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Facebook censors German anti-lockdown movement under new rules to prevent users from organizing & amplifying ‘harmful’ ideas

RT | September 17, 2021

No longer content to go just after bots and trolls, Facebook has established a new category of “social harm” posted by genuine users, starting with purging pages and Instagram accounts of a German anti-lockdown group Querdenken.

Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher announced the action on Thursday, saying that his team has been working for months to “expand our network disruption efforts so we can address threats that come from groups of authentic accounts coordinating on our platform to cause social harm.”

The closest his post comes to defining “social harm” is content that “calls for violence or to discredit medical science.”

Gleicher says his group has removed a network of Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages and groups “for engaging in coordinated efforts to repeatedly violate our Community Standards, including posting harmful health misinformation, hate speech and incitement to violence.”

Sharing their domains on Facebook and Instagram has been blocked as well, he added, but noted that “we aren’t banning all Querdenken content.”

The Querdenken – German for “lateral thinking” – movement is “linked to off-platform violence and other social harms,” Gleicher wrote, adding that the content posted on the banned pages “primarily focused on promoting the conspiracy that the German government’s [Covid-19] restrictions are part of a larger plan to strip citizens of their freedoms and basic rights.”

According to Facebook, the group “typically portrayed violence as the way to overturn the pandemic-related government measures limiting personal freedoms.” The group “engaged in physical violence against journalists, police and medical practitioners in Germany,” Gleicher claimed citing “public reporting.”

Police officers scuffle with a demonstrator during a protest in Berlin, Germany, on August 1, 2021. © Reuters / Christian Mang

There have been multiple mass protests against coronavirus lockdowns in Germany, with the authorities denouncing them as the work of the “far-right,” neo-Nazis and other extremists. While the UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer raised concerns about police brutality in dispersing the demonstrations, last month, Berlin police responded that violence is “still part of our legal system.”

“Direct enforcement is violence. Violence harms. Violence hurts. Violence looks violent,” Berlin police spokesperson Thilo Cablitz told DPA last month.

Facebook has cracked down hard on “debunked” and “false” claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, loosely defined as anything that contradicts the guidance by the World Health Organization or national health authorities. It stopped censoring the claim that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China back in May, however, citing “new facts and trends” that emerged.

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

And now the feds are taking over the distribution of monocloncal antibodies

By Meryl Nass, MD | September 16, 2021

From the WaPo we learn there is a shortage of monoclonal antibodies, so the feds will take over distribution.  Hmm. We don’t know anything about long-term side effects of monoclonals.

Monoclonal antibodies are an effective and very expensive product if used in the first week of illness–just like hydroxychloroquine, which the feds (and most states) have restricted. Will this move restrict monoclonals too? Why are the feds buying monoclonals to dole out for free but not letting us have HCQ and ivermectin? Does it have anything to do with the fact they are injected?

And of course the feds defend the move with the “equity” argument.

The Biden administration moved this week to stave off shortages of monoclonal antibodies, taking over distribution of the critical covid-19 therapy and purchasing 1.4 million additional doses…

“HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis,” an HHS spokesman said. “State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe new procedures that are still being explained to communities throughout the country.

“This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country, providing states and territories with consistent, fairly distributed supply over the coming weeks,” he added.

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

The Escape and Capture of Zakaria Zubeidi

By Israel Shamir | Unz Review | September 16, 2021

Heroes are rare; they are tragic and inspiring at the same time. Such a real-life hero is Zakaria Zubeidi, 45, from Jenin in Palestine. A man of brawn and brain, of sword and harp, he was an al Aqsa Brigade commander as well as the director of the Freedom Theatre. Years ago, the Sunday Times called him ‘one of Israel’s most wanted and implacable enemies’. A cat of nine lives, he survived many Israeli assassination attempts; he had been in and out of jail many times; he got his first Israeli bullet at 13; his film premiere at 14.

A few days ago, he staged an audacious escape from Israel’s high security prison, together with five other convicts. They dug a 20 yard-long tunnel with their spoons, just like the Count of Monte Cristo, and emerged outside the walls, squeezing through a narrow communication channel. This brave, nay impossible feat encouraged the captive Palestinians and gave them a second wind when they were exhausted and desperate. The people in the Holy Land and the large Palestinian diaspora held its collective breath following their escape and prayed for them to reach safety.

It is normal for humans to empathise with fugitives, rather than pursuers. Young readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin thus followed the plight of Eliza, child in tow, crossing the frozen Ohio River from bondage to freedom, escaping the murderous dogs and slave catchers. Alas, Zakaria never reached the safe shore. In the Dixie of the 1830s, there were courageous and noble white people who harboured the runaway black slaves. Germans and Russians, Poles and Frenchmen provided refuge for the Jews that escaped from the camps. In Israel 2021, not a single Jew offered the fugitives water and food nor helped a Palestinian runaway; everyone who saw them immediately informed police, said the authorities. In a few days, four starved prisoners were hunted down, beaten up and taken back to jail; two are still at large.

I saw on Israeli TV news four shackled prisoners in the court. Zakaria had been badly beaten. His capturers broke his ribs and jaw, while he was already handcuffed. His face was grim and stern like that of a suffering Christ before the crooked court of Synedrion. It was a sad sight, the return of the hero to the dark dungeons of the Jewish state. But then, he was born and brought up under the occupation. His story is the story of the cheated generation that came to the fore after the great betrayal.

In 1993, the State of Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo accords; this agreement certified by handshake on the White House lawn promised Palestinians full independence after five years of transition. The Jews reneged on the deal. While individual Jews can be honest and honourable; as a collective they are extremely untrustworthy. It comes from a Jewish superiority complex, of a refusal to obey the rules established for lesser species; of feeling they can do whatever they find expedient. Fair play is not a Jewish idea at all.

The Palestinians, swindled by Israel, had nobody to turn to; they responded by initiating the Second Intifada, the rising taking place in 2000. It was the pivotal event for Zakaria’s generation; for me, too. I was radicalised by the Intifada, by the dishonesty and cruelty of the Jewish state and by the courage of Palestinian resisters. In 2001, I began writing in English to an international audience; next year, in 2002, I entered the church, parting with Jewry.

The Jews became radicalised, too: The support of US Jewry for the 9/11 narrative and for the War on Terror can’t be understood outside of this context: the Oslo accords, reneging on Oslo, the Intifada and 9/11 are links of one chain. Before 9/11, Jews were condemned for reneging on Oslo and for the bloody suppression of the Intifada. After 9/11 they could smash the Palestinians with all their might. For young men like Zakaria even survival was problematic.

Zakaria deserves a Plutarch to write up his life, but I’ll do what I can, until a Plutarch comes along. Zakaria was born and grew up in the Jenin Refugee Camp, a place where the expelled Palestinians from Haifa’s Carmel were corralled in 1948 by the victorious Jews. His father was an English language teacher; he died rather young, leaving his widow and their eight children to survive.

Zakaria was 11, when the First Intifada began. It was a spontaneous protest, caused by the enclosure of common Palestinian lands and their transfer to Jewish settlers. Jewish lawyers, predominantly ladies of liberal persuasion, applied the English 16th century idea of ‘enclosure of the commons’ and claimed all commonly held lands as belonging to Jews only. In England this policy caused ‘enclosure riots’; as it did in Palestine. In response to Jewish land grabbing, unarmed peasants took the nearest handy stone and threw it at Jewish settlers’ cars. The Jews replied with fire. Hundreds of unarmed Palestinians were shot and killed. The children suffered most.

Instead of being cowed, the camp boys like Zakaria took the danger in their stride. The daredevils would throw stones at invading jeeps like the 13-year old boy, Farris Odeh did. Farris was the Palestinian kid we saw throwing stones at Israeli tanks with the nonchalance of a village boy chasing away a ferocious dog. It was a dangerous game: the famous picture of Farris was taken on October 29, and a week later, on 8th of November, a Jewish sniper murdered him in cold blood. Boys like Zakaria lived dangerously in the camp. The Israeli army treated refugee camps as their hunting ground. They would drive in on their Jeeps and shoot around, terrorising children and grown ups. Chris Hedges, of the New York Times, wrote of their modus operandi in his Gaza Diary, published in Harper’s magazine: “the refugee camp … is still and peaceful. Children play with scrap-paper kites and ragged soccer balls. Suddenly two IDF jeeps with loudspeakers pull up. They immediately taunt the boys with obscenities, luring them up to the fence. Then [a] percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than 10 or 11 years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me… The soldiers shoot; the bullets from the M-16s tumble end over end through the children’s slight bodies. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

Karni crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip, on the outskirts of Gaza city, Oct. 29, 2000. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours)

In similar circumstances, 13-year-old Zakaria had been shot by a Jewish soldier. The bullet entered his leg; he spent six months in hospital and went through multiple operations. He remains lame to this very day. The soldier has never been tried or punished for shooting a child, but a Jewish soldier is practically never tried or punished for wounding or murdering a Palestinian child, and there are thousands of murdered children.

As Zakaria recuperated, his mother (who was a great believer in peaceful coexistence with Israeli Jews) invited a new theatre company to do rehearsals at her home. She gave them the upper floor of their house, fed them and helped them. It was a children’s theatre, performed by camp children and for camp children, organized by an unusual person, Arna Mer. This Jewish communist lady “betrayed her people” (as many Jews were prone to say) and married an Arab, an Orthodox Christian Palestinian Arab, also a communist, even a prominent member of Communist Party. They called their son Sputnik, as a sign of their love for the Soviet Union, the beacon of light for such liberation movements. Eventually Sputnik found his name too exotic, and changed it to ‘Juliano Mer’. He became a friend of Zakaria. Together they acted on stage; the company consisted of six or eight children. The theatre was called The Stone Theatre. It was around 1988-89, at the height of the First Intifada, the rising that convinced Israel to seek an accommodation and enter Oslo accords with Palestinian leadership.

Years later, Juliano Mer made a film Arna’s Children, based on their memories and video archive. It turned out that the majority of the young actors were killed by Jews by that time. Zakaria’s mother was also killed by a Jewish sniper, shot through the window, while she was at home. One hour later, the same sniper shot her elder son and killed him. Their house, which had served as a home for the Stone Theatre, was bulldozed together with many other homes in Jenin.

Jenin was the place for a Jewish onslaught on the Palestinians in 2002. Recently the Israeli court banned Jenin, Jenin, a film about these fateful events, but you still can find it on Bitchute. Zakaria was a great fighter; he became the commander of Jenin’s Al Aqsa Brigade. He survived four assassination attempts by the Israelis: in 2004, they murdered five Palestinians, including a 14-year-old child, while targeting a vehicle suspected of carrying Zakaria. On another occasion they killed 9 Palestinians, but Zakaria escaped.

Zakaria became widely known and respected in the West Bank and even in Israel. He was befriended by Yasser Arafat; he supported the election of Mahmud Abbas, Arafat’s successor. An Israeli woman, Tali Fahima, came to Jenin to support Zakaria and serve as his human shield. Israel arrested her in 2004 and she spent three years in prison for ‘aiding a terrorist organization’. After her release, she converted to Islam having become totally disillusioned by the massive Jewish support for the bloody punitive actions against Palestinians. Zakaria, who spoke perfect Hebrew and had many Israeli friends, was also disappointed by the Israeli Jewish Left. None defended him during these terrible years, despite all the efforts of his late mother to build relations with Israelis.

However, the uprising was defeated. And Zakaria continued his struggle by other means, establishing, together with Juliano Mer, his childhood friend, a new and bigger theatre company, the Freedom Theatre of Jenin. It is still around, and even prospers, though Zakaria is now in jail, and Juliano Mer was killed by unknown assassins. In 2007, Zakaria accepted the amnesty offered by Israelis to the Fatah fighters, though by its conditions he couldn’t leave Jenin. He abided by the amnesty conditions, but it didn’t help him: a few years later, Israel rescinded the amnesty. In 2019, Zakaria was caught and sent to jail for life.

He would rot in jail like other prisoners, and every second Palestinian of his generation had been in an Israeli jail for some part of his life. But then, the audacious breakout brought his name back to our awareness. He returned hope into the hearts of the Palestinians and their friends, but alas, for a short time.

It happened exactly twenty years after 9/11, the event that empowered the Jews to smash Palestinian resistance. Nowadays, the Jews can do whatever they want with their captive goyim. People aren’t even allowed to object. At the recent Tokyo Olympic games, an Algerian judoka Fethi Nourine refused to pair with an Israeli sportsman, saying his support for the Palestinian cause made it impossible for him to compete against an Israeli. The International Judo Federation promptly suspended the brave Algerian for ten years.

In the discourse, the Jews possess an unassailable position, and whoever demurs finds himself jobless and castigated as a ‘bigot’. Every time I post an item about Palestine, Facebook’s Zuckerberg bans me for a week. Never was Jewish dominance so complete. Before 9/11, the right wing was traditionally anti-Jewish. Nowadays, the European and American nationalist Right accept the rules of the game. It’s hard to find a ‘fascist’ or ‘white nationalist’ who doesn’t worship Israel. The Jewish ‘left’ in Israel avidly supports the current Israeli Prime Minister Bennett who is as strong a Jewish chauvinist as has ever held this position; and Bennett says openly that Palestinians will never be free.

And we also have lost our freedom. Freedom to roam the land, freedom to have and voice our opinion. Freedom to refuse a dubious ‘medical’ treatment. What 9/11 started, Corona completed. We are all Palestinians now.

However, as I watched the stern Christ-like face of Zakaria Zubeidi in the courtroom, I thought that despite all efforts of the Synedrion, the suffering and crucified Christ came back to life. So will Palestine. So will the World. Resurrection is as inevitable as Death, and it beats Death.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Two of the Captured Detainees Report Torture, one Hospitalized

IMEMC | September 16, 2021

Lawyers for two of the Palestinian prisoners who managed to escape Israeli prison on September 6, on Wednesday, confirmed that the escapees have suffered torture at the hands of the Israeli forces, the Associated Press (AP) has revealed.

For the first time, since they were captured, on September 11, lawyers were permitted to interview two of the detainees.

Attorney with the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) Raslan Mahajna, met with political prisoner Mahmoud al-‘Arda, one of the six Palestinians who escaped from Israeli prison, who informed him of the harsh details of interrogation and the systematic denial of basic human needs.

Detainee Mahmoud al-‘Arda

Israeli human rights lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, told AP that his client, Zakariyya Zobeidi, said that security forces handcuffed him, asked him his name, and when he stated “Zakariyya”, they proceeded to brutally assault him, causing him two rib fractures and a fractured jaw.

Feldman added; “They didn’t have any intention to commit any kind of terrorist attack.”

On September 12, one day after his capture, the health condition of Zobeidi, 46, deteriorated, so he was transferred to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for medical treatment, according to Hasan Abed Rabbo, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Detainees Affairs Commission.

Detainee Zakariyya Zobeida
~ AP, WAFA

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

The Meaning of the FDA Resignations

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | September 14, 2021

How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters? This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.

The booster has already been promoted by top lockdown advocates Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts – and their perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts in charge deserve our trust and deference.

What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.

From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.

The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the virus continues to be a problem.

All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.

At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.

Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but gradually mandatory, just as with each previous protocol began as a recommendation until it was mandated.

At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts of people who dare cite dissenting science.

The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out of all the other strategies that had failed.

That did not happen.

Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common view in the summer of 2021.

That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by the vaccine.

The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly scheduled boosters forever.

Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause. They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for October and November.

The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for anyone in a position like that to resign over a principled matter of science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something else was up.

These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state governors who disagree with him.

This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of their professional training is about assessing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away before they dropped a bombshell.

The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.

Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can save face, or so many believe.

The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another.

The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.

The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)

Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable, especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”

From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks, restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are surrounded by the carnage they created.

The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months. Not in our lifetimes has a policy failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just begun.

In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened. The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant. That is no longer believable. They cannot delay the inevitable for much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who embarked on this political experiment in the first place.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

An Evil Rationalization on Afghanistan

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 15, 2021

One of the arguments that interventionists, including many U.S. military veterans, use to rationalize the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan is that U.S. forces were fighting to bring “freedom, democracy, and women’s rights” to the country. In fact, the Pentagon even coined the term “Operation Enduring Freedom” as one of the ways to justify the invasion and occupation of the country. Even though the effort failed, the argument goes, interventionists, including veterans, should nonetheless feel good about their “service” to both America and Afghanistan.

There is a problem with this rationale and justification, however. The problem is that it is evil to the core.

In any invasion and occupation, there are inevitably going to be people killed, injured, and maimed. There is also going to be destruction of homes, business, and infrastructure. That certainly proved to be the case in Afghanistan.

Therefore, what interventionists were — and are — saying is that all those deaths, injuries, and property destruction were worth bringing freedom, democracy, and women’s rights to Afghanistan.

But who died and made these people the arbiters of that type of mathematical life-and-death calculation? After all, those who were killed in the process would never have experienced freedom, democracy, and women’s rights. That’s because they would be dead.

Now, it’s one thing for the citizens of a country to decide for themselves whether to revolt against the tyranny of their own government. Violent revolutions can be very costly in terms of life and property. That’s why people might decide to put up with a lot of tyranny before they revolt. They don’t want to lose their family members, friends, and countrymen by revolting, until the situation gets so bad that they feel that they have no choice but to do so. In the final analysis, the decision to revolt and when to revolt can be highly subjective.

But that’s a far cry from U.S. officials making that decision from afar. Their decision is a cavalier one because they don’t put the same value on Afghan life that the Afghan people do. In fact, interventionists put little or no value on Afghan life. That mindset is reflected by the fact that early in the invasion and occupation, the Pentagon, with the full support of Washington, D.C., officials, made the conscious decision to not even keep track of how many Afghans they were killing. Moreover, there was never an upward limit on the number of Afghan people who could be killed, injured or maimed in the effort to bring freedom, democracy, and women’s rights to the country. It just didn’t matter. Any number of Afghan people killed in the effort would be considered worth it by U.S. interventionists. 

That’s why the purported concern that U.S. interventionists, including many U.S. military veterans, express for the Afghan people rings hollow, given that they were willing to kill or maim any number of Afghans to reach their political goal.

How many Afghan lives were worth the U.S. effort to bring “freedom, democracy, and women’s rights” to Afghanistan? None! It was never morally or religiously justified for the U.S. government to kill even one single Afghan citizen for the sake of a political goal. Killing, injuring, or maiming even just one single Afghan, much less tens of thousands of Afghans, for the sake of “freedom, democracy, and women’s rights” has always been the epitome of evil. 

September 15, 2021 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

As BoJo prepares Britain for another winter of Covid restrictions, it’s still not enough for the hardliners

By Neil Clark | RT | September 15, 2021

The UK government’s ‘Winter Plan’ for Covid is likely to mean the attempted introduction of vaccine passports and more lockdowns. It’s all a far cry from the freedom we were promised would come with mass vaccination.

Suppose someone had told you back in March 2020, that, 18 months later, despite two-thirds of the population being double-vaccinated, Britain would be facing the prospect of another depressing autumn and winter of Covid restrictions and lockdowns?

Well, there were people back then who warned such things would happen, that life would never be allowed to get back to the ‘old’ normal and that the governing, globalist elite was working to a different plan that had little to do with countering a virus. These people were denounced as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crackpots’. Yet, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s unveiling of yesterday’s ‘Winter Plan’ for England, it seems the ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crackpots’ have got it right once again.

Plan A is learning to live with Covid. But this doesn’t mean living totally normally. There will still be border restrictions. We’ll still be urged – some would say coerced – to get the booster jab and to have our kids vaccinated too (even though, less than a fortnight ago, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation didn’t recommend it). We’ll still be encouraged to wear masks in certain settings.

Yet for all its downsides, life under Plan A is still better than the alternative, Plan B. This “toolkit” includes the return of mandatory masks, and the introduction of jab-only vaccine passports for large events, which could be extended to other gatherings too. And, most revealingly of all, further lockdowns are not ruled out, despite the disastrous impact they have had on both the economy and on society.

Let’s be clear what we are dealing with here: it’s psychological warfare on an industrial scale. The semblance of normality that Plan A gives us can be withdrawn at very short notice and Plan B – or parts of it – will be put into operation if ‘cases’ surge and the NHS comes under “unsustainable pressure.” But the NHS comes under pressure every winter, meaning Plan B is actually Plan A. Plan B is clearly what the government really wants to implement, but Johnson knows that, to keep disgruntled Tory backbenchers on side, he can’t do so straightaway.

Hospitals are nearly always close to capacity in December and January. Inevitably, once the flu/cold season starts up again in October, and with mass testing still in place, we’ll see a rise in ‘cases’, which will then see Johnson reach for his “toolkit.” That will be preceded by the usual doomladen and ludicrously over-the-top predictions from ‘modellers’ and ‘advisers’ of what will happen if the Prime Minister fails to ‘act’.

‘Something must be done!’ will be the cry from those who will lose nothing financially from another lockdown.

In fact, the calls for an immediate return of restrictions have already begun. A headline on the BBC News website reads, “Hospital Covid cases may see big jump, say experts.” The piece refers to how the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee modelling “suggested” hospitalisation could reach 2,000 to 7,000 per day next month.

We’ve been here before. Lots of times. Only a few months ago, there were dire predictions from ‘modellers’ and ‘experts’ of what would happen if restrictions were lifted in England in July. A member of Independent SAGE – which is even more hardline than SAGE – said the UK could face cases of more than 100,000 a day if lockdown easing went ahead. Well, lockdown easing did go ahead, and guess what? Cases fell. From 43,910 cases (on a seven-day average) on July 16 to 23,002 by the end of the month.

We’re meant, though, to have the memory of a gnat and to have forgotten how wrong the ‘modellers’ have consistently been, and to be terrified once again by their latest ‘predictions’, which make Private Frazer of 1970s sitcom ‘Dad’s Army’ fame – whose catchphrase was “We’re doomed!” – sound like the world’s greatest optimist.

With all the sensationalist ‘cases set to surge this autumn unless restrictions are re-imposed’ headlines, I expect that, straight after next month’s Tory Party conference – and after the Coronavirus Act has been renewed for another six months – Johnson will reach for his “toolkit” and bring back mandatory masks. Then, a few weeks after that, it’ll be ‘accept jab-only vaccine passports or we’ll have to do another lockdown’.

But hang on a minute… weren’t the vaccines meant to put an end to all of this? “15 million jabs to freedom” was the famous headline in the Daily Mail last 27 December. Yet with 66% of the population double-vaxxed – and around 90% of those deemed the most ‘vulnerable’ having had their jabs – we have more ‘cases’ and deaths with Covid than we did this time last year, when no one was vaccinated. How come?

On ‘Good Morning Britain’, Richard Madeley, a proper ‘old-school’ journalist asked this emperor’s new clothes question to Dr Hilary Jones. Jones struggled to answer and kept muttering about cases being higher this year. But if the vaccines work so well, and so many people have been vaccinated, why are we even talking of having more restrictions this autumn and winter? Either the vaccines work or they don’t. If they work, then there’s no need to discuss restrictions. If they don’t, then why push them?

The government line is we need more jabs and a “toolkit” of restrictions too. More lockdowns as a “last resort,” if cases surge, “to protect the NHS.” And vaccine passports too – without a negative-test or prior-infection option – even though we know the vaccines don’t prevent transmission.

Like the autumn and winter of 2020-21, this coming ‘winter of discontent’, of fear and dread, and restrictions being imposed or re-imposed at a moment’s notice, is meant to be our ‘new normal’. Which means this will only end when people realise it’s never meant to end.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.

September 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Viral Reality Check – What’s going on, but with real logic and science

Ivor Cummins | September 13, 2021

Quick update on the evolving irrationality of our viral issue – couple of links below that were mentioned:
Revealing talk on one major reason WHY science died in early 2020:  https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/Ernst-Wolff—Uncovering-the-Corona-Narrative—Aug-2021:8

Also our Covid Chronicles movie latest update here:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/capecrusaders/the-covid-chronicles/posts/3279184

NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W

September 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Javid: “Healthcare Staff Facing Mandatory Covid & Flu Jabs”

By Richie Allen | September 14, 2021

Speaking in the House of Commons this morning, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that a consultation has been launched over making Covid and flu vaccinations mandatory for front-line healthcare and social care workers in England.

Javid said that while he’s keeping an open mind until he sees the results of the consultation, he believes that:

“It is highly likely that front-line NHS staff and those working in wider social care settings will also have to be vaccinated to protect those around them and this will be an important step in protecting those at greatest risk”.

Tyranny just rolls off the tongues of these fascists doesn’t it? Nobody cares though. There wasn’t so much as a murmur from the Labour Party benches, the so-called party of the working man and woman.

The Health Secretary had just threatened hundreds of thousands of people who work in the nation’s hospitals and care homes, that if they don’t take his medicine, they’ll be out of a job. Not a peep from Labour.

Javid was laying out his plans for tackling covid and flu this Winter. On flu, he said that in the next few weeks we will see the launch of the largest flu vaccination campaign the country has ever seen.

He said that people will also be encouraged to meet outdoors where possible, and try to let in fresh air when meeting indoors.

He also said that people will be encouraged to wear face masks in crowded areas where they can come into contact with others they don’t normally meet. This was greeted by jeers from his Tory colleagues on the backbenches.

I never believed for a moment, that we would ever see the back of the arbitrary measures introduced to tackle covid. I said many times on The Richie Allen Show that we’d be living with these measures and more forever. I hate being right.

September 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

You’re liable for vaccine harm, Euro MPs are warned

TCW Defending Freedom – September 14, 2021

DOCTORS yesterday warned Euro MPs that they will be held personally responsible for harm and death caused by Covid vaccines.

Doctors for Covid Ethics, a group of doctors and scientists from 30 countries, sent letters to all European Parliament members giving notice of liability.

They sent the same letter to Emer Cooke, executive director of the European Medicines Agency.

Their action came as the parliament resumed business with a debate on health and prevention of disease, which will be voted on today.

The notice, served with supporting documentation, read: ‘The rush to vaccinate first and research later has left you in a position whereby Covid-19 vaccination policy is now entirely divorced from the relevant evidence-base.

‘As you consider your next steps in mandating a vaccine that is contra-indicated by science, we draw your attention to recently published Freedom of Information requests, which reveal gross negligence in the Covid vaccine authorisation process, including misleading the Commission on Human Medicines as to whether any independent verification of vaccine trial data had occurred.’

Doctors for Covid Ethics describes itself as an organisation of hundreds of doctors and scientists from all corners of the globe.

Its website says: ‘We have written three letters to the European Medicines Agency, urgently warning of short term and long term dangers from Covid-19 vaccines, including clotting, bleeding and platelet abnormalities. We first began warning of blood-related risks before media reports of clotting led to vaccine suspensions around the world.

‘In the absence of crucial safety data, we are demanding the immediate withdrawal of all experimental gene-based Covid-19 vaccines.

‘We oppose vaccine passports, which threaten public health and violate Nuremberg and other protections. We are warning that “health passes” place coercive pressure on citizens to submit to dangerous medical experimentation, in return for freedoms that once were human rights.’

September 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Most Americans say Biden’s vaccine mandates for companies set bad precedent – poll

RT | September 13, 2021

The majority of Americans oppose President Biden’s vaccine mandate for employees of mid-size or larger companies, according to a recent poll which found many doubt his authority to impose such a rule and fear it will be abused.

Nearly six in ten (58.6%) Americans polled over the weekend believe the president lacks “constitutional authority” to force private businesses to mandate that employees receive vaccination against Covid-19, according to the Trafalgar Group, which published the results of its survey on Monday. Just 29.7% argued he did have the authority, while 11.7% were unsure.

The White House plans to roll out the vaccination mandate announced last week through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a subsidiary agency of the Department of Labor. Under the proposed rule, any business with 100 or more employees must require its workers to be vaccinated or receive weekly Covid-19 testing. The mandate is expected to affect as many as 100 million Americans.

Opinions regarding the president’s authority or lack thereof were strongly split along party lines, with 54.9% of Democrats agreeing Biden did in fact have the power to order private businesses to demand their employees be vaccinated. Among Republicans, however, 83.5% believed the president was overstepping his authority, and more than two thirds of independents and those with no party affiliation (68.2%) agreed Biden lacked the ability to make such demands.

Similarly, the vast majority of Republicans – 79.5% – believed the vaccine mandate set a dangerous precedent that “could be abused by future presidents on other issues,” an opinion shared by 58% of non-affiliated voters and even 30.4% of Democrats. The majority of those hailing from Biden’s party, however (54.4%), did not believe the mandate would be abused by future leaders.

Biden’s announcement on Thursday regarding the pending vaccine mandate has polarized the nation, with even many fully vaccinated Americans balking at using government muscle to force a controversial medical treatment on unwilling individuals. Several Republican governors have vowed not to enforce the mandate, a show of defiance which won support from 55.1% of the poll’s respondents. Some 40.1% opposed the governors’ efforts to block Biden’s mandates, however. Party affiliation heavily predicted whether one supported or opposed the dissident governors, with the majority of unaffiliated voters (62.3%) also supporting the governors who had vowed to block the mandate.

No timeframe has yet been unveiled for the mandate to take effect, though the White House has hinted OSHA will deliver the order “in the coming weeks.” There has been little discussion of exemptions, medical or otherwise, and the matter of who will be expected to pay for weekly testing for those who refuse vaccination remains up in the air. Companies that fail to heed the mandate have been threatened with enforcement fees of $14,000 per violation.

Conducted in partnership with the Convention of States Action, the poll surveyed 1,098 likely general election voters.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 and ‘Politician’s Logic’

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | September 13, 2021

Freddie Sayers, the host of UnHerd’s ‘Lockdown TV’, has written an interesting piece for The Telegraph. Commenting on the Government’s insistence that we must vaccinate 12–15 year olds – in defiance of its own expert panel – he notes that a “dangerous new wisdom is forming, which views action as always better than inaction”.

“In this view,” Sayers continues, “long-standing rules and institutions of liberal democracies have been demoted to fussy obstacles that prevent us from replicating the successes of the command-and-control governments of Asia.”

He then makes the important but often overlooked point that “action can be every bit as damaging as inaction”. If only politicians had taken this into account last year, the response to the pandemic might have looked very different.

When I asked Philippe Lemoine why lockdowns were implemented with so little regard for costs, he suggested that politicians didn’t want to “leave themselves open to the accusation of not having done anything to curb the epidemic”. They had to do something, even if that something ended up causing more harm than good.

This fallacy was popularised by the much-loved British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister. In the episode ‘Power to the People’, Sir Humphrey Appleby is talking to his predecessor Sir Arnold Robinson about the Prime Minister’s plans to reform local government.

Sir Arnold says, “He’s suffering from politician’s logic,” to which Sir Humphrey replies, “Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.” In other words: ‘Something must be done; lockdown is something; therefore we must do it.’

The incentives that gave rise to ‘politician’s logic’ in this case are obvious. While the ‘benefits’ of lockdown are immediate and visible, the costs may take months or even years to materialise. (By ‘benefits’, I mean the reduction in social and economic activity that is believed to reduce viral transmission.)

Furthermore, even if lockdown’s impact on mortality turns out to be marginal, politicians can claim that things would have been far worse if not for their tough and far-sighted decisions.

After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown. And the politicians themselves? They may well be out of office by the time the full costs of lockdown become apparent.

Incidentally, the fact that ‘politician’s logic’ is a fallacy obviously doesn’t imply we should never do anything. In the case of the pandemic, there was something else we could have done, namely focused protection.

Let’s hope that when the next pandemic arrives, there are a few people around who remember the lessons of Yes, Prime Minister. Just because this is something, doesn’t mean we have to do it.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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