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Social media misinformation ‘killing people,’ Biden says, as White House doubles down on private censorship

RT | July 16, 2021

US President Joe Biden claimed social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about Covid-19, as his press secretary Jen Psaki made a case for deplatforming ‘offenders’ across the ostensibly private networks.

“They’re killing people,” Biden told reporters who asked him to send a message to platforms like Facebook. “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” he shouted, over the noise of a helicopter outside the White House on Friday.

On Thursday, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory against health “misinformation,” calling it “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.” He defined it as information that is “false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence” and claimed 67% of unvaccinated Americans had heard at least one “myth” about Covid-19 vaccines.

At the same press conference, Psaki admitted the government was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook,” causing a stir among some civil libertarians.

Insisting that it was these ostensibly private companies doing the censorship and not the federal government – thereby trying to dodge the thorny issue of the First Amendment – Psaki then doubled down on Friday, saying that platforms should coordinate their rules and terms of service so that a person “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others… for providing misinformation out there.”

Her announcement raised more than a few eyebrows across the political spectrum. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, responsible for publishing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, called the entire line of White House thinking “pernicious.”

Psaki was “issuing decrees on who should and shouldn’t be allowed to use social media, then smugly scoffing at the notion that this should concern anyone on the ground that we’re going to die if we don’t submit to the White House’s orders,” Greenwald added, summarizing her exchange with Fox News’ Peter Doocy.

In a video making rounds on social media, Psaki tells Doocy that everyone, including journalists, ought to be more concerned about “the number of people who are dying around the country” due to misinformation rather than any Big Brother-like behavior by the government. When he argued the opposite, she replied, “That feels unlikely to me.”

“We don’t take anything down… Facebook makes decisions,” she insisted.

Asked politely by Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics to explain how often and how long the White House has been flagging “misinformation,” and if she could define it, Psaki responded with generalizations and claims that all this information is “publicly available” on social networks.

Psaki’s remarks amounted to an admission that the government is coordinating with private corporations to ban people from social media, podcast host Jack Murphy pointed out, calling it “literal fascism before our eyes.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was conspicuously silent about this threat to freedom of expression, Greenwald noted, and was instead tweeting about transgender issues.

Meanwhile, a UK-based nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed the White House relied on their research in identifying the people producing alleged “misinformation,” and promoted their CEO Imran Ahmed’s TV appearance in which he spoke about online “superspreaders.”

CCDH first drew attention in June 2020, when NBC – one of the big three broadcast TV networks in the US – cited their research in a story trying to pressure Google into demonetizing the blog ZeroHedge and the conservative-leaning online magazine Federalist.

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

US Surgeon General advises “clear consequences” for online “misinformation super-spreaders”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 16, 2021

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released its general Covid advisory on “confronting health misinformation” signed by US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

For the purposes of the advisory, health misinformation is defined as information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading “according to the best available evidence at the time.”

And among those who are urged and given suggestions on how to act to suppress this kind of information are technology platforms, who are advised to devise “clear consequences” for users who are branded as “misinformation super-spreaders.”

Technology platforms are told to assess the benefits and harms of their platforms and products, and then “take responsibility for addressing the harms.”

And those who are found to be “super-spreaders” and “repeat offenders” in posting misinformation should be faced with “clear consequences” that tech platforms are supposed to devise and impose on their users.

Tech companies are also expected to commit to long-term investments for the purpose combating misinformation that can include changing their products – such as redesigning recommendation algorithms. The idea here is to tweak these algorithms so that unwanted medical information is down ranked and difficult to discover.

The surgeon general also wants tech platforms to put more “frictions” in place – like labels and warnings that now appear on many social media posts in order to dissuade users from interacting with the content in question, or direct them towards “trusted sources.”

Next, unspecified researchers should be given access to Big Tech’s data so that they can learn “what people see and hear, not just what they engage with.” Another reason is for “researchers” to be sure how platforms are moderating and censoring content – some methods mentioned are labeling, removing, and downranking.

Privacy is also paid lip service in a remark that says user data “can be” anonymized while provided with user consent – but the advisory is not explicit that this “must be” the case.

And not all medical (mis)information is happening in English, so these US platforms are recommended to “increase staffing of multilingual content moderation teams and improve the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms in languages other than English.”

The advisory also wants platforms to amplify, i.e. direct users even more aggressively towards “trusted and credible sources” and those who are accepted as experts.

Then there’s – as the advisory phrased it – the “unintended consequences” of censorship. And that’s not about free speech suppression or anything similar – it’s “migration of users to less-moderated platforms.”

And that is another thing, the US surgeon general writes, that tech platforms should “work to understand.”

July 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Israel exploits case of Mexico official wanted for torture, murder for diplomatic gain

MEMO | July 15, 2021

The notorious case of former top Mexican official wanted in connection with the torture, abduction and murder of 43 students, and for embezzling $50 million of state funds, has become mired in a diplomatic tussle between Israel and Mexico over the occupation state’s treatment of Palestinians.

Tomás Zerón de Lucio, the former director of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI, fled to Israel following the opening of an investigation into his role in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping, which continues to cause a storm in Mexico to this day. Zeron headed the criminal investigation, but his report was discredited after it was discovered that crucial testimony was obtained under torture, evidence was mishandled and promising leads ignored.

Zeron has dismissed the charges and has been seeking political asylum in Israel, where he has lived for nearly two years. Mexican officials say that Zeron has connections to powerful Israeli companies that helped him flee Mexico.

Allegations against the former official also include the embezzlement of $50 million worth of state funds. While in office, Zeron is said to have authorised the purchase of tens of millions of dollars in surveillance systems from private Israeli intelligence firms including the notorious Pegasus software developed by Israel’s NSO Group. The software has been used to target journalists, lawyers and activists in several countries around the globe. It’s claimed that in some cases the intelligence gear purchased by Zeron were never delivered.

Mexico has demanded the extradition of Zeron. Israel however has not acted on either the extradition request or the asylum claims and is said to be looking for ways to squeeze diplomatic concessions out of the highly sensitive case.

Senior Israeli officials were cited in the New York Times saying that Zeron’s extradition case was being slow-walked as “tit-for-tat diplomacy” against Mexico, which has supported United Nations inquiries into allegations of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. “Why would we help Mexico?” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to offer a candid view of a diplomatic dispute.

The senior Israeli official said that the current Mexican government has repeatedly supported resolutions criticising Israel at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, including decisions to investigate Israel’s killing of Palestinian protesters in Gaza in 2018 and the killing of civilians in the besieged enclave during the occupation state’s latest onslaught.

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , , , | Leave a comment

Governments are using credit card purchase data as “contact tracing’ COVID surveillance

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 16, 2021

The ongoing “war on cash” that far preceded the pandemic, whose goal is to steer people towards using traceable forms of payment, is coming in very handy in the COVID era precisely for the reason the policy is criticized in the first place – it makes it easy for authorities to keep tabs on individuals who use card transactions.

Reports now mention instances of Australian residents receiving a mandate to quarantine after using their credit card to pay at an establishment, where somebody known to be infected with the virus had stayed.

Credit card receipts led back to the person that was then forced to self-isolate (although they did not have coronavirus) – and apparently led the person to consider what, if anything, is left of their privacy in a world where more and more people leave long “data trails” behind them.

Stop-gap measures like switching to alternative browsers etc (while probably running it on Windows) aside – the takeaway is that the only way to regain some privacy in the world of mass surveillance and tracking is to turn to alternatives – but do it consistently, and be prepared to pay for the privilege of removing oneself from the closed ecosystems like those ruled with an iron fist by Google, Apple, or Microsoft.

As for using card transactions to do COVID contact tracing, Australia is far from being the only country that is doing it. In fact, those lauded as most successful in even getting their contact tracing efforts off the ground, like South Korea, pioneered the practice. Data surveillance, reports said, was used by authorities there to make sure that people who were either unable or unwilling to share their every move are eventually forced into doing it.

Australia has “distinguished” itself for being willing to jeopardize people’s privacy with a series of COVID surveillance and control measures over the past 18 months, and last November, the National Contact Tracing Review, whose chair is Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, recommended using consumer credit card data for track and trace purposes.

But what about privacy? Privacy rules will apply – until they don’t, seems to be the gist of it.

“Privacy rules will apply,” the Review said, but then added, “and in some jurisdictions legislative change may be required.”

July 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Spain’s Top Court Rules That Lockdown Was Unconstitutional

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | July 14, 2021

Spain’s top court has ruled that the country’s national COVID-19 lockdown was unconstitutional following a lawsuit filed by the populist Vox party.

“While leaving intact most of the state of emergency’s terms, the court said that the key articles ordering the population off the streets except for shorts trips for shopping and unavoidable commutes for work and other official business were unconstitutional,” reports the Associated Press.

“According to TVE, the ruling said that the limitations on movement violated citizens´ basic rights and therefore the state of emergency was insufficient to give them constitutional backing. The six magistrates said that a state of exception, which does allow the government to suspend basic rights, would have been necessary.”

During the first six weeks of the lockdown, stay at home measures were so strict that Spaniards weren’t even allowed to go outside to exercise or walk their dogs.

In one case, police were called after a neighbor spotted two brothers playing soccer in their own back yard.

As we previously highlighted, Spain’s lockdown laws were so draconian that at one point authorities briefly told citizens that wearing masks while swimming in the sea was mandatory.

For many months during hot weather, wearing masks in every outdoor setting, even on beaches, was compulsory.

People were also issued fines of €2,000 euros for “disrespecting” a police officer during lockdown.

