Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Why has Israel banned Jenin, Jenin? It fears the Palestinian narrative

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO |  January 19, 2021

On 11 January, Israel’s Lod District Court ruled against Palestinian film-maker Mahmoud Bakri, and ordered him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

As reported by Israeli and other media, the case seemed to be a relatively simple matter of defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from the singular event known to Palestinians as the “Jenin Massacre”, the court’s verdict not only has political undertones, but also historical and intellectual implications.

Bakri is a Palestinian born in the village of Bi’ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel. He has been paraded repeatedly through Israeli courts and censured heavily in the local mainstream media simply because he dared to challenge the official discourse about the violence in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.

The director’s documentary Jenin, Jenin is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli state violence, did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when units of the Israel Defence Forces, with air cover provided by fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverised much of the camp, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.

Israel claims to be a democracy, remember. For it to ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable its content is to the authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any definition of freedom of speech. To ban Jenin, Jenin, indict the Palestinian filmmaker who made it, and then compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes is outrageous.

The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of its occupation and apartheid; and two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.

Israeli censorship dates back to the inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country’s founding fathers painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of the state, erasing Palestine and the Palestinians almost entirely from their narrative. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said had this to say in his essay “Permission to Narrate“: “The Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of ‘non-Jews,’ whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.”

To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from Israel’s official discourse, the state’s censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded programmes of its kind in the world. Its sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be put on trial and sentenced to terms in prison for merely challenging Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems deemed offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the brunt of Israel’s ever-vigilant censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organisations, have also suffered.

The case of Jenin, Jenin is not one of routine censorship, though. It is a statement, a message, to those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians and allow them to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place or timing of any contested event, starting with the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948.

My first book, Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion, was published almost simultaneously with the release of Jenin, Jenin. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts from the survivors of the violence brought down upon the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israel media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or attacked it ferociously.

Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the dominant Israeli version, whether on the “Jenin Massacre” or the Second Intifada which was still underway at the time, was humble, and largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version were considered dangerous, and rejected vehemently as irresponsible, sacrilegious or anti-Semitic.

Israel’s true power — but also its Achilles heel — is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that the narrative is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meagre and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.

Bakri’s story of Jenin was not attacked relentlessly and eventually banned simply as the outcome of Israel’s censorship, but because it dared to blemish Israel’s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted “people with no land” arriving in the alleged “land with no people”, where they “made the desert bloom”. These are two of Israel’s most potent founding myths.

Jenin, Jenin is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda. It sent (and still sends) a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be challenged and defeated.

In her seminal book, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examines the relationship between history and power. She asserts that, “History is mostly about power… It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others.” It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that Jenin, Jenin and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned and punished.

Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not simply official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of fear that the “truth” could lead to legal accountability. The colonial state cares nothing at all about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people: the people of Palestine.

Nevertheless, a Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist, no matter the geography, the physical hardship and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears above all else.

January 19, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

UK Labour leader Starmer hired former Israeli spy for social media team

MEMO | January 19, 2021

Britain’s Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer hired a former Israel spy to work in his social media team, The Electronic Intifada has revealed. Assaf Kaplan was hired as a “social media listener”, and worked formerly for the infamous 8200 cyber unit of the Israeli intelligence services. In a profile of Kaplan on an ex-employer’s website, he is described as a “Unit 8200 veteran”.

Unit 8200 specialises in cyber intelligence, and is known for its role in blackmailing and assassinating Palestinians, as revealed in a shocking Guardian report in 2014. Another former Unit 8200 officer revealed anonymously the extent of the activities undertaken by the unit, some of which resulted in the killing of an innocent child in the Gaza Strip. Operatives also used sexual preferences to blackmail Palestinians into becoming collaborators with the Israeli occupation authorities.

“Once when I was the unit representative, there was someone suspicious next to a weapons warehouse in Gaza and we thought he was our target,” explained the anonymous source. “It had taken us a long time to find him. Judging by his location, the time and similar data, we concluded it was him. After we assassinated him it turned out that he was a kid… I remember an image on the screen of him in an orchard, and the explosion on the screen, the smoke clearing and his mother running to him, at which point we could see he was a child. The body was small. We realised we had screwed up.”

Another pointed out that “any Palestinian” may be targeted and may suffer from sanctions such as the denial of permits, harassment, extortion or even direct physical injury. “Such instances might occur if the individual is of any interest to the system for any reason. Be it indirect relations with hostile individuals, physical proximity to intelligence targets, or connections to topics that interest 8200 as a technological unit.” Any information that might enable “extortion” of an individual is considered relevant information by the 8200 team. “Whether said individual is of a certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank, he is a target for blackmail.”

Kaplan was also involved in the latest General Election in Israel, working for Israeli Labor as deputy head of campaigns. The party suffered a catastrophic collapse in its share of the vote, and there are now rumours that it will be wiped out completely in the upcoming election in March.

Although some Twitter users have pointed out that Israeli citizens are subject to mandatory conscription into the Israeli army, the duration of national service is only two and a half years. Kaplan apparently served in Israeli intelligence for nearly five years, twice the normal conscription period. Other Twitter users have said that Kaplan is being singled out simply because he is an Israeli citizen, and that if it was any other intelligence service there wouldn’t be any problem.

January 19, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Noted COVID expert Noam Chomsky compares anti-maskers to mass shooters

By GREG PIPER • The College Fix • JANUARY 19, 2021

When Noam Chomsky defended the academic freedom of a political science professor who made “The Case for Colonialism” in a journal article, I wondered if the famed MIT linguist and prominent anti-war [sic] activist might have other surprises up his sleeve.

Looks like the answer is no.

Chomsky made perhaps the most inapt comparison since our president-elect equated support for due process with white supremacy, telling a Stanford University audience that failure to wear a mask in public was analogous to going on a shooting rampage.

The Stanford Daily reports that Chomsky spoke virtually last week at the invitation of two student-run organizations, the Stanford Speakers Bureau and Stanford in Government.

Chomsky was classic Chomsky, wondering if “the human experiment [was] going to continue” as humans deal with climate change and nuclear weapons. He claimed the “super-rich fraction of 1 percent” has absorbed at least $47 trillion from “the lower 90 percent” since the Reagan administration.

But apparently prompted by moderator Rush Rehm, who teaches a class on Chomsky, the invited speaker waded into unfamiliar territory: current research on COVID-19 and mitigation methods.

The “legitimacy” of President Trump’s former coronavirus advisor Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, “has been called into question,” the Daily paraphrased Rehm. The newspaper noted an Atlas tweet, removed by Twitter, that started “Masks work? NO,” but the Daily failed to mention the context: Atlas recommended masks “when close to others, especially hi[gh] risk.”

Atlas made the same point when he denounced Stanford colleagues for claiming he was harming the university’s reputation and even violated the faculty code of conduct. He resigned from the White House task force a week later.

