Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The UK Passes Sweeping New Surveillance and Censorship Measures in The Online Safety Bill

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 20, 2023

The UK has passed its controversial online censorship act known as the Online Safety Bill. The bill, one of the widest sweeping attacks on privacy and free speech in a Western democracy will become law.

The bill seeks to shield internet users, especially youth, from the slingshots of malicious online content. But the bill goes beyond forcing platforms to remove illegal content. It calls upon social media giants to act as custodians, safeguarding users against ill-intent messages, cyberbullying, and explicit material.

Shrouded in a veil of safetyism and paying only lip service to privacy and free speech rights, we cannot cower from highlighting the bill’s overt undertone of censorship, veering into a territory where freedom of speech and privacy might be sacrificed at the altar of digital safety.

Michelle Donelan, Technology Secretary, voiced her support for the bill, branding it as an “enormous step forward in our mission to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online.” Under the proposed law, social media corporations will be forced into swift action, not just for removing violative content but also for hindering its emergence.

The implementation sword will be wielded by Ofcom, the communications regulator, with the law setting a stringent punishment pathway for non-compliers, inclusive of colossal fines and even incarceration.

The bill further pioneers new criminal offenses to its roster, like cyber-flashing and the distribution of manipulated explicit content, or deepfake pornography.

The bill imbues the government with tremendous power; the capability to demand that online services employ government-approved software to scan through user content, including photos, files, and messages, to identify illegal content. Non-compliance can result in severe penalties such as facing criminal charges.

From a free speech and anti-censorship perspective, this legislation is fundamentally disturbing. Critics argue this bill could enhance potential censorship on the pretext of safety.

The backdoor scanning system poses significant threats. It may be exploited by those with malicious intent, mishandled which could lead to false positives, resulting in unwarranted accusations of child abuse.

These alarming flaws render the online safety bill incompatible with end-to-end encryption – a staple for ensuring user privacy and security – and human rights.

The UK government has subtly conceded that it might not harness some elements of this law to their full potential. During the concluding discussion about the bill, a representative confirmed that the government would only order scans of user files when “technically feasible,” and these orders would be subject to compatibility with UK and European human rights law. This acknowledgment seems a subtle retreat from a previously aggressive stance taken by the same representative.

On the same day of these declarations, it surfaced that the UK government conceded privately that technology capable of examining end-to-end encrypted messages while observing privacy rights does not exist.

But, citizens who value their privacy shouldn’t have to rely on weak assurances from the government. The official safeguarding of privacy rights should be a priority. Rather than relying on murmurs of amendments, the government should offer comprehensive assurance through clear regulations and explicit protection policies for end-to-end encryption.

The bill, as it stands, allows the government to scan messages and photos, posing significant threats to security and privacy to internet users globally. These powers are enshrined in Clause 122 of the bill.

Several end-to-end encrypted service providers like WhatsApp, Signal, and UK-based Element have threatened to pull out their services from the UK if Ofcom demands examination of encrypted messages – an extreme but important move. This reaction is a testament to the perceived invasive nature of the Online Safety Bill.

September 20, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Unrest grows in US-occupied Syria after Kurdish proxy hikes fuel prices by 300 percent

The Cradle | September 19, 2023

Syrians living under the de-facto rule of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in Hasakah governorate have launched mass demonstrations and a general strike to oppose a fuel price hike of over 300 percent for public transport and industrial vehicles.

The unprecedented protests have grown in scope after Kurdish authorities announced that reversing the decision is “almost impossible,” citing the country’s deteriorating economic situation. While fuel prices for vehicles were hiked from 525 to 2,050 Syrian pounds, the fuel price for heating, agriculture, and electric generators remains the same.

Protesters have been blocking roads and shutting down businesses for several days in the towns of Qamishli, Rumailan, and Mabada, accusing the US-backed authorities of plundering Syria’s wealth for their own benefit. Demonstrations have also been called in the regions of Raqqa, Manbij, and Ain al-Arab, which could lead to significant economic repercussions in all areas under the control of the AANES and its official military force – the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“The people went out to express their rejection of the policies of AANES, which aim to impoverish the people and push them to migrate,” a demonstrator in Qamishli told Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar.

“There was a consensus to provide and improve the quality of diesel in exchange for increasing its prices,” the head of the AANES fuel management authority, Abeer Khaled, recently told reporters, adding that “it is difficult to retract or modify the decision to increase [considering that] raising prices will contribute to reducing fuel smuggling operations outside areas under the control of AANES.

In 2021, AANES reversed a similar decision to hike fuel prices after intense clashes between locals and the SDF left several dead.

The territory occupied by the SDF and the US army in Syria’s northeast houses the country’s largest oil and gas fields, as well as vast wheat fields.

Washington’s forces regularly smuggle these resources via convoys to their bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), where the oil and gas are sold to fund the operations of US proxy militias and de facto authorities.

The protests in Hasakah come as armed operations continue in neighboring Deir Ezzor governorate by Syrian Arab tribes who have been staging a rebellion against Kurdish forces. While heavy clashes have subsided for the most part, the region is still seeing sporadic attacks targeting the SDF.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Illegal Occupation | , , | Leave a comment

Why I Blew Up My Life to Campaign Against Gender Identity Ideology

BY DR HELEN JOYCE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

This is the text of a speech Dr. Helen Joyce gave at Ireland Uncensored, a one-day conference in Dublin on September 16th to rally opposition to the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, a new law that will impose more speech restrictions in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe. The conference was organised by Free Speech Ireland and Gript.

Five years ago, I was working as the Economist’s International editor. One fateful day in 2017, the editor asked me: “Why do kids keep coming home and say, ‘Such and such is trans’?” I replied that I didn’t know, but would look into it. Though I had no idea about that at the time, that conversation changed my life.

I ended up writing an article about it – an only semi-satisfactory article, because it was so hard to get a handle on what people were talking about. Many potential interviewees I reached out to either didn’t reply or brushed me off with platitudes. They seemed to think I was doing something very wrong simply by asking obvious questions – the sorts of questions journalists ask of all sorts of people, all the time. Basics like: what does ‘trans’ mean? What is ‘transition’? Do people feel better afterwards? Why do some people say they ‘feel like’ members of the opposite sex? And the big one: should those feelings give them licence to use facilities restricted to that sex?

The difficulty of getting facts, the science-denial that was universal among proponents of ‘trans rights’ and the circularity of their core mantra, namely that ‘trans women are women’ all kept bothering me. I became seriously concerned that grave harms were being done in the name of this ideology: harms to women, who were losing single-sex spaces, services and sports; children, who were being taught that one’s sex is a matter of feelings; and lesbians, who were being pressured to include men who identified as women in their dating pools.

I started thinking about writing a book about it. By now I knew that women were losing jobs and facing death threats for expressing the slightest scepticism about so-called ‘trans inclusion’. But I worried I wasn’t the right person – and if I’m honest also about the toll it would take.

And then, in late 2018, I met a group of detransitioners. A half-dozen young women, all of whom now identified as women, and as lesbian. All had been gender non-conforming in childhood; most had suffered mental-health issues, including anxiety, bulimia and self-harm. Doctors had diagnosed them with gender dysphoria (a fancy word for distress), and given them testosterone, which left them with permanently lowered voices, thick facial and body hair and distressing changes to their genitals. Some had had double mastectomies; one, at age 21, had had her uterus and ovaries removed.

That night, for the first time, I articulated the thought I’d been circling around for months: “They’re sterilising gay kids.” My hesitations vanished. As a journalist, you’re supposed to run towards the news. A scandal that is being suppressed for political convenience isn’t the sort of story you should ignore.

Well, I wrote my book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (recently reissued as Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights). And although my career at the Economist continued to flourish, I became increasingly convinced that the book alone wasn’t enough. I moved to work with Sex Matters, a non-profit human-rights campaign group co-founded by Maya Forstater, who lost her job at an American think-tank, the Center for Global Development, after tweeting about her concerns about ‘gender self-ID’ – the policy of allowing people to change their legal records to reflect the sex they want to be, rather than the sex they actually are.

I now believe that ‘gender-identity ideology’ – the claim that self-defined gender should trump sex when it comes to classifying humans – is far from the liberal, kind approach it is portrayed as. Indeed, it is quite the opposite: part of a generation-defining threat to liberalism and indeed rationalism; and also deeply cruel.

You can imagine that given that I think this, after years of thinking about it, I regard it as my moral duty to say so, as loudly as possible, as often as possible, in front of as many people as possible.

This is an ideology that is harmful to women, because women’s ability to play a full part in public life requires us to be able to draw boundaries, on occasion, that exclude men. That’s all men. Including the men who wish they weren’t men, and the men who think they’re not men, and the men who identify as women.

It’s harmful to children, because children believe what adults tell them. The idea that you can really be a member of the opposite sex is a seductive one for quite a lot of them. Disproportionately the ones who are going to grow up gay, the ones who have autistic-spectrum disorders, the anxious or self-harming or depressed ones, the ones who are being abused.

And it’s harmful to gay people for two reasons. The first is that without a meaningful definition of sex, there cannot be sexual orientation. What does it mean to be same-sex attracted, if ‘sex’ is a matter of self-identification? The second is that gay adults are disproportionately likely to have been gender non-conforming in early youth. Now those children are being told that their atypicality makes them ‘really’ members of the opposite sex. This lie starts some of them on a pathway towards cross-sex hormones, genital surgery – and eventual sterility.

All of what I’ve said till now is deeply unpopular speech with some people. Because it punctures dearly held beliefs about people’s identities, some of whom experience what I say as unkind, even hateful. I don’t revel in being unkind, still less ‘hateful’. I’m not someone who seeks controversy for its own sake. But neither do I shy away from it. And on this subject I speak to prevent harm, and to prevent unkindness.

What happens if you base public policy on substituting subjective, self-declared gender identity for the objective material reality of sex?

For women, it means men in rape crisis centres, rapists in women’s prisons, men winning women’s sporting prizes.

Barbie Kardashian – a man who was recently jailed for four and a half years for threatening to torture, rape and murder his own mother, and who is “legally female” and universally called a woman in Ireland’s self-satisfied, corporatist mainstream media – was until recently held in Ireland’s sole women-only prison in Limerick. He is being moved to a men’s prison only because the staff in Limerick don’t feel safe having to handle him – no one seems to give a toss about the female inmates.

For children, this ideology means telling them lies about their bodies and the material reality of being a member of this evolved mammalian species. This creates mental distress and confusion. We’re telling them that if they don’t fit into the pink or blue box designated for their own sex, they should declare they are the opposite sex so they can fit back in. This is the very opposite of progressive. It’s cruel.

As for gay people, once sex becomes a matter of self-identification, so does sexual orientation. It’s lesbians who bear the brunt of it: lesbian friends tell me that a quarter to a third of the profiles on lesbian dating apps are now of men, and that if they make it clear in their own profiles that they will only consider partners who are really female, as opposed to pretend-female, they are banned for ‘hate’.

———

There is no material reality to the notion of gender identity; it’s a belief that a minority of people have about themselves, given life by utterances and nothing else. A person declares their gender, declares their pronouns, and everyone else is supposed to ignore the evidence of their own senses, their own understanding of the nature of humans, and accept that ‘people are who they say they are’.

So it is no coincidence that the draconian, Orwellian, Hate Crime Bill Ireland is considering enshrines within it a circular, non-reality-based definition of ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’:

‘Gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.

This is tautology – circular gobbledegook. It’s not a definition at all.

As for hate, I know what it feels like to be its target. I’ve experienced serious death threats, some from men who identify as women who have serious criminal records, and who express their threats in gruesome, sexualised, personalised ways. On September 11th in Manchester, as I walked peacefully along the road after a teach-in on equality and human-rights law, I was followed by masked, flag-waving protesters shouting the usual idiotic slogans, with the addition of “Fuck Helen Joyce, my body my choice” and “There are many, any more of us than you”.

It makes some sense to call that hateful – though to be clear, I don’t think we need any new laws to handle this, just better policing. It’s a public-order offence. Me saying that men are men, that no man can become or be a woman, that a man who ‘feels like a woman’ is having an entirely male experience, albeit an atypical one – that’s not. Those statements are not just true, but in some situations essential to say in order to uphold other people’s human rights.

Irish legislators are considering passing a law that will criminalise ‘hate’ –undefined. Which protects ‘gender’, defined circularly – that is, undefined.

This law could criminalise mere possession of the book I blew up my life to write. There’s a ‘safety clause’ that excuses works of scientific or artistic merit – but please. The people who call me a Nazi, genocidal, antisemitic, racist, homophobic and so on, and who follow me down the street bellowing Fuck Helen Joyce, don’t think my work has scientific or artistic merit. That clause isn’t going to stop them going after me.

The problem isn’t so much that I might actually be charged and found guilty. It’s that I can’t be sure I won’t be. This is the so-called chilling effect.

I hear from my fellow thought criminals all the time. And I’ve seen the public polling. Most people agree with me entirely on issues of sex and gender.

But they don’t dare say so.

Well, I do, and I’m not going to stop saying it. I don’t do it for fun, I do it because everyone’s human rights depend upon it. I am going to keep saying the following true and important things:

• Being a man or woman is entirely a matter of biology and not at all a matter of identity.
• Men can’t be women. None of them, no matter how much they want to.
• Children shouldn’t be given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. They shouldn’t be told they can change sex. They shouldn’t be told that their feelings define their identities.
• No men, and that includes men who say they are women, should be allowed into women’s spaces or sports.

And so, if Ireland, my home country, does pass this dumb new law, I’m willing to go there and say all this again, because I feel a moral imperative. And even if you don’t feel the same urgency on this particular subject, I hope you will support me. My free speech is your free speech. You don’t know what unpopular thing you may one day feel a moral imperative to say.

Dr. Helen Joyce is the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Is Wiping Safety Content on COVID-19 Vaccines

Study Finds Platform is Cleansing Side Effect Information and Promoting Unbridled Use of Experimental Products

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | September 19, 2023

YouTube is the most utilized video platform in the world. Many of my patients ask “doctor, why don’t we hear about vaccine side effects?” People feel blind-sided when they develop myocarditis, stroke, blood clots, or other common vaccine side effects but can can find no information on them with standard Google searches landing on YouTube.

Ng and colleagues performed a rigorous analysis of YouTube COVID-19 vaccine content and found that the platform is having effective content moderation. This means when you do a search, they are wiping vaccine safety information off the platform as “anti-vaccine” and replacing it with either irrelevant health information or pro-vaccine content.

Ng YMM, Hoffmann Pham K, Luengo-Oroz M Exploring YouTube’s Recommendation System in the Context of COVID-19 Vaccines: Computational and Comparative Analysis of Video Trajectories J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e49061 doi: 10.2196/49061PMID: 37713243

The authors declare this a “success” of content moderation. Others would say this is censorship of valuable health information replaced with propaganda promoting novel, experimental unsafe, ineffective, genetic vaccines. What YouTube is doing is very scary, the authors self-expressed virtuosity is even more alarming.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

Ng YMM, Hoffmann Pham K, Luengo-Oroz M Exploring YouTube’s Recommendation System in the Context of COVID-19 Vaccines: Computational and Comparative Analysis of Video Trajectories J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e49061 doi: 10.2196/49061 PMID: 37713243

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Biden Regime Awards Over $4 Million In Grants To Programs That Target “Misinformation”

Millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that target speech

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 19, 2023

Since the start of September, the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and State Department have awarded grants totaling more than $4 million to programs, studies, and other initiatives that target “misinformation” — a term that the Biden admin has used to demand censorship of content that challenges the federal government’s Covid narrative.

The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:

The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:

These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.

An appeals court recently stated that the Biden regime violated the First Amendment when pushing social media platforms to censor and in an Independence Day ruling on this case, a judge described the Biden admin’s actions as “Orwellian.” The Supreme Court is now considering whether to hear the case.

While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.

For example, Biden’s State Department has previously funded foreign think tanks that created “disinformation” blacklists. These blacklists were used to target American conservative media outlets.

Both of the agencies that awarded these grants have been involved in prior censorship controversies.

In addition to funding groups that created disinformation blacklists, Biden’s State Department has flagged thousands of accounts to Twitter, now known as X, for censorship.

Meanwhile, the NSF has been accused of funding programs that develop tech that targets vaccine dissent and has funded research on correcting “false beliefs” online.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Dr. Michael Yeadon: A message to a friend struggling to accept that what is happening is intentional

“I’m afraid we cannot hide from the reality that this is a global coup and deliberate mass murder.”

By Michael Yeadon | Exposing The Darkness | September 10, 2023

A message written to a trusted campaigning friend, who is struggling to accept that what is happening is intentional.

It is indeed a big step to go from legitimate criticism of allegedly incompetent politicians and industrialists to putting the pieces together in such a way that they can only point to intentionality. See what you think.

***

Dear X,

I find it impossible to try to put all the information together in such a way that the whole thing could even be benign or at least not entirely malignant.

That’s because, as I’m sure you’ve heard me say, I believe it’s evil!

I also had difficulty with it early on, with the argument “they must have known this!?”, etc. Once I allowed the possibility that all the bad things were intentional, I found everything else fell into place. Of course, that alone doesn’t prove it was intentional.

Some early indications of deliberateness are the coordinated responses of dozens of governments to the alleged pandemic: lockdowns, masking, mass testing of the source, the misapplication of PCR-based techniques to bulk testing of clinical samples, selective closures of businesses and schools, border restrictions, etc.

No country had any of this as a core part of its own pandemic preparedness plan.

Even the WHO’s scientific review of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) concluded that none worked and that the only changes worth anything were asking people with symptoms to stay home until they recovered and increasing the frequency of washing hands (because the route of transmission would initially be uncertain).

I argued at the time that the only way all countries could have adopted all these useless but harmful and expensive NPIs was if there was supranational coordination. I don’t know whether that was from the WHO, WEF, etc. Don’t know. But it is certainly illegal.

We now know that they knew that imposing these restrictions would not save anyone, but that the negative consequences would be devastating, even fatal, for some, who would no longer have access to the medical care they needed. Moreover, the use of furlough would of course be enormously damaging for governments that were already deeply in debt.

This is why millions still believe the absurd COVID lies.

I note that an American term, furlough, is widespread in public debate. In Britain we have never used that term before. No one commented on its arrival, which betrayed the leading role of the Americans.

Then there is the imposition of radically changed medical protocols.

Because of my long exposure to respiratory matters, I knew right away when they started panicking about needing 30,000 mechanical ventilators that something truly diabolical was going on. It is never appropriate to anesthetize, intubate, and ventilate a patient with an unobstructed airway and an intact chest wall.

Mechanical ventilation is certainly a wonderful, life-saving tool, but it carries serious risks for the vulnerable patient, in the form of ventilator-induced pneumonia, lung injury from the use of pressure to inflate the lungs, and much more.

The correct treatment would consist of an oxygen mask, a single, low dose of benzo, a cup of tea and a biscuit, and a caring hand on an arm.

Also in the US, many in this vulnerable condition received remdesivir and not full intravenous nutrition. In most cases it was only a matter of time before they died.

High doses of midazolam (a benzodiazepine) and morphine were used indiscriminately in nursing homes. Not only high doses, but also administered repeatedly to their elderly patients. The highest medical authorities in the country had told them to do this and so few questioned it.

My Ph.D. happened to be in this area, the effect of opiates on respiratory function. The discovery of multiple opiate receptors raised the possibility of inventing receptor-selective ligands that would relieve pain with reduced respiratory depression. Unfortunately, both are primarily mediated by mu opiate receptors, both centrally and in the periphery.

The combination of opiate agonists and benzodiazepines is contraindicated in patients unless closely monitored (for signs of respiratory depression).

That is not the case and is not possible in a nursing home. They too were murdered en masse.

Finally, community GPs were warned not to prescribe antibiotics in cases of Covid “because antibiotics cannot treat viral diseases”.

It is well known that what is commonly called a secondary bacterial infection results in death in this situation. However, the data shows that antibiotic prescribing for suspected bacterial infections of the lungs fell by 50% and large numbers of people died avoidable deaths (and a rather gruesome ones at that).

It is not possible to look at all this evidence without concluding that this was intentional. What they have done is literally diabolical.

I’m still confused as to how it was done with so little opposition. I do know that from the late 1990s to the end of 2019, a series of simulations of global pandemics and bioterrorism scenarios were carried out, allowing the perpetrators to hone their skills in the responses and control measures imposed.

I believe some of these simulations were conducted in the field so that the emergency response teams could form and practice what most of them felt was appropriate given the fictional setup, although this is speculative.

Then we come to the “vaccines”.

Given my career in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, I knew that it was impossible to produce a vaccine in less than 5-6 years if one wanted to demonstrate clinical safety and improve production to the usual high quality required to to create a precisely defined end product.

If the latter is not done, there is no point in doing the former, because what would otherwise be injected would not be what was used in the clinical tests.

In other words, if there was a need for a new vaccine, you would never even consider implementing such a program, because no pandemic in history has lasted even a fraction of the minimum time it takes for a safe and to create an effective new vaccine.

Yet they continued with it. This is also malicious, let alone the extraordinary lying, censoring and slandering of those who think differently.

Since my entire career has been based on the principles of “rational drug design” to design and test molecules, I could put myself in the shoes of the vaccine designers.

There are several obvious safety issues built into these products. One of these is the axiomatic induction of “autoimmune” responses, regardless of which antigen is chosen.

Next was the choice of antigen, where no one would choose the spike protein as it would most likely be directly toxic, it is subject to the fastest mutation (so a vaccine could lose its efficacy) and it is also the least different from human proteins (and thus could provoke bystander attacks on even somewhat similar self-proteins).

Yet the four protagonists all chose this antigen. What a coincidence! I would have called on my colleagues in the other companies to make sure we didn’t do that. This is because it would be highly undesirable to have common risks for all programs.

When formulated, the mRNA-based products both chose LNPs (highly toxic lipid nanoparticles) to encapsulate their message. Yet the industry knew that not only do these travel throughout the body, including the brain, but they also accumulate in the ovaries.

Yet, knowing this, companies and regulators went ahead and others exacerbated the toxicity risk by recommending these injections in pregnant women and children.

I was still slow to piece together all this evidence of carefully crafted damage. But I got there eventually and have been speaking in what many consider extreme terms ever since.

I fear we cannot hide from the reality that this is a global coup and deliberate mass murder.

Worse still, we see the advance of surveillance technology and legal powers to introduce digital ID & CBDC and eradicate cash. It is not difficult to imagine scenarios where showing a digital ID becomes mandatory.

All it takes is for the WHO to make up fake pandemics, for the pharmaceutical industry to produce billions of doses of fake mRNA-based vaccines, and for governments to insist that digital IDs only remain valid if you take these harmful injections, and there will be a near-perfect unacceptable means of depopulation.

They can do other things, too, but I think they’ll try this. We must continue to raise our voices and try to wake people up.

It only takes a large minority to say NO & these diabolical plans fail.

With best wishes,

Mike

September 17, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

The UN’s New Political Declaration on Pandemics

By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | September 15, 2023

On September 20th our representatives meeting at the United Nations (UN) will sign off on a ‘Declaration’ titled: “Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.”

This was announced as a ‘silence procedure,’ meaning that States not responding will be deemed supporters of the text. The document expresses a new policy pathway for managing populations when the World Health Organization (WHO), the health arm of the UN, declares a future viral variant to be a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’

The WHO noted in 2019 that pandemics are rare, and insignificant in terms of overall mortality over the last century. Since then, it decided that the 2019 old-normal population were simply oblivious to impending annihilation. The WHO and the entire UN system now consider pandemics an existential and imminent threat. This matters, because:

  1. They are asking for far more money than is spent on any other international health program (your money),
  2. This will deliver great wealth to some people who now work closely with the WHO and the UN,
  3. The powers being sought from your government will reimpose the very responses that have just caused the largest growth in poverty and disease in our lifetimes, and
  4. Logically, pandemics will only become more frequent if someone intends to make them so (so we should wonder what is going on).

Staff who drafted this Declaration did so because it is their job. They were paid to write a text that is clearly contradictory, sometimes fallacious, and often quite meaningless. They are part of a rapidly growing industry, and the Declaration is intended to justify this growth and the centralization of power that goes with it. The document will almost certainly be agreed by your governments because, frankly, this is where the momentum and money are.

Whilst the Declaration’s thirteen pages are all over the place in terms of reality and farce, they are not atypical of recent UN output. People are trained to use trigger words, slogans, and propaganda themes (e.g., “equity,” “empowerment of all women and girls,” “access to education,” “technology transfer hubs”) that no one could oppose without risking being labeled a denier, far-right, or colonialist.

The Declaration should be read in the context of what these institutions, and their staff, have just done. It is difficult to summarize such a compendium of right-speak intended to veil reality, but it is hoped this short summary will prompt some thought. Wickedness is not a mistake but an intended deception, so we need to distinguish these clearly.

Doing Darkness Behind a Veil of Light

Put together, the following two extracts summarize the internal contradiction of the Declaration’s agenda and its staggering shamelessness and lack of empathy:

“In this regard, we:

PP3: Recognize also the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries, …

PP5: “Recognize that the illness, death, socio-economic disruption and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, …”

‘Recognition’ of devastation is important. SARS-COV-2 was associated with mortality predominantly within wealthy countries, where the median age of Covid-associated death was between 75 and 85 years. Nearly all of these people had significant comorbidities such as obesity and diabetes, meaning their life expectancy was already restricted. People contributing significantly to economic health were at very low risk, a profile known in early 2020.

These three years of socio-economic devastation must, therefore, be overwhelmingly due to the response. The virus did not starve people, as the Declaration’s writers would like us to believe. Deteriorating disease control was predicted by the WHO and others in early 2020, increasing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malnutrition. Economic disruption in low-income countries specifically results in more infant and child deaths.

In Western countries, adult mortality has risen as expected when screening for cancer and heart disease are reduced and poverty and stress increase. Knowing this, the WHO advised in late 2019 to ”not under any circumstances” impose the lockdown-like measures for pandemic influenza. In early 2020, under the influence of their sponsors, they advocated for them for Covid-19. The Declaration, however, carries no note of contrition or repentance.

Undeterred by incongruity, the Declaration goes on to describe Covid-19 as “one of the greatest challenges” in UN history (PP6), noting that somehow this outbreak resulted in “exacerbation of poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty…”. In fact, it acknowledges that this caused:

“… (a) negative impact on equity, human and economic development across all spheres of society, as well as on global humanitarian needs, gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, the enjoyment of human rights, livelihoods, food security and nutrition, education, its disruption to economies, supply chains, trade, societies and the environment, within and among countries, which is reversing hard-won development gains and hampering progress…” (PP6)

To restate the obvious, this does not happen due to a virus targeting sick elderly people. It occurs when children and productive adults are barred from school, work, healthcare, and participation in markets for goods and services. Economic, social, and health catastrophe inevitably results, disproportionately harming poorer people and low-income countries, conveniently far indeed from the halls of Geneva and New York.

No, we were not all in this together.

Not all were negatively impacted by this catastrophe. People and corporations who sponsor much of the WHO’s health emergency work, and that of its sister organizations such as CEPI, Gavi, and Unitaid, did very well from the policies they advocated so strongly for. Software and Pharma companies made unprecedently high profits, while this mass impoverishment played out. The international agencies have also gained; construction and recruitment are strong in Geneva. Philanthro-capitalism is good for some.

The main aim of the Declaration is to back the proposed WHO international health regulation (IHR) amendments and treaty (PP26), key to ensuring that viral outbreaks that have such a small impact can remain highly profitable. An additional $10 billion per year in new financing is requested to support this (PP29). There is a reason why most countries have laws against scams. The UN and its agencies, fortunately for its staff, are outside of any national jurisdiction.

Based on their sponsors’ assessments, the staff of these agencies are doing their job well. For the rest of humanity, their work is an unmitigated disaster. In 2019 they said never lock down, then spent 2020 defending top-down lockdowns and mandates. For three years, they theatrically pretended that decades of knowledge on immunity, disease burden, and the association of poverty with mortality did not exist.

Now they write this UN Declaration to fund their industry further through taxpayers they so recently impoverished. Once tasked to serve the world’s vast populations, particularly the poor and vulnerable, the UN vision has been consumed by public-private partnerships, the allure of Davos, and a fascination with high-net-worth individuals.

When Words are Used to Obscure Actions

While the Declaration underlines the importance of educating children during pandemics (PP23), these same organizations backed school closures for hundreds of millions of children at minimal risk from Covid-19. Among them, several million more girls are now being farmed off to nightly rape as child brides, others in child labor. Women and girls were disproportionately removed from education and from employment. They weren’t asked if they supported these policies!

The girls are being raped because the people paid to implement these policies did so. They know the contradiction, and the harm. But this is a job like many others. The only unusual aspects, from a business standpoint, are the sheer amorality and lack of empathy that must be engaged to excel in it.

To justify wrecking African children’s lives, the UN claims that the continent has “over 100 major public health emergencies annually” (OP4). Africa has a rising burden of endemic diseases that dwarfs mortality from such outbreaks – over half a million children die every year from malaria (increased through the Covid-19 lockdowns) and similar burdens from tuberculosis and HIV. By contrast, total Covid-19 deaths recorded in Africa over the past 3 years are just 256,000. The 2015 West African Ebola outbreak, the largest such recent emergency pre-Covid, killed 11,300 people. MERS and SARS1 killed less than 1,000 each globally. However, induced poverty does cause famine, raises child mortality, and wrecks health systems – is this the health emergency that the UN is referring to? Or are they simply making things up?

Through the IHR amendments, these agencies will coordinate the locking down, border closures, mandated medical examinations, and vaccination of you and your family. Their Pharma sponsors reasonably expect to make several hundred billion more dollars from these actions, so we can be confident that emergencies will be declared. By claiming 100 such events annually in Africa alone, they are signaling how these new powers will be used. We are to believe the world is such that only the abandonment of our rights and sovereignty, for the enrichment of others, can save us.

The UN and the WHO do recognize that some will question this illogic. In PP35, they characterize such skepticism as:

“health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization.”

The WHO recently publicly characterized people who discuss adverse effects of Covid vaccines and question WHO policies as “far-right,” “anti-science aggressors,” and “a killing force.” This is unhinged. It is the denigration and hate speech that fascist regimes use. The reader must decide whether such an organization should control their freedom of expression and decide what constitutes truth.

It is not helpful here to give details of all 13 pages of right-speak, contradiction, and fallacy. You will find similar rhetoric in other UN and WHO documents, particularly on pandemic preparedness. Straight talk is contrary to business requirements. However, the first paragraph in the Declaration’s ‘Call to Action’ sets the tone:

“We therefore commit to scale up our efforts to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and further implement the following actions and express our strong resolve to:

OP1. Strengthen regional and international cooperation, multilateralism, global solidarity, coordination and governance at the highest political levels and across all relevant sectors, with the determination to overcome inequities and ensure the sustainable, affordable, fair, equitable, effective, efficient and timely access to medical countermeasures including vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other health products to ensure high-level attention through a multisectoral approach to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics and other health emergencies, particularly in developing countries;”

There are 48 more. You paid taxes so that someone could write that!

Those millions of girls suffering at night, the hundreds of millions of children who had their futures stolen, the mothers of those malaria-killed children, and all suffering under the increasing burden of poverty and inequality unleashed by this farce are watching. The Declaration, like the WHO IHR and treaty it supports, awaits the signatures of the governments that purport to represent us.

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

September 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Face Masks Decrease Cognitive Function and Increase Reaction Time, Study Finds

BY DR ROGER WATSON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Prolonged wearing of a surgical face mask, made compulsory in many settings in many countries during the Covid years, reduces cognitive function and increases reaction time in addition to increasing shortness of breath and fatigue. These are the findings of a study published in Nurse Education in Practice, an international peer reviewed journal, on September 15th 2023.

The study, carried out in Turkey and titled ‘The effect of prolonged use of surgical masks during face-to-face teaching on cognitive and physiological parameters of nursing students: a cross-sectional and descriptive study’ involved 61 nursing students who volunteered to participate in the study. The sample size was determined to be adequate for the study using the statistical method of power analysis. Information was collected on cognitive fatigue and dyspnoea (shortness of breath) using a self-administered questionnaire and cognitive reaction time was measured objectively using an app. Body temperature and blood oxygen saturation were also measured.

The students were asked to complete the questionnaires and measure the above parameters at the start of a five-hour class and to repeat the process at the end. Surgical face masks were worn for the duration of the class. With the exception of blood oxygen saturation, all the remaining parameters were adversely and statistically significantly affected over the course of the class.

At the end of the class, the students reported greater shortness of breath, cognitive fatigue and had demonstrably slower reaction times. They experienced a rise in body temperature which is an established correlate of physical fatigue.

The authors of the study are careful to point out that the design of their study was a pre-test/post-test where the participants were, effectively, acting as their own controls. It is possible, therefore, that alternative explanations may exist to explain the observations. For example, we do not know if or to what extent the observed changes in parameters may have taken place anyway after five hours in class. For that reason, as recommended by the authors, further study is required of these phenomena using a parallel control group who undergo the five-hour class but who are not subjected to wearing surgical face masks for the duration. The reported study was carried out under Covid restrictions, therefore, there was no possibility of incorporating a control group.

Assuming that the outcome of the study does provide evidence for the adverse effects of face masks then further study should be conducted. Furthermore, the implications of the study could be very important if transposed to clinical practice. Prolonged wearing of surgical (and even more restrictive) face masks was compulsory during Covid restrictions. The ramifications for the ability of clinicians to make the correct decisions and to act quickly in emergency situations are surely worrying.

Declaration of interests: the author is Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.

Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.

September 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

California Threatens to Defund 600+ Schools Over Low Vaccine Rates

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 12, 2023

The California Department of Health (CDPH) is threatening to restrict funding for the more than 600 schools being audited by the state because they reported more than 10% of their kindergarten or seventh grade students were not fully vaccinated last year or because they failed to file a vaccination report with the state, EdSource reported.

“Schools found to have improperly admitted students who have (not) met immunization requirements may be subject to loss of average daily attendance payments for those children,” the CDPH said in an email.

CDPH posted the audit list, which included 449 schools with kindergarten students, 175 schools with seventh graders, 56 schools with both grades and 39 schools that had not filed a vaccination report.

California students are considered “not fully vaccinated” if they have not provided proper immunization records to their school, if they don’t have the vaccinations required by the school system or if they have been admitted to schools conditionally while they are in the process of finishing their school-mandated vaccine series, according to the state audit guide.

If a student behind on the vaccine requirements has not received a first dose of a required vaccine within 10 days of starting school and a second dose of a required vaccine within four months of the first dose, the student must be excluded from school.

The audit guide indicates that to determine whether schools have students behind schedule, auditors check whether kindergarteners have two doses of a varicella (chickenpox) vaccine and two doses of a measles vaccine and whether seventh graders have two doses of varicella and one dose of Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis), their sixth pertussis-containing vaccine.

Oakland Unified School District, with 48 elementary schools and eight of the seventh grade schools on the list, has the highest number of schools being audited. Los Angeles Unified has 75 of its non-charter schools on the audit list, while Pomona Unified has 13, San Francisco Unified 14 and San Juan Unified in Sacramento County, eight.

The vaccination audit has been occurring in public schools only since the 2021-2022 school year, when 45 schools made the list.

Schools in violation of the state law must submit corrected attendance reports that reflect the reduction in average daily attendance cited in the audit finding, which will likely reduce their funding, according to CDPH spokesperson Scott Roark.

Sensationalizing vaccine numbers

Over the last year, legacy media organizations such as The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post along with public health officials across the country have been sounding the alarm over decreasing rates of routine vaccination among U.S. children.

But even at its lowest point — the 2020-2021 school year — the kindergarten vaccination rate only dipped to 94% from 95%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Experts cited in these articles blame the drop on pandemic disruptions to U.S. healthcare, “vaccine hesitancy” about the COVID-19 vaccine bleeding over into other vaccines and the availability of non-medical vaccine exemptions.

EdSource reported that vaccination rates in California, which had been climbing since the state eliminated the personal belief exemption in 2015, plunged after schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thousands of children in California were unable to start the school year in 2022 because they were behind on their vaccinations, it reported.

But EdSource also reported that the kindergarten vaccination rate was 92.8% in 2020 — down from 95% in 2018 — but went back up to 94% in 2021.

Substack writer and analyst Karl Kanthak told The Defender these numbers are being used to create the appearance of a crisis, which he says is part of a broader attack on vaccine exemptions.

Between the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which gave vaccine makers immunity for any injuries caused by vaccines, the 1994 Vaccines for Children Program that provides no-cost vaccines to low-income children and the school mandates, Big Pharma has achieved nearly full saturation of the pediatric market, Kanthak said.

But that’s not the case for the adult market, where vaccine uptake is much lower without mandates. “Eliminating school exemptions for children is a major step in making exemptions unavailable for adults,” Kanthak said.

Because the child market was already saturated, “they [pharma] couldn’t use low rates as an excuse” to argue legislators should eliminate access to exemptions, he said.

That has resulted in the misrepresentation of vaccine rates, where it is made to seem as if high numbers of children are missing required vaccines, raising the specter of disease outbreaks, said Kanthak, which is apparent in the audit and EdSource’s reporting on it and most media headlines about vaccines.

“So you get policy influenced by headline,” he said.

Audit numbers are ‘misleading’

For example, Kanthak told The Defender that many shots required for kindergarteners, including the last doses of the MMR, varicella, DTaP and polio can be administered between the ages of 4 and 6, according to the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule.

Doctors or parents planning to complete the course of vaccination may choose to do so later in that time period for any number of reasons related to the child’s development, health condition or previous vaccination.

Because children start kindergarten in that window, many children being counted as unvaccinated are on the CDC schedule, even if they are not yet “fully vaccinated,” he said.

“To count conditional admissions as unvaccinated is misleading,” he said.

“The tracking systems are not designed to track students who are simply still ‘in process’ with pediatricians who are following the medical guidelines and individualizing care to the patient,” he said.

Instead, “The schools are measuring too-young students, too early in the school year, for injections they are not overdue for until second grade.”

Kanthak said the audit numbers themselves are misleading because some of the schools listed have very few students and some of those students are missing something marginal.

“The first two schools on the list have only two seventh grade students, therefore one student missing their Tdap — sixth pertussis injection — gives those schools an only ‘50% fully vaccinated’ measurement.”

The audit lists a significant number of schools with very few students. Sixty-three elementary schools and 53 seventh grade schools have fewer than nine students. Thirty-five elementary schools and nineteen seventh grade schools have fewer than 20 students.

In those schools, having one or two students not “fully vaccinated” places them on the audit list, but it is a small number of overall students. Using a percentage in any population less than 100 is misleading, he added, because each student comprises more than 1% of the total.

Kanthak added that such reports typically exclude these small numbers to protect children’s confidentiality.

Only 61 of the kindergarten schools on the list and 46 of the seventh grade schools on the list had more than 100 students.

Overall, the total number of kindergarten students in the more than 500 schools on the audit list comprises about 5.3% of the total 471,379 kindergarten students in California.

California-based attorney Brad Hakala of the Hakala Law Group told The Defender, “In a state that has in excess of 39 million residents … it seems like statistics are consistently being skewed” to favor the position that dropping vaccine rates is a crisis.

“With that said, and in light of parental rights which more and more parents are attempting to exercise,” he added:

“There certainly seems to be a growing concern among parents … who are avoiding or delaying the vaccination of their child/children for one reason or another. …

“Some parents are not fundamentally opposed to the traditional vaccines being administered to their children, but they just want to space them out in frequency, timing, and volume, especially in light of ongoing concerns of vaccine injuries. Others want a more holistic approach and are opposed to their children having any vaccinations.

“I believe that the pandemic, the emergency use authorized (EUA) shots and the ever-increasing negative health ramifications that we are seeing arise from these untested medications that are still under EUA, are highlighting the already growing concern that parents are having with injecting their children with more and more medications.

“From the requisite number of injections and vaccines significantly increasing over the years, to the way that society has been treated by varying governmental entities since 2020, parents just want to protect their children and have the absolute right to protect their children, and I personally think that is having an overall effect on the current vaccination rates within California.”

Vaccine rights attorney Greg Glaser told The Defender he thinks the rising concerns parents have with vaccination has the potential to pose a real threat to Big Pharma, which is “calling the shots” on these audits to make sure vaccination rates don’t drop at all.

“The pharmaceutical companies fund the politicians and then the politicians put pressure on the Department of Public Health,” he said. “The first lever they’re able to control is these public health officers and public health departments.”

“Vaccine hesitancy scares Big Pharma,” he said.

He added:

“Pharma is very sensitive to trends. They can see when parents are no longer choosing vaccination and they know what a trend looks like. …

“Pharma’s clearly seeing a trend that less parents are vaccinating. So they’re using their levers of power in public health departments to audit schools to stop that trend.”

Ad hoc immunization clinics raise concerns

EdSource reports that schools and districts trying to increase vaccination rates are sending vaccination guidelines home with students and health services teams and reaching out to families to let them know where to get vaccinated.

Also, some schools or school districts are offering immunization clinics.

For example, Sacramento City Unified School District offers weekly free vaccination clinics at its district enrollment center. And Gateway Community Charters offered a clinic at its middle school.

The presence of such clinics also raises concerns, Glaser said, specially given the recent push by the U.S. federal government to rapidly expand the use of school-based health centers across the country.

This push has some critics concerned children will receive, or be pressured into receiving, unnecessary or unwanted medical interventions without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton — an integrative physician whose license was revoked by the California medical board for writing eight vaccine medical exemptions the board alleges were not fully compliant with CDC regulations — told The Defender she saw the clinics as a way to pressure families and children into vaccination in ways that could violate their rights.

“Schools are not medical offices, and the records on vaccines are not complete, so some children will get vaccines they do not need,” she said.

Sutton added, “Many questions must be asked: how is permission obtained? How is the vaccination transmitted to the child’s chart in the real doctor’s office? How are adverse events handled medically and financially?”

Vaccine exemptions: ‘as California goes, so goes the nation’

California has been ground zero for struggles over vaccine mandates for over a decade.

In 2012, California passed Assembly Bill 2109 to restrict the ability of parents to have their children exempted from vaccine requirements based on personal beliefs.

Where before parents simply had to write a letter stating their personal beliefs, the new law stipulated that parents seeking exemption for their children must get the signature of an authorized healthcare provider stating that parents had received information about the risks of not being vaccinated.

In 2015, allegedly prompted by a measles outbreak at Disneyland — that the media blamed on unvaccinated children — and low vaccination rates in many California schools, Democratic State Sens. Richard Pan and Ben Allen authored a controversial bill, Senate Bill 277, that eliminated the “personal belief exemption” altogether.

Pan’s SB 277 passed in 2015 and Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law, despite significant pushback from parents, hundreds of whom protested at the legislature.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pan also proposed legislation mandating the COVID-19 vaccine for all school children, with no personal or religious exemptions permitted — before the full approval of the vaccine for children by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The bill did not pass.

He also wrote a 2021 op-ed in The Washington Post likening “anti-vaccine extremism” to domestic terrorism.

The passage of SB 277 in 2015 made California the first state in nearly 35 years to eliminate nonmedical vaccine exemptions. Beginning in January 2016, nonmedical vaccine exemptions were no longer accepted for school entry.

After that, school vaccination rates rose. Parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children can obtain a medical exemption, have their children enrolled in special education services or homeschool them.

California has one of the highest rates of homeschooled children in the country, and those numbers are higher post-pandemic.

But California has also taken an aggressive stance against medical exemptions.

Doctors providing medical exemptions have been investigated by the California Medical Board, with many of them having their licenses revoked.

All medical exemptions for California children issued on or after Jan. 1, 2021, are subject to review by CDPH and can be revoked. All exemptions are automatically reviewed if they are submitted in a school where the immunization rate is below 95% if the school has failed to report its vaccination rates, if the physician writing the exemption has written more than five medical exemptions in a calendar year or if CDPH deems it necessary to protect public health.

As a result, Glaser said, “the number of medical exemptions in California has slowed to a trickle.” And those rules, he said, were put in place by Pan “for political reasons, not for reasons of public health.”

Glaser also said he thought these audits were happening in California because “as California goes, so goes the nation.”

He added, “When something is tried and succeeds in California, according to the metrics set by those in power, then they have a justification to roll it out across the nation.”

Hakala thinks that since 2020, “an increasing portion of the population is growing in their concern for what messages and information the government is putting forth, and the laws that are being passed that affect parental rights, especially in California.”

He added:

“I think there’s a growing distrust for the veracity of the information that is being disseminated, and on the basis of the laws that are being passed — and not just by one side of the political aisle or the other — but all information being disseminated seems to be increasingly scrutinized, as society’s skepticism continues to grow.

“This, in part, I think has a direct effect on the numbers that the audit report exemplifies.

“The public’s trust seems to be consistently evaporating, and it is my belief that a significant amount of work will need to be done to repair that trust.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Court Orders Facebook To Comply With Subpoena For Data On All Users That Broke “Covid-19 Misinformation” Rules

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 15, 2023

The District of Columbia (DC) Court of Appeals has rejected Meta’s appeal to quash a sweeping subpoena that demanded it hand over “documents sufficient to identify all Facebook groups, pages, and accounts that have violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policy with respect to content concerning vaccines” to the DC government.

Millions of users, many of whom made truthful statements that challenged the government’s Covid narrative, are likely to be swept up in this government data grab due to the scope of Facebook’s “Covid-19 misinformation” rules and the number of users that were impacted by them.

Facebook’s Covid-19 misinformation rules prohibited many truthful statements during the pandemic. For example, at one point claiming that “vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against” was banned — an assertion that health officials have now reluctantly admitted is true.

Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that Facebook censored truthful information.

And millions of people were impacted by these far-reaching censorship rules. In some quarters, Facebook censored over 100 million posts for violating these rules. Some of the groups Facebook took down under these rules also had hundreds of thousands of users.

Meta had challenged the subpoena on free speech and privacy grounds, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and that a warrant was required to compel disclosure of the requested data.

Specifically, Meta argued that the subpoena violated Meta’s own First Amendment rights by “prob[ing] and penaliz[ing]” its ability to exercise editorial control over content on its platform and also violated Meta users’ First Amendment rights because it would deter them from engaging in future online discussions of controversial topics.

Additionally, Meta cited the warrant requirements in the Stored Communications Act (SCA) — a law that sought to provide Fourth Amendment-like privacy protections by statute to communications held by third party service providers.

However, the DC appeals court rejected Meta’s arguments.

The court stated that Meta had not shown the subpoena will result in its free speech or associational rights being chilled. Additionally, it said Meta users’ First Amendment rights wouldn’t be chilled because “the users who made those posts have already openly associated themselves with their espoused views by publicly posting them to Facebook.”

The court also insisted that the warrant requirement in the SCA does not apply to public posts and that the subpoena “does not require Meta to ‘unmask’ any anonymous Users.”

Furthermore, the court characterized this mass request for user data as “reasonably relevant” to the DC’s investigation and said the subpoena is “narrowly tailored to the government’s asserted interest.”

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

Not only does the subpoena require Facebook to hand over the data of users that were banned for sharing dissenting opinions on Covid but the Covid-19 misinformation policy the subpoena centered around is starting to be rolled back by Meta.

September 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Kiev orders closure of Christian churches

RT | September 15, 2023

Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko on Friday ordered the closure of 74 temples belonging to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), citing its alleged “direct ties” to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Klitschko’s decree is using the same legal justification employed to seize the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, or Monastery of the Caves, which Ukrainian police stormed last month. The monastery, which is nearly 1,000 years old, was handed over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a rival organization set up by the government in 2018.

The Lavra is technically state property but the church administered it under a 2013 agreement, which Kiev declared null and void earlier this year, claiming that the UOC violated it by having ties to “enemy nation” Russia. Ukrainian courts rejected the UOC’s appeals.

The shuttered temples may be handed over to the OCU or the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is in communion with Rome, or could even be demolished as “illegal objects” given the government’s annulment of lease and use contracts.

Back in March, President Vladimir Zelensky called the seizure of the Lavra “a move to strengthen our spiritual independence” and accused the UOC of being a tool of Russia. A third of Ukraine’s regions have outrightly banned the UOC so far.

Moscow has accused Kiev of persecuting the canonical Orthodox church and Washington for tacitly approving Ukraine’s actions. The US State Department, which produces an annual “religious freedom” report, has not once commented on Kiev’s campaign against the UOC. The reports published so far contain references only to meetings with representatives of the government-backed OCU.

September 15, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

UN Human Rights Chief Criticizes Elon Musk For Pushing Back Against ADL Censorship Demands

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 15, 2023

The UN human rights chief Volker Turk rallied against criticism of attempts by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to suppress online speech, particularly on X.

Turk took the bull by the horns in his fervent appeal on Wednesday, levelling sharp criticism at tech tycoon, Elon Musk, who has rebranded Twitter as X, demanding a stauncher response to rampaging so-called “hate speech.”

Turk expressed concern over the criticism leveled against the ADL after the group campaigned for advertisers to pause spending on the platform.

Turk alluded to Musk’s criticism of the ADL’s tactics without explicitly dropping names, although it was clear he placed Musk’s platform X near the heart of his grievance.

Musk, who has painted the ADL in a harsh light, accusing it of pushing baseless claims which have frightened advertisers and inflicted financial damage, is currently in the eye of the media.

Turk made no bones about drawing attention to this matter, as he urged online media behemoths to step up the crackdown on the blitzkrieg of “offensive” language and “disinformation.”

Transparency over policies dealing with “hate speech,” their effective implementation, and accessible ways for average users to report such abuse were among Turk’s key demands.

“Social media platforms have played a terrible role in metastasizing of hatred from limited backwaters into multi-current mainstream trends,” he complained.

Turk demanded that social media platforms increase transparency about their hate speech policy.

“And they must much more effectively put these policies into practice, including by ensuring that people can report hate speech easily and that those reports will swiftly lead to appropriate action,” he added.

September 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »