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Manufacturing Consensus

UK Government’s favourite polling firm says British public overwhelmingly “supports” 15-minute-cities…

By JJ Starky | The Stark Naked Brief | March 13, 2023

The British government’s favourite pollster has been deployed once again.

Only a few days ago, audaciously declaring Brits should “forget the conspiracy theorists”, YouGov tweeted the results from a new poll about 15-minute-cities. They reported that 62% of all Brits support the schemes. While 23% oppose them and 15% don’t know.

In the survey, they explained how such schemes aim to make everyday amenities like banks, shops, and schools closer to residential areas. The major benefit, proponents argue, is as well as convenience, they will negate the need for driving and thus, reduce carbon emissions.

The only problem is, in reality, 15-minute-cities are vastly more complex urban redevelopment models. Integrated as a part of them is “technology and policy interventions” that create “compact urban cells” – at least according to one of its original proprietors, Kent Larson. Not to mention that they were born from the smart city model, which prioritises “electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data”.

This is where Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) come in. Intending to do exactly what they say on tin, they limit traffic. They seek to do so by limiting residents’ ability to drive in certain areas and at certain times. It is a 15-minute-city precursor designed to purge traffic and free up space.

Now, YouGov contends us desperate conspiracy theorists are over-egging the pudding here. Apparently, conflating 15-minute-cities and LTNs is a mistake. This is despite both sharing a practically identical goal to “improve” accessibility via urban spatial management (or rather dictation).

One could easily argue that without LTNs, 15-minute-cities would not be viable or indeed efficient.

Then, there is the digital surveillance. In order for LTNs to offer “benefit”, there has to be a policing system. London currently possesses seven LTN zones, all of which are monitored via camera. If residents fail to buy the correct permit to drive in a certain area, at a certain time, a camera will capture their license plate and send a fine to the corresponding address. If one ignores that fine, one can be jailed.

According to RAC, almost 7.5 million penalty tickets were issued to drivers breaking LTN rules in London last year. Transport for London (TfL) data further reveals the total number of fines, which cost up to £160, increased by 2.2 million from 2020 — an increase of 41% to 7,472,886.

YouGov failed to notify survey participants of any of this information.

The data they collected amounted to the equivalent of someone asking “hey, do you like the idea of your local shop, bank, or GP surgery being closer to you?” Farcical.

Indeed, YouGov shares a very profitable relationship with the British government. During 2020, the polling firm received a £6,85 million contract to carry out surveys for the Cabinet Office up to January 2023. This equated to a reported 7% of the company’s annual revenue in 2020.

The firm is also directly connected to the government. Nadhim Zahawi, the former jab-passport endorsing vaccine minister, founded YouGov back in 2000 alongside the former owner of Conservative Home, Stephan Shakespeare, an outlet that persistently publishes articles written by various conservative MPs.

It’s well-established as a party-line mouth piece…

These curious conflicts of interest do not stop at the lower levels. British PM Rishi Sunak’s family also runs a company that is actively pushing for further urban digitalisation. The father of Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is the founder of Infosys, an Indian information technology company that aims to develop the technological infrastructure to implement a global “social credit score” system – a scheme directly tied to the smart city initiative.

So we have a dubious survey, distributed by a polling company riddled with various conflicts of interest, partnered with a government whose head would indirectly benefit if these schemes were adopted…

Politicians fully understand the capability of polling. A 2020 study published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research that measured the effect of online polls on voting behaviour found advertising majority opinions can sway voting by 7%. In short, voters can be heavily influenced by percieved support for a cause, even if it is unpopular in reality. The same study further found this effect was not confined to general elections but all sorts of political issues.

YouGov knows what it is doing… they just don’t care.

March 17, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon paid internet censors

RT | March 17, 2023

The US Department of Defense funds private internet monitoring firms NewsGuard and PeakMetrics, which then trawl the web for “misinformation” to censor and demonetize, conservative news site The Federalist reported on Friday.

NewsGuard is a private company that rates news outlets by their “reliability” and reputation for sharing “falsehoods and misinformation narratives.” Before a Congressional hearing last week, journalist Matt Taibbi labeled the company a part of the “censorship-industrial complex,” publishing an image of a $750,000 grant award from the Pentagon to the firm. During the hearing, reporter Michael Shellenberger explained that NewsGuard uses its ratings system to drive advertiser revenue away from conservative sires or other “disfavored publications.”

In an email to Taibbi, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz denied receiving government funding, stating instead that the government pays for access to its data. The Pentagon, he wrote, is specifically looking for evidence of “Russian and Chinese disinformation.”

However, NewsGuard received a $25,000 award from the Pentagon in 2020, after winning the military’s ‘Countering Covid-19 Disinformation’ challenge, The Federalist, a conservative news outlet, reported on Friday. A year later, Newsguard was given $750,000 to develop an AI-powered database of “misinformation networks” alongside the Department of Defense.

NewsGuard is one of several such businesses funded by the Pentagon. PeakMetrics was another winner of the Covid-19 challenge, earning a $25,000 grant to develop “social listening” technology for the military. It received a further $1.5 million from the federal government in 2021, but even before that the company had been singled out as potentially useful to the Pentagon.

In early 2020, PeakMetrics took part in the ‘Air Force Accelerator’ program, under which it developed “measuring tools to detect misinformation campaigns.” According to The Federalist, it put these tools to use during the 2020 and 2022 elections in the US. At that point, PeakMetrics solely worked for the US State Department and Pentagon, before later offering its services to the private sector.

It is unclear what the Pentagon aimed to achieve during these election monitoring campaigns. PeakMetrics did not respond to a request for comment by The Federalist.

Aside from paying private companies to develop web surveillance tools, the Pentagon, along with a number of other government agencies and departments, directly engaged in social media censorship in recent years. Internal communications from Twitter published by Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other journalists, showed that the social media giant “directly assisted” the US military’s online influence campaigns and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple intelligence agencies. The platform also received extensive lists of accounts to ban from the US State Department and associated NGOs.

March 17, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

It Was A ‘Vaccine Strategy’ From The Start

Ideological zealots wanted jabs in arms

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | March 11, 2023

Our recent “Null Hypothesis” article postulates and evidences a succinct summary of the happenings of the last three years: “The hypothesis that will likely stand the test of time goes like this: a nasty — if not particularly unusual — respiratory disease season was turned into a catastrophe by human misadventure, and this catastrophe was compounded by efforts to save face and justify the unjustifiable”.

In answering the question ‘what happened’, we did not attempt to tackle the obvious follow-up question (apart from a brief discussion about social contagion): ‘why did it happen’?

The sceptical community – living up to its decentralised worldview – is not short of opinions and theories, robustly debated. These are too numerous to cover in detail in this short piece: it suffices to say that they cover a wide spectrum ranging from calamitous ineptitude (and innumeracy) of politicians and civil servants, deceitful and underhand sales & marketing by nefarious global corporations, efforts by the elite to enrich themselves by impoverishing the middle classes and the digital enslavement of the masses, through to some more esoteric beliefs covering depopulation agendas, eugenics and long-in-the-planning Satanic plots… the list just goes on and on.

As many of the most ardent supporters of both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (PIs and NPIs) begin to wake up to the collateral damage they helped bring about, it is instructive to stand back and observe tried-and-tested Biblical precedent being re-enacted. Few are not enjoying seeing the pantomime villain Matt Hancock being hoist by his own self-promoting petard via the Oakeshott WhatsApp trove. After all, who does not take some satisfaction from the fall of a petty tyrant?  But much like the goat that gets bestowed with the sins of the community in Leviticus (“the goat will carry on itself all their iniquities” ) before being cast out into the wilderness (thus avoiding a full and frank ‘lessons learned’ exercise), the demonisation of this preening ’cock (or monkey) does not necessarily get us much further in terms of identifying whodunnit — who was the organ grinder? After all, a self-promoting chancer whose self-confessed epidemiological education is based on a studious viewing of the film ‘Contagion’ is demonstrably not an evil Blofeld mastermind. Indeed, some sceptics have attempted to use the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files to scotch any discussion of conspiracy and underscore their belief that the disastrous events of 2020-2022 were ‘merely’ a cock-up.

But that simplistic take assumes that the former Secretary of State for Health was more than just a bumbling low-grade chaos agent intent on filling his boots via fast-track procurement channels. Loathsome though he might be, Hancock and his cronies are a symptom – not a cause – of the pit we find ourselves in. Why did he – and the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson – get themselves into such a pickle such that they were not able to navigate a more rational – and less damaging – course through the crisis?

The answer is probably to be found somewhere within what one might term the ‘pandemic preparedness industry’ as outlined a few months ago in the Daily Sceptic :

“The response to the COVID-19 pandemic represented the triumph of a pseudo-scientific biosecurity agenda that emerged in 2005 and has been pushed ever since by a well-organised, well-funded and well-embedded network of ideologues. These fanatics promote and perpetuate the ideas underpinning the draconian new approach by publishing them in leading journals, planting them in public policy and law, pushing them in the media and smearing those who dissent, however eminent or well-qualified.

This avenue of investigation is, we believe, more likely to lead to the source of our misadventure than attempting to rationalise ‘scorched earth’ attempts at containment, suppression and eradication of a killer virus. There was only ever a warped logic to these actions, unless – one way or the other (perhaps for the ‘greater good’ or simply for old-fashioned crony capitalist ends) – you wanted to create a favourable backdrop for a new set of medical interventions that might otherwise have met with limited take-up or even downright opposition. CMO Chris Whitty advised government ministers in February 2020 (!) that covid was not deadly enough to justify fast-tracking vaccines. Put another way, earth could not have been scorched in this way if seasonal respiratory disease had not been given a name such that scariants could be ‘deployed’ to ‘frighten the pants off’ the general populace.

Whether the driving force behind these fanatics is saintly goodwill, pure greed, corruption – or even a Luciferian conspiracy for that matter – is beside the point: what is essential to understand is how a nasty seasonal respiratory disease season was weaponised to drive one of the greatest policy failures of all time. There does not necessarily need to be a single cartoon villain masterminding events to avoid multiple parties conspiring (“breathing together”) to create a great evil.

With this backdrop one does not even need to ferret around in the weeds to find out more. Last summer’s detailed POLITICO/WELT Special Report sheds plentiful quanta of light on the matter:

Four [supra-national] health organizations, working closely together, spent almost $10 billion on responding to Covid across the world. But they lacked the scrutiny of governments… While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots.

The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.

… The World Health Organisation (WHO) was crucial to the groups’ rise to power. All had longstanding ties to the global health body. The boards of both CEPI and Gavi have a specially designated WHO representative. There is also a revolving door between employment in the groups and work for the WHO: Former WHO employees now work at the Gates Foundation and CEPI; some, such as Chris Wolff, the deputy director of country partnerships at the Gates Foundation, occupy important positions. Much of the groups’ clout with the WHO stems simply from money.

… “They’re funded by their own capabilities and or endowments and trusts. But when they step into multilateral affairs, then who keeps watch over them?” a former senior U.S. official said. “I don’t know the answer to that. That’s quite provocative”.

Consider this small early 2020 cameo featuring senior executives from one of these four organisations:

“When it first became clear that this disease was appearing, Richard [Hatchett] and I sat down and said, we know what happened with the last swine flu pandemic, where wealthy countries bought up all the doses [of Pandemrix] that were … available for the developing world, we have to try to do something different about that…”.

Most normal people draw entirely different conclusions from the swine flu saga, not least the absolutely devastating tale of Pandemrix, a giant swindle involving misuse of taxpayer funds to purchase these doses in the first place, the substantial human damage that they then caused, a subsequent cover-up and then further cost to the taxpayer compensating those affected.

Contrast this with CEPI’s ‘mission’: “Vaccines are one of our most powerful tools in the fight to outsmart epidemics. The development of vaccines can help save lives, protect societies and restabilise economies”.

There you have it: the ‘saviour vaccine’, a sacred cow extolled with messianic zeal. It seems that one of the world’s greatest policy failures happens to neatly coincide with the stated aims of the Fantabulous Four. Food for thought given that there is no example of a vaccine ever defeating a sudden onset viral epidemic, let alone a ‘pandemic’ (there is also the question of whether viral pandemics are in any way even a hypothetical threat to modern societies — unless, of course, one incorrectly pins the blame for iatrogenic collateral damage on said virus).

Following the money, therefore, it is not that much of a surprise what came next: while — as pointed out above — “nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic” (i.e. correctly monitoring the possibility of a slightly-more-serious-than-usual respiratory disease season), the Fantabulous Four were busy setting the scene with targeted investments to create fertile ground to fulfil their aims. Consider then:

  • Who might have benefitted from a social media campaign showing those faked ‘deaths in the street’ in China?
  • Who might have considered funding a social media ‘bot army’ to promote lockdowns, interventions that as per Neil Ferguson’s ‘seminal’ fear-mongering 16 March 2020 paper could only conceivably make any sort of logical sense if they were followed in short order by a ‘saviour vaccine’, as explicitly stated by Ferguson and co-authors in that paper (“these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available” )?
  • Who might have benefitted from squashing an early ‘lab leak’ theory that might have implicated some of the Fantabulous Four and the justification for a fast-track vaccine roll-out?
  • Conversely, once said roll-out had been successfully funded and procured at eye-watering expense, who might have benefitted from re-floating the ‘lab leak’ theory to help justify future ‘pandemic preparedness’?
  • Who might benefit from tightly controlling media output and censorship (after all, “true content … might promote vaccine hesitancy”)? Who was writing this script?
  • WHO might wish to publish — in 2022 — detailed recommendations about how those in authority should respond to a ‘vaccine crisis’ (defined as any occurrence that ‘will most likely or has already eroded public trust in vaccines … and may create uncertainty’)?
  • Why only the vaccine ‘pillar’ of the WHO’s wish list, the ACT-A (Access to Covid Tools Accelerator), received the funding that was sought? And why did all others on that ACT-A list — most notably cheap therapeutics that might have saved many lives (while of course competing with lucrative vaccines) — remain well short of their funding targets?

This congruency of the categorical trinity — means, motive and opportunity — is difficult to explain away. It is true that much that happened from March 2020 was anarchic, uncontrolled, panicked and unscripted. But there was method to the madness, an ultimate aim to the chaos, namely to make way for a ‘saviour vaccine’ that would only be accepted if the intended recipients had had ‘the pants frightened off them’, i.e. were sufficiently afraid of the alternatives to risk such an unproven medical intervention.

It may conceivably be that many people involved in the Fantabulous Four believe that this collective action was necessary. But collective action – however well meaning – that is dictated by a group and imposed on everyone else is tyranny, pure and simple. It gets worse if authorities are sufficiently captured by this tyranny such that they deploy subversive psychological weaponry on their citizens and suppress any dissent.

These are grave misdeeds that led to great harm, both in terms of bad outcomes and collateral damage from unnecessary non-pharmaceutical interventions, but also from the utterly unnecessary coercion used to foist pharmaceutical interventions on those that did not need them.

Even if we presuppose that there are no evil Blofeld-types standing behind all of this, it is beyond doubt that a fanatical ideology has inspired an evil tyranny. As per the Daily Sceptic :

“This ideology is the enemy, and seeing it for what it is is the first step to defeating it”.

This process has begun.

March 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Indigenous Rebellion Continues as Post-Coup Peruvian Government Flounders

BY W. T. WHITNEY | COUNTERPUNCH | MARCH 10, 2023

Revived democratic struggle in Peru is well along into a second act. There was the parliamentary coup December 7 that removed democratically elected President Pedro Castillo and the “First Taking of Lima” in mid-January, embittered and excluded Peruvians occupied Lima and faced violent repression. Then on March 1 protests renewed as the indigenous inhabitants of Peru’s extreme southern regions prepared once more to demonstrate in Lima and would shortly be protesting in their own regions. The resistance’s make-up was fully on display.

Protesters throughout Peru were rejecting a replacement president and an elite-dominated congress and calling for early elections and a new constitution. They belonged for the most part belonged to Aymara communities in districts south of Lima extending from Lake Titicaca both west and northeast, into the Andes region.

Their complaints centered on wealth inequities, rule by a Lima-based elite, inadequate means for decent lives, and non-recognition of their cultural autonomy. Their support and that of other rural Peruvians had brought about the surprise election to Peru’s presidency in 2021 of the inexperienced Pedro Castillo. He had defeated Keiko Fujimori, daughter of a now imprisoned dictator and favorite of Peru’s neo-liberal enablers.

By March 1, residents of provinces close to the city of Puno were arriving in Lima to carry out the so-called “Second Wave of the Taking of Lima.” Demanding the de facto President Dina Boluarte resign, as of March 4 protesters had not been able to break through police lines surrounding key government buildings. The main action, however, was going on in the epicenter of police and military repression ever since Boluarte had taken office on December 7.

That would be the Puno area where most of the 60 deaths caused by violent repression have occurred, with 19 protesters having been killed on January 9 in Juliaca, a town 27 miles north of Puno city.

On March 5, violence was again playing out in Juli, a town 58 miles south of Puno, also on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Demonstrations along with roadblocks were in progress throughout the extended region, all in sympathy with the concurrent protests in Lima. Involved were indigenous groups, small farmer organizations, and social movements.

In Juli the demonstrators, confronted by military units and police in civilian dress, set fire to judicial office buildings and the police headquarters. The troops fired, shots came from open windows, and tear gas was released from a helicopter; 18 demonstrators were wounded.