Chomsky claimed that people who oppose wearing masks are an “epidemic” in American politics, more concerned about protecting their freedoms than following science:

“I mean, do you have an individual right to take an assault rifle and go to the supermarket or mall and start shooting randomly?” he questioned. “That’s what it means not to wear a mask. It’s a strange kind of individualism.”

If Chomsky had bothered to read the research cited by Atlas before Twitter censored it, or followed the flood of research papers on COVID-19 mitigation practices in the past year, he would have known the case for mask mandates is incredibly weak, at best.

Even if the famed linguist were still convinced that wearing masks was a good idea, it’s baffling how he would connect two activities with enormously different risk profiles.

Opening fire with an “assault rifle” in a crowded space is highly likely to kill and seriously wound a lot of people. Not wearing a mask while shopping is far more nebulous. Even a person who tests “positive” for COVID-19 – using tests that are often unreliable – may not be infectious at all, particularly if they don’t show symptoms.

Finally, the vast majority of Americans are not at serious risk from COVID-19 even if they get infected. If Chomsky bothered to read the Great Barrington Declaration, he might consider that a “focused protection” approach actually makes the most sense holistically.

MOREStanford Daily falsely claims Atlas incited violence

January 19, 2021 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

PROFESSOR SUCHARIT BHAKDI INTERVIEWED BY WILLEM ENGEL

Willem Engel with Sucharit Bhakdi, January 14, 2021

The great professor Sucharit Bhakdi interviewed by Willem Engel from Viruswaarheid, Netherlands.

Optimization of Lipid Nanoparticles for Intramuscular Administration of mRNA Vaccines
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6383180/

Sucharit Bhakdi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucharit_Bhakdi

Viruswaarheid

https://viruswaarheid.nl/

Corona false alarm?

English https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/corona-false-alarm-karina-reiss-phd/1137565564
Deutsch https://www.presse.online/2020/06/28/bhakdi-der-zensierte-bestseller-corona-fehlalarm/
Nederlands https://www.deblauwetijger.com/product/corona-vals-alarm/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOFHlVmACJo

January 18, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

How soon will the Left eat their own?

By Jon Rappoport | January 18, 2021

Hey. I’m always here to offer advice to the Left, to make their road smoother, to point them in the direction of fellow travelers they should cancel for deficiencies of “wokeness.”

Let’s start with the issue of GMOs, poisonous Roundup, and Monsanto (now swallowed up by Bayer).

Joe Biden is going to appoint Mr. Monsanto, Tom Vilsack, as his Secretary of Agriculture. Tommy boy held that post under Obama.

The Organic Consumers Association writes [1] (see also [2], [3], [4]): “If, like us, you dream of an organic, regenerative food system led by independent family farmers, then news that Joe Biden has asked Tom Vilsack to return to his Obama Era post as Secretary of Agriculture should be a real cause for concern.”

“…when you look behind the curtains to see what Vilsack was really doing at USDA from 2009 through 2017, it’s not pretty.”

“He pushed through a corporate agribusiness agenda that began with his approval of more new genetically modified crops than any other Secretary, culminated in his shepherding of a bill to kill GMO labels through Congress, and included his racist firing of African American land trust hero Shirley Sherrod and his distortion of data to conceal decades of discrimination against black farmers. Between 2006 and 2016, the USDA [US Dept. of Agriculture] was six times more likely to foreclose on a black farmer than a white farmer.”

“But, Biden doesn’t care about any of this. Vilsack is Biden’s buddy and that’s all that matters to him. As the American Prospect reports, Vilsack has had ‘a decades-long relationship with Joe Biden, going back to when he endorsed him for president while mayor of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, in 1988’.”

“Vilsack has remained very loyal to Biden. In the last year, he gave Biden more than $8,000 in campaign contributions (excluding money from his wife or to Democratic Party committees).”

“This support didn’t just get him a job in the cabinet, he wrote Biden’s campaign platform on agriculture issues, stuffing it full of false solutions like corn ethanol and methane digesters run on factory farm dairy waste.”

“We need a USDA Secretary of Agriculture who will be a hero, steering our food and farming system toward a brighter, regenerative future—not a Secretary who will continue to be a pawn for the same corporate interests that are causing, and profiting from, the mess we are in.”

Good luck with that dream under Biden.

Let’s go further. Here’s a piece I wrote during the Obama years—you know, when we were all living in paradise—about the president’s GMO program.

Keep in mind that Biden’s new secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, was on board every step of the way, with Obama. Vilsack was enabler, expert, political operative, cheerleader—

MEET MONSANTO’S MAN IN WASHINGTON, BARACK OBAMA

Obama? A warrior against corporations on behalf of the people? It’s long past the time for ripping that false mask away.

During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO/Roundup issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.

These activists weren’t just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said: “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.”

Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.

Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in assuring that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”

Then came the reality.

After the election, people who had been working to label GMO food and warn the public of its huge dangers were shocked to the core. They saw Obama had been pulling a bait and switch.

After the 2008 election, Obama filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA:

At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center.

As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.

As commissioner of the USDA, Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack. Vilsack had set up a national group, the Governors’ Biotechnology Partnership, and had been given a Governor of the Year Award by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto.

As the new Agriculture Trade Representative, who would push GMOs for export, Islam Siddiqui, a former Monsanto lobbyist.

As the new counsel for the USDA, Ramona Romero, who had been corporate counsel for another biotech giant, DuPont.

As the new head of the USAID, Rajiv Shah, who had previously worked in key positions for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of GMO agriculture research.

We should also remember that Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, once worked for the Rose law firm. That firm was counsel to Monsanto.

Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court. Kagan, as federal solicitor general, had previously argued for Monsanto in the Monsanto v. Geertson seed case before the Supreme Court.

The deck was stacked. Obama hadn’t simply made honest mistakes. Obama hadn’t just failed to exercise proper oversight in selecting appointees. He wasn’t just experiencing a failure of short-term memory. He was staking out territory on behalf of Monsanto and other GMO corporate giants.

And now let us look at what key Obama appointees have wrought for their true bosses. Let’s see what GMO crops have walked through the open door of the Obama presidency.

Monsanto GMO alfalfa.

Monsanto GMO sugar beets.

Monsanto GMO Bt soybean.

Coming soon: Monsanto’s GMO sweet corn.

Syngenta GMO corn for ethanol.

Syngenta GMO stacked corn.

Pioneer GMO soybean.

Syngenta GMO Bt cotton.

Bayer GMO cotton.

ATryn, an anti-clotting agent from the milk of transgenic goats.

A GMO papaya strain.

And perhaps, soon, genetically engineered salmon and apples.

This is an extraordinary parade. It, in fact, makes Barack Obama the most GMO-dedicated politician in America.

You don’t attain that position through errors or oversights. Obama was, all along, a stealth operative on behalf of Monsanto, biotech, GMOs, and corporate control of the future of agriculture.

From this perspective, Michelle Obama’s campaign for gardens and clean, organic, nutritious food is nothing more than a diversion, a cover story floated to obscure what her husband has actually been doing.

Nor is it coincidental that two of the Obama’s biggest supporters, Bill Gates and George Soros, purchased 900,000 and 500,000 shares of Monsanto, respectively, in 2010.

We are talking about a president who presented himself, and was believed by many to be, an extraordinary departure from politics as usual.

Not only was that a wrong assessment, Obama was lying all along. He was, and he still is, Monsanto’s man in Washington.

To those people who fight for GMO labeling and the outlawing of GMO crops, and against the decimation of the food supply and the destruction of human health, but still believe Obama is a beacon in bleak times:

Wake up.

—end of 2014 article—

Well, well. Tom Vilsack is back. Biden is about to betray the Left on a key issue.

Dear Lefties: Are you going to sit still for this?

Start tweeting and FBing.

I wonder whether you’ll get censored by your comrades in Big Tech…

SOURCES:

[1] https://advocacy.organicconsumers.org/page/25412/action/1

[2] https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/tom-vilsack-agriculture-secretary-everything-thats-wrong-democratic-party

[3] https://www.organicconsumers.org/blog/back-future-tom-mr-monsanto-vilsack-part-i

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/21/joe-biden-tom-vilsack-agriculture-secretary

January 18, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Children Of The Great Reset

reallygraceful

This video is one of the last projects my friend Jeff C. worked on before he passed. Jeff dedicated his life to informing others on what was really happening in the world, and he taught us all that it was more than okay to ask questions and demand answers.

All music used in the video was produced by him.

You can watch his original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js0o1…

Comments disabled by Youtube’s Coppa Rules. Please share!

This Channel NEEDS Your Support: https://www.patreon.com/newworldagenda (Thank You!)

January 18, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Is This Fraud Ever Going to End?

By Dr Vernon Coleman

I sometimes envy the zombies who believe that the only problem is an infection which causes a disease called covid-19.

They get up in the morning, check in the mirror to make sure they haven’t died in the night, munch their chocolate flavoured bran flakes, choose a mask that goes best with their chosen outfit for the day and venture out into the world a little nervous but confident that their government is doing its best to protect them in these tricky times.

As they go about their business they disinfect their hands at every possible opportunity, carefully obey the social distancing rules and wait impatiently for the vaccine.

In a way I occasionally envy them their ignorance. They are like not very bright goldfish swimming round and round in one of those glass bowls.

People sometimes refer to the ignorant as sheep but this isn’t fair.

I have kept sheep and they are far more intelligent than most people imagine. Hardly anyone has bothered to do any research because, like cows and pigs, sheep are just farm animals and farmers and vets don’t have much interest in studying animals whose destiny is to be slaughtered, chopped up and eaten.

For example, the books will tell you that sheep are colour blind. They aren’t.

I used to have a four wheel drive vehicle which was the same model as the vet’s. My car was blue and his was green. When the sheep saw my car coming they ran towards me because I always gave them biscuits. When they saw the vet coming they ran away because he always wanted to check their feet and they didn’t like that. I later tested with different coloured feed buckets and I can promise you that sheep are not colour blind. They are actually very bright animals – far more intelligent than Gates, Fauci or Whitty and invariably a darned site better conversationalists. And they are brave too. My sheep once frightened a dog so much that the dog’s owner begged me to call my sheep off his dog.

So, to me, the ignorant thickos who still believe the coronavirus is the new plague are zombies or collaborators.

The vigilance of the collaborators means that every trip to the shops has become something of an ordeal.

The staff in the supermarket are always fine and actually a few seem genuinely sympathetic. But there is invariably one customer who worships Bill Gates, probably has his picture above his bed, and who feels it is his duty to confront any intelligent people he sees with naked faces.

This morning I hadn’t got more than three feet into the supermarket when a pompous, sanctimonious mask-finder general, one of Commander Dick’s shame police, rushed up to my wife and rudely and aggressively demanded that she put on a mask. That’s Commander Dick of the Metropolitan police.

My wife was startled and upset and politely told him that she was exempt. He still scowled, and I thought he deserved more. And with my wife’s permission, I explained that it wasn’t really any of his business but that she’d had surgery for breast cancer and a month’s radiotherapy which has caused damage which makes breathing difficult. Thanks to the absurd coronavirus hoax, the hospital physiotherapy department is still closed so she is in pain most of the day. I wish someone would explain that to me, incidentally. My wife can have a tattoo, were she so inclined, or her hair done, but she cannot have physiotherapy because the physiotherapy department is still closed. I pointed out to the mask-wearing prefect that nurses at the hospital told her to remove her mask after she almost collapsed with palpitations caused by her condition.

You might have thought a human being would have been embarrassed. Not a bit of it. The Dick police specials are shameless. The cretin, utterly indifferent and uncaring, just shrugged and demanded to know why I wasn’t wearing a mask.

I always explain to the thickos that the mask they are wearing does absolutely no good, that mask wearing is dangerous, that they didn’t wear a mask last year so why are they wearing one this year and that covid-19 has killed fewer people than the flu.

I do this because I think these zombies need to be educated before they accost an elderly or frail person and cause serious upset.

Sadly, however, in my now generous experience the mask promoting lunatics always run away when you reply to their muttered, `where’s your mask?’ mantra. The collaborators compound their selfishness and their ignorance with good old-fashioned cowardice: without exception, they run away. Say something, anything, in reply and they scoot away back to the hole in the skirting board.

And that’s what happened with this coward. He ran off. All mouth but no guts.

`You are an idiot!’ I shouted at the retreating mask wearer.

Not witty, I admit, but adequate.

The collaborators will destroy our lives as well as their own unless they are brought to heel.

I had trouble in the bank, too. There was, inevitably, a lengthy queue outside which was fine because Bill Gates’s cloud of calcium carbonate hanging in the sky was keeping the sun at bay though I wonder how many people will freeze to death when the weather becomes a little chillier. All part of the Agenda 21 plan to get rid of the elderly and the frail.

Eventually, when I got a foot in the door, a girl whom I could identify as a staff member only because of her uniform, asked me where my mask was and wanted to know if I was exempt. I smiled and nodded and she offered to get me a lanyard with a label to hang around my neck to show that I was exempt. Since I don’t want a lanyard with a label any more than I want a mask I just smiled and said no thank you and explained that masks are entirely useless because viruses go straight through the material.

`I know,’ she said. `But wearing a mask gives people confidence.’

What madness. She knows that masks are useless but she thinks they give people confidence. Does she think all their customers are half-witted five-year-olds? The answer is obviously yes.

And talking of five-year-olds, when is someone going to start arresting parents who force small children to wear masks? In England, children under 11 are exempt from mask wearing. (Look at the Government website for the latest information because the rules change almost daily.) There is much talk of authorities taking children away from parents who disapprove of vaccination. I think they’ve got it the wrong way round. They should be taking children away from parents who force children to wear masks or let them get vaccinated.

Just before we left town, we saw a maskless man come out of the supermarket. Like conspirators we chatted for a few moments. He was quite awake and aware of the fraud being perpetrated upon us. He told us that he watched UK Column and the old man in a chair. He didn’t have the faintest idea the old man, without his chair, was standing just two feet away from him. We didn’t mention it.

You and I are involved in a war where we are not quite sure whom we are fighting or precisely what their final aims might be – other than the fact that we are destined to be drones, slaves, proles in a world run by a new self-appointed aristocracy.

The minute we think we have worked it out and know what the rules are they change the rules. It is a world which appears to have been designed by Lewis Carroll to make Franz Kafka feel comfortable.

The only stable currency is the lie.

It is no exaggeration to say that it is fair to assume that everything anyone in authority says will be a lie. They do it so naturally that I sometimes wonder if any of the politicians and their advisors realise just how much they are lying. Maybe it’s just like breathing. They do it without thinking.

I think we perhaps all misunderstand how vile politicians are. Auberon Waugh once said that the only thing that any of them is really interested in is the chance to make decisions and see them put into effect – to press a button and watch us all jump.

He was right, but the politicians have recently been joined by an army of advisors, hangers on and confidants who are also in it for the power, and who have very real views on how the world should be but who cannot be bothered to stand for election. The Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Gates, Soros and so on are all too arrogant to expose themselves to the ballot box and I suspect they all hold us in contempt.

It is often said that the truth will set us free but the one certainty these days is that long before we get there we will be disappointed, frustrated and not a little angry.

They say we must be prepared for a second wave.

A second wave of what?

Did we actually have a first wave? Covid-19 killed less people than the flu. What sort of wave is that? More of a ripple really.

How can there be a second wave without a first wave?

We could, I suppose, have a second ripple.

Take out the hundreds of thousands of old people who were murdered in care homes around the world, and the hundreds of thousands who were put down as dying of covid-19 but actually died of something else and the total number who have allegedly died of the coronavirus can hardly be called a wave. It certainly wasn’t much of a pandemic.

In England and Wales, the excess number of deaths has fallen below the five year average for the fifth week in a row. Moreover, the figures now show that more than 90% of covid-19 deaths occurred in people over 60, and 90% of those who died in hospital had existing health conditions before they got infected. In due course the real figures will be available and they will, I suspect, show that over 90% were in their 80s or older, and had two or three co-morbidities.

There are regions of England where I suspect that more people are dying from falling off horses than are dying from the coronavirus. Does that mean that we’ve having an epidemic of deaths caused by people falling off horses? In many parts of the world anything that actually kills people is a bigger threat than the coronavirus. Is rabies now a global pandemic? How about falling off mountains? I would bet that there have been more suicides, caused by fear and despair for the future than covid-19 deaths in some places in the last month.

Nothing much makes any sense any more, does it?

And yet, as hypnotherapist and author Colin Barron points out, many of the so-called experts on covid-19 don’t have any medical qualifications. Neil Ferguson is a mathematician and yet his predictions were used as the basis for the global lockdowns.

Everyone with a certificate in basic woodwork has suddenly become a medical expert.

The other day the Scottish Daily Mail printed a letter from someone called Professor Greg Philo of Glasgow University who warns `the fear is real and we need a strategy to eliminate the virus’.

So, what is Professor Philo’s medical speciality? Medicine? Surgery? Epidemiology? General Practice?

None of the above.

The only Professor Philo I could find is a professor of communications and social change.

And if you’ve got any idea what that means then you have my commiserations.

Why do such people assume the right to pontificate about whether or not a virus infection is a threat?

As Dr Barron says, there was a time when only taxi drivers were experts on everything. These days even professors of communications and social change want to share their conclusions about a complex piece of global manipulation.

We have reached the strange position where paranoia is no longer a medical condition. It is a rational state of mind. Governments have lied about lockdowns, they have lied about the number of deaths, they have lied about the need for masks and they have lied about social distancing. Trying to dismantle the lies and find the kernel of truth is like playing three dimensional chess and if that isn’t the most mixed up metaphor in history then I’ll try again another day.

I can’t remember the last time a politician said anything that bore even a faint relationship to the truth. You’d be mad not to assume that everything the dishonest, deceitful cynical politicians and the advisors say is a barefaced lie. We’re being ruled by crazed psychopaths who have somehow succeeded in encouraging the collaborators to believe that it is possible to remove all risk from human life.

Politicians and their advisors should be forced to wear logos on their suits to list their sponsors, allegiances and connections. They’d have so many advertising logos they would look like race car drivers. All BBC staff should have EU and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation logos on their clothing at all times. The Guardian too. Anyone with links to a drug company should be banned from any sort of public role. As I have shown in previous videos, the world’s drug companies are more dishonest and dishonourable than tobacco companies. We would be better off if the world were run by a cabal of Colombian drug barons than the pirate crew currently striving for global control.

Telling lies is the new normal in our world.

They say that wearing masks will provide protection. This isn’t true. What evidence there is shows that masks are entirely pointless and potentially dangerous. Only the clinically insane and people with IQs in single figures think masks are of any value whatsoever. Why don’t footballers have to wear masks when they’re playing? Because masks impede their breathing. Why do even politicians and government advisors agree that those with respiratory problems don’t have to wear masks? The answer is obvious – because masks impede breathing.

They say that it will be necessary to introduce more lockdowns to prevent more deaths. But even governments now admit that lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent. So the only possible reason for having more lockdowns is to kill more people.

They say they need to introduce new laws to avoid a second wave of infections and deaths. The truth is that it was the last lot of laws – the social distancing, the lockdowns and the masks – which have caused the deaths. More laws will result in more deaths.

They say we have to close our borders to keep out the virus. This is bollocks. In March I suggested closing airports to control the infection rate. But airports were left open. Now that the death rate has collapsed they want to stop people travelling. They are desperate to stop anyone travelling or having a good time. They are deliberately creating fear to sustain their corrupt, satanic ideology.

They say that testing is showing up more cases. This is so deceitful it’s worthy of Bernie Madoff. The tests which are being used throw up so many false positives that they are about as much use as a castrated ram in a field full of sheep. And even the politicians and their advisors must realise that if you test ten times as many people then the chances are that you will find more people who have or have had the infection. Tracking and tracing is simply an infringement of our civil liberties. It is of no value whatsoever.

They say the only way we will ever get back to normal will be with a vaccine. This is the biggest lie of all. Worst of all, they say that the new vaccine will be safe. They cannot possibly know this. The dimmest, most stupid person you know can judge whether their new vaccine will be safe as well as they can.

Politicians, advisors, commentators and professors of golf course management claim that the world will not get back to normal until there is a vaccine available. There is of course, another unspoken option: that the majority will realise that the coronavirus scare is a hoax; a massive fraud deliberately arranged by people with malignant intentions.

And that’s what is going to happen.

I will leave you with a quote from the Robert Donat film version of the Count of Monte Cristo: `They call me mad because I tell the truth.’

What more can I say?

Vernon Coleman’s bestselling book about the coronavirus is called `Coming Apocalypse’. It is available on Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.

Copyright Vernon Coleman August 2020

January 17, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Is ivermectin effective against covid?

By Sebastian Rushworth M.D. | January 17, 2021

Over the last two months I’ve literally been bombarded by people asking me about my opinions on ivermectin as a treatment for covid, so I figured I’d better look in to it. Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug, used primarily to treat infections caused by parasitic worms. It was discovered in the 1970’s, and the researchers who discovered it were awarded the Nobel prize for their discovery in 2015.

The interest in ivermectin as a potential treatment for covid-19 is likely due to a study published way back in June of 2020, that showed a large reduction in SARS-CoV-2 in a cell culture after addition of ivermectin. If ivermectin were shown to be effective against Covid, that would be great, because it’s generic, cheap, safe, and widely available, so it would be easy to start treating people quickly. Unfortunately, that also means western pharmaceutical companies have zero interest in doing research on ivermectin, because there is no way to make a decent profit from it.

Who does have an interest? Poorer countries, that can’t afford expensive new drugs. That means the research on ivermectin as a treatment for covid has been pretty much entirely carried out outside the west.

I’ve managed to find four reasonably large randomized controlled trials looking at ivermectin for covid, and those are the trials we’re now going to discuss (I also found a fifth one, but it only enrolled 12 patients in each group, which to me is so small it’s not even worth looking at). Note that (as far as I’m aware) none of these studies has yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Personally, I don’t think peer-review is worth very much, so that doesn’t bother me at all, but it’s just something to be aware of.

The first trial was carried out in Bangladesh and completed in October. It included patients over the age of 18 with mild to moderate covid confirmed with PCR. Patients with severe covid were excluded from the study. According to the researchers the study was double-blind and placebo-controlled, although it is unclear from the study protocol whether the control group actually received a placebo, and what the placebo consisted of.

The intervention group received a single 12 mg dose of ivermectin plus 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day for five days (doxycycline is an antibiotic). Thus this wasn’t really a trial of ivermectin, it was a trial of ivermectin + doxycycline.

A total of 400 people were recruited in to the trial, and they were divided evenly between the intervention group and the control group. The average age of the participants was 40 years. The primary end point for the study was recovery within seven days, which the researchers defined as follows: absence of a fever for at least three days, significant improvement in respiratory symptoms, significant improvement on lung imaging, absence of complications requiring hospitalization, and an oxygen saturation above 93% .

This is a problematic end point, because a couple of the things in that list are not very specific, which leaves it up to the researchers to decide whether someone has recovered within seven days or not. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a problem if we could be 100% confident that there was complete blinding of the participants and the researchers, but based on the information provided I’m not even remotely certain that that was the case. And if there wasn’t blinding, then the researchers could easily have manipulated the results to make them appear more impressive.

Ok, let’s get to the results.

In the group treated with ivermectin + doxycycline, 61% had recovered within 7 days, and in the control group, 44% had recovered within 7 days. The difference was statistically significant (p-value <0,03).

At the two week mark after recruitment in to the study, participants had a second PCR test performed. In the group receiving ivermectin + doxycycline, 8% had a positive PCR test at two weeks. In the control group, 20% had a positive PCR test. Again, the result was statistically significant, in fact highly so (p-value <0,001).

Three people died in the control group, compared with zero people in the treatment group. However the result was not statistically significant (which of course doesn’t mean that there isn’t a difference – even if there is a real difference in mortality, this study simply was not large enough to be able to detect it).

So, what can we conclude?

This study suggests that ivermectin + doxycycline can shorten symptom duration, and also decreases viral load. If the results are real, the effect is actually pretty impressive. However, it is not clear from the published data that the study really was effectively blinded, and that means we can’t be very confident that the results are real. Additionally, it is unfortunate that the researchers chose to combine two separate drugs in one study, because it muddies the waters and makes it impossible to know whether it was the ivermectin or the doxycycline that was producing a benefit. Let’s move on to the next trial.

This was an open-label trial (i.e. both the researchers and the patients knew who was in which group) involving 140 patients, and the results were posted on MedRxiv in October 2020. As with the previous study, the treatment being tested was ivermectin plus doxycycline. The study was carried out in Iraq.

In order to be included in the study, patients had to have confirmed covid (based on a combination of symptoms, radiology, and PCR). All levels of severity of disease were admitted in to the study. Those with mild symptoms had to have been symptomatic for three days or less, while those with severe symptoms had to have had severe symptoms for at most two days, and those with critical symptoms had to have had critical symptoms for at most one day. The researchers motivate this somewhat weird set of inclusion criteria by saying that they wanted to see how effective ivermectin plus doxycycline is at the earliest stage of each phase of the disease.

Patients were randomized to either 200 ug/kg of ivermectin per day (roughly 14 mg per day for an average 70 kg person) for two days, and 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day for five to ten days. Unfortunately the researchers decided to break randomization because they felt it would be “unethical” to put people with critical illness in to the control group (personally I think it’s unethical to break randomization, because the results become less scientifically valid and thereby less useful to all the other millions of patients around the world). So all participants with critical covid recruited in to the study ended up in the ivermectin + doxycycline group. In the end there were 48 people with mild to moderate disease in each group. In the ivermectin + doxycycline group there were 11 people with severe disease and 11 people with critical disease, while in the control group there were 22 people with severe disease and no people with critical disease.

So, technically, this study wasn’t actually randomized at all. However, the fact that everyone with critical illness was placed in the treatment group should make the treatment look worse, not better, so if there is a positive effect of treatment in spite of that, then it’s likely bigger than this study shows.

The average age of the patients was 50 years in the treatment group and 47 years in the control group. Among those with mild to moderate disease, symptoms had started a median of three days earlier, while those with severe disease had first become symptomatic seven days earlier, and those with critical disease had started having symptoms nine days earlier.

The primary end point was time to recovery. This is very problematic in an unblinded study, because “time to recovery” is quite subjective, and it is very easy for the researchers to manipulate the results in whatever direction they want. Anyway, let’s look at the results.

The average time to recovery was eleven days in the group treated with ivermectin plus doxycycline, and 18 days in the control group. The result was highly statistically significant (p-value < 0,0001). That would mean that ivermectin and doxycycline together shorten the time to recovery by almost 40% in relative terms! If the study had been double-blind, and it was very clear exactly what the criteria for “recovery” were, that would be a very impressive result, especially considering that the people in the treatment group were on average sicker to start. However, since neither of those things are true, the result is highly questionable.

Two people died in the ivermectin + doxycycline group, compared with six people in the control group. This also seems impressive, but again, the study isn’t statistically powered to show an effect on mortality.

So overall so far we have two studies that suggest that the combination of ivermectin and doxycycline can be beneficial when used to treat patients with covid-19. However, both studies have flawed methodologies that make the results suspect. And if there is a real benefit, then we still don’t know whether to attribute that benefit to ivermectin or to doxycycline, or to some combination of the two. Let’s move on.

Next up we have a trial that went up on MedRxiv at the beginning of January 2021. The study was carried out in Nigeria. It was double-blind, which is good, but unfortunately it was very small. 62 patients were included in total, and randomized to three different treatment arms, so there were only around 20 patients per group.

Participants were included in the study if they had a positive PCR test. There was apparently no requirement that they have any symptoms. Obviously, this is a problem, since we know that the risk of a false positive result rises enormously when asymptomatic people are being tested. Funnily enough, even though they included asymptomatic people, they excluded people with severe covid, so this was really a trial of people with mild to non-existent disease. Why they tested people without symptoms is unclear, and why they then went even further and decided to try treating asymptomatic people with drugs is even less clear.

After inclusion in the study, participants were randomized to one of three treatments. The first group received a 6 mg dose of ivermectin which was repeated every 48 hours. The second group received a 12 mg dose of ivermectin, also repeated every 48 hours. The third group was the “control” group, but for some reason the researchers opted to give the “control” group lopinavir/ritonavir rather than a placebo. No explanation is offered for this strange decision. Since the control group was given an active drug rather than a placebo, we can’t say for certain whether the ivermectin is helping the patients, even if there is a positive treatment effect. It’s equally possible that the lopinavir/ritonavir is hurting the patients.

The participants were re-tested with PCR at four days, seven days, ten days, and 14 days, and this was used as the basis to determine how successful the different treatment arms were. PCR-positivity isn’t even a remotely patient-oriented outcome, so as with so much else to do with this study, this is problematic. Anyway, let’s take a quick look at the results and then move on to the next study.

On average it took nine days for participants in the control group to become PCR negative, six days for participants in the low dose ivermectin group, and five days in the high dose ivermectin group. If the two ivermectin groups are combined, the average time to PCR negativity becomes five days, and the reduction compared with the control group is four days (42% relative risk reduction), which is statistically significant (p-value 0,007). There were no deaths in any of the groups treated, which isn’t really surprising since it was a small study and many of the participants were completely asymptomatic to begin with.

So, what can we say about this study?

Not much. The number of participants is tiny, the control group isn’t a real control group, and the results are based entirely on the flawed PCR-test, not on any real reduction in symptoms or in any other outcome that actually matters in any way. The results are somewhat promising, but that’s really all we can say.

Ok, let’s get to the final study.

Like the previous study, this was posted on MedRxiv in early January 2021. It was double-blind, and it was carried out in India. In order to be included in the study, potential participants had to be over the age of 18 and have mild to moderate covid, with the diagnosis confirmed by PCR.

I’m not sure why these studies keep focusing on people with mild disease, since it’s more important to find an effective treatment for severe disease. I guess it stems mainly from a hypothesis that ivermectin is unlikely to be effective if given later in the disease course. But we still need to know whether it’s a good idea to give it to people with severe disease, so it’s unfortunate that this group was excluded in three out of the four studies.

A total of 115 people were recruited in to the study. The average age of the patients was 53 years. Half received 12 mg of ivermectin on the first and second day after inclusion in the study, while the other half received an identical placebo pill (ivermectin has a long half-life in the body, which is why it’s generally enough to just give one or two doses and then stop).

The primary end point chosen for the study was whether or not participants had a positive PCR-test at six days after inclusion in the study. Just as in the previous study, the researchers have chosen a totally meaningless end point, that tells us nothing about whether the drug in any way actually helps patients. Luckily, they did actually measure some other things too, that actually do matter, like length of hospital stay, ICU admission, and death.

So, what happened?

At the six day time point, 68% in the control group still had a positive covid PCR, compared with 76% in the ivermectin group. So the control group seemed to do better than the ivermectin group according to the irrelevant metric chosen by the researchers. However, this difference wasn’t even close to being statistically significant (p-value 0,35). Let’s look instead at some metrics that actually do matter.

In terms of symptoms, 84% in the ivermectin group were symptom free by day six, compared with 90% in the control group. So again, the control group seemed to do better than the ivermectin group. However, again, this result was not statistically significant (p-value 0,36).

If we look at invasive ventilation and mortality however, we do see an apparent benefit in the group treated with ivermectin. Five people in the control group ended up receiving invasive ventilation, compared with only one person in the ivermectin group. Four people died in the placebo group, compared with zero in the ivermectin group. So in terms of the more serious end points, that actually matter to patients, ivermectin seems to be better than placebo. However, as with all three previous studies, this study was far too small to say whether that difference was really due to ivermectin or just due to chance.

So, the final study gives a weirdly mixed message. In terms of PCR-positivity and likelihood of being symptom free at six days, the placebo seemed to be better, but in terms of invasive ventilation and death, ivermectin seemed to be better. However, none of the differences were statistically significant and could easily just be due to chance. So, overall, the final study is not able to show any benefit to treating patients with ivermectin.

Ok, let’s wrap up. Three of the four trials did produce some signal of benefit. However, all four trials had major flaws, and two of the trials that did find a benefit were also giving doxycycline, which makes it impossible to disentangle whether the potential benefit was coming from ivermectin or doxycycline. But these trials were all small, so it’s perfectly possible that there is a benefit but that the trials were just too small to detect it. What we really need now is a big, high quality, double-blind, randomized controlled trial of ivermectin as a treatment covid.

However, lacking that, we can try to put the results from these four trials together in to a little meta-analysis of our own, just for fun, to try to compensate for the fact that these studies were small, and therefore not really statistically powered to find anything but the biggest effects imaginable. When we do that, this is what we get:

I’m sure you’re all as nerdy as me, and love looking at forest plots. What this one shows is a 78% reduction in the relative risk of dying of covid, if you get treated with ivermectin!

The result is statistically significant (p-value 0,01). If the result is real, that is pretty damn amazing. That would mean that four out of five covid deaths could be avoided if everyone was treated with ivermectin (potentially together with doxycycline), a dirt cheap generic drug that’s been around for decades, and which we know is safe. It blows all the currently approved drugs for covid out of the water in terms of effect size.

There is of course, as always, a risk of publication bias. In other words, there might be more studies of ivermectin out there that haven’t had their results published, because they were less impressive. So let’s have a quick peek over at clinicaltrials.gov, and see if there is anything suspicious going on.

There are currently five trials of ivermectin for covid listed as completed at clinicaltrials.gov, but for which results haven’t yet been published. However, four out of those five were completed less than two months ago, and one was completed three months ago, so most likely they just haven’t gotten around to posting their results yet. So the risk of publication bias seems to be relatively low. It will be interesting to see what those studies show, when they do get published.

Do I think the huge reduction in mortality is real? I think it’s very possible. These were after all randomized controlled trials, so the risk of confounding factors is low (with the exception of doxycycline, which could be responsible for some or even all of the beneficial effect seen). And, as mentioned, the risk of publication bias appears to be pretty low. And the outcome for which there is a big effect size is mortality, which is a hard outcome that is hard for researchers to manipulate.

January 17, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The 4th Annual Fake News Awards!

01/16/2021

From the palatial living room studios of The Corbett Report it’s the 4th Annual Fake News Awards. The boldest lies. The stupidest propaganda. The ugliest presstitution. Join James as he debunks the lies and shames the liars behind the biggest fake news stories of 2020. Who will take the Dino for the worst fake news story of the year? Watch and find out!

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

Worst Acting by a Politician or Health Official goes to Matt Hancock crying over William Shakespeare

Best Acting by an Actor in a Fake and Staged Scamdemic goes to Governor Andrew Cuomo for his Scripted Scamdemic Unreality Show

Fakest Fact Check Award goes to FactCheckNI for Can you generate a positive result for COVID-19 from an RT-PCR test?

Fear Porn Story of the Year goes to the New York Post for NYC may temporarily bury coronavirus victims on Hart Island

Best Orwellian Doublethink Award goes to Ali Velshi for “It is not generally speaking unruly but fires have been started.”

Best Suppression of a Real News Story goes to NPR for their refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story

Lockdown Hypocrite of the Year Award goes to Neil Ferguson for breaking the very lockdown orders he himself helped bring about

Fakes Science Story of the Year goes to the BBC for Oxford Covid vaccine ‘safe and effective’ study shows

Fake News Story of the Year goes to Bloomberg for Coronavirus Is 10 Times Deadlier Than Seasonal Flu, Fauci Says

SHOW NOTES:

The First Annual REAL Fake News Awards

The 2nd Annual REAL Fake News Awards

The 3rd Annual REAL Fake News Awards

Matt Hancock crying over William Shakespeare

Governor Cuomo Receives Founders Award at 48th International Emmy Awards

Cuomo blames large gatherings in the Hasidic community for spread of COVID-19…

…using a photo from 2006

Cuomo implores New Yorkers to stay home on Thanksgiving: ‘Forget the politics’

Gov. Cuomo cancels Thanksgiving plans with family after backlash

Cuomo orders nursing homes to accept sick patients

Cuomo still refuses to disclose total number of COVID-19 nursing home deaths: watchdog

‘It never happened’: Cuomo denies causing 6,500 nursing home deaths

Can you generate a positive result for COVID-19 from an RT-PCR test?z

COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless

WHO Information Notice for IVD Users (PCR false positives warning)

Fauci admits PCR high cycle threshold problem on This Week in Virology

Episode 381 – Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers?

Fact check: Inventor of method used to test for COVID-19 didn’t say it can’t be used in virus detection

Kary Mullis Explains the PCR Test

Kary Mullis on Fauci

New Coronavirus Wasn’t ‘Predicted’ In Simulation

NYC may temporarily bury coronavirus victims on Hart Island

Lies, Damned Lies and Coronavirus Statistics

Ali Velshi: “It is not generally speaking unruly but fires have been started.”

Nineteen eighty-four

Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, Don’t shut down protests using coronavirus concerns as an excuse

Same Facts, Opposite Conclusions – #PropagandaWatch

“Fiery but mostly peaceful protests”

NPR explains their refusal to cover the Hunter Biden story

Dave Smith on Hunter Biden story (POTP #671)

Politifact twists itself into pretzel knots over the Hunter Biden coverup

Denver Mayor Hancock flies to visit family for Thanksgiving

Newsom’s winery remains open while other California wineries ordered to shut down over COVID

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot defends hairstylist visit amid coronavirus outbreak

Dr. Mike called out for partying maskless

CTU board member facing criticism for vacationing in Caribbean while pushing remote learning

MSM presstitute called out live on air for mask hypocrisy

Pelosi’s trip to salon apparently broke COVID-19 rules

Let Them Eat Ice Cream! – #PropagandaWatch

Pelosi staffer’s email has entire folder for hair appointments

Oxford Covid vaccine ‘safe and effective’ study shows

Lancet: Safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222) against SARS-CoV-2: an interim analysis of four randomised controlled trials in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK

What Vaccine Trials?

The Future of Vaccines

Honourable Mentions and Nominations from the announcement thread

Coronavirus Is 10 Times Deadlier Than Seasonal Flu, Fauci Says

Dr. Anthony Fauci addresses COVID-19 mortality rate

The Worst Miscalculation in Human History

Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation

Silicon Valley and WEF-Backed Foundation Announce Global Initiative for COVID-19 Vaccine Records

Stop Watching Propaganda – #PropagandaWatch

January 16, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

MSM calls for “new definition of free speech”

New buzzwords in the mainstream media bubble spell trouble for those outside it

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | January 16, 2021

Part of the main duty of OffGuardian is to troll through the masses of media output and try and pick up patterns. Sometimes the patterns are subtle, a gentle urging behind the paragraphs. Sometimes they’re more like a sledgehammer to the face.

This has been face-hammer week. In fact, it’s been a face-hammer year.

From “flatten the curve” to “the new normal” to “the great reset”, it’s not been hard to spot the messaging going on since the start of the “pandemic”. And that distinct lack of disguise has carried over into other topics, too.

We pointed out, a few days ago, the sudden over-use of the phrase “domestic terrorism” preparing us for what is, almost certainly, going to be a truly horrendous piece of new legislation once Biden is in office.

Well, the buzz-phrase doing the rounds in the wake of Donald Trump being banned from the internet is “the new definition of free speech”… and variations on that theme.

Firstly, and papers on both sides of the Atlantic want to be very clear about this, Donald Trump being banned simultaneously from every major social network is not in any way inhibiting his free speech.

Indeed none of the tens of thousands of people banned from twitter et al. have had their free speech infringed either. Neither have any of the proprietors – or users – of the Parler app which the tech giants bullied out of existence.

Free Speech is totally intact no matter how many people are banned or deplatformed, the media all agree on that (even the allegedly pro-free speech think tanks).

They also agree that maybe… it shouldn’t be. Maybe “free speech” is too dangerous in our modern era, and needs a “new definition”.

That’s what Ian Dunt writing in Politics.co.uk thinks, anyway, arguing it’s time to have a “grown-up debate” about free speech.

The Financial Times agrees, asking about the “limits of free-speech in the internet era”.

Thomas Edsall, in the New York Times, wonders aloud if Trump’s “lies” have made free speech a “threat to democracy”.

The Conversation, a UK-based journal often at the cutting edge of the truly terrifying ideas, has three different articles about redefining or limiting free speech, all published within 4 days of each other.

There’s Free speech is not guaranteed if it harms others, a drab piece of dishonest apologia which argues Trump wasn’t silenced, because he could make a speech which the media would cover… without also mentioning that the media has, en masse, literally refused to broadcast several of Trump’s speeches in the last couple of months.

The conclusion could have been written by an algorithm analysing The Guardian’s twitter feed:

the suggestion Trump has been censored is simply wrong. It misleads the public into believing all “free speech” claims have equal merit. They do not. We must work to ensure harmful speech is regulated in order to ensure broad participation in the public discourse that is essential to our lives — and to our democracy.

Then there’s Free speech in America: is the US approach fit for purpose in the age of social media?, a virtual carbon copy of the first, which states:

The attack on the Capitol exposed, in stark terms, the dangers of disinformation in the digital age. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which certain elements of America’s free speech tradition may no longer be fit for purpose.

And finally, my personal favourite, Why ‘free speech’ needs a new definition in the age of the internet and Trump tweets in which author Peter Ives warns of the “weaponising of free speech” and concludes:

Trump’s angry mob was not just incited by his single speech on Jan. 6, but had been fomenting for a long time online. The faith in reason held by Mill and Kant was premised on the printing press; free speech should be re-examined in the context of the internet and social media.

Ives clearly thinks he’s enlightened and liberal and educated, after all he drops references to Kant AND Mills (that’s right TWO famous philosophers), but he’s really not. He’s just an elitist arguing working class people are too dumb to be allowed to speak, or even hear ideas that might get them all riled-up and distract them from their menial labour.

To season these stale ideas with a sprinkling of fear-porn, NBC News is reporting that the FBI didn’t report their “concerns” over possible violence at the Capitol, because they were worried about free speech. (See, if the FBI hadn’t been protecting people’s free speech, that riot may not have happened!)

And on top of all of that, there’s the emotional manipulation angle, where authors pretend to be sad or exasperated or any of the emotions they used to have.

In the Irish Independent, Emma Kelly says that “free speech” doesn’t include “hate speech” (she’s never exactly clear what part of “go home in peace love” was hate speech though).

In The Hill, Joe Ferullo is almost in tears that the first amendment has been ruined by the right-wing press continuously “shouting fire in a crowded theatre”, citing the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, which so many use to “qualify” the idea of free speech, without realising it hands over power to destroy it completely.

Up until you can show me the hard-and-fast legal definitions of “shout”, “fire”, “crowded” and “theatre”, this open-ended qualification is nothing but a blank canvas, free to be interpreted as loosely – or stringently – as any lawmaker or judiciary feels is necessary.

As an example:

Twitter is certainly bigger and more populated than a theatre, and spreading anti-vaccination/anti-war/pro-Russia/”Covid denial” news [delete as appropriate] is certainly going to cause more panic than one single building being on fire. Isn’t it?

It’s this potential abuse of incredibly loose terminologies which will be used to “redefine” free speech.

“Offensive”, “misinformation”, “hate speech” and others will be repeated. A lot.

Expressions which have no solid definition under law, and are already being shown to mean nothing to the media talking heads who repeat them ad nauseum.

If “go home in peace and love”, can become “inciting violence”, absolutely everything can be made to mean absolutely anything.

The more they “redefine” words, the further we move into an Orwellian world where all meaning is entirely lost.

And what would our newly defined “free speech” really mean in such a world?

January 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Biden Picks “Mr. Monsanto” Tom Vilsack to Head the USDA

Return to Now | December 29, 2020

Under Obama, Vilsack brought us cloned farm animals, lab-grown meat and more GMOs than any Agriculture Secretary before or after him

“No More Malarkey” Joe Biden just nominated one of Monsanto’s best friends to head the US Department of Agriculture.

During his eight years under Obama, Tom Vilsack earned the nickname “Mr. Monsanto” for approving more new genetically modified organisms than any Agriculture Secretary in history, and for making gobs of money for every approval.

The Organic Consumer’s Association has compiled a list of GMOs we have to thank him for:

Roundup Ready sugar beets. A judge ruled Monsanto’s sugar beets would inevitably contaminate other crops, eventually “eliminating a consumer’s choice to eat non-genetically engineered food.”

Roundup Ready alfalfa. Monsanto’s first genetically modified perennial went wild, costing alfalfa growers millions.

Monsanto’s DroughtGard corn. The GMO seeds actually ended up yielding 11% LESS corn than conventional corn during the 2012 drought.

Dicamba-tolerant Xtend soy and cotton.  Several states have banned Monsanto’s dicamba herbicide since its approval in 2015, after it drifted and destroyed millions of acres of conventional soy, as well as nurseries, vineyards, vegetables, trees and native plants.

Roundup Ready lawn grass. Vilsack told the Scotts Miracle-Gro it didn’t need permits to sell genetically engineered grass commercially.

Agrisure corn. Vilsack allowed Syngenta to sell corn seed with genetically engineered traits that were illegal in China to U.S. farmers. The corn crop was rejected by the markets, costing farmers $1.5 billion.

Ethanol-only corn. Unsuitable for human or animal consumption, Syngenta’s ethanol corn has the potential to destroy the genome of edible corn where cross contamination occurs.

2,4-D-tolerant corn, cotton and soy. A known endocrine disruptor, Dow’s 2,4-D is linked to cancer, thyroid disorders, decreased fertility and birth defects. Vilsack’s approval of the crops increased the use of 2,4-D as much as 600%.

Innate potatoes. The former Monsanto scientist who invented this “RNA interference” GMO exposed the dangers of his work four years after Vilsack approved it. He found an accumulation of toxins in the potatoes,  and even scarier, he found their double-stranded RNA enters the human bloodstream, where it can influence our own cell function.

Arctic Apples. These ever-green apples don’t turn brown when they bruise or start to rot, and even retain their bright green pigment when they are juiced. These GMOs were also created using RNA interference technology.

Cloned animals. When Vilsack was asked in 2010 if cloned cows or their offspring had made it into the North American food supply, he claimed he “didn’t know”. Needless to say, this aroused alarm. While Europe responded with an embargo, Vilsack left the door open for cloned animal products to be labeled “USDA Organic.”

“It is very likely that the offspring of cloned animals are now being used to produce organic milk and other food,” the Organic Consumer’s Association says.

Synbio dairy substitutes. Vilsack allowed companies like Perfect Day to begin using genetically-altered yeast cultures to manufacture synthetic dairy substitutes. Most vegans have no idea their non-dairy cheese is a product genetic engineering.

Lab-made meat. Vilsack gave companies like Memphis Meat the green light to engineer cell-cultured meat without requiring USDA inspection or labeling. A former USDA staffer of his ended up lobbying for the company.

Click here to send your senator a message telling them to “vote no” on Mr. Monsanto for Agriculture Secretary.

January 16, 2021 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment