving unbearable physical or mental suffering? Or do other factors predominate?
I used to believe the former, but my recent re-examination of the issue suggests the latter is more likely.
On March 17, 2021, Bill C-7 came into effect across Canada. The new law significantly increases the proportion of the population eligible to undergo physician-assisted death (PAD). C-7 expands PAD eligibility to, for example, people whose death is not reasonably foreseeable.
On March 18, Spain passed federal legislation that for the first time allows PAD there; it goes into effect in June.
The same thing has happened in New Zealand: the federal ‘End of Life Choice Act’ goes into effect in November.
And on April 8 the French federal parliament debated whether to make euthanasia the law of their land. The majority of the parliamentarians favour legalizing euthanasia. However, the law was not passed because there wasn’t enough time for them to go through the thousands of amendments proposed by legislators who oppose PAD.
(Other terms for the act of doctors helping people commit suicide include physician-assisted suicide, voluntary assisted suicide and medical assistance in dying. And the difference between euthanasia and PAD is the latter requires patients to request it.)
Other countries, such as the UK, are similar to France: active euthanasia is illegal but most residents and physicians approve of it. Therefore in these countries many physicians perform euthanasia without being punished and there is a considerable push to legalize it.
Holland and Belgium were the first countries to decriminalize euthanasia and PAD, bringing their laws into effect in 2002. In Luxembourg a similar assisted-death law came into effect in 2009.
All three countries allow people to undergo PAD if they have a serious medical condition, disability or psychiatric disorder, whether their death is imminent or not.
For the last few years years Holland has been moving towards voting on legalizing PAD for people 75 years of age or older who are ‘tired of life.’ And there has been a steady and very significant increase in the overall number of people undergoing PAD in Holland and Belgium.
PAD currently can also be legally performed in five other countries, either across the whole country or in parts of it: Canada, the US, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.
In the U.S. each state can decide whether PAD is permitted there. So far, eight states plus Washington, D.C. have legalized it. Similarly, in Australia it’s a state issue; so far the state of Victoria has brought into effect a law allowing PAD and on July 1 the state of Western Australia will follow suit.
In Canada PAD was first legalized federally in 2016. Now Bill C-7 expands PAD by, among other measures:
- no longer requiring a 10-day ‘reflection’ period between the time a person whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable consents to PAD and when they receive it;
- allowing people who have a very serious illness or disability but whose natural death is not imminent to access PAD as long as they meet certain conditions (previously, PAD was only allowed in people whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable);
- allowing PAD for people who have previously requested it, been found eligible to receive it and their natural death has become reasonably foreseeable but they’ve lost the capacity to consent; and,
- starting in 2023, allowing PAD for people who have a mental illness alone, and no other underlying medical conditions or disabilities.
The government and mass media largely paint all of this as giving more people more right to choose how and when they end their lives.
Pro-PAD groups and opinion leaders refer to it in positive terms such as ‘right to die’ and ‘death with dignity.’
Other institutions have an overt pro-PAD position; among these is the Hastings Center in the US.
And additional influential groups and organizations — Wikipedia, for example — have a more subtle but definitely detectable pro-PAD slant in the information they provide to the public about PAD.
Most of the individuals and groups that oppose PAD do so on religious grounds.
But there are at least three facts that most people don’t know about physician-assisted death.
One
Expanding PAD is a serious potential threat to people with disabilities, dementia and Alzheimer’s.
That’s because what the vast majority of these people want and need is good care and services – but those services are becoming very hard to access, particularly in this era of Covid.
Most countries’ PAD laws require health-care providers to inform people of available services for relieving their suffering as alternatives to PAD and to offer referrals to professionals who can provide these services. But those laws don’t also require that the services be made accessible to all of these people, via increased government funding.
And there already have been documented cases of people with disabilities being pressured to undergo PAD.
That’s why many disability advocates oppose expansion of PAD.
Catherine Frazee, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto and a leading disability advocate, gave powerful testimony to the Canadian parliamentary Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights’s Bill C-7 hearing in November 2020.
She told hearing attendees that the Quebec Superior Court’s 2019 decision allowing disabled Quebec resident Jean Truchon to undergo assisted death even though his death was not reasonably foreseeable – which the Canadian federal government used as a springboard to create Bill C-7 — does not in fact translate into the need to make it easier for disabled people to kill themselves.
Frazee said that, rather, “the deprivations of institutional life that choked out his [Truchon’s] will to live [and resultant request for PAD] were not an inevitable consequence of disability.”
Krista Carr, executive vice-president of Inclusion Canada, has voiced a similar sentiment.
“This bill has got to be stopped, or it will end the life of people. It will end the life of way too many people with disabilities who feel they have no other options,” she’s quoted as saying in a February 8, 2021, Canadian Press article.
Two
In 2014, Belgium became the first country to expand PAD to apply to people as young as one year old.
In Holland, ever since its PAD law went into effect in 2002, the country has allowed assisted killing of children — in cases where they’re considered to be incurably ill — of as young as 12. And the Dutch government is now considering following Belgium’s lead and lowering that minimum age to as young as one.
This expansion wouldn’t involve a change in federal law in Holland. Instead, it would be done via changes to the ‘Groningen protocol.’ This set of guidelines was created in 2004 for the killing of newborns and infants with very serious illnesses or deformities such as spina bifida.
Three
There is significant controversy about allowing assisted suicide for people who have a psychiatric disorder alone and no other conditions.
Currently only Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg permit this, as part of their original assisted-death laws.
Under Bill C-7, Canada will allow it in 2023.
The Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA) released a position statement last year saying it “did and does not take a position on the legality or morality of MAiD [medical assistance in dying] as this is a decision reflecting current Canadian ethical, cultural and moral views.”
This prompted two former CPA presidents to post an open letter to Canadian psychiatrists highlighting that the CPA did not engage its membership in a consultation process before releasing its position statement.
The two past presidents asked the CPA to “revisit the Statement by temporarily withdrawing it, to allow for a proper engagement process and development of evidence-based recommendations to inform any future Position Statement on MAiD.”
The CPA did not do this.
The American Psychiatric Association released its PAD position statement in 2016. It states, in whole: “The American Psychiatric Association, in concert with the American Medical Association’s position on medical euthanasia, holds that a psychiatrist should not prescribe or administer any intervention to a non-terminally ill person for the purpose of causing death.”
The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics states, in part, that “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks. Instead of engaging in assisted suicide, physicians must aggressively respond to the needs of patients at the end of life.”
It certainly makes one wonder why the public isn’t given all of this information.
Instead, the rush to expand access to PAD around the world in the name of humaneness is holding sway.
After obtaining an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Rosemary Frei became a freelance writer. For the next 22 years she was a medical writer and journalist. She pivoted again in early 2016 to full-time, independent activism and investigative journalism. Her website is RosemaryFrei.ca
April 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Australia, Canada, Germany, Human rights, New Zealand, Switzerland, United States |
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I posted Episode 398 of The Corbett Report podcast, “Science Says,” around 10 PM Japanese Standard Time on Friday, April 9th, 2021, and then went to bed. Sometime shortly after midnight, the main Corbett Report channel was removed from YouTube.
And, just like that, 14 years of work—some 1700+ videos, 569,000+ subscribers and 90 million+ video views—was erased from the digital ether. . . . Well, the GooTube portion of that digital ether, anyway.
Given that I’ve been promoting YouTube alternatives since at least 2009, and given that I have made video after video after video after video after video warning my audience that I would be banned from GooTube, and given that I even delivered a presentation last year noting that The Library of Alexandria is on Fire, it’s safe to say that this news did not catch me off guard. Learning about the banning after waking up on Saturday morning, my only thought was, “Well, that took longer than I expected.”
Indeed, it was not surprising in any sense that this was the report that led to GooTube purging my main channel. When you release a video on an account that already has two strikes for information that “contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19” and that video itself contains information calling those very authorities’ pronouncements into question, you better believe the thought that this might be your last YouTube upload crosses your mind when you push that publish button. Heck, the “offending” podcast even centers around an op-ed comparing COVID skeptics to terrorists and calling for the UN to mount a “counteroffensive” against them. Of course this video was going to be censored.
What’s more, this had been a particularly difficult report to post in the first place. After rendering and uploading to GooTube, the GooTube censorship copyright check flagged the 30-second clip of “Bill Nye Saves the World” embedded in my commentary on The Weaponization of Science and refused to post the video. So I had to cut the offending 30 seconds (specifically, the extremely scientific video for Rachel Bloom’s highly educational song, “My Sex Junk,” which can still be enjoyed in the audio version of the podcast), re-render the episode and re-upload it. Then, after that video processed, I performed one quick check before hitting “publish” and noted that the fancy transitions that Corbett Report video editor Broc West had used for this episode (which had worked perfectly fine in the previous two renders) were now suddenly glitching. Banging my head on the keyboard in dismay, I went back into the project, manually changed all of the transitions and rendered and uploaded the entire episode for the third time.
And in the span of those three renders, my initial excitement at the prospect that I would actually get a podcast episode rendered, uploaded and published before 5 PM on a Friday night evaporated. Venting my spleen at Broc over my bad luck, I made the obvious “joke”:
So, as you can see, this turn of events was not unexpected.
In a sense, it’s even more fitting that it was specifically a video about the philosophy of science that ended the channel. Not a documentary about the central banking system. Not an expose of false flag terrorism. Not a hard-hitting report on geopolitics or hidden history. No, a podcast about science that quotes Thomas Kuhn and highlights the growing politicization of science.
I say it’s “fitting” that such a report would be the one to do in the channel not only because I have been exploring this theme over and over in different ways since the very earliest days of The Corbett Report (since at least Episode 006 of the podcast, to be precise), but because in a sense the removal of The Corbett Report’s YouTube channel provides the ironically hilarious answer to a question that I had as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and naive undergrad over two decades ago.
You see, as I explained at the beginning of The Weaponization of Science video, I began my university career as an aspiring physics major. But after a semester spent in chemistry labs, applied mathematics courses and physics tutorials, I decided one day that I wanted to take my life in a completely different direction. So I dropped all my science courses for the upcoming semester and replaced them with English courses.
As one of the very, very few scientifically inclined students in the entire English department, I found that I was particularly on guard against all the eye-rollingly ignorant ways that those in the humanities attempted to add gravitas to their arguments by shoehorning inaccurate analogies about poorly understood scientific concepts (like “relativity” and “quantum mechanics”) into their lectures and papers. And so it was that I found myself approaching one professor during his office hours after he made a remark about how science was “politically determined.”
“How can science be politically determined?” I demanded of him indignantly. “If I drop this tape dispenser off your desk it’s going to fall at 9.81 m/s2 regardless of who is in political office.”
My professor, for his part, had only to prompt me to consider the inquisition’s investigation of Galileo for me to realize his point. Yes, scientists can be intimidated into proclaiming whatever the authorities—political, religious or otherwise—tell them to proclaim, even if it goes against their experimental results. The Galileo example may have been a particularly blunt one (and may or may not be apocryphal), but it hit the mark.
I never forgot that lesson. It is part of what has informed my work on the various pseudoscience fads, trends and hoaxes that have been foisted on the masses over the preceding century, from eugenics to Malthusian fearmongering to the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change myth.
Fast forward 20+ years and here I am daring to point out how the neo-inquisitionists are purging all criticism of their pseudoscientific pronouncements and . . . poof. Channel gone. Which kind of proves my point, doesn’t it?
Now, as I do not need to tell my regular audience, none of the videos are actually gone. Every single video has been backed up to LBRY. Years worth of videos are also backed up to BitChute, and, to a lesser extent, Minds and Archive.org. Every video since 2011 is downloadable directly from my servers. But if you don’t know that by this point, perhaps you’re not really ready to follow The Corbett Report into the Brave New (post-YouTube) Internet. Newsflash: this is 2021. If you’re still using YouTube to get your news, history and political information then you’ve got bigger problems than just the loss of The Corbett Report.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the “infowar” is not an analogy but a stone cold sober reality, and the fact that The Corbett Report was able to use a major enemy information platform to propagate the truth to the slumbering masses for 14 years is a major victory in and of itself.
So long, GooTube. Thanks for helping me to unlock so many minds. You will not be missed.
April 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | YouTube |
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