Numerous instances of police beating people for not wearing masks also emerged, while protesters at one point freed a woman from police arrest while cops were trying to handcuff her for not wearing a face covering.

Early on during the first lockdown, police helicopters fitted with loudspeakers were also used to aggressively order beachgoers to go home.

The Spanish government many now face multiple lawsuits as a result of the lockdown being declared unlawful.

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Court Document Shows FBI Used At Least 12 Informants to Entrap Men In Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot

By Eric Striker | National Justice | July 12, 2021

Defense lawyers yesterday filed a brief detailing the FBI’s extensive role in a Michigan militia’s plot to supposedly kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.

The document, obtained by National Justice, severely undermines the narrative prosecutors and FBI agents have constructed against the six defendants in USA v. Fox, et al, who are accused of multiple serious crimes related to organized terrorism.

In a motion to compel disclosure, lawyers for Kaleb Franks are asking the court to force the government to identify their informants by name, their criminal and mental health histories, and how much money they were rewarded for infiltrating and setting up the defendants.

According to the brief, prosecutors have already identified at least 12 paid informants who were involved in driving the kidnapping plot forward by their Confidential Human Source (CHS) numbers. These informants worked in conjunction with undercover FBI agents, revealing that the small Wolverine Watchmen militia had over a dozen government infiltrators pressuring them into engaging in violent criminal activity.

In the case of Franks, his lawyers cite exculpatory evidence showing that when presented with the idea of kidnapping the Governor, he told government agents that he was “not cool” with the idea and that he only attended a training camp — which was also organized by the FBI — just for the fresh air, fellowship and training.

Franks, who previously struggled with heroin addiction but provided help to his community by getting clean and becoming a professional drug counselor, never intended to break the law. Lawyers accuse the FBI of setting a “hide and seek” standard, where Franks is guilty simply because he was unable to avoid FBI informants that were committing crimes and working together to pressure individual men into doing illegal things.

According to the testimony of Special Agent Hank Impola, who led the investigation, the men in the Wolverine Watchmen expressed negative feelings when Adam Fox, a homeless man informants convinced to think kidnapping Governor Whitmer was a good idea, broached the subject. An informant put on the stand even testified that the men alleged to be at the center of the plot stressed that they did not want to break the law.

Lawyers for the defense have been able to identify payment to at least one infiltrator for his work in propelling the plot forward, a whopping sum of $54,000 dollars. Some of the other informants, mostly ex or current criminals, have been employed as government snitches for decades, including one man who became an informant in 1985 after obtaining information that was later used against his cellmate in prison.

With federal snitches having already confessed to hosting the “training” events where the plot was allegedly concocted, the entrapment defense is growing stronger by the day.

Prosecutors are already scrambling to save their case, primarily by withholding evidence, conscripting the mainstream media to meddle in the case, and even indicting one of their own crucial informants.

Lawyers are also complaining that the FBI and US Attorney are engaging in malicious compliance in the discovery process by deliberately overwhelming them with countless copies of the same pieces of audio and video evidence in hopes of wasting their time and running up the legal fees of the accused.

In another court filing, lawyers are asking for a change of venue due to the media’s role in poisoning the public against the defendants. The defense is also working to suppress a number of pieces of evidence that were outside of the scope of the FBI’s search warrants.

What is now clear is that the Michigan militia plot was not an act of legitimate law enforcement, but instead a political stunt to aid Democrats in a swing state a month before a presidential election.

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

The Approaching Storm

By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory Inc. | July 14, 2021

So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to where we’re headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed. I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future.

Yes, friends, a storm is coming. It has been coming for the last 16 months. And GloboCap is steering right into it. I, and many others like me, have been tracking its relentless advance like a self-appointed International Pathologized-Totalitarian Hurricane Center (you know, like the one in Miami, except all the meteorologists are “conspiracy theorists”). We have documented all the propaganda, the lies, the manipulation of statistics, the abrogation of constitutional rights, the New Normal goon squads, the corporate censorship, and all the rest of the roll-out of the new official ideology and the totalitarian measures deployed to enforce it.

Our efforts have not been in vain, but they have not been successful enough to change the course events are now taking … a course of events that has always been clear, a course that every totalitarian movement needs to take to get where it’s going. You can’t remake entire societies into quasi-totalitarian systems without civil unrest, chaos, rioting, war, or some other form of cataclysm. Brainwashing the masses is all fine and good, but, at some point, you need to goad the people who are resisting your new totalitarian “reality” into getting unruly, so you can crack down on them, and transform them into official enemies, which appears to be what is happening currently.

GloboCap is dialing up the totalitarianism, and they are rubbing it in our faces. Here in New Normal Germany, government officials are openly barking out Goebbelsian slogans like “NO FREEDOM FOR THE UNVACCINATED!” and “THE UNVACCINATED ARE A DANGER TO SOCIETY!” All over Europe, including the UK, where “Freedom Day” is fast approaching, pseudo-medical social-segregation systems are being implemented. In France, Greece, and many other countries, people who refuse to be “vaccinated” are being stripped of their jobs and otherwise punished. In the USA, where the Unvaccinated are also being segregated, New Normal goon squads are going door-to-door, bullying “vaccine hesitant” families into conforming to the new official ideology.

And so on … I’m tired of citing the facts. They do not make the slightest difference to the vast majority of New Normals, anyway. As I’ve noted in several previous columns, these people have surrendered their rationality, and have been subsumed into a totalitarian movement, which has become their perceptual and social “reality,” which their “sanity” now depends upon defending, so the facts mean absolutely nothing to them.

And you already know the facts.

Yes, you. Us. The others. The Unvaccinated. The “Covid deniers.” You don’t really think any hardcore New Normals have made it this far into this column, do you? They haven’t. If they stumbled into it on the Internet and accidentally started to read it, their brains switched off in the opening paragraph … literally, neurologically, switched off. They recognized it as a threat to their “reality” and instantly erased it from their consciousness, or they reported it to the proper authorities, perhaps the FBI, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Facebook, or some other global corporation.

This is what it has come to, folks … people are reporting other people’s “thoughtcrimes” to global corporations and the law enforcement agencies of “democratic” governments in the hopes of destroying or damaging their lives, or, at the very least, getting them censored, or otherwise erased from public view.

As I noted in my previous column, our societies have been torn apart. We’re living in two mutually hostile “realities,” a state which cannot continue indefinitely. The problem for us (i.e., the Unvaccinated) is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, so we are massively outnumbered by New Normals. The problem for the New Normals is that 20 to 25 percent of the population is way too many people to imprison or otherwise remove from society.

Thus, their plan is to make our lives as miserable as possible, to segregate us, stigmatize us, demonize us, bully, and harrass us, and pressure us to conform at every turn. They are not going to put us on the trains to the camps. GloboCap is not the Nazis. They need to maintain the simulation of democracy. So they need to transform us into an underclass of “anti-social conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxer disinformationists,” “white-supremacist election-result deniers,” “potentially violent domestic extremists,” and whatever other epithets they come up with, so that we can be painted as dangerously unhinged freaks and cast out of society in a way that makes it appear that we have cast out ourselves.

This process is already well underway, and it’s only going to get more intense, which will inevitably lead to social unrest. The hardcore “Unvaccinated” are not going to go quietly. Again, this isn’t Nazi Germany. There are too many of us who are already resisting. They can segregate us, ban us from travelling, blackout our protests, censor us, deplatform us, cancel our bank accounts, and otherwise harass us, but they cannot forcibly disappear us. So, they are going to keep goading us until we lose it. We have demonstrated incredible discipline so far, but eventually, we’re going to run out of patience. It’s going to get messy. People will get hurt.

Which, of course, is exactly what GloboCap wants. Nothing will make them happier than if we turn ourselves into the “violent extremists” they have been conjuring into existence for the last five years. They desperately need us to become those “extremists” before we “embolden” too many others with our “disinformation,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “election result denial,” and general distaste for the whole global-capitalist ideological program.

Unfortunately, they are probably going to get their wish.

What we need is an organized, global campaign of classic, non-violent civil disobedience, but they are not going to give us time to organize that. They are going to keep the pressure on, and crank up the pace, and the official propaganda, and the absurdity, and the confusion, and the ever-changing rules, and the mass hysteria, and the blatant lies, until we start flipping out in restaurants, and in pubs, and schools, and on public transportation, and segregated New Normal establishments start getting nocturnally vandalized, or worse, and other forms of “direct action” are taken.

At which point, game over, because they will have won. We will be the “extremists” they warned themselves about, and they’ll be able to do whatever they want with us, and our former (now New Normal) friends will applaud, or just look away in silence.

Or … I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe some New Normals are still reading this essay, and can still, at this late stage, regain their senses. Maybe we can still avoid the storm, and the full implementation of “New Normal Reality.” I know, I’m probably a hopeless idealist, but let me tell you a quick anecdote before I let you go.

I’ve been kind of nudging, or politely badgering, Glenn Greenwald, who I respect, and have always respected, to grow a pair and at least speak out against the totalitarian features of the New Normal movement. Glenn is totally on board with the official Covid narrative, and has made it clear that he has no interest in using his investigative-journalism skills to investigate that official narrative. Despite that, I have continued to nudge him, and politely prod him, and otherwise urge him, to maybe post a few critical words, or raise a few investigative-journalist questions, about the most flagrant official propaganda campaign in the history of official propaganda campaigns and the blatantly totalitarian actions of governments all over the world.

For example, I posted this on Twitter recently.

Shortly thereafter — and I’m sure this was just a coincidence, because Glenn doesn’t follow the Consent Factory — he tweeted this bit of New Normal blasphemy:


So, apparently, it is, in fact, still possible for people who believe the official Covid narrative as if it were the Word of God to speak out against some aspect of it, or just politely question the logic of it, or otherwise stop behaving like a bunch of mindlessly obedient “Good Germans” as a new iteration of totalitarianism is rolled out right in front of their eyes.

Yes, I know. I’m clutching at straws, but I have this crazy faith in people. On top of which, I’m getting old, so I am not looking forward to the street-fighting part of this as much as I would have 30 or 40 years ago.

Oh, and, I almost forgot, to all my friends in the New Normal UK … have a lovely Freedom Day!

#

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

France’s mandatory ‘health pass’ with government-issued QR codes is the start of a dystopian nightmare

A police officer checks a woman’s self-certified note for being out near the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 15, 2020. © THOMAS COEX / AFP
By Rachel Marsden | RT | July 14, 2021

President Macron’s announcement that citizens must adhere to a Covid-19 vaccination schedule, or pay for nose-swab tests every 2-3 days to live any semblance of a normal life, is the final nail in the coffin of civil liberties.

In the dead of summer, just a couple of days before the July 14 Bastille Day national holiday, when many French citizens had tuned out and left the big cities for some respite from a long stretch of sanitary restrictions – including months of curfews – French President Emmanuel Macron took advantage of the lull to drop a bomb on their lives that few were expecting.

From July 21, a health pass including a government QR code will be necessary for those over the age of 12 to access bars, restaurants, cinemas, gyms, swimming pools, museums, shopping centers, and any other venues capable of holding at least 50 people. Employees of these venues are included, if they want to keep their jobs.

The government will issue people a QR code to activate the pass by only two means: pricey PCR or antigenic nose-swab tests that Macron says will have to be paid out of pocket starting in October, or a full course of two jabs of the Covid-19 vaccination, which he also said will be the subject of a new round of third doses, starting in September.

What’s particularly stunning is that there is little recognition of acquired immunity – as though our immune systems are virtually useless. There is no way for someone who has recovered from Covid-19 to obtain a QR code as the result of a blood test proving the presence of adequate post-infection antibodies conferring immunity. The government considers their naturally acquired protection invalid and wants those who already have proven antibodies to take at least one dose of the vaccine.

The system does allow those who have a QR code from a positive Covid-19 PCR test up to six months old to obtain the health pass, after which they are then expected to take the shot as well – all this despite ample research indicating lasting immunity in previously infected individuals.

By shoehorning everyone into just two government-defined camps – compliant vaccinated individuals who will be allowed to live normally, and the unvaccinated non-compliant who will be denied access, despite the fact that both are capable of catching and transmitting the disease – it feels like the public health crisis is being used to implement a new dystopian system that permits tracking of everyone who wants to participate in everyday life.

And, as of September 15, healthcare workers who aren’t fully vaccinated “won’t be able to work and won’t be paid,” according to health minister Olivier Veran.

So much for France’s motto of “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” Liberty no longer exists when the government decides with a flash of a QR code generated at its whim whether you can live normally or not.

And while Macron was adamant about maintaining solidarity and equality among citizens by not singling out either the most vulnerable fatsos or the elderly for restrictions at the height of the pandemic – choosing instead to lock down the entire country – he now has no qualms about treating Covid victims with natural immunity, and those who simply don’t think that vaccination is the right decision for them, as second-class citizens who can rot at home with no access to daily life.

Fraternity? Pitting the vaccinated against the anti-vaccinated – with Macron treating the former as the ‘good’ citizens and the other as the ‘bad’ in his official narrative – has been adopted far too easily and uncritically by many. These people fail to see that vaccination status is a false dichotomy that effectively herds every single citizen into a single camp: those with a QR code issued and mandated by the government. It just so happens that those who refuse the QR code have to be unvaccinated by definition. Therefore, anyone who is resistant to the implementation of this new government tracking system should oppose any attempt to divide society by personal medical decisions and support individual choice of all – including the unvaccinated.

This destruction of fundamental freedoms is all the more striking at a time when Covid deaths and hospitalizations are incredibly low. First this crisis was about saving the hospitals, then it was about saving lives, then it became about reducing cases, and now that sound you hear are the goalposts being dragged again to make it all about preventing some potential future event.

It all seems like a system is now being implemented that will last well beyond Covid-19. If that thought doesn’t wake up the French, who last hit the streets en masse for months on end to protest a rise of a few cents in the price of gas, then it’s because the government they so distrusted has now successfully managed to co-opt and neutralize them.

Now is the time to take a stand against this continuing erosion of our freedoms. But how many French are even still awake?

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Tennessee vaccinations turn political: Dems denounce state halting programs that Republicans say bypassed parents

RT | July 14, 2021

After Republican lawmakers voiced concerns that Tennessee health authorities were directly targeting schoolchildren for Covid-19 vaccinations, the state halted the program – and came under fire from outraged Democrats.

The state Department of Health (TDH) is halting “adolescent outreach” for all vaccines, not just Covid-19, the Tennessean daily newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing “internal report and agency emails” they obtained. This includes Covid-19 vaccination drives on school property and reminders for teens to get their second dose of the jab.

Postcards and reminder emails will be sent to parents, so that they won’t be “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” according to a TDH report cited by the Nashville-based daily.

The decision was reportedly made by Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey personally, and comes after the Monday firing of Dr. Michelle Fiscus, which the paper described as “Tennessee’s former top vaccine official.”

Fiscus claimed the decision was due to pressure from Republican state lawmakers who had embraced “misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines. She also complained to CNN about a “toxic” environment at work.

At a legislative hearing in June, some GOP lawmakers accused TDH of circumventing parents and pressuring minors to get the vaccine using the school environment. Some conservatives said Fiscus was pushing to vaccinate teens without parental knowledge or approval, using what is known as the Mature Minor Doctrine, which typically says children 15 or older can consent to medical treatment.

According to the Tennessean, TDH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones told staff they should conduct “no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines” and “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV [Human papillomavirus] vaccine.” All school vaccination information should come from the Department of Education instead.

The paper’s report caused widespread outrage among Democrats. Former first daughter turned public health advocate Chelsea Clinton called the policy change “horrifying” with potentially “tragic consequences,” and insisted there was “no reasonable or moral defense” of it.

“Trumpism and right-wing anti-science extremism is harming and killing Americans,” declared Mother Jones writer David Corn, while Howard Fineman of the Yale School of Medicine called Republicans “pro-death & anti-science.”

“Does Tennessee really want kids not to be vaccinated against measles, mumps or meningitis,” Congressman Ted Lieu (D-California) wondered on Twitter.

“We’ve governed by nut-jobs with the intellectual skill sets of five year olds on sugar highs,” lamented Obama administration staffer and Democrat candidate for Congress Christopher Hale, who pointed out the halting of outreach applies to polio vaccines as well.

“They’re now, like, pro-polio?” tweeted MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

However, the CDC recommends polio vaccinations starting at two months, with subsequent doses through age six. Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccines are typically given starting at 12 months, while the CDC recommends meningitis shots starting at age 11. None of these would apply to school outreach to teens.

The Tenneseean report did include a statement by TDH spokesperson Sarah Tanksley, who said the agency was responding to “an intense national conversation that is affecting how many families evaluate vaccinations in general.”

“Tennessee is on solid footing when it comes to childhood immunizations and will continue to keep information and programming in place for parents,” Tanksley said. “We are simply mindful of how certain tactics could hurt that progress.”

Covid-19 vaccinations at schools are being discontinued in part because of low demand, she added, but also “out of an abundance of caution” because they were “perceived by some to give the wrong impression regarding parental consent.”

“While the location may change, the effort to vaccinate individuals who choose to receive it continues,” Tanksley said.

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube censors public Lake Forest School District board meeting where parents opposed mask mandates

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 13, 2021

YouTube has scrubbed a public Lake Forest High School District 115 board meeting from its platform after numerous parents at the meeting spoke out against required masking.

Ben Bradley, a news anchor and investigative reporter for WGN TV News, tweeted: Our understanding is that people reported the content to youtube as a violation of its terms, which triggered the removal while youtube reviews.”

Twitter user Harriet Smith Martin said “numerous parents spoke against required masking” at the meeting and added that the video was removed before she had finished listening to it.

“The video was up as of 10:30 or so last night (I was watching it.),” she tweeted. “When I went back to finish listening this morning, it was gone.”

Under its far-reaching “medical misinformation” policy, YouTube prohibits a wide range of claims about masks including claims that “wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects,” that “wearing a mask causes oxygen levels to drop to dangerous levels,” or that “masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19.”

As a result of this policy, numerous public debates and meetings on mask mandates have been censored by the tech giant.

In May, a public Shawnee Mission School District board meeting was removed under similar circumstances. The meeting was open to public comment and parents urged the district to remove mask mandates. YouTube flagged these comments as “misinformation” and removed the video.

A few days after this video was removed, YouTube deleted a Georgia mom’s testimony against mask mandates during a school board meeting. YouTube again claimed that the video violated its medical misinformation rules.

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

The Persecution of Canadian Physicians by Organized Medicine During the COVID-19 Pandemic

https://www.bitchute.com/video/Yd5AuSxmyAln/

July 6, 2021

In this group interview facilitated by Sam Dubé, M.D., Ph.D., four physicians from across Canada – emergency physician Dr. Chris Milburn, rural family physician Dr. Charles Hoffe, general surgeon Dr. Francis Christian, and pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson – tell their stories of persecution at the hands of their governing bodies. Their only crime: practicing evidence-based medicine by questioning the safety of their patients and the public during the pandemic.

A legal representative for their cases, John Carpay, Esq., provides insights and legal commentary, invoking the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These physicians, and others like them, are the living embodiment of the medical mantras of “do no harm” and “informed consent”.

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

The Fight to Save Lifta, the Last Remaining Palestinian Village

By Jessica Buxbaum | MintPress News | July 9, 2021

Yacoub Odeh is 81 years old but he can still remember his childhood in the Palestinian village of Lifta as if it were yesterday. Children playing together in the gardens, swimming in the pools and laying in the grass.

Today, Lifta remains as a frozen time capsule. While the residents were expelled during Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing campaign (Nakba), the ruins of their homes still stand. These ruins carved into the lush hillside are perceived as a symbol of the Palestinians’ right of return. This is the only town Israel did not demolish after the Nakba, but a government plan may soon change that.

In May, the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), the government agency in charge of managing public lands, issued a new tender for construction in Lifta. The development scheme, known as Plan 6036, seeks to build 259 housing units along with a commercial and business space and a luxury hotel on top of and around the existing houses. Daphna Golan-Agnon, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and part of the Save Lifta Coalition’s board, explained that while the homes may not be demolished, “the village will disappear behind walls of concrete needed to hold new construction.”

The bid was supposed to be held on July 4, but significant public opposition delayed it to July 29.

The ruins in Lifta, a Palestinian village ethnically cleased in 1948. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News

Attempts to demolish Lifta have been ongoing for years. The ILA first published a tender for Plan 6036 in 2010 after the Israeli state approved the construction plan for Lifta in 2006. A 2012 Jerusalem District Court ruling found Plan 6036 insufficient and requested amending it in accordance with a conservation survey on Lifta from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The IAA survey was completed in 2017 and found that Plan 6036 could not be executed without making significant adjustments in order to preserve the ancient village. Plan 270b was drawn up to fit the survey’s findings but in 2017 the Local Planning and Building Committee of Jerusalem temporarily halted the initiative for further examination.

The recent ILA announcement was met with hundreds of letters to Jerusalem’s mayor rejecting the sale. When reached for comment, the Municipality of Jerusalem told MintPress News that it “wasn’t informed about the publication of this tender and didn’t approve it. The mayor of Jerusalem asked all the relevant authorities to reconsider the construction plan.” The Israel Lands Council, which operates the ILA, did not respond to a request for comment.

‘In one hour, we became refugees’

Lifta’s strategic location at the edge of Jerusalem has made it a prime target for land grabs. Acting as a suburb of Jerusalem, Lifta’s placement next to the Jerusalem-Jaffa Highway makes for an easy trip to the Mediterranean while still being tied to the city of Jerusalem.

Lifta, often referred to as the entrance to Jerusalem, was a wealthy, agricultural community supported by olive presses and flour mills and situated atop the Wadi al-Shami spring. Homes made of limestone were cut into the hillside and Lifta’s roads wended through the valley.

Prior to the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias like the Haganah saw seizing Lifta as necessary to cement Jewish control over all of Palestine. According to the Haganah Historical Archives, “[s]ecuring the western exit of the city [of Jerusalem] entailed the eviction of Arabs.”  Israeli historian Benny Morris said the Haganah fired the first shots in 1947, setting off the mass expulsion of Lifta’s 2,960 residents.

In December 1947, the Haganah killed a Palestinian business owner in Lifta. Later that month, one of Lifta’s two coffeehouses was ambushed with gunfire and grenades. The attack killed six and wounded seven. Two months into 1948, the Jewish Agency chairman and future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, boasted of the ethnic cleansing’s success, telling his political party members: “From your entry into Jerusalem through Lifta — Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King George Street and Mea She’arim — there are no strangers. One hundred percent Jews.“

Odeh, head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission, was 8-years-old when Lifta came under siege by Zionist forces.

Yacoub Odeh, Nakba survivor and head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News

“I remember one day my mother was preparing the fire to heat our room, and then [the Zionist miltiias] began to shoot. My brothers began to cry, ‘Mama, mama! They’re shooting us!’ My mom took us inside the room in the corner and under a table to protect us,” Odeh said, recalling two stories of Lifta — the town’s beauty and charm and then its tragic fall.

“There is the beautiful life and then began the miserable life because of the occupation.”

Toward the end of February 1948, Odeh’s father put him, his siblings and his mother into a truck heading to Ramallah to escape the violence in Lifta. Odeh’s father stayed behind to defend the village from the Zionist gangs.

“We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.” Odeh took a deep sigh and said, “In one hour, we became refugees.”

Today, 55 buildings out of approximately 450 remain in Lifta, including a club, mosque, cemetery and school, which now operates as a school for Israeli Jews. Liftawi refugees are estimated at around 30,000 and live in Jerusalem, the Occupied West Bank and the Diaspora. Most of the homes are empty, but a few are occupied by Israeli settlers. According to Zochrot, the Israeli nonprofit seeking to raise awareness of the Nakba, the “settlements of Mey Niftoach and Giv’at Sha’ul were built on village lands and now have become parts of the suburbs of Jerusalem.”

Saving Lifta

The Save Lifta Coalition orchestrated the campaign to the mayor and has been organizing since 2010 against Plan 6036. The organization spent five years working with scholars, activists, conservation specialists and higher education professionals to develop an alternative to 6036.

Their proposal aims to “expand the area of the national park and turn the village into a natural urban space for the adjacent neighborhoods,” while preserving Lifta’s cultural landscape.

The World Monuments Fund added Lifta to its list of endangered sites in 2018 and UNESCO added the village to its tentative list of world heritage sites.

‘Not something we can discuss now’

When asked about the plan’s responsibility regarding the right of return for Palestinians, Golan-Agnon said, “our plan is a plan to save Lifta as it is for the future generations to decide upon its fate.” She explained:

Many of us [in the coalition] do think there should be a right of return for Palestinians but we know it’s not something we can discuss now. So we say, it’s beautiful, keep it open, and then one day there can be a decision about what happens and who’s coming.

Dana Amawi’s grandmother grew up in Lifta and was expelled from the village in 1948. Now the family lives in Amman, Jordan. The 20-year-old said she was shaken to her core upon hearing the news of the sale. “Lifta symbolized a tiny, very small bit of hope that maybe we will be able to return to it,” Amawi told MintPress. “And now to think that other people might live in the house that I have the right to be in, it’s very sad.”

A Palestinian woman holds a partially eaten fig picked from a tree in Lifta. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News

Amawi said that her grandmother fell ill after learning of the auction. “She got sick. She had a fever and she was really, really sad because to her, this is where she grew up. This is where her earliest memories are and this is where she has the right to be,” Amawi said.

Stone houses like the one Odeh spent his early childhood in now crumble from neglect. The walls are sprayed with graffiti and piles of trash line the floors. On Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath), you’ll often find Israelis bathing in the spring’s waters.

Aseel AlBajeh, advocacy officer and legal researcher at the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, visited Lifta in 2018. Her grandmother, who lives in Ramallah, is from Lifta. “It was a painful experience,” AlBajeh said of her time in Lifta. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come back to Lifta in this situation.”

‘You are here as a visitor’

During her visit, AlBajeh tried recalling her grandmother’s memories of a flourishing Lifta, but she said those stories were disrupted by the fact that she’s only in Lifta because of a permit she received from the Israeli government to enter 1948-occupied Palestine or modern-day Israel from the West Bank. “You are here as a visitor. It’s like it’s not a place where you belong, or this is what [the Israeli government] intends for refugees to feel like,” AlBajeh said. “Settlers were swimming in the spring of the village and they were blasting loud music, and it also disrupted my ability to even imagine Lifta as Palestinian.”

Israeli settlers in Lifta hold a middle finger to a group of Palestinian children. Blekh | MintPress News

To help her reclaim Lifta, AlBajeh took a small piece of the village’s remains during her visit. She collected a broken tile painted with traditional designs from one of the house’s floors, knowing this might be the last physical object she can have of Lifta.

“Lifta is a witness of what happened during the Nakba,” AlBajeh said, explaining:

We have this connection as Palestinians, and when we see the cactus plants, we connect this as evidence that displacement happened here. And if you go to Lifta, you’ll see the huge amount of cactus. So even if the houses remain and [Israel] tries to remove the cactus, it’s still painful… It’s not about the stones or about the trees. It’s about the whole identity of Lifta and the Palestinian history, which we still connect to. “

‘We were kings in our village’

Odeh’s memories paint Lifta as an idyllic place, an oasis carved into the steep slopes of Jerusalem where life was carefree and bountiful. “We were kings in our village,” Odeh said. “Everything we need, we had — a life so simple. We didn’t need cinema or computers, no, everything we needed came from our land.”

But the minute Odeh and his family became refugees, their resources became scarce. “At that time there were no charitable associations or agencies ready to help,” Odeh recalled. “You know what Nakba means? Nakba does not mean to destroy homes. No, Nakba means to destroy the life — economic life, social life, educational life, political life. They destroyed our life.”

Upon reminiscing about Lifta, Odeh said his dream is to go back home:

I miss my childhood. Palestinian children have lost their childhood life to play like children, to go to the theater, to concerts, to football. No, until now we have house demolitions, we have arrests, we have land confiscation and killings. Every day we have events like these — if not my family, my neighborhood.”

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

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