Demonstrators blocking a bridge over a river prevented the entry of troops into the nearby town of Llave. Rains had caused flooding and in the process of swimming across the river, one of them drowned and five others disappeared.

Protesters captured 12 soldiers; community leader Nilo Colque indicated they were released after they admitted to trying to break the “strikes” but that they too opposed the military’s actions. Coolque predicted that soon 30,000 Aymaras would be descending on Juli and nearby population centers.

Aymara activists in Ilave announced a strike of indefinite duration. A “Committee of struggle” in Cusco announced the beginning as of March 7 of an indefinite strike in 10 provinces. The president of the national “Rondas Campesinas” (peasant patrols), said to represent two million Peruvians in all, announced a big march on Lima from all regions set for March 13.

Meanwhile Peru’s chief prosecutor has embarked upon an investigation of President Boluarte and other officials for crimes of “genocide, homicide resulting from circumstances, and causing serious injury,” that allegedly took place mostly in southern regions in the weeks immediately after her taking office.

There are these other developments:

* Peru’s Supreme Court on March 3 heard a proposal that the “preventive imprisonment of ex-President Castillo be extended from 18 to 36 months. Another court had previously denied his appeal for habeas corpus.

* The Congress as of March 6 looked to be on the verge of, for the fourth time, refusing to advance new presidential elections from April 2024 to sometime in 2013.

* The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has released a preliminary report accusing the new Peruvian government of excessive use of force against protesters.

* Polling results currently go one way: 77% of Peruvian reject the Dina Boluarte government, 70% say she should resign, 90% denounce Peru’s Congress. 69% favor moving general elections ahead to 2023, and 58% support the demonstrations. Most of those making up these majorities live in rural areas, according to the report.

The opposed sides in the Peruvian conflict are stalemated. Powerbrokers presently lack a government capable – willing though it may be – of providing structure and organization adequate for protecting their political and economic interests. Marginalized Peruvians are without an historical experience from which revolutionary leadership and strategies might have developed, such that now they might have direction and focus. The people’s movement there is not as lucky as counterparts were in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Now the U.S. government meddles with this state of precarious balance in Peru. And not surprisingly: it has long intervened militarily and is competing with China economically.

Speaking on March 1, State Department Ned Price did insist that in Peru, “our diplomats do not take sides in political disputes … They recognize that these are sovereign decisions.” He added that the United States backs “Peru’s constitution, and Peru’s constitutional processes.”

Even so, there is active interest hinting at more to come. Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols on February 28 urged Peru’s Congress to expedite early elections and Peru’s president to promptly “end the crisis caused by ex-President Castillo’s self-coup.”

March 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

I Read Richard Haass’ New Book (So You Don’t Have To!)

Corbett • 03/13/2023

Have you ever thought that the Bill of Rights was a bit lacking? Did you ever wish there was a list of obligations detailing those things we owe to the government for the privilege of being born into a certain political jurisdiction? Then, boy, do I have the perfect book for you! Join James for today’s dissection of The Bill of Obligations, the latest turgid tome of trash from Richard Haass, the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4

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

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

DOCUMENTATION

Episode 188 – Listening to the Enemy
Time Reference: 00:30

 

Episode 225 – Still Listening to the Enemy
Time Reference: 00:36

 

Episode 412 – I Read The Great Narrative (So You Don’t Have To!)
Time Reference: 00:41

 

Episode 418 – I Read Bill Gates’ New Book (So You Don’t Have To!)
Time Reference: 00:48

 

The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens
Time Reference: 01:06

 

Richard Haass: “No,” CFR members are not New World Order architects (Feb 11, 2021)
Time Reference: 01:21

 

Richard Haass on ‘The Bill of Obligations’
Time Reference: 04:23

 

Wall Street and FDR by Antony Sutton
Time Reference: 07:48

 

FLASHBACK: You Are Being Programmed to Accept Global ID
Time Reference: 08:15

 

Corbett Report Radio 050 – Deconstructing Pearl Harbor with Robert Stinnett
Time Reference: 08:22

 

What Is The Average Global Temperature?
Time Reference: 17:24

 

Episode 430 – The Media Are the Terrorists
Time Reference: 27:30

 

Episode 382 – Your Body, Their Choice
Time Reference: 32:06

 

Jacobsen v. Massachussetts
Time Reference: 32:20

 

Buck v. Bell
Time Reference: 32:26

 

How & Why Big Oil Conquered the World
Time Reference: 32:30

March 15, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | , , | Leave a comment

NEW CA BILL SEEKS TO MANDATE DANGEROUS HPV VACCINE

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 9, 2023

California legislators continue their reign of vaccine mandate terror with the proposed Assembly Bill 659, which would require children to be vaccinated for HPV before entering 8th grade. Attorney, Michael Baum, Esq., discusses his law firm’s fight to block this bill, which would stop countless crippling injuries, especially in the absence of proof of efficacy.

March 13, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

US House Passes Bill Prohibiting Government Workers From Censoring Speech in Official Role

Sputnik – 10.03.2023

WASHINGTON – The US House of Representatives passed a bill to prevent federal government employees from censoring speech in their official capacity, amid hearings by congressional committees on the collusion between tech companies and the government to “moderate” content online.

House lawmakers passed the Protecting Speech From Government Interference Act along partisan lines on Thursday in a vote of 219-206.

The bill prohibits employees of executive agencies or those otherwise in the competitive service from using their official authority to influence or advocate for a third party, including private entities, to censor speech.

“Government agencies such as the FBI and the State Department have been working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to silence American citizens expressing conservative views online,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement on the bill. “Americans have the right to express themselves lawfully online without the government controlling the narrative.”

Earlier on Thursday, a House select subcommittee held a hearing with authors of the so-called Twitter Files to hear testimony on the collusion between Big Tech, government agencies and private organizations – dubbed the Censorship-Industrial Complex – to moderate, suppress and censor online content.

The Twitter Files have revealed how the US government collaborated with Big Tech companies such as Twitter to suppress information related to COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop story, among others.

March 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

‘An Injustice & A Disgrace’: Outrage Surges Over ‘Shameful’ Corsican Language Ban on French Island

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 11.03.2023

The French island of Corsica has for many years been trying to achieve autonomy, seeking legislative powers in economic and social fields, as well as recognition of the Corsican language as the official lingua franca.

Public outrage has been triggered by a “shameful” court decision in France’s Corsica to ban use of the Corsican language in its local parliament, according to reports from the capital, Ajaccio.

A verdict issued on 9 March in the Corsican city of Bastia ruled that French is the only language allowed to be used in official communications on the Mediterranean’s fourth-largest island which is a “territorial collectivity” of France. Furthermore, use of the Corsican language in debates – something that had been commonly practiced by the Assembly (unicameral legislative body of Corsica) – was pronounced as being against the French constitution.

Referred to as Corsu, or Lingua Corsa, the Corsican language is closely related to the type of Italian spoken in Tuscany. The language is spoken and written not only on the French island of Corsica, but also in northern Sardinia – an Italian island. The language has been classified as “definitely endangered” by UNESCO.

Also deemed a violation of the constitution by the court were local rules in support of “the existence of a Corsican people”.

The present ruling has come in the wake of a lawsuit introduced by Amaury de Saint-Quentin, the prefect of Corsica, according to reports. De Saint-Quentin is the highest-ranking official on the island and is appointed by the central French government.

The court ruling prompted an immediate backlash from pro-autonomy politicians on Corsica, with the pro-Corsican independence party Core in Fronte going on Twitter to lambaste the “shameful” verdict.

“This decision amounts to stripping Corsican parliament members of the right to speak their language during debates. Accepting this state of affairs is unthinkable for us,” a joint statement by the island’s executive council president Gilles Simeoni, and Corsican Assembly president Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis said.

Emphasizing that the Corsican language needed to be granted official status alongside French if it were to have any chance to “survive and develop”, they vowed to lodge an appeal against the verdict.

Jean-Christophe Angelini, leader of the Party of the Corsican Nation, tweeted to say the court ruling was “an injustice and a disgrace”, and “sounds to us like an insult”.

Corsica has for years been seeking autonomy from France, and – as well as a whole slew of issues – recognition of the Corsican language as official has always been top of the agenda.

In February 2018, during his first visit to the island, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against granting Corsica special status or recognizing its language as official, insisting that Corsica was an integral part of the French Republic.

However, this February Macron reportedly told members of parliament that he had neither red lines nor a predetermined decision regarding Corsica when it comes to the draft constitutional reform, which he hopes to carry out after the summer and put up for debates in 2023-24. However, the option for Corsica to secede from France is off the table, according to the report.

March 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Ukrainian Opposition Leader: Zelensky Regime Won’t Be Able to Destroy Orthodox Faith

By Viktor Medvedchuk – Sputnik – 11.03.2023

The Zelensky regime has once again demonstrated that it holds nothing sacred, this time in the literal sense. Today, the authorities have begun a gangster-style takeover of the main shrine of Orthodoxy – the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.

On March 10, the leadership of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine received an ultimatum, being informed that the National Preserve is breaking its lease agreement for the Lower Lavra of the Holy Assumption Monastery of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and requiring monks to vacate the territory before March 29, 2023.

We remember from history that even during the Nazi occupation, the parishes of the canonical Orthodox Church were not closed by the Nazis. But today, their ideological heirs are taking away from the people of Ukraine that which gives them their spiritual core, strengthens them in trying times, consoles them in their grief and unites them in the joy of Easter.

The Ukrainian people have been robbed of their tongue, both Russian and Ukrainian. Russian, native to millions of Ukrainians, was declared the language of invaders and traitors. Ukrainian has been perverted to such an extent that it has lost its roots, musicality and meaning.

The Ukrainian people had their rights and freedoms taken from them, with deceitful, thieving and criminal authorities placed above all laws, with the people given over into the hands of demented Nazi bandits, spawning informers and extremists. Today, a Ukrainian not only has no right to have an opinion that differs from that of the authorities, but is obliged to support this government at any opportunity, since even silence is considered a crime.

The Ukrainian people have been robbed of peace and prosperity, since the Zelensky government does not want to admit its mistakes and its lies to voters. They preferred to lead their people to the slaughter, receiving unlimited finances and NATO weaponry. The current government does not hide that it is going to fight a long and bloody conflict. It is not interested in the lives of ordinary Ukrainians.

Today, the people are being robbed of the last thing they’ve got – their faith. Orthodoxy is the basis of the culture and spiritual life of the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has called the people to peace, unity and conscientiousness. But peaceful, God-fearing and conscientious people have been declared enemies by the Zelensky government.

Ukrainians are being robbed of their souls, their language, their hearts, their minds and their conscience. The Ukrainian state has turned into a man-made Frankenstein, a monster that hates everything living and natural, that wants to destroy peace in the world. But the authorities in Kiev will not succeed in turning Ukraine into a corpse, a dangerous zombie. Ukrainians are a living, spiritual, righteous people.

Ukrainians aren’t zombies. There is Another Ukraine – the genuine, true, Slavic, Orthodox one, which will not allow Satanism and lawlessness to be imposed upon it. And today the traitors of the Ukrainian people, Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian faith hear our voice, and understand that their sinister, black core is becoming more and more obvious each day. Everyone will receive their just deserts. The attempt to destroy the true Orthodox faith only strengthens the people. The Orthodox faith, like the people, cannot be destroyed!

Viktor Medvedchuk is a former Ukrainian opposition leader.

March 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Twitter Files expose ‘censorship-industrial complex’ – journalist

RT | March 9, 2023

Social media platforms colluded with non-governmental organizations and the US government to suppress information they did not like in the name of fighting “disinformation,” journalist Matt Taibbi testified at a congressional hearing on Thursday.

Taibbi appeared alongside Michael Shellenberger, another journalist who has covered the “Twitter Files” for the past several months, before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by Congressman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio.

Taibbi described what he called the “censorship-industrial complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a free press envisioned in the US Constitution.

Right before his testimony, Taibbi also published a lengthy thread on Twitter, laying out the evidence he entered into the congressional record.

According to Taibbi, Twitter acted “more like a partner” to the government, censoring based on requests it received from federal agencies as well as taxpayer-backed NGOs. Intelligence agencies, dubious “disinformation researchers” and corporate executives effectively worked as a team, he argued.

Taibbi’s thread described an “incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back,” with the same agencies inviting the same “experts” funded by the same foundations and covered by the same reporters to every panel and every conference.

He identified the key players in the censorship-industrial complex as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, authors of the infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard. Many of the NGOs involved received funding from the US government, while legacy media outlets acted as their proxies, demanding censorship.

Taibbi described the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and its “Election Integrity Partnership” – renamed the Virality Project after the 2020 election – as “perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” By its own admission, it labeled 22 million tweets during the 2020 election campaign, and was then given access to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, which is able to tackle 50 million tweets a day.

SIO is run by Renee DiResta, who helped design Hamilton68 and worked at New Knowledge – a group caught creating fake “Russian bots” to help Democrats in the 2017 Alabama special election for the US Senate. That did not stop them from advising the Senate Intelligence Committee on “Russian interference” in US elections, and the US legacy media from not questioning any of their conclusions.

“Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, [the CIC] is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality,” Taibbi wrote. “Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.”

During the hearing, multiple Democrats tried to pressure Taibbi into revealing his sources, insinuating Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, was behind the disclosures.

March 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

The US military plans to use deep fakes and take over appliances for propaganda

By Rachel Marsden | RT | March 9, 2023

Can you create cutting edge “deep fake” videos, spy on people using household appliances, and make massive data dragnets? If so, the Pentagon wants to hear from you so it can amp up its manipulation efforts.

US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) has issued proposal requests for a whole host of dodgy services, according to new documents obtained by The Intercept.

Specifically, the Pentagon is looking for “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to collect data and information from local populaces to enable a breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received.”

For what purpose? “This would enable MISO [Military Information Support Operations] to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by the local populace in relevant peer/near peer environments,” according to the document.

Despite publicly obsessing over others’ foreign interference and propaganda, Washington is now openly admitting that it is actively seeking these new technologies for its own “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.”  You know, exactly the same kind of thing, over which it drums up fear as a threat to freedom and democracy among the general public.

Earlier this year, a Washington-based advisory firm OODA published a report warning that Chinese-made household items could not only be spying on you, but basically fronting for the Chinese government. The report’s author called for the British government to act on claims that Chinese-made Internet of Things appliances, and even car components, can collect and transmit data through cellular 5G networks to Chinese companies, which could then be ordered to pass it on to the government. The story was hysterically splashed across British media.

OODA describes itself as a “global strategic advisory firm with deep DNA in global security, technology and intelligence issues.” The genetics run deep, indeed: straight to the Pentagon and Western intelligence communities where its executives, experts and advisers have past or current working relationships.

So now it looks like calls to ban Chinese household appliances for their spying potential have turned into Washington wanting to get in on the action by obtaining the best possible front row seat as you stand in front of your refrigerator at midnight, chugging chocolate milk straight from the carton.

The Pentagon also wants to be able to create “deep fake” videos that can realistically portray fake events as real, in an attempt to manipulate the target viewer(s). Or, as the Pentagon puts it, to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels in relevant peer/near peer environments.” It’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of actual fake news, yet the Pentagon wants to produce it in the way that Netflix makes movies and TV shows.

Finally, the Pentagon says that they want to get their hands on “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations and messages in relevant peer/near peer environments.”

Some might be tempted to just shrug this off as conventional practice because, when the military is tracking down bad guys, they’re obviously going to want to use every possible tool available at their disposal – and constantly seek to expand that tool box. But recent evidence suggests that military-grade collection and subversion tools targeting online and conventional information platforms have largely been turned on the average citizen for the purpose of protecting the establishment and its various narratives from dissent rather than for reasons of national security.

Last December, for example, Twitter CEO Elon Musk worked with a journalist to reveal the collusion between US government authorities and the social media platform to manipulate and censor public debate over the Covid-19 pandemic. According to internal Twitter documents, one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative. According to the journalist, David Zweig, “Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.” He added that, “With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the Twitter staff as Covid “misinformation.”

Earlier this year, a British whistleblower also revealed that critics of Covid-19-related lockdowns and vaccine mandates – including prominent journalists and politicians – were monitored by the UK army’s information warfare brigade. The 77th Brigade, created in 2015 and described by the media at the time as composed of “warriors who don’t just carry weapons, but who are also skilled in using social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the dark arts of ‘psyops’”.

The Canadian military was also caught using propaganda techniques honed on the battlefield in Afghanistan to shape the Covid debate by boosting the government’s narrative and attempting to head off any civil unrest over the harsh mandates.

The Pentagon’s latest wish list raises concerns that these tools will also be deployed on average Americans or Westerners for purposes of control and manipulation. Last September, the Pentagon vowed to review its secret psyops, but only after public outrage when a group of researchers suggested collusion between US government entities and American online platforms like Twitter and Facebook to control online narratives with fake accounts. Was the lesson learned to stop deploying psyops on average citizens? Or was it just to do a better job of keeping it secret?

Not that there’s any shortage of Western establishment cheerleaders demanding even more psychological manipulation efforts by the US government, if only to counter “disinformation” from foreign adversaries.

It seems that we’ve now come to the point where sticking it to Russia and China means actively cheerleading the increasingly militarized efforts by our self-styled defenders of freedom and democracy to brainwash their own people.

March 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment