Dark times for political opponents, skeptics of dubious science.
Governments weaponizing the justice authorities to go after political opponents and protest movement leaders seems to have become vogue nowadays in the once democratic western hemisphere.
Victims of the tactic often face dubious charges, some even having to spend months in detention as authorities drag their feet carrying out the “legal” process.
Corona lockdown protest leader Michael Ballweg (left) released from the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison after detention on dubious charges. Image cropped from AUF 1 here.
For example, in Germany a number of physicians have been charged and even jailed for allegedly issuing “false mask exemptions” or “false vaccination exemption” certificates to patients who fear the experimental, shoddily launched COVID vaccine. Critics accuse the authorities of using these heavy handed tactics to intimidate legitimate political opponents into silence.
Ballweg released after 9 months of detention
One high profile example in Germany is Michael Ballweg, the founder of the Corona restrictions protest movement dubbed “Querdenken” (unorthodox thinking). Today we know that the “querdenkers” were right about a lot of things, and huge amounts of damage could have been avoided had their warnings been taken seriously.
But instead, the government and media got paranoid and scared of the Ballweg’s protest movement. The media characterized the movement as fringe right wingers who threatened “our democracy”. Last June, Ballweg was arrested and dragged to jail on dubious charges.
Today, after more than 9 months detention, he was finally allowed to leave Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court on Tuesday lifted the arrest warrant in exchange for a condition.
Ballweg had been in pre-trial detention since June 2022 on suspicion of money laundering and fraud. Suspicion is all that’s needed nowadays to arrest unwanted voices.
Previously, several appeals against Ballweg’s pre-trial detention had come to nothing. As part of the nine-month trial, he can now leave prison. The reason for the revocation of the arrest warrant was proportionality. The expected punishment in case of a conviction was too small to justify a longer pre-trial detention.
Ballweg’s lawyer Dr. Alexander Christ commented on the decision: “I am happy for my client!”
Allegations reduced, allegations dropped
Last week, the allegations were significantly reduced: for example, parts of the money laundering allegations against Ballweg were dropped. Most recently, Ballweg had only been accused of attempted fraud. The prosecution worked with the daring legal construct of an “unsuccessful attempt”. Nobody had ever been harmed by Ballweg.
Lawyer Dr. Alexander Christ from Ballweg’s legal team appeared in an interview with Austria’s AUF1 last week and reported numerous inconsistencies in the 120-page indictment. For example, money laundering allegations that had already been dropped resurfaced in the indictment. “A tale,” summarized Dr. Christ.”
On Sunday, April 2, 2023, the well-known Russian journalist/blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was killed in what appears to have been a targeted assassination.
At the time of his murder, Tatarsky had over 560,000 followers on his Telegram channel, making him one of the most influential voices when it came to covering the ongoing Russian special military operation in Ukraine.
The Russian government has publicly condemned the attack, with Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemning the role played by the West, noting that the harassment of Russian journalists by the West constitutes a veritable “witch hunt” that represents an acquiescence, if not outright complicity, in the murder of persons like Tatarsky and Daria Dugina, the daughter of the noted Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin, and a journalist in her own right.
“Not a single case of the violent death of a Russian journalist hailed as a ‘success’ by the Kiev regime and its thugs, has been investigated by Western countries, international organizations, or foreign professional communities, and not even basic human sympathy has been shown,” Zakharova noted.
The double standard of the collective West, and in particular the United States, which prides itself for its ostensible support of a free press, has been put on display for all the world to see. In 2012, Marie Colvin, a war correspondent for The Sunday Times, was killed while covering the conflict in Syria.
In February 2019, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, of the US District Court in Washington, DC, awarded Marie Colvin’s estate damages in the amount of $300 million, claiming that Colvin had been “specifically targeted” by the Syrian government “because of her profession.” Judge Jackson further stated that “The murder of journalists acting in their professional capacity could have a chilling effect on reporting such events worldwide,” adding that “a targeted murder of an American citizen whose courageous work was not only important, but vital to our understanding of war zones and of wars generally, is outrageous.” [Note: The Syrian government denies that Marie Colvin was specifically targeted. She died when a so-called “media center” in a rebel-held town that doubled as a command center was struck by Syrian artillery. Colvin was operating in Syria without the permission of the Syrian government, in an active war zone.]
The murder of Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky clearly represents the deliberate targeting of journalists operating in their professional capacity. Both Dugina and Tatarsky provided reporting that was “vital to our understanding of war zones and war,” and yet, because this “understanding” came with a Russian slant, the US government remains silent.
The “chilling effect” which Judge Amy Jackson warned about is, it seems, to be embraced when those chilled speak Russian, or whose facts sustain a Russian narrative.
The compassion shown Marie Colvin by the US government, in the defense of a free press, is exposed as a lie when confronted by the silence that followed the deaths of Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky. But this was to be expected — after all, the US is seeking the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange so he can be prosecuted for the crime of publishing so-called “secrets” that exposed war crimes and other official malfeasance on the part of the US government and military in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Putting a journalist in jail for 175 years (the maximum sentence Julian Assange would face if found guilty) is the same thing as a death sentence. Free speech, American-style, is not free — it comes with a heavy price, especially if one publishes material that runs against the US-backed official narrative.
Both Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky were included on the notorious “Myrotvorets” “kill list,” purportedly promulgated by the Ukrainian Security Services, along with hundreds of others—many of them minor children—similarly marked for death for the crime of speaking out against the policies of the Ukrainian government.
I, too, am on that list, along with scores of other Americans and non-Ukrainians.
To date, the US government has yet to condemn the Ukrainian government for targeting US citizens to die for exercising their Constitutionally protected right of free speech.
If the US government won’t protect its own citizens, one cannot expect it to speak out in the defense of the lives of non-US citizens designated for speech-related assassination.
But this isn’t simply a case of remaining silent in the face of crimes being committed by others. The US government is an active participant in the Ukrainian government’s campaign to silence dissenting voices using whatever means possible, including targeted assassination. The US government funds, helps organize, and actively supports the work of the Center for Countering Disinformation, or CCD, a Ukrainian agency operating under the auspices of the Office of the President of Ukraine. The CCD publishes a so-called “black list” containing the names of persons designated by the Ukrainian government as facilitating “Russian propaganda,” and designates those whose names appear on this list as “information terrorists” and “war criminals” who must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Just to be clear, the US actively hunts down and kills persons designated as terrorists. To fund and support similar designations of its own citizens by a foreign government — Ukraine — known to arrest, torture, and murder dissenting voices means the US, implicitly, supports marking them for death.
This is the truth behind the US silence in the face of the murders of Russian journalists like Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky. A nation founded on the principles of free speech cannot tolerate free speech when it is practiced by those who oppose the US-backed narrative. Rather than engaging these dissenting voices in fact-based debate, dialogue, and discussion, the US —cognizant of the fact that their side could not prevail in such a contest — opts to silence these voices forever. For Julian Assange, this means life in prison.
For Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky, this meant death.
This is how you kill a free press. Hopefully the voices of dissent that remain will not be “chilled” by this result, but rather opt to double down on their commitment to pursue the truth, whatever the cost.
The specter of Operation Choke Point 2.0 has just been raised in a recent House Financial Services Committee meeting. But what was Operation Choke Point 1.0? And why should we be concerned about this latest attempt to debank “disfavoured individuals,” anyway? Find out all the details in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report podcast.
US President Joe Biden “led the charge” in transgender activism following the Nashville school shooting by releasing an “absurd statement” about Transgender Americans shaping the “nation’s soul”, Sky News host Rita Panahi said.
“That is the state of the culture right now, celebrities, corporates and the overwhelming majority of the media relentlessly pushing the trans activist rhetoric,” Ms Panahi said.
Climate change for some has turned into a real doomsday cult, where a small group of people has excessive control over its members and require unwavering devotion. The climate cult members are in fact so brainwashed that they are convinced it’s the Gospel Truth and that disagreement is heresy of dangerous criminals. So it’s not surprising some climate cult members are calling for a Catholic Church model Climate Inquisition to root out and punish the heresy.
Marcel Odermatt of Switzerland’s online WELTWOCHEreports on how one Swiss Green politician wants to make “climate-sceptic statements”, i.e. free speech, a criminal offence.
Green National Councillor Valentine Python, 47, is calling for “climate denial” to be declared a crime.
Ms. Python believes statements casting doubt on man’s dominance over the global climate hinders efforts to educate children on the dangers of climate change, and so obstruct adopting “effective measures”.
28% of youth ignoring climate alarm
Germany’s Pleiteticker elaborates on why Ms. Python is all agitated about people having other opinions and cites a recent French study that found 28 percent of young people consider climate change to be a natural phenomenon against which no special measures are necessary.
Based on such results, Ms. Python claims there’s been a “decline in the scientific understanding of the world” and that the state needs to take action against “climate-skeptical statements”.
“She compares these [statements] to calls for anti-Semitism and racism. Such calls could lead to violence and would violate human rights. The National Councillor believes that the ‘unrestricted dissemination of climate-sceptic views’ could fall under the same law”, reports Pleiteticker. “Python seems to consider herself in possession of an immutable scientific truth. Apparently, Python is not interested in convincing dissenters, but in banning their thoughts and imposing penalties on them.”
In a startling display of doublespeak at the Summit for Democracy 2023, United States (US) Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned about more countries “using the internet to try to control speech” and claimed that the Biden administration is trying to promote an open internet before threatening to “hold platforms accountable” for so-called “harms.”
Blinken raised the alarm about the internet “growing more closed, more insecure, more siloed by the day.”
He continued by stating: “More countries are putting up firewalls and shutting down access, using the internet to try to control speech, quash dissent, spread misinformation and disinformation.”
The Secretary of State followed up by claiming that the Declaration for the Future of the Internet (a 60-country commitment to bolstering “resilience to disinformation and misinformation”) reaffirms the US’s commitment to an “open network of networks that respects democratic principles and human rights.”
After lambasting other countries for closing off the internet and positioning the Biden admin as a paragon of openness, Blinken pivoted and said, “We have to do better at addressing some of the risks that come with the open internet.”
He then proposed a “delicate balance” between “openness and security,” “protecting speech and preventing incitement,” and “fostering innovation and limiting the power of Big Tech.”
Not content with suggesting a balance between protecting speech and censoring speech that the Biden administration deems to be “incitement,” Blinken then threatened consequences for platforms that don’t fall in line.
“The President’s…made clear that we need to be able to hold platforms accountable when they fail to address the harms caused by their technology, from the content they spread to the algorithms that they use.”
Blinken’s comments come days after the introduction of the RESTRICT Act — a bill that would give the US federal government additional powers to crack down on free speech. The bill claims to target “foreign adversaries” and is widely thought to be aimed at China‘s TikTok. But the powers in the bill are so vast that it would give the federal government the authority to ban a wide range of apps and online services if they’re deemed to be “national security” threats.
Ukraine has spearheaded a collective call to action, joining forces with seven other Central and Eastern European nations to combat “disinformation” on social media platforms.
In an open letter, the prime ministers of these nations urge prominent tech companies, such as Meta, to implement effective measures that curb the spread of misleading content and foreign interference, which threatens peace, stability, and democracy.
The letter, signed by the leaders of Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, alleges a danger of disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing their countries and undermining the European Union‘s support for Ukraine amidst Russia’s aggression.
Tech giants are implored to remain vigilant and avoid inadvertently advancing hostile goals.
Specific steps recommended in the letter include refusing payments from sanctioned individuals, increasing algorithmic transparency, and adjusting algorithms to prioritize accuracy over user engagement.
Furthermore, the leaders insist that platforms dedicate adequate resources to content “moderation” and address the growing challenges posed by deep fakes and AI-generated disinformation.
In response, Meta has stated that it has expanded its fact-checking capabilities in Eastern Europe and implemented measures to combat alleged misinformation related to the conflict in Ukraine.
The company has also restricted access to Russian state-controlled media and added labels to related posts, informing users of the source before they click or share.
Operation Garden Plot – A FEMA Plan to put American Citizens in Prison Camps. Executive Order #12919 signed in 1990s by Clinton which will allow government to seize all private personal property for “National Defense.”
This country has been under Emergency since 1933 with the enactment of FEMA, which gave Presidents the ability to issue Executive Orders for the emergency, since then EACH President has issued the EO for the emergency to continue. We the people have been effectively played.
The results of Berlin’s Climate Neutrality By 2030 referendum tell us that FFF and Last Generation are fringe movements, remote of even Berlin’s mainstream.
It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback
The movement’s leaders reacted in disbelief and sourly to the defeat, as Twitter account holder Georg tweeted.
Crushing defeat
Last Sunday’s “Berlin Climate Neutrality By 2030” referendum failed resoundingly despite the more than a million euros spent in a massive run-up campaign that included plastering the city with posters, concerts by famous performers, huge support and propaganda by the media and hefty donations coming from left wing activists from the east and west coasts of USA.
Once the dust of the referendum had settled, it emerged that the “yes” side fell way short of the quorum 608,000 votes needed to pass the measure. Only 442,210 cast a vote in favor, which represents only 18% of Berlin’s eligible voters. The activists expected a far greater turnout. 82% refused to lend any support.
Berlin’s rejection of the climate neutrality by 2030 mandate is a massive body blow to the the radical Fridays for Future and Last Generation movement in Germany, and it will take months for the radicals to recover, it ever, from this setback.
The Berlin initiative to make the city climate neutral by 2030 was led by rich, upper class youths like Luisa “Longhaul” Neubauer. But Berliners, having been harassed for months by activists gluing themselves to the streets and blocking traffic, saw the folly of the initiative and the high costs it would entail politically and financially. They decided resoundingly they’d wanted no part of it.
Lashing out at the majority
The agony of referendum defeat was palpable as some of its leaders reacted by lashing out and insulting those who refused to vote “yes”, In a video, movement co-leader Luisa Neubauer sank into cynical accusations against the majority, even calling the uncooperative Berliners “fossil cynics” and “climate destroyers”.
Neubauer added: “There are forces in this city that are doing everything to get the last spark of climate destruction out.” In Neubauer’s view these forces include the vast 82% of Berliners who refused to vote “yes”. So troublesome democracy can be.
“Bubble has finally burst”
Germany’s Pleiteticker here commented on the Berlin referendum:
Social Democrat Dario Schramm wept on Twitter at the gloating that would now come from the other side. But he and other supporters of the green ban politics need not be surprised. For years they have been spreading their ideas of good politics for years in a self-righteous, arrogant and sometimes aggressive manner.
They, mostly members of the upper middle class, have declared war on the lower and lower middle class with their destructive climate measures. Outside the Berlin political bubble and the other urban feel-good oases of Germany, the Neubauers of this world never possessed much support. And now the bubble has finally burst. In the Marzahn, Köpenick and Lichtenberg districts, the majority of voters voted against the referendum. The normal working population of Berlin decided against the journalistic and political elite.”
But don’t expect the climate radicals to go away. They’ll be back at it soon enough.
The FBI was a customer of a private company Team Cymru, a contract shows. The company is in the business of harvesting NetFlow – network protocol for collecting IP traffic information and monitoring network flow – data from ISPs in return for threat intelligence, and then selling it on.
The contract became public knowledge thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Motherboardwhich reveals that the federal agency’s Cyber Division spent “tens of thousands” of dollars to get its hands on this data.
The deal was worth $76,450 and was made in 2017.
NetFlow data provides information about traffic volume and flow on a network, such as servers communicating with each other. This is something that is known only to the server owner, or an ISP – and, thanks to deals companies like Team Cymru have with ISPs, also to the FBI and other buyers.
Team Cymru openly states that the product it sells can track traffic through VPNs, Motherboard writes. The company also offers data like visited URLs and cookies, however, the internal FBI document detailing the deal does not say if this was part of the package.
“Commercially provided net flow information/data – 2 months of service,” is what the document on what the FBI purchased states.
The FBI is not alone in showing interest in NetFlow data – the military does it as well, and according to a whistleblower who went to Senator Ron Wyden with their information, one of the customers is the Navy’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), a civilian federal law enforcement agency.
Several days ago, Wyden said that he asked the Department of Justice inspector general to look into how the FBI is buying and using metadata, also based on a whistleblower report, and now, concerning NetFlow data, the senator sees it as yet more proof that the FBI is buying metadata capable of showing “the websites Americans visit, as well as sensitive information such as what doctor a person sees, their religion or what dating sites they use.”
And for that, Wyden said in a statement, the FBI explained what data concerning Americans’ browsing history it buys and why.
“It is not acceptable for the government to go around the courts by using a credit card to buy private information, which is why I have proposed the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act to ban the purchase of this kind of private data,” he concluded.
According to Motherboard, neither the FBI nor Team Cymru were in the mood to offer any comment at this time.
Londoners have launched a war against the surveillance cameras being installed to monitor Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) expansion in the city by covering the cameras with cardboard boxes and shopping bags, and plastic bags.
The aim of the ULEZ scheme is to reduce air pollution in the city but comes with invasive surveillance of vehicles. Drivers with vehicles that do not meet the minimum emission requirements would be charged £12.50 ($15.42) daily just for using ultra-low emission zones.
Critics have argued that the expansion of ULEZ would affect low-income households as it covers most of the neighborhoods within the M25, the highway that circles most of Greater London.
Others have raised privacy concerns after it was revealed that the British Transport Police and the London Metropolitan Police would have access to the cameras.
300 Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), referred to as Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) in America, cameras have recently been installed in the city. 2,750 more will be added before the ULEZ expansion deadline of August 29, 2023.
In some parts of the city, people have protested the expansion of the scheme by cutting wires to the cameras and painting the lenses with black paint. In other parts, the cameras were ripped out and thrown to the ground.
Since February, Londoners have been taking to the streets to call for a halt to the expansion of ULEZ, with some calling for the resignation of Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.
The mayor has championed other eco-friendly measures like Lower Traffic Neighborhoods (LTNs), which ban vehicles from using backroads. Miles of bicycle lanes have also been added throughout the city.
16-year-old Anas Al-Khalili was used as a human shield by Israeli forces in the northern occupied West Bank town of Nablus earlier this year. In this video, he describes his terrifying experience.
13-year-old Abdul-Rahman was shot in the head by Israeli forces while collecting grapes near his home in the village of Kafr Qaddoum in the occupied West Bank. An expanding bullet struck him in the forehead and doctors were unable to remove all the bullet shards, leaving Abdul-Rahman with lifelong injuries.
These bullets used by Israeli forces are designed to expand inside the body upon impact, causing massive internal injuries. Customary international law prohibits the use of expanding bullets, or any bullets that expand or flatten easily in the human body, though DCIP regularly documents fatalities and injuries seemingly as a result of expanding bullets, also known as dumdum bullets.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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