New York City to Track Personal Food Choices Using Credit Card Data
BY IGOR CHUDOV | APRIL 18, 2023
Remember the crazy right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that our food purchases will be tracked to reduce our CO2 consumption?
That one is turning out to be true!
Yesterday, New York City announced its plan to track the “food choices” of New Yorkers using credit card data from individual store purchases. According to the mayor, tracking individual food choices is a step towards “reducing the CO2 output” of New Yorkers.
The Adams administration has announced a plan to begin tracking the carbon footprint created by household food consumption as well as a new target for New York City agencies to reduce their food-based emissions by 33% by the year 2023. [Did they mean 2032 – I.C.? ]
New York City, in partnership with American Express, a credit card company, will track purchases to calculate New Yorkers’ carbon footprints:
The new plan puts the city on par with London and 13 other cities to incorporate food consumption into its greenhouse gas emission metrics. The effort to examine the environmental effects of eating foods like meat and dairy was first announced about a year ago as part of a collaboration among major cities across the globe.
You would think such a plan would only be made after a conversation with New Yorkers, right? After all, the mayor of New York is supposed to serve New Yorkers, not the other way around.
However, the reality is that there was no consultation and no “conversation” because New York’s mayor Eric Adams is sure that people do not even want to have a “conversation” about interrogating their food choices.
On Monday, Adams acknowledged that interrogating people’s food choices would be difficult. “I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation,” he said.
The WEF’s “My Carbon” Plan
Eric Adams, of course, is not serving New Yorkers, whom he did not even consult. He is serving his sponsors, demanding that food and other personal expenditures be tracked to advance climate goals. The World Economic Forum proposed tracking personal CO2 consumption in its infamous “My Carbon” agenda article.
The WEF explains that tracking individual choices was always met with resistance. Fortunately for the WEF, the Covid pandemic, caused by a mysterious lab-made pathogen, changed this calculation and, according to the WEF, allowed us to extend “pandemic measures” into consumption tracking due to greater social acceptance of the governmental intrusion into our personal lives:
Few cities exhibited more sheep-like adherence to pandemic measures than New York City, so it should not be surprising that “food purchase tracking” is being tried in that particular locale in accordance with the WEF’s instructions.
Tracking of purchases will not be limited to food, of course.
On Meat, Health, and Freedom
This article is intentionally neutral on meat and health. Some of my subscribers are vegans, and some are avid meat eaters. I respect everyone. I was a vegetarian for a whole year, a long time ago. I try to eat less meat nowadays, which still amounts to eating too much, but I am trying.
Rather than framing this issue as a health matter, I urge you to consider it a question of basic fairness: the unelected, supranational, self-appointed masters of the world are trying to track and influence our behavior without even asking for permission or our opinion.
We are being assured that this is done for our good. However, these same people benefit financially from well-placed investments in companies growing fake meat comprised of cancer tumor cells:
Lab-Grown Meat Is Made of Cancer Cells. Would You Like It Rare or Medium?
We are generally taught that conflicts of interest should make us question the intentions of people promoting ideas related to such conflicts.
In the case of Covid-19 or climate change, we are asked to throw such precautions away and put blind faith into mega billionaires benefiting mightily from the pandemic or their climate change investments.
As skeptics and critical thinkers, we should refuse to believe promoters standing to benefit financially from their crazy ideas. Instead, we should demand a close and skeptical look into what is behind the curtain.
I am sure, however, that instead of skepticism, we will get more fake fact checks, denials, and gaslighting.
Ninth Circuit Spikes Berkeley’s Gas Ban
By Robert Bryce | April 18, 2023
Three federal court judges just rescued your gas stove and other gas-fired appliances from the nanny state.
Yesterday, in a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the nation’s first ban on natural gas, put in place by the City of Berkeley in 2019, violates federal law. The three judges found that the city’s ordinance was preempted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which prohibits the implementation of regulations that favor one type of fuel over another.
The first report I saw on the court’s ruling was here on Substack by my friend, Ed Ireland. There’s no doubt that the decision is a huge win for consumers, businesses, and energy security. Indeed, the ruling in California Restaurant Association vs. City of Berkeley, has ramifications that go beyond California and the Ninth Circuit. It should invalidate the dozens of gas bans that have been enacted across the country over the past four years. It may also mean that plans by federal authorities, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to ban, or restrict, the use of gas stoves, gas furnaces, and other gas-fired appliances, are kaput.
About 47 million American homes have gas stoves and lots of chefs, and consumers, including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, like cooking with gas. The Department of Energy’s own numbers show that heating homes with gas is far cheaper than heating with electricity. Despite these facts, a group of lavishly funded activist groups have been pushing electrify everything mandates that would prohibit the use of gas in homes and businesses and require consumers to rely almost exclusively (including energy for electric vehicles) on our already-shaky electric grid. The electrify everything claque got a boost in January after Richard Trumka Jr., who sits on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, told a Bloomberg reporter that gas stoves are a hazard and that “any option is on the table,” including, presumably, a ban.
Trumka’s comments sparked a storm of criticism. Within hours, the White House issued a statement saying that President Joe Biden doesn’t support a ban on gas stoves.
What has since been dubbed the “gas stove culture war” was ignited in July 2019, when Berkeley became the first municipality in the country to ban the use of gas. Since then, as I explained in January, (See: “The Billionaires Behind The Gas Bans”), several NGOs, including Climate Imperative, the Sierra Club, and Rocky Mountain Institute, as well as Rewiring America, have spent untold (and undisclosed) millions of dollars campaigning and lobbying at the local and national levels to ban the direct use of natural gas in homes and businesses. And thanks to remarkably friendly (and largely unquestioning) coverage from legacy media outlets, they’ve had undeniable success.
The Sierra Club, which operates on an annual budget of about $180 million, says 74 communities in California have “adopted gas-free buildings commitments or electrification building codes.” But that number doesn’t include the most recent ban. On April 13, the Irvine City Council, again according to the Sierra Club, adopted measures mandating that all new buildings be all-electric “on or after July 1, 2023. That puts the number of California communities that have banned gas at 75. The group isn’t just pushing for restrictions in its home state. Last August, it asked the Environmental Protection Agency to ban natural gas appliances at the federal level.
In September, the California Air Resources Board voted to ban the sale of all gas-fired space heaters and water-heating appliances in the state by 2030. New York City and Seattle have banned the use of gas in new construction. Massachusetts is also rolling out a measure that will allow up to 10 communities to ban gas.
As I reported last month (See: “California Screamin’”), the Bay Area Air Quality Management District recently approved regulations that will ban the use of residential and commercial natural gas-fired water heaters and furnaces. The regulation, which only applies to new appliances, prohibits residents in the Bay Area from buying or installing gas water heaters starting in 2027. Also last month, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, said she is working on a “climate friendly” building code that will hamper or––in the words of the Boston Globe, “discourage”––the use of hydrocarbons in new buildings in Boston.
Following the proliferation of gas bans requires following the money. The Sierra Club has been a prime beneficiary of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has pledged $500 million to the Beyond Carbon project. In 2019, the pledge was considered the largest ever “philanthropic donation to combat climate change.” The Sierra Club is now getting about $30 million per year from Bloomberg.
For several years, the Rocky Mountain Institute, a group that took in $115 million in 2022, has been ginning up bogus studies that claim gas stoves are a threat to human health. And like the Sierra Club, it is getting big money from super-rich donors. In 2020, the Bezos Earth Fund gave RMI $10 million. RMI said the cash from the group, which, of course, came from Amazon founder and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, would help fund its “work with a coalition of partners in key states. The project will focus on making all U.S. buildings carbon-free by 2040 by advocating for all-electric new construction.”
In January, numerous national news stories were published after RMI issued a paper claiming that 12.7 percent of childhood asthmas are due to gas stoves. One of the authors of that paper, Talor Gruenwald, works at RMI. Gruenwald is also a research associate at Rewiring America, a San Francisco-based outfit that calls itself the “leading electrification nonprofit, focused on electrifying our homes, businesses, and communities.” Rewiring America is funded entirely by dark money. It doesn’t publish its budget or file a Form 990. Instead, it is a sponsored project of the Windward Fund, a 501c3 non-profit that does not disclose its donors. Nor does the Windward Fund reveal how much it is giving to Rewiring America.
The January RMI paper didn’t stand up to even modest scrutiny. The definitive analysis of indoor air pollution and gas stoves was published in 2013 in Lancet Respiratory Medicine. It studied half a million schoolchildren in 47 countries over a multi-year period and relied on questionnaires that were filled out by the mothers of the children. It concluded, “We detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.”
Furthermore, just a day or two after the RMI paper came out, the group walked back its claim about asthma, with one RMI official telling the Washington Examiner that the study “does not assume or estimate a causal relationship” between childhood asthma and natural gas stoves.
Restoring Some Vaccination Choice in Mississippi
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | April 18, 2023
Like every American state government, the Mississippi government pressures parents to ensure their children take a slew of vaccination shots as a condition for the children to attend school. But, unlike most states, Mississippi law does not recognize the right of parents to refuse, based upon philosophical or religious objections, to follow the state-imposed childhood vaccination schedule.
Instead, the only exemption Mississippi parents have had available is a medical exemption that has turned out for almost all parents to be the same as having no exemption at all. I wrote about this in an April of 2015 article:
The New York Times reported in February how extremely restricting vaccination mandate exemptions causes a significant increase in vaccination rates, pointing to Mississippi as an example. Mississippi has among the strictest vaccination requirements in America — barring philosophical and religious exemptions and allowing only a medical exemption for students in both public and private schools. In the 2013-14 school year the Times reports that only 17 out of 45,179 kindergarten students in the state were exempt from the state’s vaccination mandate.
The medical exemption could more accurately be called the mirage exemption. In contrast, philosophical and religious exemptions can allow much greater ability for parents to refuse government pressure to have their children subjected to each and every state-mandated shot at each and every state-mandated time in a child’s life.
Since I wrote that article in 2015, California and New York, two of the largest population states, have joined Mississippi by eliminating all exemptions other than the medical exemption. Three additional states — Connecticut, Maine, and West Virginia — also recognize only the medical exemption.
Some good news came for Mississippi parents this week. The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) has announced that on Monday a federal court “ruled that the First Amendment requires that, by July 15, 2023, the State of Mississippi afford its residents a religious exemption for their children to attend school without one or more state mandated vaccines.” ICAN, which has supported the lawsuit that led to the court’s ruling, provides more information in a legal update at its website.
Hopefully, religious and philosophical exemptions, in addition to medical exemptions, will soon be exercisable by parents in all states.
Iran slams world’s inaction on deteriorating rights situation in West
Press TV – April 15 2023
Iran’s vice-president of the judiciary for international affairs has criticized international mechanisms for failing to take a position regarding the deteriorating human rights situation in Western countries, saying international rights bodies are duty-bound to support and promote the key issue across the world.
In a Saturday letter to Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kazem Gharibabadi said the world suffers from fundamental challenges and dilemmas regarding human rights which are mainly caused by those countries that “claim to be defending human rights and see themselves in the position of making demands from others and being immune from any criticism and responsibility.”
“The responsibility of the international human rights mechanisms in such conditions is fundamental to support and promote human rights, which must be fulfilled by respecting independence, impartiality, professionalism, and non-selectivity,” said Gharibabadi, who also served as the Secretary General of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights.
He warned of adopting “politically-motivated and selective” approaches that does a great disservice and is detrimental to human rights, and erodes public trust in human rights mechanisms.
He drew the commissioner’s attention to situations in several countries, including France, Britain and Germany, over the last six months regarding the “right to freedom of assembly and of association.”
Pointing to massive public demonstrations in France in protest against the government’s policies, the Iranian rights official said, “Instead of listening to the protesters’ demands and trying to improve the situation, the French government resorts to large-scale violence to deal with the gatherings.”
Gharibabadi censured the French government for using anti-riot equipment, assaulting people, and arresting thousands of protesters as only part of the countermeasures.
Referring to Britain’s introduction of amendments to the Public Order Bill to increase police powers to deal with protesters at rallies, he said the “repression bill” leads to a “significant and unprecedented increase in the powers of the police force to impose undue restrictions on peaceful protests and … it criminalizes assemblies under the pretext of deprivation of public comfort and provides a sentence of up to 10 years of imprisonment.”
Gharibabdi pointed to a sit-in protest in Germany. He said over 3,000 German police and security forces arrested hundreds of political opponents under the pretext of plotting to stage a coup d’état.
“In yet another move, the German government seeks to pass a law that will expel its opponents from all government jobs under the pretext of extremism.” The top Iranian rights official said most European countries have been the scene of peaceful protests over the past months which were “suppressed and dispersed with the most severe attacks by law enforcement forces.”
Referring to the recent riots in Iran, Gharibabadi said,” Egged on by incitement and backing of particular states, media outlets and terrorist groups, the recent gatherings in the Islamic Republic of Iran deviated from their peaceful nature and morphed into riots, causing violations of the fundamental rights of citizens.”
On the contrary, he said, Iran took a responsible policy, and established an investigative committee to launch inquiries into the possible physical and financial damages and the violations of the rights of all parties.
The Iranian vice-president slammed the West and the United States for pursuing a politically-motivated approach and exploiting the Human Rights Council by establishing a so-called mechanism to investigate the riots in the country.
“The same countries that consider themselves supporters of the rioters in Iran are – both in law and in practice – committing the most heinous crimes to systematically violate the right to peaceful assembly.”
The Orwellian RESTRICT Act is a chilling echo of ‘1984’ and an erosion of American freedom
Far beyond cracking down on TikTok, the bill envisages frightening powers to control citizens’ access to ‘unwanted’ information
By Ian Miles Cheong | RT | April 15, 2023
In an eerie semblance to George Orwell’s ‘1984’, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or RESTRICT Act, looms as a dark cloud over American liberties.
Branded as a mere “TikTok ban,” this act possesses a sweeping reach that would empower the federal government to designate any nation a “foreign adversary,” ban online services and products even indirectly controlled by an entity within their jurisdiction, and severely punish Americans who engage in almost any transaction with them.
Sponsored by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the RESTRICT Act not only targets the Chinese-linked TikTok platform but also has the potential to dismantle the very foundations of American freedom. One cannot help but draw comparisons to Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, where pervasive government surveillance and control are the norm. In a frightening twist, this proposed legislation could make such nightmarish fiction a stark reality.
The chilling provisions of the RESTRICT Act would impose a civil penalty of up to $250,000 by the Secretary of Commerce on individuals who conduct transactions that violate the act. The bill’s definition of a transaction is disturbingly broad, encompassing activities such as acquisitions, importation, data transmission, software updates, repairs, data hosting services, and other transactions designed to evade or circumvent the act’s application.
However, as in the oppressive world of ‘1984’, the $250,000 fine is only the beginning. American citizens found to be in violation of the act could face a criminal fine of up to $1 million and a jail sentence of up to 20 years.
The parallels to Orwell’s vision are striking, as the RESTRICT Act essentially serves as a tool of control and punishment. It is a sobering reminder of the dystopian fate that awaits the public if it allows government unchecked power in the name of security from foreign nations.
Moreover, the bill allows the federal government to seize and access various devices and services belonging to American citizens, including phones and computers, internet access points, e-commerce technology and services, cryptocurrencies, and even advanced technologies like quantum computing, post-quantum cryptography, advanced robotics, and biotechnology.
To add insult to injury, the government is granted immunity from public oversight by restricting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to the enforcement of the bill. In this regard, the RESTRICT Act resembles an American version of China’s “Great Firewall,” which isolates its citizens from a significant portion of the World Wide Web.
However, unlike in China, where VPN usage does not automatically lead to imprisonment and many citizens use it to access popular apps and video games without repercussions, the RESTRICT Act imposes much more severe penalties on those who violate its provisions.
Already, conservatives are sounding the alarm on the dangers of the bill, including Tucker Carlson, who dedicated a monologue warning that it would provide the government the ability to “punish American citizens and regulate how they communicate on the Internet.”
Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter: “Nothing is ever as it seems. The uniparty wants more power to control what we do and see. And now we’re going to give the Biden goons the ability to throw us in jail for 20 years if they decide we’re in violation of this craziness? No thanks.”
The US House Committee on Financial Services issued a warning to other members of the Republican party to reject the bill, stating that the RESTRICT Act “is using TikTok as a smokescreen for the largest expansion of executive power since IEEPA.”
“The US can’t beat China by becoming more like the Chinese Communist Party,” it added.
It remains to be seen whether Americans will be able to wake up to the dystopian reality that looms just beyond the horizon should the ratification of the RESTRICT Act proceed. For their sake, and everyone else’s, let’s hope so.
Ian Miles Cheong is a political and cultural commentator. His work has been featured on The Rebel, Penthouse, Human Events, and The Post Millennial.
Testing the system
XYMPHORA | APRIL 15, 2023
The affidavit used to establish the probable cause to get an arrest warrant for the patsy. Two things of interest: 1) whatever the experts might think is likely, Teixeira had a Top Secret security clearance, and 2) whatever Bellingcop might say, he was identified easily without recourse to fancy internet sleuthing of the granite countertop.
The standard model is that the authorities get a young, idealistic, patriotic guy (Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps even Timothy McVeigh), and convince him that he needs to do some seemingly odd things in order to save his country from real peril. For example, he may be working to stop illegal sales of weapons by mail, or even protect the President from assassination (both options in the case of LHO). Given the current controversy over Presidents and classified documents, it would not be hard to convince a guy like Teixeira that he had to ‘test the system’ by posting documents on relatively obscure social media platforms, and talk up these documents on discussion groups, in order to determine how long before the government is aware of the risk. It is a plausible ‘stress test’ of the government’s ability to protect secrets. The oddity of using photos of previously folded documents may be because the team using the patsy was lazy and that was the easiest way to do it, particularly as it didn’t leave a computer trail the patsy might use in his defense, or perhaps it was just supposed to remove identifying marks that could be found by specialized search engines (or so he might have been told). In any event, none of this was true.
The reasons for the operation:
- to get the open-ended RESTRICT Act passed by producing a phony security crisis (‘the Chinese are using their apps to suck out all our secrets!’);
- to further integrate and normalize the (((media))) as a full part of the national security state;
- to publicize the utility of using British intelligence assets like Bellingcop, a method of getting US PR accepted as fact due to the ‘objective’ magic of ‘computer sleuthing’;
- to get out of the war in Ukraine, now generally considered to be a lost and embarrassing War For The Jews, damaging to the reputation of the hegemon, to turn to the war against China; and
- possibly, but it is a stretch, to use the lies revealed by the documents to replace Brandon with somebody more capable of facing the Deep-State-threatening Trump candidacy.
Of course, as is standard in these cases, the patsy will say various things in his defense, but his lawyers will tell him to shut up as: 1) everybody involved will deny everything, 2) he will have no concrete proof, and 3) raising these issues will just anger the judge and increase his sentence for slandering the good name of the Deep State and the patriotic people who do its bidding. He’ll be told to keep his head down and he may come out of this, older, but alive.
Israel drops case against soldiers who killed Palestinian doctor
MEMO | April 14, 2023
Israel’s State Prosecutor yesterday closed the case into two Israeli soldiers who shot dead a Palestinian man at one of the entrances to Al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied city earlier this month.
According to Haaretz, the State Prosecutor, Amit Aisman, accepted the claims of the Israeli Justice Ministry’s police misconduct unit and the deputy state prosecutor for criminal affairs. Following “solid and clear evidence,” the State Prosecutor’s Office announced that the victim, Mohammad Al-Osaibi, shot two bullets while attempting to grab the weapon of one of the officers before he was shot dead and therefore, no offence was imposed by the Israeli forces.
Moreover, further investigation, according to Aisman, concluded that the area where the attack took place was not recorded by the cameras in the area and the Israeli officers failed to switch on their body cameras due to lack of time.
Rights groups have, however, questioned the lack of video footage of the event.
Al-Osaibi’s family deny the police’s version of events, saying the 26-year-old doctor from Houra, a Bedouin Arab village in southern Israel, was shot when he intervened to help a Palestinian girl.
His uncle, Ahmed Alasibi, told Haaretz : “From what we understand, he encountered the police who were harassing a young Palestinian woman, and apparently there was an argument. They shot him to death for no reason, the whole talk about an attack and taking their weapon is a lie.”
Tensions have been running high across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in recent months amid repeated Israeli raids into Palestinian towns and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Over 90 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the start of the year, according to Palestinian figures. Fourteen Israelis have also been killed over the same period.
Washington’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers Poses Danger to Free Speech
By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 14.04.2023
The US government is tightening its grip over the internet, social media and free speech. Facebook* whistleblower Ryan Hartwig and former Google and YouTube software engineer Zach Vorhies reveal the dangers and implications.
A US bill targeting the TikTok app is really a wider crackdown on online privacy and public scrutiny of government, two Big Tech whistleblowers have told Sputnik.
The Restrict Act, currently working its way through the US Congress, has been touted as an attack on Chinese software developer ByteDance — whose US CEO Shou Zi Chew was hauled before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March.
The legislation would allow the government to restrict access to apps from any firm it chooses — raising the prospect of its use to protect US firms from foreign competitors. But tech experts and free speech advocates fear it will open the door to a widespread crackdown against online critics of the White House.
Ryan Hartwig said the legislation was “essentially the Patriot Act online” — referring to legislation passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that allowed unwarranted government wiretapping of US and foreign citizens’ phone lines.
“It’s a horrible piece of legislation. Basically it’s not only banning TikTok, it’s giving the government authority to arrest people for anything they say online. It’s definitely clear that the government wants to continue to restrict free speech online,” Hartwig said. “It is really a problem. They are going to crack down.”
The bill is ostensibly aimed at protecting children and teenagers from harmful content, which the former Facebook employee said had some validity. “But the Restrict Act does a lot more than just censor a few bad posts. It basically gives them blanket authority… and criminalizes any kind of political speech.”
“If I just attack them, if I say bad things about the president, it gives the government authority to arrest me.” Hartwig stressed. “The Restrict Act can punish people for whistleblowing on an illegal government action.”
Just this week, 21-year-old US Air National Guard enlisted Airman Jack Teixeira was arrested as the suspect in the embarrassing Pentagon leaks of Ukrainian plans for its yet-to-materialize spring counter-offensive. Teixeira was traced through an online chat group for video gamers on the Discord app. The whistleblower said its users should “be concerned.”
The ‘blockchain’ technology used by Bitcoin and other concerns — essentially a variant of mass file-sharing for online data — could protect users’ rights, he said.
“There are websites that are using blockchain technology to avoid censorship, which is great. So there’s one called Bastion that is Blockchain-based and cannot be deleted off the internet,” Hartwig explained, calling the technology “the future of the Internet.”
But protecting oneself from government snooping is difficult for the average casual web surfer.
“Unless you’re a tech nerd, and you have all kinds of things for it,” Hartwig says. “It starts with using a different operating system, because most people use Microsoft Windows. So a lot are moving over to Linux, which has less vulnerabilities,” he said.
Using a virtual private network (VPN) protects users from advertisers gleaning their web history, but “it’s hard to prevent that from tracking us because I’m sure the NSA has tools that can bypass pretty much anything,” he added. “They probably know exactly what we’re talking about.”
“People are waking up to government censorship and surveillance,” Hartwig insisted. “It’s important for us to realize that the government is not our friend… If that bill passes, then the United States will have become essentially a police state. We will no longer be a free country.”
Zach Vorhies emphasized that the point of online snooping was not to eavesdrop on citizens, but to tar them by association with known suspects.
“We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA tracks by default the endpoints of communication. It turns out that the most valuable part of a communication is not the content that is said but identifying who is talking to who in order to build a relationship graph.”
Even AI assistants like Amazon Alexa have been used to record their users’ conversations. “Police have used court orders to grab audio content from these Alexa’s when they were supposedly not in active recording mode,” the tech expert noted.
Vorhies agreed that users of internet chats like Discord and 4Chan should be “concerned”, because “no corporate or public space is safe for private speech anymore. That ship has sailed long ago.”
He said the government and major tech corporations were “strong-arming companies to employ AI monitoring of content.”
“We saw this in the 2020 election when the iPhone app store kicked off Parler for not integrating content-approved moderation,” Vorhies noted. “It looks like the government is going to play a soft hand for the meantime and let the big tech organizations employ massive censorship through their terms of service.”
The tech guru said it would take about a day for someone with the coding know-how to write software for a “private space” on the internet, which government agencies would be unable to crack.
“It’s my expectation that the elite families that control governments and military are using such obscure private spaces to communicate,” he ventured. “I can’t stress enough what an exciting time we are entering. It’s also terrifying as we are entering an age of so many unknowns. It’s obvious that Pandora’s box has been opened, and the elites are putting both hands in and grasping tightly.”
Biden Administration is sued, accused of pressuring Twitter to censor journalist Alex Berenson
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 13, 2023
Independent journalist Alex Berenson has filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden, a Pfizer board member, and others for pressuring Twitter to ban his account.
His account was banned after posting a tweet questioning COVID-19 vaccines.
Initially, Twitter resisted the calls to ban Berenson. However, eventually the social media platform caved to the pressure.
Berenson sued Twitter in a federal court in California, accusing the company of violating its contract with him. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement and Twitter admitting it should not have banned him.
The defendants in the new lawsuit, filed on April 12, are President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former White House COVID-19 official Dr. Andrew Slavitt, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and the White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty.
In a meeting with Twitter, Slavitt and other White House officials asked why Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter. Slavitt has previously called Berenson a conspiracy theorist.
Flaherty recently said that he remembered Slavitt “expressing his view that Twitter was not enforcing its content guidelines with respect to Alex Berenson’s tweets, and that employees from Twitter disagreed with that view.”
Gottlieb also asked Twitter to suspend Berenson. He has also previously called for the suspension of other people, including former acting FDA commissioner Dr. Brett Girior.
In the offending tweet, Berenson wrote, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or Transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
According to his lawsuit, the defendants violated his First Amendment rights.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
“The government Defendants specifically targeted Mr. Berenson’s constitutionally protected speech and journalism,” the suit states.
“Members of [the Biden] administration engaged in a nearly unprecedented conspiracy to suppress Mr. Berenson’s First Amendment rights.
“Through 2021, they—and a senior board member at Pfizer, Inc. which has made more than $70 billion selling COVID-19 vaccines—worked together to pressure Twitter to suspend Mr. Berenson’s account and mute his voice as a leading COVID-19 vaccine skeptic. The White House and the Biden Administration did this at the same time government officials promoted their views on the necessity of COVID19 vaccination on Twitter, effectively blocking Mr. Berenson from commenting on their own statements or making his own.”
It adds that the permanent suspension “harmed both Mr. Berenson and a clearly identifiable class of nearly 100 million Americans whose interests he helped represent—Americans who either had questions about the vaccine or did not want to be forced to take a shot that they feared had been rushed through development and lost its ability to prevent COVID-19 infections within months.”
The suit is asking the court to stop the government from targeting the journalist and to award him damages.
Guantanamo: Yemeni man will remain in prison despite US court ruling he is no threat
MEMO | April 13, 2023
A Yemeni man held in Guantanamo Bay for over 20 years without charge or trial will remain in detention despite a US court ruling that he does not pose a threat to the country. In an opinion yesterday over the ongoing case of Abdulsalam Al-Hela, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the authorities may not be allowed to keep a man imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay after he is no longer deemed a threat.
According to the Washington Post, Al-Hela, a businessman and tribal sheikh from Yemen, was captured in Egypt in 2002. He was held overseas for two years before being taken to Guantánamo. He has been contesting his detention in court since 2005 and was cleared for release two years ago.
Reporting on Al-Hela’s legal battle, the New York Times said that a Periodic Review Board in June 2021 approved the 55-year-old prisoner for transfer if the receiving country could fulfil security conditions. However, just like 10 other Yemenis at Guantanamo who have been approved for transfer, he cannot be repatriated because the US considers Yemen, which is in the middle of a civil war, to be too unstable to monitor his activities.
Since the latest ruling by the Periodic Review Board, major steps have been taken to end the war in Yemen. Delegations from Saudi Arabia and Oman have achieved “tangible progress” during peace talks with Yemen’s Houthi leaders currently taking place in the capital Sanaa.
The DC Circuit returned Al-Hela’s case to a lower court to decide whether he should be released because the US no longer considers him a security threat. However, it was determined that the fact Al-Hela can be released is irrelevant.
“The Biden administration continues to fight in court to detain an individual, who the government says it doesn’t want to detain, in a prison the president says should be closed,” a senior staff attorney at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, J Wells Dixon, is reported as saying in the Post.
The ruling raised “a significant legal question… does the Constitution allow the government to continue to hold someone without foreseeable end simply because it hasn’t made sufficient efforts to transfer them?” Dixon added.
Any future appeals court ruling on that issue could have an impact on 16 other detainees who are being held at Guantanamo despite being approved for transfer. Some have been in such limbo for over a decade.
FDA Commissioner says regulation is needed to target “misinformation” which harms life expectancy
Speech regulation
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 12, 2023
In an interview with CNBC, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said that online misinformation was harming the life expectancy of people, there is a need for “better regulation” on how to handle health misinformation and that “specific authorities at FDA, FTC, and other areas are going to be needed.”
“We know more and more about misinformation. It relates back to this life expectancy,” Califf said. Why aren’t we using knowledge of diet? It’s not that people don’t know about it. Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking. The COVID vaccines and the antivirals give us an easy way to talk about it, but this is not limited to those areas. In heart disease, so many people don’t take their medicines, even though they’re now generic and very low-cost, often [they’re] deluded into taking things that are sold over the Internet that aren’t effective.”
According to the FDA commissioner, one of the solutions is telling the “truth is a louder volume.”
“In the good old days, when I was a practicing cardiologist, for the most part, people developed products, they got through the FDA, the label determined what was talked about, the Internet didn’t exist, you advertised in medical meetings and journals. There was sort of a hierarchy of information that went through the prescriber or the implanter in the case of devices to the patient. Of course, the problem in that system is it left a lot of people out. We now know about that. Now, everyone’s included because everyone’s connected to the Internet. But we can put out a statement about what we’ve determined based on the highest level of evidence, within ten minutes, someone who’s thought ten minutes about it can reach a billion people. And there’s nothing that restricts them from telling things that are not true. This has always existed. … But they couldn’t reach so many people,” he explained.
He added that there isn’t enough regulation on health information and that is “impacting our health in very detrimental ways.” As such, he thinks “there is a real need for better regulation of how to deal with this complex information.”
Califf noted that the FDA already has regulatory authority over advertisements content on tech platforms. But he feels the agency could do it better.
“And there are so many avenues now by which that information goes around that we have to think hard about what the right regulation is,” he added.
Using COVID-19 vaccination to explain his point, he said: “I’m highly aware that, in our society, people don’t want the government to have too much power, but I think specific authorities at FDA, FTC, other areas are going to be needed. I’m not saying what they are, because I don’t really know, but I do believe we’re going to need to, when we see people being harmed — like, let’s look at vaccination again, very few people are dying from COVID who are up to date on their vaccination. And if – beyond that, even if they get infected, almost no one is dying if they’ve been vaccinated up to date and they’ve gotten an antiviral that’s approved by or cleared by the FDA. So, why is this not happening? We need to work on this.”
Reiterating that misinformation should be countered with truthful information, he said that those who are succumbing to COVID “are the people that are not up to date on their vaccination and don’t encounter clinicians who are up-to-date on the advantages of antivirals. But they’re also people who have been heavily influenced by people on the Internet telling untruthful things about the vaccination. And I’m not arguing here that we should suppress free speech, that’s not — the First Amendment is the First Amendment. But we have to counter that information with truthful information and reach many, many more people.”
Trump’s arrest exposes America’s Soros-style (in)justice system
By Tony Cox | RT | April 12, 2023
Alvin Bragg, the New York City district attorney who made a name for himself by arresting Donald Trump, waxed triumphantly about his effort to take down the former president. You see, the Manhattan prosecutor said, no one is above the law in the “business capital of the world.”
“We today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg told reporters last week, following Trump’s arraignment on 34 criminal charges. “No amount of money and no amount of power changes that enduring American principle.”
So as Bragg tells it, the patriotic decision to prosecute Trump was all about equal justice under the law. Never mind that Bragg campaigned for office by pledging to prosecute the locally hated ex-president in a county where Joe Biden won 86.8% of votes in the 2020 presidential election. And never mind that Bragg’s 2021 campaign for the Manhattan DA job was bankrolled largely by billionaire activist George Soros, the biggest donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes.
That’s right, Bragg says his case is legally and ethically righteous. However, a closer look at the indictment reveals that the charges he filed are so legally dubious that only a Manhattan jury of Trump haters might buy his story. He’s prosecuting Trump for allegedly falsifying business records six years ago, and he’s bypassing the two-year statute of limitations on such misdemeanors by elevating the charges to felonies. To make that possible under New York’s criminal code, he’s claiming the offenses were committed to cover up violations of election laws when Trump was running for president in 2016.
Those alleged violations stemmed from a supposed hush-money payment to a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with Trump. The payment wasn’t illegal on its face, but if it was proven to have been made solely for the purpose of helping Trump win the election, it would exceed the legal limit for a political contribution. Both the Federal Election Commission and the US Department of Justice looked into the matter at the time and found no cause to pursue a case against Trump.
Even if you give Bragg the benefit of the considerable doubt regarding his motives for going after Trump – just as the 2024 election is approaching, with the former president polling as the top Republican candidate – it would be tough to argue that he’s driven by the interests of justice. For one thing, Bragg shows no interest in investigating the leaks of information about Trump’s prosecution to the media, which is itself a felony under New York law.
For another, his approach to justice is making the city increasingly more lawless. Bragg used his first memo after taking office as DA in January 2022 to direct prosecutors to quit sending so many criminals to prison and downgrade charges for such crimes as armed robbery and drug dealing. He also ordered his underlings to make sentencing recommendations that address racial disparities in incarceration – meaning the criminal’s punishment should depend at least partly on his or her skin color.
During Bragg’s first year as DA, 52% of the felony cases referred to his office were downgraded to misdemeanors (the opposite of the Trump charges being upgraded to felonies). Nearly half of the felony cases Bragg’s office did take on ended in defeat for the prosecution.
With many laws being enforced lightly, if at all, crime has surged in America’s largest city and the business capital of the world. Car thefts are at a 16-year high. There were more than 2,000 felony assaults committed in January alone, up 15% from a year earlier, according to police figures.
If there’s one thing on which Bragg appears to be really cracking down – other than Republican presidential candidates – it’s self-defense. Consider the case of Manhattan parking-garage attendant Moussa Diarra, who woke up in a hospital earlier this month to find himself handcuffed to his bed. The 57-year-old had been shot twice by a suspected car burglar. The suspect also was shot, during a tussle for his gun as the garage attendant fought for his life.
Weeping at his predicament, Diarra reportedly told his boss, “I got bullets in me, and I’m chained to a hospital bed, but I didn’t do anything wrong.” He was charged with attempted murder and illegal possession of a gun – the same gun that the suspected burglar, a career criminal with over 20 arrests on his rap sheet, used to shoot him.
The charges against Diarra were later dropped, “pending further investigation,” amid public outrage over the case. Diarra had to hire a lawyer, who suggested that his client was initially charged because the authorities hadn’t had time to sort out how the two men wound up shot. But police claimed the DA’s office directed the arrest and charging of the garage worker.
This might be viewed as an aberration, or merely an unfortunate circumstance for Diarra. Perhaps he was handcuffed to his hospital bed because police couldn’t immediately discern that he was a hero, rather than a perpetrator, so it was just a placeholder to charge him. That might be believable if not for Bragg’s pattern of trying to punish people who defend themselves.
Before Diarra, there was Jose Alba, a 61-year-old Dominican bodega owner who was attacked behind the counter of his Harlem store by a 35-year-old black ex-con last July. After sitting passively and pleading with the assailant, reportedly saying “Papa, I don’t want a problem,” Alba fought for his life as the attack escalated, stabbing the younger man to death. Surveillance video of the incident shows Alba being stabbed by the attacker’s girlfriend as he fights the man off.
Alba was arrested for murder and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island jail, where he reportedly didn’t even receive proper treatment for his stab wounds. His bail was initially set at $250,000. Bragg finally dropped the charge weeks later, but only after public outcry, including statements by Mayor Eric Adams and New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton that Alba clearly acted in self-defense. The DA didn’t charge the girlfriend who stabbed Alba.
In another case, Bragg broke a campaign promise to drop the charges against Tracy McCarter, a nurse who fatally stabbed her abusive husband, allegedly in self-defense. In other cases, he has downgraded charges against serial criminals, such as a man who had nearly 90 arrests on his record and had his bail set at just $1 after being busted last month for two alleged robberies on the same day.
In rationalizing his policies against enforcing some laws, Bragg has claimed that limited resources must be freed up to focus on violent crime. Yet, on his watch, violent criminals – at least those who weren’t acting in self-defense – have been set free without bail while awaiting trial. The DA cut a sweet plea-bargain deal for a man arrested for raping a teenager, requiring him to serve only 30 days in jail, but while out on bail and awaiting sentencing, he sexually assaulted five more people.
Nevertheless, with resources stretched thin and a poll showing that 40% of New York City office workers are considering leaving the city because of crime concerns, Bragg has found time to prosecute a political enemy. He’s doing so in a case stemming from seven-year-old allegations that the more relevant authorities – those who police federal elections – found unworthy of pursuing.
Whatever is going on with law enforcement in Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan, it’s not about equal justice under the law – or any kind of true justice at all. This sort of unjust legal activism isn’t limited to New York, either. Soros has reportedly helped stake about 70 lawyers to victory in district attorney elections around the US. These social justice warriors have made their cities less safe and more racist, calibrating their prosecutorial policies to essentially legalize certain types of crime and favor certain categories of criminals.
MSNBC political analyst Peter Beinart recently offered a leftist’s perspective on what’s driving the prosecution of Trump, arguing that a coalition of groups that are historically victims of discrimination – black people, Jews and “LGBT folks” – have “come together to push back against the white Christian nationalist assault on American democracy.”
Yes, the aggrieved victim classes are so concerned about protecting democracy that they’re banding together to take down the leading Republican presidential candidate, potentially taking him off the 2024 election menu if they’re successful. They would love to dictate the candidates from which voters can choose because, you know, democracy.
The first arrest of a former US head of state is a clown show, which some foreign leaders have been honest enough to point out. For instance, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said, “Think what you want about former President Trump and the reasons he’s being indicted, but just imagine if this happened in any other country, where a government arrested the main opposition candidate. The United States’ ability to use ‘democracy’ as foreign policy is gone.”
Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
Featured Video
New positive ivermectin evidence
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Fanatical Followers of the Covid Regime: A Jim Jones-Style Cult?
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- EU Council Advances Chat Control 2.0 Scanning Proposal
- Ex-Greek MEP files complaint against Israeli spyware firm over alleged Pegasus surveillance
- Troubling ideas throughout the Torah, Talmud, Mishneh Torah and Tanya
- ‘Grave, alarming’: Iran mission on Trump’s UNGA ‘annihilation’ threats
- Najaf airport to reopen to Iranian flights within 24 hours: Ambassador
- From ‘How Will This End For Iran’ to ‘When America Walks Away’: A tale of two Economist covers
- Tehran blasts ‘baseless’ speculation linking Iran to alleged bomb plot at UK air base
- The Rise And… Rise Of ‘Color Revolutions’
- The Coming GOP Bloodbath?
- Arctic Scare Stories Melt Away
- If Americans Knew
- Netanyahu Asked UAE Leader to Deny Report on Oct. 7 Warning in Secret Visit, Sources Say
- CNN Chief Int’l Correspondent Clarissa Ward on Journalists in Gaza
- Democratic Party Consultants Surround Troy Jackson with Pro-Israel Donors
- Christian Leader Responds To Netanyahu’s Claims Regarding Palestinian Christians
- In Gaza, ‘Whoever Survives the Bombing Won’t Survive the Rubble’
- Israel kills more Palestinians, amid push to resettle Gaza – Daily Update
- Israel forces Gazans to live in constant peril – Daily Update
- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
