Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

There’s No Need to Ban These Vaccines

By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | July 28, 2023

Individual sovereignty means that people can make their own choices, based on their own assessment of risk. It means that others can advise them, but not compel them. It is a basis for modern human rights and natural law.

Public health practitioners like to voice support for these principles, but also really feel good about telling people what to do, based on their expertise and superior knowledge. This is why fascism tends to have a strong healthcare component.

Covid Vaccines are Part of Life

Health bureaucrats have really found their feet during the Covid years, prohibiting children from going to school, families and friends from meeting, and people walking in more than one direction in supermarket aisles or sitting alone on park benches. They banned the use of safe repurposed medicines, claiming they were fit only for animals whilst continuing to use them for other human diseases. Then they mandated injections with novel pharmaceutical products, banning people from working or traveling without them. They have benefitted their sponsors but impoverish the majority with virtual impunity. They rightly feel important, the guardians of society.

But all is not well. While medical fascism has paid well for three years, the public are starting to show signs of lack of trust – perhaps they are sick of being told what is best for them. They may be starting to think they are best placed to assess their own risks and priorities, and act accordingly.

Growing mistrust may stem from a realization that few of the Covid response measures seem to have brought much benefit. They successfully promoted poverty whilst transferring wealth upwards, disproportionately benefiting those promoting the response. They had old people locked up in solitary confinement, so they died alone rather than with family. They declared that those calling for informed consent are a threat to society, and children a threat to adults. Perhaps mistrust is justified.

Now many are proposing a ban on Covid-19 vaccines. They are convinced, on reasonable evidence, that these novel pharmaceuticals probably do net harm overall. They note the unprecedented rate of adverse events associated with the vaccines, from rising mortality to falling birth rates. They worry about mRNA vaccines concentrating in ovaries and adrenal glands, and crossing the placenta to unborn babies, with no long-term data on safety. Many who were standing for freedom of choice regarding ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are now backing this movement.

Understanding safety and effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines is complicated, as the initial randomized clinical trials were damaged by evidence of incompetence and lack of transparency. The manufacturers themselves were unable to show all-cause benefits. Trials for carcinogenicity and genotoxicity, normally mandatory for the genetic therapeutic class to which these substances belong, were also avoided simply by changing the name from genetic therapeutic to ‘vaccine.’ This renaming had required a broadening of the definition of vaccine, as mRNA must co-opt the person’s cellular machinery, like a medicine, in order to eventually stimulate an immune response.

Pharma in general, including these vaccine manufacturers, have appalling histories of fraud. This is shaky ground for trusting a new class of pharmaceuticals, and considerable propaganda and censorship have been required to project a positive image.

However, for better or worse, Covid-19 vaccines do now exist. Lots of people have had them and lots of people, for reasons best known to themselves, continue to request boosters. The vast majority are clearly not dying. People also skydive, go rock climbing and base jumping, risky activities but with generally non-mortal outcomes. While a marketed pharmaceutical is not quite equivalent to a cliff face, both carry inherent risk and theoretical benefits. Anyone partaking of them should be fully aware of the risks and provide informed consent.

The Right to Choose

Truly informed consent is one of the most unpopular ideas in medicine. The idea that the health professional is there merely to inform a patient’s sovereign, independent decision is difficult for a self-entitled profession to accept. Most believe they have a right to limit the public’s freedom when they deem it necessary. While many on both sides of the Covid vaccine debate act with good intent (and sometimes switch sides accordingly), their positions on mandates or bans require that governments use authoritarian approaches to implement public health policy.

As this article will upset well-meaning people, my argument needs further explanation. A belief common to those for and against the Covid response holds that people need to be protected from toxic substances and from malfeasance by doctors or pharmaceutical companies. It assumes that health professionals have a special place in society, shielding the public from areas where they lack knowledge and therefore cannot make sound judgment.

These arguments are reasonable, and in a world where all people live by high standards of integrity and ethics they might represent the safest approach. Unfortunately none of us seem able to infallibly uphold such standards. As 1930s Germany showed, and the Covid response reiterated, the public health establishment is particularly vulnerable to influence and abuse by political or corporate sponsors.

While a penchant for authoritarianism is well-established within medicine, the inclination to ban pharmaceuticals is relatively new. The doctor-patient relationship previously determined use based on context and history, informed (one hoped) by an honest regulatory system. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been managed similarly to occasionally deadly penicillin; available at the doctor’s discretion with the patient’s agreement.

Many in the West are getting fat on carbohydrates. However, we don’t ban sugar, but we do encourage the public to eat less, because it’s slowly killing them. We ban smoking where it directly affects others, but don’t ban people from taking risks when alone or among those who consent. Some would like to, but there are always people who wish to ban books, limit free speech, and impose their preferences on others. Decent societies should tolerate them but not indulge them.

Who Should be in Charge?

The primacy of decision-making within the doctor-patient relationship was based on recognition that illness is not just about a virus. It is the result of these within a body with particular genetic makeup, past exposure history, and underlying immune competence. Its severity further depends on the cultural context and value system of the sick person. Lastly but most importantly, it was based on the principle that the patient is a free, independent being, with primary rights over their own body. A doctor could refuse to perform a requested service, but could not force one. Insanity was the only exception. This is fundamental to medical ethics.

Medical practice also traditionally assumed that the doctor has a responsibility to help the patient, or a requirement to cause no harm. This requires expertise and may involve refusal to do all that a patient requests; the doctor is an advisor of the individual and not their subordinate. For this relationship to work, it must be free of conflict of interest and provided with reliable evidence and opinion. Various professional governing boards are supposed to support this process, so these boards and regulators must also be free of conflict of interest.

Public health should be no different – public health practitioners have a role in providing evidence-based guidance to help populations make decisions on health in their own interest. But in the end, the population’s values – cultural and religious – and its weighing of this advice against other priorities it faces, will determine the response. Within this community response, each sovereign individual has a right to decide their participation and actions.

The Nuremberg Code was written to address the harm caused when these principles are abrogated, even if ‘for the greater good.’ Opposing them requires a belief that one person should have rights over another. This may manifest as preventing those considered less desirable from giving birth, destroying an ethnic group considered inferior, studying untreated disease outcomes at Tuskegee, or coercing vaccination as a criteria to earn a living. Like any other group, the health professions simply have no right to impose their will on others. The historic results of ignoring this are obvious.

Market Forces are Preferable to Self-Entitlement

Here we are in 2023 with the Covid vaccines established on the market, amidst allegations of fraud and misrepresentation of data, poor safety and efficacy, and a lack of clear overall benefit. Their target illness is confined in severity to a small segment of the population, nearly all of whom now have good post-infection immunity. The vaccines do not stop or substantially reduce transmission, and may over time increase it.

Mass vaccination in this context is obviously a flawed policy. Mandating a non-transmission blocking vaccine for immune people at minimal intrinsic risk could only be driven by gross ignorance or corporate profit. The use of behavioral psychology to instill fear and the use of coercion are clearly unethical by any modern ethical standard. The many people who have lost their jobs and homes, and were publicly vilified for standing on principle and refusing to submit to such practice, have a clear right to redress. Those who committed fraud should have to answer for it. Those who abandoned the precautionary principle and informed consent should be required to justify their actions and their right to continue to practice.

None of this should remove the right of the public to make their own decisions on accessing these new genetic vaccines as a currently marketed commodity. Where expected harm clearly outweighs benefit, no medical practitioner should offer it, just as it would be inappropriate to offer Thalidomide to a pregnant woman with nausea. Where there are plausible grounds for overall benefit, if should be available as an option. These individuals can decide, based on the information available. While this group of potential beneficiaries appears diminishingly small, it remains conceivable that elderly obese diabetics with no prior Covid infection may benefit. Market forces can then decide whether the product is viable, rather than authoritarian dictates.

In the meantime, the Covid vaccines must pass full regulatory approval as a valid, reasonably safe product. This opens a can of worms, as most were only accepted under emergency use authorization (EUA) and the companies aborted their Phase 3 clinical trials, normally required for approval, by vaccinating the control arms. Valid approval would require submission of data at least confirming overall benefit in people who remain at high risk for Covid. Large trials involving non-immune people would now seem impossible.

A Way Out

To fix the health and societal disaster of the past three years, the public does not need more dictates from the self-appointed medical guardians who caused it. Too many have proven unworthy and incompetent. The problem is deeper than the availability or withdrawal of a vaccine. Public health professionals have forgotten the primacy of individual freedom – of the right of each person to set their own priorities and manage their own bodies. The public are sovereign, not the doctors who wish to lead or mislead them.

With reducing interest in vaccine boosters, it appears the public may solve the vaccine access issue themselves. A free flow of information and genuine informed consent will probably accelerate this. So would a responsible attitude from medical journals and regulatory agencies, if they can emerge from the yoke of their sponsors.

These are problems caused by the public health establishment. This establishment should reform itself, and never again presume it has the right, or the character, to dictate to others. The public will make mistakes, but these will pale beside the mess the health professions have already created.

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.

July 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham team up to tackle “cyberbullying,” “physical, emotional, developmental” online harms


By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | July 28, 2023

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have jointly proposed a strategy to rein in Big Tech companies, reignite competition, and curb the spread of what they call “harmful” online content.

“Our legislation would guarantee common-sense safeguards for everyone who uses tech platforms. Families would have the right to protect their children from sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, and deadly drugs. Certain digital platforms have promoted the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, suicidal ideation, and eating disorders or done precious little to combat these evils; our bill would require Big Tech to mitigate such harms and allow families to seek redress if they do not,” the senators wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The senators aim to establish a new federal agency tasked with cracking down on what they call potential harms originating from tech behemoths, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and beyond, encompassing everything from social media to ecommerce and artificial intelligence.

Warren and Graham’s collaborative venture comes in response to mounting concerns about the overreach of Big Tech, which they argue have shown a pattern of flouting privacy, threatening national security, and exterminating competition.

“For too long, giant tech companies have exploited consumers’ data, invaded Americans’ privacy, threatened our national security, and stomped out competition in our economy,” stated Warren.

The proposed federal watchdog, however, raises concerns about potential censorship and individual free speech infringement. Industry advocates worry that authoritative regulation could enable government manipulation and compromise the essence of an open, unbiased digital ecosystem that advances innovation and public discourse, particularly when the senators refer to “harms” such as “cyberbullying.”

“A covered entity shall mitigate the heightened risks of physical, emotional, developmental, or material harms posed by materials on, or engagement with, any platform owned or controlled by the covered entity,” the bill states.

The proposal, titled the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, delineates the power of this new agency to initiate lawsuits against platforms for their potential harms, establish industry regulations, investigate alleged wrongdoings, and enforce compliance. For significant violators, the commission could have the power to revoke operating licenses, marking a move towards directing the course of the digital era.

In addition to these sweeping powers, the legislation would also prescribe outright bans on certain practices. For instance, Google would be restrained from privileging its own applications in search results. The data mining practices of these companies would also be scrutinized, restricting their ability to use personal data for targeted advertising.

Moreover, the proposal addresses the increasing national security anxieties tied to dominant tech platforms like TikTok. The legislation would require such platforms to be based in the United States or be controlled by US citizens and would curb their ability to store data in designated countries.

Senator Elizabeth Warren stated the congruity of this proposed tech-focused commission with the Federal Communications Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which specifically regulate different sectors. However, clarity regarding potential collaboration or synergy with existing agencies such as the FTC and the Department of Justice remains to be seen, fostering doubt about potential jurisdictional conflicts.

In their New York Times op-ed, Senator Graham and Warren claimed, “Enough is enough. It’s time to rein in Big Tech.” Despite this, while there is some need to curb Big Tech practices, critics call for caution over measures that could undermine free expression and technological innovation in an era where they seem more intertwined than ever before. Free speech, not censorship should be promoted.

July 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

‘Health Program or Military Program’? White House Taps Military Official to Lead New Pandemic Policy Office

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023

Just weeks after ending the COVID-19 national and public health emergencies and the resignation of COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, the White House launched its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR).

Retired Major General Paul Friedrichs, a military combat surgeon, will lead the office, the White House said.

According to the White House, the OPPR will be “a permanent office in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) charged with leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.”

The OPPR will take over the duties of President Biden’s COVID-19 and monkeypox response teams, including “ongoing work to address potential public health outbreaks and threats from COVID-19, Mpox, polio, avian and human influenza, and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus],” the announcement stated.

The OPPR also will oversee efforts to “develop, manufacture, and procure the next generation of medical countermeasures, including leveraging emerging technologies and working with HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] on next generation vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other public health threats.”

According to The New York Times, Friedrichs, set to take office Aug. 7, will have the authority to “oversee domestic biosecurity preparedness.” He will work on the development of next-generation vaccines, ensure adequate supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile and “ramp up surveillance to monitor for new biological threats.”

Several medical, biosecurity and civil liberties experts questioned the selection of a career military and biosecurity individual to head a new office charged with pandemic preparedness.

They also told The Defender they saw parallels between the White House’s establishment of the OPPR and ongoing United Nations (U.N.) efforts to draft a global declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR).

‘Is OPPR a health program or a military program?’

Friedrichs, a board-certified physician, is currently a special assistant to the president and senior director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council.

He previously served as joint staff surgeon at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and as medical adviser to the Pentagon’s COVID-19 task force.

Throughout his career, the White House said, Friedrichs worked closely with federal, state, tribal, local and territorial government partners, as well as industry and academic counterparts.

According to the White House:

“As the United States’ representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Committee of Military Medical Chiefs, he worked closely with many of America’s closest allies and partners throughout the pandemic and in developing medical support to the Ukrainian military.”

In his previous roles at the National Security Council and DOD, Friedrichs was a strong proponent of COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures.

The Times reported that, in a February speech, Friedrichs said, “The military health system became the pinch-hitter that stepped in to help our civilian partners as we collectively struggled to work through that pandemic.”

In a February 2022 podcast, Friedrichs praised the COVID-19 vaccines and also appeared to blame those who were unvaccinated for placing “stress on our system.”

And in remarks shared in January 2022 with the Association of the United States Army, Friedrichs asked military families to continue holding off on gatherings so that service members are “able to do the things that our nation depends on them to do.”

Does Friedrichs’ appointment signal more vaccine mandates?

Describing Friedrichs’ appointment as “a joke and a fraud,” Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender :

“DOD has routinely enforced experimental medical vaccines on U.S. Armed Forces, in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation — that is, a Nuremberg crime against humanity — from today’s COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ and going all the way back in recent history to the ‘vaccines’ that produced Gulf War sickness starting in 1990-1991, when Friedrichs was a U.S. Military medical doctor.

“Of 500,000 U.S. troops inoculated, 11,000 died and 100,000 were disabled. I do not recall that Friedrichs was among the handful of courageous and principled military medical doctors who refused, as a matter of principle, to inflict Nuremberg crimes on our own troops. Did he? That needs to be investigated.”

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said the selection of Friedrichs, who supported military vaccine mandates, may signal similar future mandates for the general public.

“We should not forget that the DOD mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for service members,” Rectenwald said. “The OPPR will mandate vaccines for the nation.”

And writing on her blog, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, questioned if the OPPR plans “to use the military’s OTA [other transaction] authority again to bypass the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and vaccinate us with untested junk that turned out to be poison, like it did for COVID.”

Is OPPR “a health program or a military program?” Nass wrote.

Nass told The Defender that if the main purpose of the OPPR was to respond to pandemics and pandemic threats, an epidemiologist or infectious disease doctor would have been tapped to head the office instead of a military general.

Similarly, Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and former director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, told The Defender :

“COVID-19 demonstrated that the sort of interventions envisioned by the pandemic preparedness lobby such as lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination, have poor public health outcomes.

“Public health should be concentrated on informing the public to make personal decisions about health, rather than the population-control approaches we saw for COVID-19 that are most profitable to the corporate world. We must hope this new health bureaucracy is more independent of vested interests, and will take an evidence-based approach.”

Nass suggested that Friedrich’s selection belies a broadly encompassing biosecurity agenda, which would include censorship of non-establishment medical information, surveillance and mass, or mandatory, vaccination, tied to U.N. and World Health Organization (WHO) “pandemic preparedness and response” efforts.

A ‘WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state’ here in the U.S.?

Other experts also noted the similarities between the name of the OPPR, the U.N.’s draft PPPR and a similar recent agreement among WHO member states.

Still in “zero draft” form, the PPPR is scheduled to be discussed by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2023. It would also be tied to the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations.

Similarly, a June 28 document from the WHO said, “Member States … have agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”

And a separate but similar set of proposals — part of the U.N.’s “Pact for the Future” and “Our Common Agenda” — would give the U.N. secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers not only for pandemics but seemingly for an unlimited range of other potential crises. The U.N. will discuss these proposals in September 2024.

Boyle told The Defender the OPPR is “obviously being coordinated with the U.N. [and] the Biden administration to establish the effective functioning of a WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state here in the United States.”

“You need the mentality of an unprincipled military medical major general to do that,” Boyle said. “All the trains will run on time.”

Rectenwald drew similar connections, telling The Defender the OPPR and Friedrichs’ selection:

“Signifies the militarization of pandemic responses in the U.S., in line with the ‘global governance’ measures outlined by the U.N.’s Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response declaration.

“This new wing of the executive branch is the means by which this ‘global governance’ (read: one-world totalitarian system) is being introduced to the U.S., using pandemic preparedness as the pretext.”

Notably, proposals for a government “pandemic preparedness” office date at least as far back as October 2020, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) issued an extensive set of recommendations calling upon the U.S. government to “adopt a robust strategy for domestic and global pandemic preparedness.”

The report recommended that the U.S. “finally treat pandemics as a serious national security threat, translating its rhetorical support for pandemic preparedness into concrete action.”

According to the CFR, this would entail “bolstering the White House’s leadership role in preparing for and responding to pandemics, improving congressional input into and oversight over executive branch efforts, reforming the CDC so that it can perform more effectively, and clarifying the often confused division of labor across federal, state, and local governments in pandemic preparedness and response.”

“The president should designate a focal point within the White House for global health security, including pandemic preparedness and response,” the report added. “This office would have lead responsibility for coordinating the multiple federal departments and agencies in anticipating, preventing, and responding quickly to major disease outbreaks.”

OPPR reports to Congress required only every 5 years, not annually

The establishment of the OPPR resulted from the passage of the PREVENT Pandemics Act in December 2022.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and the now-retired Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), passed as part of an omnibus spending bill, contained a requirement for the creation of a White House pandemic preparedness and response office.

Though the bill was passed in December 2022, the White House was unable to immediately establish a pandemic preparedness office and name a director.

A Politico report in May said these efforts were “hindered by concerns over whether [the office] will have the influence within the administration and the financial resources needed to fulfill its broad mission — especially as COVID plummets down the list of political priorities.”

According to the White House announcement, OPPR will “Develop and provide periodic reports to Congress” as required by law, including drafting and delivering to Congress “a biennial Preparedness Review and Report and Preparedness Outlook Report every five years.”

On her blog, Nass wrote, “Instead of the more customary yearly reports, the reporting to Congress is being delayed considerably, perhaps until after many of us have died from the countermeasures — a great way to evade oversight.”

In a separate blog post, Nass also observed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requested $20 billion for “pandemic preparedness” in its fiscal year 2024 budget.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

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.

July 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

UK Government Censorship Unit Consulted With United Nations and G7 on “Misinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | July 28, 2023

The UK government is not a fan of free speech and its Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), which urged social media companies to censor Covid dissent from UK citizens, is one of many recent examples of the ways it tries to chill the public’s speech.

But recently released witness statements have revealed that the government’s eagerness to crack down on speech is so great that it doesn’t even restrict its censorship operations to domestic government agencies. Instead, it lets representatives from foreign governments, who weren’t elected by UK citizens, give feedback to a domestic censorship unit that target the lawful speech of UK citizens.

The witness statements from Sam Lister, director-general for strategy and operations at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and Susannah Storey, permanent secretary at the DCMS, were made public this week as part of an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic. However, Lister’s statement was given in March 2023 and Storey’s statement was given in April 2023.

Lister’s witness statement revealed that the CDU consulted with international partners “who provide additional insights on potentially harmful disinformation, based on social media data and academic research.”

Storey’s statement elaborated on the scope of these consultations and revealed that the CDU attended multiple “disinformation sessions” with these international partners which include the Internet Government Forum (a United Nations initiative), Digital Nations (a UK-founded network that has 10 member countries), and G7 (an intergovernmental political forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US).

Foreign government representatives were just some of the many partners interfacing with the CDU, according to the statements.

Both Lister’s and Storey’s statements revealed that UK spy agencies were involved with the CDU since its inception.

Additionally, the statements divulged that some of the other partners that work with the CDU, the Counter Disinformation Cell (a unit that was formed by the CDU), and the DCMS, which oversees the CDU, include other government departments, academia, civil society, social media companies, think tanks, and international organizations.

Lister and Storey claim that the purpose of these partnerships is to address “disinformation” and “misinformation” and “combat online harm spread by disinformation.”

Previous reports have revealed that the CDU has a high censorship success rate with 90% of the posts that it flags being removed or suppressed. Despite the CDU being responsible for mass censorship of lawful speech, the UK government has defended the unit and claimed that it supports free speech.

July 28, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Israel court orders 500 Palestinian residents out to build new Israeli neighbourhood

MEMO | July 28, 2023

An Israeli court on Monday ordered 500 Palestinian residents of Ras Jrabah, a village in the Negev (Naqab) that predates the establishment of the state of Israel, to evacuate and demolish their homes to make way for a new Israeli neighbourhood.

Represented by the legal centre, Adalah, the Palestinian villagers had argued that they owned and resided on the land for generations, prior to the 1970 Land Law that registered land and established state-owned real estate.

However, despite their decades of continuous residence in the area, the Beersheba Magistrate’s Court rejected the claim that the Palestinian residents have lawful authority to stay and use the land.

In addition to claiming that the evidence presented by the Palestinian families in court is insufficient and ordering them to evacuate by March 2024, the Israeli Judge Menachem Shahak also ordered them to pay 117,000 shekels ($31,630) in legal charges.

The Israel Land Authority (ILA) has plans to expand the city of Dimona by occupying the village of Ras Jrabah and turning it into a new neighbourhood called “Rotem”.

Judge Shahak also rejected the Palestinian villagers’ request to be integrated into the new neighbourhood, claiming the Israeli Bedouin Development and Settlements Authority in the Negev is the authorised body to make that decision.

However, the Israeli Bedouin Settlement Authority has only offered to relocate them to the town of Qasr Al-Sir, which belongs to other Palestinian families.

The court’s approval comes after the ILA failed in its attempt at evacuating the village 30 years ago, reported Haaretz. Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev (Naqab) have faced the threat of forcible displacement for decades, with their land being seized and their homes levelled by Israeli occupation forces.

Adalah condemned the move as a crime of apartheid and argued that displacing the villagers to resettle them in a Bedouin town was part of a strategy of racial segregation.

It said in a statement: “Since the Nakba, the state of Israel has employed a range of tools and policies to forcibly displace the Bedouin residents in the Naqab. Their livelihood has been confined to restricted areas and segregated townships, and they have been subjected to harsh living conditions, with no regard for their basic needs and way of life.”

“This is part of a system of Jewish supremacy that was constitutionally enshrined in the Jewish Nation-State Law, which prioritises “Jewish settlement” as a value that all state bodies are mandated to promote. Israel’s judicial system approves, time after time, the displacement of Palestinian citizens in favour of Jewish expansions, thereby advancing Israel’s colonial objectives.”

The forced displacement of Ras Jrabah’s residents to expand the Jewish city of Dimona, which was built on the residents’ lands, serves as clear evidence that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against its Palestinian citizens, and urgent international intervention is necessary to halt it.

The Adalah lawyers will be appealing the judge’s decision.

July 28, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

Revealed: Dark Money Funders Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Report

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 27, 2023

A new report published Monday by GreenMedInfo revealed nine of the dark money sources funding the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an influential nonprofit that allegedly colluded with social media platforms and the White House to censor Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave and others for spreading “disinformation.”

The report identified CCDH’s funders primarily as U.K.-based philanthropic organizations whose directors and trustees are affiliated with legacy media organizations, the U.K. government and major global philanthropic organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.

Despite claims by Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO and founder, that the organization has “never taken government money,” the report also found at least one of its funders has received U.K. government funding.

“It appears that CCDH may be an astroturf front operation for both NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and the U.K. government to directly interfere with and target the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and this should be a concern for all Americans,” report author Sayer Ji told The Defender.

CCDH famously drafted a list of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which included Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola, the founders of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer websites Ty and Charlene Bollinger, and Ji, founder of the natural health website GreenMedInfo.

CCDH alleged in its report that just 12 accounts produced the majority of “anti-vaccine disinformation” on social media.

Facebook investigated and dismissed the report, releasing a statement saying that “There isn’t any evidence” to support its claims and that the small sample used in CCDH’s analysis was “in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines.”

“There is no justification for [CCDH’s] claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps,” Facebook stated.

Yet, the report was used by the White House and Twitter to censor those individuals and by legacy media outlets such as NPR, The Guardian and countless others to discredit the people on the list.

Despite its baseless claims, the report was extremely effective, Ji said.

Ji told The Defender :

“CCDH’s factually baseless campaign was amplified and disseminated globally by hundreds of colluding media outlets, such that today you can find over 3,400 news articles online uncritically citing their defamatory construct ‘disinformation dozen.’

“This has wrought profound reputational damage, and has dramatically curtailed our ability to share our message, given that over 2 million of our followers have been removed, following the deplatforming efforts of those spreading these lies.”

In Kennedy’s testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing organized by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government last week, he cited his inclusion on CCDH’s list as part of a “new form of censorship, which is called ‘targeted propaganda,’ where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax’ … to silence me.”

The latest “Twitter Files” released July 18 by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker detailed how Twitter and the White House used CCHD’s “Disinformation Dozen” report as justification for censoring the people on the list.

Thacker also profiled Ahmed, who previously worked for Merrill Lynch and was a British Labour Party political operative, and is the co-author of “The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them… .” Ahmed emerged during the pandemic as a “vaccine and disinformation expert,” although lacking any experience that would qualify him as such, Thacker reported.

Thacker raised questions about who funds CCDH and reached out to the organization to investigate, but received no response.

Ji’s report published Monday provides a partial answer to that question, seeking to “contribute to the collective effort to shed a sterilizing light on the dark agenda spear-headed by astroturfing organizations like CCDH,” he wrote in the report.

CCDH’s funders primarily global but U.K.-based nonprofits

Although CCDH does not make its funders publicly available and failed to respond to Thacker’s inquiries, Ji was able to identify some of them by examining the public grant-reporting website 360 GrantNav, along with other publicly available sites, including CCDH’s 2020 website archived on the Wayback Machine.

The funders identified are primarily U.K.-based charities, some of which operate globally and generally contribute to a wide variety of causes that cluster around issues of environment and poverty, rather than health or science.

According to the report, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2021 gave CCDH a £100,000 grant earmarked for “growing the digital presence and impact of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.” The foundation’s trustees include the former general-director of the BBC Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, and Sir Anthony Saltz, formerly on BBC’s board of governors.

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a large U.K. charity with a £1.5 billion endowment, whose mission is “to improve the natural world, create a fairer future and strengthen community bonds in the UK,” gave CCDH £200,000 in October 2021 to support a salary at the organization and to “disrupt the spread of online hate and misinformation.” It awarded CCDH a second £13,333 grant in January of this year.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which, according to the report, is a U.K.-based limited company — not a charity and therefore able to fund political causes — gave CCDH £53,400 in 2020.

CCDH is also funded by the Oak Foundation, a global environmentalist grantmaking foundation that gave CCDH $100,000 to help it shine a “spotlight on digital misinformation platforms that are polluting the public discourse.”

CCDH reported on its website that it received an undisclosed amount of money from the Barrow Cadbury Trust, whose mission is to “tackle profound social ills, including juvenile crime and urban poverty.”

The Pears Foundation, a U.K. charity that Ji’s report says focuses on “Israel-related projects” gave CCDH £250,000 over three years. The foundation is funded by the William Pears group and the U.K. government, according to the report.

The Hopewell Fund is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organization managed by a Washington, D.C.-based philanthropy consulting firm and is dedicated to funding “innovative social change projects.” It gave CCDH a small $15,000 grant in 2021.

Unbound Philanthropy, the final donor identified by the report, is a New York-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose executive director Taryn Higashi also sits on the advisory board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations and who formerly worked at the Ford Foundation.

But this is just a partial list, and in his report, Ji appealed to the public to continue researching the “dark money” behind the organization.

Ji also invited readers to take action on the Stand for Health Freedom campaign website “to send the message that the targeting of U.S. citizens to illegally suppress protected speech is unacceptable.”

The Defender examined CCDH’s 990 — the tax form nonprofits must file annually with the IRS — from fiscal year 2021, where the organization reported receiving $1,471,247 in contributions and grants and listed $860,457 in total assets.

The list of contributors was marked as “restricted,” and further information was not provided. It did report spending $12,633 on “lobbying activities.”

While The Defender was only able to find the single 2021 federal form 990, we did locate CCDH’s U.K. financial reporting form for fiscal year 2022 (ending Oct. 31, 2022), showing the organization received $904,452 from donations in 2022 and $638,499 in 2021.

Financial filings also reveal CCDH board member affiliations

The U.S. 990, the U.K. financial statements and the U.K.’s company information service also revealed CCDH’s frequently changing board members and directors, many of whom have close ties to government and media organizations.

Notable figures include Simon Clark, board chair, who was a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The Atlantic Council is a NATO, arms industry and Persian Gulf monarchies-funded think tank.

Prior to his work at the Atlantic Council, Clark was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he led the work that informed the Biden White House’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Ji found it “unsurprising” that “CCDH’s rhetorical points made it into several U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletins equating free speech and open debate about mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy, or Covid origins, as possible new forms of domestic terrorism.”

Another CCDH director, Kirsty McNeill has also worked as Save the Children’s executive director for Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns since 2016, a period during which the Bill & Melinda Foundation donated more than $40 million to the organization.

Save the Children has also partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Gavi maintains a core partnership with the World Health Organization and the World Bank.

McNeill previously worked as a special adviser and speechwriter for former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. She is a member of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, funded by such entities as the Open Society Foundations, the United Nations and the Gates Foundation.

Aleen Keshishian and Zack Morgenroth are both CCDH board members and work at Lighthouse Management & Media, a Hollywood management agency representing top stars including Jennifer Aniston, who famously cut ties with her unvaccinated friends.

Damian Noel Thomas Collins, who joined CCDH in 2022, is a British Conservative Party politician who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

CCDH sought to silence the voices that were ‘most effective’ at warning the public

In addition to its government, social media and legacy media connections, CCDH has partnered with “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard — specifically, its HealthGuard product, described as “a vaccine against medical misinformation” and against critiques targeting the healthcare industry and global public health authorities.

According to an article by Off-Guardian, CCDH claimed the COVID-19 pandemic “will only be overcome by the most ambitious vaccination programme in human history” and those who question this program have “fringe and extremist views,” which “should not be permitted and should indeed be banned.”

They have also advocated for the imprisonment of “anti-vaxxers.”

Ji told The Defender that CCDH’s targeted campaign spoke to the validity of the ideas of those it sought to deplatform.

He said:

“George R. R. Martin once said, ‘When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.’

“I believe CCDH’s campaign was intended to silence those of us who they believed were most effective at warning the public about the true dangers of the mRNA vaccine rollout and how this mass experiment violated the medical ethics principle of informed consent.”

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.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bank manager makes non-apology to Nigel Farage, fails to apologize for lying to BBC that Farage was overdrawn

But Dame Alison Rose is good at misdirecting, deflecting, delaying and blaming the law for her overreach.

BY MERYL NASS | JULY 27, 2023

What a dame. Cancels Nigel Farage’s bank accounts and then lies about the reason to the media, claiming he had negative balances. Defamation on top of her other crimes.

After that, she sends a non-apology apology to Nigel, offering to re-bank him. Here are 4 paragraphs from it:

“… I fully understand yours and the public’s concern that the processes for bank account closure are not sufficiently transparent. Customers have a right to expect their bank to make consistent decisions against publicly available criteria and those decisions should be communicated clearly and openly with them, within the constraints imposed by the law.

To achieve this, sector–wide change is required, but your experience, highlighted in recent days, has shown we need to also put our own processes under scrutiny too. As a result I am commissioning a full review of the Coutts processes for how these decisions are made and communicated, to ensure we provide a better, clearer and more consistent experience for customers in future.

The review will be reporting to me as NatWest Group CEO.

I welcome the FCA’s reviews of regulatory rules associated with Politically Exposed Persons, and we will implement the recommendations of our review alongside any changes that they or the Government makes to the overall regulatory framework…”

Her ‘non-apology’ is almost certainly lying again, and I dissect only 4 paragraphs of it:

  • claiming that ‘sector-wide change is required’ to allow people to bank as they always have? Pretty please Dame Alison, what sectoral changes have occured that you might be hiding from us that require you to ‘debank’ customers? Or are you making this up too?
  • claiming customers have a right to expect consistency and transparency around these decisions—then she provides him neither in the letter
  • she suggests maybe the law prevents transparency and consistency. Pray tell what law might that be?
  • she is commissioning a full review—the usual delaying deflecting tactic. We know she made the decision—it would not have been done without the CEO’s approval.
  • and the review will go to her, not to the public. Super. The circle-jerk.
  • And what are Politically Exposed Persons, Dame Alison, and what special rules apply to them? Help us out here.

Not only did Joe Mercola have his busines acount, his family’s accounts, and his employees’ accounts suddenly cancelled by Chase Bank, but Dr.Syed Haider had his accounts closed and his vacation cancelled (in the middle) when his credit card stopped working.

Welcome to the opening volley in the Social Credit Score onslaught. Do NOT get an iris scan because you were promised free cryptocurrency to do so, as many have just done. No digital IDs, no digital driver’s licenses, no CBDCs. Unless you want your life shut off at will. Time to fight back.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Documents show White House pressured Facebook to censor speech

RT | July 27, 2023

Newly unearthed documents from Facebook have revealed that US President Joe Biden’s administration pressured the world’s largest social media platform to censor commentary by its users, potentially violating their constitutional right to free speech.

US House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Republican Jim Jordan obtained the documents amid his panel’s investigation of the administration’s alleged “weaponization” of government. The documents prove that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their moderation policies because of “unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan said on Thursday.

Among the evidence cited by the lawmaker was an April 2021 email from a Facebook employee to top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine-discouraging content,” the sender said. The message noted, for example, that the White House had pushed for the censoring of a humorous meme that suggested the jabs might be unsafe.

Around the same time period, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, sent a message informing his colleagues that Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden on Covid-19 policies, was “outraged” that the platform didn’t take down the anti-vaccine meme. Clegg said he countered that removing the content “would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” but Slavitt disregarded that concern and argued that the meme would hinder the government’s vaccine-rollout effort.

Social media platforms themselves can legally choose how to restrict their content, but government intervention to influence those decisions could infringe on free-speech rights. After a report last October showed that the administration had set up a portal through which federal officials could make content-moderation requests to Big Tech, the American Civil Liberties Union said, “The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false – online or anywhere. Our government can’t use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights.”

Jordan warned earlier this week that his committee would vote to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress unless Facebook provided the documents it had subpoenaed on government interventions into content moderation. He claimed that the committee had seen enough evidence to believe that Facebook was holding back on turning over evidence that would show it faced the same sort of government pressure that was previously revealed by Twitter.

Facebook executives feared repercussions if they didn’t appease the White House, Jordan said. Three months after Biden took office, Facebook’s vice president for public policy, Brian Rice, wrote in an April 2021 email that Slavitt’s pushback felt “very much like a crossroads for us with the White House in these early days.” He added, “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the White House and our internal methods, too.”

Another document showed that “talking points” were prepared for Clegg to help smooth over relations with the administration. One of the suggestions was that he point out the company’s handling of a Tucker Carlson video that angered the White House. Although the video didn’t violate the platform’s policies, Facebook throttled back its distribution by 50% while it was queued to be “fact-checked.”

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Were lockdowners and vaccinators really just trying to save lives? And is this what made them so dangerous in the end?

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | July 26, 2023

Daniel Hadas, whose sensitive and measured commentary on the pandemic I’ve long valued, recently offered these remarks on lockdowns and mass vaccination on Twitter:

It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown / forced vaccination Covid response really 𝑤𝑎𝑠 Saving Lives.

Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.

Of course, there was opportunism: there were those who used the state of emergency to claw power, money, fame to themselves. There were both supporters and opponents of the Covid measures who did that.

Where [there] is opportunity, there will be opportunists.

But mere opportunism is not enough to drive forward the leaders and followers in a revolution on the scale of the Covid response.

That requires faith, and the faith that drove this revolution was the faith in Saving Lives.

To deny the authenticity of the project to Save Lives is to remain perilously ready to sign up to all current and future projects to remake society and morality in the name of Life-Saving.

And it is to remain blind to the fact that Saving Lives has come to mean hacking away at the limits of what can be done to men, women and children in the name of saving their lives and those of others.

This thesis angered many people, at least some of whom misconstrue what Hadas is arguing. The point is not that a genuine commitment to “Saving Lives” might excuse the response or make it better. Rather, a commitment to Life-Saving public health interventions is in Hadas’s view the ominous root of the problem, because Life Saving is in fact a shallow goal that sounds good enough to rationalise all manner of harmful, destructive policies. Almost anything can be justified – any amount of collateral damage accepted – if it is for Saving Lives, and this is why all of us should cultivate a distrust of self-appointed Life Savers everywhere we encounter them.

In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: The millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense. Even if lockdowns and vaccines had the potential to stop the virus, nobody deserves house arrest or forced medical treatment for the crime of being a potential vector of infection. Placing Life Saving ahead of all other outcomes is very dangerous and also very stupid, for the simple reason that we are all going to die. As a justification, it functions as a mere pretence to ignore the very real trade-offs that lurk in any alleged solution to anything. Explaining how it could be a good idea to delay the deaths of some elderly and sick people at the cost of the well-being, physical health and autonomy of billions is very hard. Pleading that “we need to save lives” is easy.

That said, I find the thesis less than complete. The public health establishment and their media collaborators carefully manufactured public support for their response by sowing far and wide the belief that it was necessary to Save Lives. Had we acted otherwise – say, by staying open and not doing very much – this, too, would’ve been marketed as the Best Way to Save Lives, and many millions would’ve believed it just as sincerely as they believed in lockdowns. To this comes the fact that Life-Saving in one form or another is profered as justification for a wide range of modern political pathologies, from mass migration schemes to climate change. Especially in ageing European countries like Germany, where an ever-growing number of pensioners and their health anxiety dominate national discourse, there are few better ways to sell noxious political programmes to the masses. Without our naive Life-Saving ethos, it’s not clear to me we wouldn’t have had lockdowns, though they would’ve required a much different kind of argument.

The extent to which states can be said to act upon clear motives at all is a further problem. A longstanding plague chronicle argument, is that modern managerial government doesn’t have goals, motivations or purposes in any human sense. Our countries every day do all kinds of truly insane things behind paper-thin justifications that bear no scrutiny. A lot of what is maligned as “conspiratorial” discourse, on both the left and the right, represents an effort to reimpose logic on state actions, generally by positing that the stated goals are a pretence for some deeper, hidden purpose. Most of the time, these analyses just aren’t convincing, and they function to obscure the blunt reality that we find ourselves beset by an incomprehensible post-liberal political order, in which state actions have been farmed out to a vastly complex network of stakeholders, NGOs, academics, bureaucrats and special advisory committees. For every area of policy the constellation of forces will be different, and nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works – not even the most powerful individuals in the midst of it all. Everything the state does is the sum of these thousands of different forces. What complicates this picture even further, is the fact that those responsible for policy formulation don’t act directly to shape outcomes in the outside world. Their motivations are almost always institutionally mediated, and for this reason much more confined and limited in perspective. They want to secure promotion and grant funding, they want to be thought well of by their peers, they want to satisfy their superiors, and many other petty careerist personal things of this nature.

To say that “climate change policy” is motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions, then, is merely to outline a descriptive thesis from outside. Such a thesis will sink or swim insofar as it explains actions of the system as a whole, but no such motivation is present in the system itself. The apparatus of modern governance is a vast inhuman machine consisting of human components; it doesn’t have thoughts any more than a storm system does. And in this sense, I think Saving Lives as the motivation behind lockdowns and mass vaccination is not quite right. Popular supporters of mass containment certainly saw these policies as Life Saving, and this helped enable them. The state itself, however, was playing a rather different game, one which fell (depending on the country) somewhere on a scale from “virus suppression” to “virus eradication” – lives be damned. The pandemicists’ abandonment of prior mitigationist plans entailed precisely deprioritising Life Saving in favour of a new, pathogen-centred approach.

“That may very well be, eugyppius, but what of the people at the start of it all, before lockdowns were taken up by the system? Surely they had human motivations, even if the regime cannot.”

This is true. The Neil Fergusons, Tomas Pueyos and Christian Drostens who sold lockdowns to their countries and the world surely did so for specific, personal reasons. The problem is that these reasons are very elusive. In fact, the more I read their early statements and their leaked correspondence, the more elusive they seem to me. Their words and actions, however, have a very clear and persistent sinister undertone, which is not a mere artefact of retrospect. Their mysterious coordination with each other, their willingness to engage in highly manipulative messaging and risk magnification, their reliance on foreign agents to launder research and strategies from China, and their constant efforts to justify with pseudoscientific findings apparently preconceived conclusions, are all very unsettling. The ambient Life-Saving ethos of modern society surely helped them win the argument in the moment and get away with it in the longer term, but whatever they thought they were up to, was something much different.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

UK Ministry of Justice Invests in Social Listening Tool

Monitoring online conversations

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 25, 2023

The UK’s Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has decided to spend taxpayer money in order to be able to use a monitoring tool whose job is to access people’s conversations that might impact the ministry’s “reputation.”

This decision certainly impacts that reputation, but perhaps not in a positive aspect.

And it would be an interesting full circle if the maker of the software, Brandwatch (owned by Cision, a PR outfit) – allowed the MoJ to learn how inking this three-year deal will impact its reputation.

From what is known about the contract, things don’t look good – just more outsourced good old mass surveillance carried out by governments and various departments and agencies.

The tech is described as social media and “online listening,” and will cost the MoJ £50,000 per each of the three years of the deal. The hope is that it will allow the ministry to know about any of the millions of times people mention it online.

The procurement documents show that the contract, signed last month, will give the MoJ the ability to monitor and track mentions about itself on social and online media in general, in forums, blogs, based on particular keywords, terms and topics.

The justification for needing this tool, found in the same documents, is that the MoJ has a social media presence on major platforms. And that means it is exposed to discussion – and, likely, criticism, that the officials would like to know about, all for the sake of “reputation, campaigns, and policy announcement.”

The MoJ steers very far from framing any of this as surveillance and tracking, but rather a selfless act where money will be spent simply in order to work better – by “listening” (figuratively, and literally) to what citizens and stakeholders are saying and expecting from it.

Reports say that the contract with Brandwatch will cover 100 individual users, as well as 48 million past mentions of MoJ, along with two million more “live” ones each month.

Up to 50 different terms can be fed to the software to be tracked on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram each, and whatever information is gathered will remain accessible on the cloud, including that from the previous 2 years.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Chief editor at Russian media outlet flees EU country over threats

RT | July 26, 2023

Marat Kasem, a senior journalist at Russian media outlet Sputnik, has fled Latvia after President Edgars Rinkevics suggested that prosecutors had treated him too leniently in a recent case, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Kasem spent four months in a Latvian jail earlier this year before being fined for allegedly aiding and abetting Russia.

“Would somebody from the White House or Downing Street tell Rinkevics that he is failing them by showing the feral nature of the liberal diktat,” Zakharova asked, during an interview with Sputnik on Wednesday.

The Russian official argued that the US and the UK were patrons of the Baltic states, but had failed to keep their “nationalist” clients in check. Latvia specifically presents itself as a nation that supposedly upholds liberal values, including by protecting journalists, Zakharova noted.

Kasem, who is a Latvian citizen, has faced legal problems in the EU due to his work as editor-in-chief of the Lithuanian branch of Sputnik.

He was first arrested in January, when he arrived in Latvia to visit his dying grandmother. Kasem was initially accused of espionage and violation of EU sanctions, charges that could carry up to 25 years in prison. Four months later, the authorities agreed to move him to house arrest.

Two weeks ago, local media reported that the case had been resolved, with Kasem admitting to aiding and abetting Russia and paying a fine of €15,500 ($17,000).

Latvian President Rinkevics, who took office on July 8, responded to the news by tweeting that “some recent decisions” by the Prosecutor General’s Office “raise questions.” He later clarified that in Kasem’s case and several others, he believed the punishments were too mild and indicated that he intended to seek explanations.

The remarks “made it clear as daylight” that Kasem’s problems in Latvia would continue, prompting him to leave, according to Zakharova.

The Prosecutor General’s Office said the public had not been informed about numerous details of the case due to national security, which it claimed “had an influence on the choice of the final punishment.” It hinted that the interests of other nations were involved.

Moscow considers the situation to be an example of political persecution. International journalism organizations and other Western states have turned a blind eye to it, said Zakharova, who implied that Kasem had admitted guilt under duress.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

UK Blocks Ukrainian Orthodox Priest’s Testimony at UN Security Council

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 26.07.2023

London prevented the religious leader from delivering his first-hand experience of repression against the church in Ukraine.

“Today is an extremely sad moment for the UN Security Council, as well as for the international community as a whole,” said Dmitry Polyansky, first deputy permanent representative of the Russian Federation in the UN.

“Western delegations actually agreed with the repressive policy of the Kiev regime against the canonical Orthodoxy. This is a clear evidence of blatant double standards in matters concerning freedom of expression, religion, and in general all those ideals that they preach. Your decision to block the participation of an Orthodox clergyman in accordance with the prerogatives of the president of the UN Security Council is clear evidence of how London treats ideals and how easily it is ready to give them up for the sake of narrowly selfish, petty attempts to prick Russia.”

The UK holds the 15-nation organ’s rotating presidency for July 2023.

Earlier, on July 18, Russia called for a meeting of the UNSC on Ukraine for July 26, in particular on the topic of repression against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

On the same day, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Moscow would raise the issue of the persecution of the vicegerent of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Bishop Pavel, at the upcoming meeting of the UN Security Council.

On July 14, a Kiev court changed the measure of restraint for Metropolitan Pavel from round-the-clock house arrest to detention until August 14.

For his part, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia called on the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and heads of churches, including Pope Francis, to protect the vicegerent of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.

Earlier this month Pope Francis responded to the appeal of Patriarch Kirill and spoke against politically motivated arrests in Ukraine.

The Kiev regime started to exert pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2022. Ukrainian authorities gave an ultimatum to the monks of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra to vacate the monastery’s premises until March 29 under the pretext of allegedly violating the terms of the lease – jurisdiction over which is divided between the National Kiev-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Preserve, a Ukrainian secular organization and the UOC. Lavra monks condemned the eviction order as illegal as it was not backed by a court decision. As they resisted the Kiev regime’s attempts to expel them from the monastery, the Ukrainian authorities resorted to persecution.

Other Ukrainian Orthodox priests have also been subjected to pressure from the Ukrainian authorities. Ukrainian law enforcement officers searched the homes of bishops and priests, churches and monasteries, including the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, in order to find traces of “anti-Ukrainian activities.”

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »