Human rights « Aletho News

New Paper: Masks Achieve Nothing In Terms Of Spread

By Damian D. Guerra and Daniel J. Guerra | medrxiv.org | May 29, 2021

Latest analysis shows yet again – yet again – what we already knew from 40 years of published research. And also empirically from simply glancing over the past year’s real-world data. Masks don’t work!

Our main finding is that mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among US states. 80% of US states mandated masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mandates induced greater mask compliance but did not predict lower growth rates when community spread was low (minima) or high (maxima). We infer that mandates likely did not affect COVID-19 case growth [15], as growth rates were similar on all days between actual or modeled issuance dates and 6 March 2021. Higher mask use (rather than mandates per se) has been argued to decrease COVID-19 growth rates [11].

While compliance varies by location and time, IHME estimates are robust (derived from multiple sources [17]) and densely sampled (day-level precision). Higher mask use did not predict lower maximum growth rates, smaller surges, or less Fall-Winter growth among continental states.

Mask-growth rate correlation was only evident at minima. This may be an artifact of faster growth at fewer normalized cases, as well as regional differences in case prevalence early in the pandemic. States in the high mask quintile grew at similar rates as states in the low mask quintile after maxima (when interstate total case differences were smaller than before minima).

In addition, mask use did not predict normalized cases at minima, and low mask growth curves trailed those of high mask (particularly Northeast) states before minima. Growth maxima and Fall-Winter surges did not differ between Northeast and other states. Northeast states exhibited the highest seroprevalence up to at least July 2020 [24] and constituted 80% of the top quintile of mask use, which may explain their comparatively lower Summer growth.

Overall, mask use appears to be an intra-state lagging indicator of case growth. There is inferential but not demonstrable evidence that masks reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Animal models [25], small case studies [6], and growth curves for mandate-only states [16] suggest that mask efficacy increases with mask use [11]. However, we did not observe lower growth rates over a range of compliance at maximum Fall-Winter growth (45-83% between South Dakota and Massachusetts during maxima) [17] when growth rates were high.

This complements a Danish RCT from 3 April to 2 June 2020, when growth rates were low, which found no association between mask use and lower COVID-19 rates either for all participants in the masked arm (47% strong compliance) or for strongly compliant participants only [8].

Masks have generally not protected against other respiratory viruses. Higher self-reported mask use protected against SARS-CoV-1 in Beijing residents [26], but RCTs found no differences in PCR confirmed influenza among Hong Kong households assigned to hand hygiene with or without masks (mask use 31% and 49%, respectively) [27].

Medical and cloth masks did not reduce viral respiratory infections among clinicians in Vietnam [9] or China [10], and rhinovirus transmission increased among universally masked Hong Kong students and teachers in 2020 compared with prior years [28].

These findings are consistent with a 2020 CDC meta-analysis [29] and a 2020 Cochrane review update [30].

Our study has implications for respiratory virus mitigation. Public health measures should ethically promote behaviors that prevent communicable diseases. The sudden onset of COVID-19 compelled adoption of mask mandates before efficacy could be evaluated.

Our findings do not support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates decrease with greater public mask use.

As masks are required in public in many US states, it is prudent to weigh potential benefits with harms. Masks may promote social cohesion as rallying symbols during a pandemic [31], but risk compensation can also occur [32]. Prolonged mask use (>4 hours per day) promotes facial alkalinization and inadvertently encourages dehydration, which in turn can enhance barrier breakdown and bacterial infection risk [33].

British clinicians have reported masks to increase headaches and sweating and decrease cognitive precision [34]. Survey bias notwithstanding, these sequelae are associated with medical errors [35]. By obscuring nonverbal communication, masks interfere with social learning in children [36]. Likewise, masks can distort verbal speech and remove visual cues to the detriment of individuals with hearing loss; clear face-shields improve visual integration, but there is a corresponding loss of sound quality [37, 38].

Future research is necessary to better understand the risks of long-term daily mask use [30]. Conversely, it is appropriate to emphasize interventions with demonstrated or probable efficacy against COVID-19 such as vaccination [39] and Vitamin D repletion [40]. In summary, mask mandates and use were poor predictors of COVID-19 spread in US states. Case growth was independent of mandates at low and high rates of community spread, and mask use did not predict case growth during the Summer or Fall-Winter waves.

Strengths of our study include using two mask metrics to evaluate association with COVID-19 growth rates; measuring normalized case growth in mandate and non-mandate states at comparable times to quantify the likely effect of mandates; and deconvolving the effect of mask use by examining case growth in states with variable mask use. Our study also has key limitations. We did not assess counties or localities, which may trend independently of state averages.

While dense sampling promotes convergence, IHME masking estimates are subject to survey bias. We only assessed one biological quantity (confirmed and probable COVID-19 infections), but the ongoing pandemic warrants assessment of other factors such as hospitalizations and mortality. Future work is necessary to elucidate better predictors of COVID-19 spread. A recent study found that at typical respiratory fluence rates, medical masks decrease airway deposition of 10-20μm SARS-CoV-2 particles but not 1-5μm SARS-CoV-2 aerosols [41].

Aerosol expulsion increases with COVID-19 disease severity in non-human primates, as well as with age and BMI in humans without COVID-19 [42]. Aerosol treatment by enhanced ventilation and air purification could help reduce the size of COVID-19 outbreaks.

May 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Let’s Not Be Sensible, Folks

By Sinéad Murphy | Lockdown Sceptics | May 28, 2021

My little boy with autism is back at school, for three days in the week. His support teacher is at last unmasked. On the seventh day of his return, there was an unheralded change. Instead of Joseph being accompanied by his support teacher at pick-up time so that she and I might have a quick chat, he was sent out alone along with his classmates. Inside his bag was a new small notebook, with “Communication Log” written on the cover, in which there were phrases describing aspects of Joseph’s day.

Joseph’s communication is profoundly restricted. He is unable to report any aspect of his physical experience; he cannot tell of anything that has happened to him, no matter how recently. A short exchange, before and after school, with the person responsible for him during the day is essential.

At drop-off time the following morning, Joseph’s support teacher watched helplessly from behind the classroom’s glass door while I held Joseph’s hand at the gate – another of the pathetic scenes that have been a feature of our Covid incarceration. “Mummy’s going to drop you here”, said one of Joseph’s year’s teachers, to me via him. When I objected, she told me, in a rush of what seemed like resentment, that the ‘Communication Log’ was to substitute for the morning and evening chats.

It did not take much representation to the school’s Head to have the chats reinstated; the arguments in their favour were so obviously reasonable. But that the arguments against them were so paltry reveals something concerning, I think.

Even according to ‘The Science’, there could be no conceivable added risk of infection by a respiratory virus in ending a day of up-close support of Joseph by standing in the open air and talking for a few minutes to his mum – to his credit, the Head did not attempt to suggest that there could be.

But if there was nothing actually harmful about these chats, even on the highly-sensitive Covid safety-scale, why were they ruled out so summarily?

Joseph’s support teacher is a woman of great humour; chatting with her is inevitably a lively affair no matter how mundane the topic. But there is something indistinctly offensive now about liveliness of any kind, something excessive, disrespectful.

On our uncertain return to normality there is dawning a new morality, according to which lively human interaction is unseemly simply by virtue of being… well, lively.

This may explain why persecution of the public house continues unabated – insofar as the pub encourages informal and vibrant association, it is the den of a new iniquity: the spontaneous overflow of the human spirit.

At the supermarket checkout the other day, the man in front of me observed through his mask to the woman working the till, how good it is that we have our freedoms back. So long as we use them sensibly, he added.

We have been prodded this year by the devilish theme of safety, which has dramatically altered the contour of our lives. But now the colour of our lives may be changing too, as we are encouraged from all sides not only to stay safe but to be sensible.

On May 15^th, the FA Cup final was attended by twenty-two thousand supporters. The fans were back. Football was back. And certainly, the real crowd did foreground how anaemic has been its virtual equivalent. But when Leicester scored the goal that won them the cup, their cheering fans were faced down by a line of officials, caped in plastic over their high-visibility jackets and fanning their outstretched gloved hands, palms downwards, in a calming gesture – Let’s be sensible, folks.

Two days later, May 17^th, brought the return of hugging for anyone who had been observing the ban. But it is not a rush-into-the-arms hugging, not a big hugging, not a tight hugging, all of which have about them this new taint of excess. It is sensible hugging: faces turned in opposite directions and got over with as quickly as possible.

There is a new kind of puritanism abroad – casting its pall over our lives, already so out of shape. Those moments when life is brimming over, when we act on impulse, when our sides split with laughter, when we cry with anger or with joy, when we cannot let go our embrace or when we could talk and talk for hours: all have about them a new hue of poor taste. The palate of human life has been dimmed; Let’s be sensible, folks.

In a short blog post from April 16^th, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben prepared us for a change of this kind.

Differently from other animals, Agamben wrote, we humans have always the task of deciding what it is that makes us human, and not merely animal.

Homo sapiens is the being that knows itself, the only being on earth that must determine its own essence.

This unique duty – that we decide the kind of being that we are – is what makes us humans so culturally rich and almost infinitely adaptable. But it is also what makes us vulnerable, as no other animal is, to being transformed, profoundly, from the ground up.

Nothing absolute stands in the way of our knowing ourselves differently and knowing ourselves differently changes us utterly.

Is such a change occurring now, as we get back to our new future? Are we in the process of deciding all over again what it is that makes us human?

This would certainly explain the newly muted tones of the life that we are now to live, in which the chatting, the cheering, the hugging that still come naturally to some of us seem suddenly and strangely out of step, not really done, a bit much – Let’s be sensible, folks.

According to Agamben, a society’s decision about what it is that makes us human is reflected in what that society identifies as ‘mere existence’ – bare life. In this space are established the terms on which we claw back from our animal natures whatever it is that is judged to make us human.

We opponents of governments’ Covid policies have traded heavily on this concept of ‘mere existence’, criticising the lockdowns for having reduced our human life to its bare bones.

But in doing so, have we unwittingly lent our voices to a new Covid-era version of ‘mere existence’ and, consequently, to a new Covid-era decision about what it is that makes us human?

Still when I was growing up, references to ‘mere existence’ had mostly to do with work; bare life was the life absorbed by a low-paid unsatisfying job with long hours, or (depressingly) by unwaged care of other people.

If you lived this mere existence, this bare life, you were perilously close to losing that which distinguished you as human – you were said to work like a dog, to have a dog’s life.

If you managed to rise above this mere existence to something better, something more human, you did so also in terms of work. Because a bare life was a life of unwaged drudgery, a full life was a life of satisfying and rewarding employment, and a good life was industrious and purposeful, filled with hobbies and sports at which you were as hardworking as you were at your job.

But since the advent of Covid, when we have bemoaned the reduction of our lives to mere existence, we have referred not to dull work without wages but to quarantine without symptoms. Bare life is no longer the life of unrewarding toil, but of isolation from other people, faces covered and hands sheathed.

The theme of bare life is no longer work but health, where ‘health’ refers, not to a personal equilibrium, but to public safety from invisible attack.

As we have lived this bare life during the past 15 months or so, and tried to reassert our humanness so as to rise above it, it is not the dog’s life against which we have had to define ourselves but the life of the herd animal whose individual hopes and needs are submitted to the advantage of the group: I isolate for everyone, I mask for everyone, I vaccinate for everyone.

Herd immunity has always been a feature of human life. It is a well-established phenomenon in epidemiology. But never before 2020 was it brought before us so unrelentingly that we were simultaneously compelled to reject it as beneath our human status and submitted to the version of it engineered and imposed by governments and their science advisers.

On the new terrain of bare-life-as-isolation-from-and-for-the-herd, we have had to battle all over again to reestablish what makes us human. Human life, we have objected, is more than isolation for the sake of public health. Human life, we have protested, is anathema to distance and to masks.

But we should be careful. Because, if we are beginning to win the battle against the reduction of our lives to mere-existence-as-quarantine, we are likely to be winning it on the terms set up by mere-existence-as-quarantine, that is, on the terms of health-as-safety.

If the society of work is coming to an end, the society of health may be just getting going. In this society, a full life will be the life of optimal protection from identified threats to public safety; and a good life will be the life of due respect for this enterprise, the careful life, the sensible life, in which our human bodies, now branded as traitors, will not be suffered to stretch their limbs too far, nor shout too loud, nor laugh too much, nor hug too tight.

The devil used to make work for idle hands – hence the old morality of working hard. Now the devil makes sickness for loose tongues, and all other body-parts that are brought to bear with gleeful abandon – hence the new morality of being sensible.

What is it that effects a transformation of this magnitude, from a life defined by work and lived industriously to a life defined by health and lived sensibly? How can such changes come about so suddenly and completely? According to Agamben, all it needs is a powerful enough device.

For the society of work, this device was the slave, an idea (rooted in reality, of course) profound enough to capture and recast a whole culture as woven around the theme of work and as haunted by the near-animality of work without reward.

For our society of health, the device is the asymptomatic, an idea (not rooted in reality, it turns out) so powerful that it has captured and recast our world as revolving around the theme of health-as-safety and as haunted by the prospect of disease at the level of the pack.

The device of the asymptomatic sick person has reset the horizons of our lives: the bare life is the life lived apart from the herd for the good of the herd; the full life is the life that is constantly proven to be without sickness itself and protected from the sickness of others: and the good life is the life that abstains from the joyful excess that so irresponsibly forgets that the absence of symptoms does not imply safety.

One of the Internet phenomena of our Covid era has been the film of a flash mob rendition of ‘Danser Encore’ in the Gard du Nord on March 4^th.

It has inspired many repeat performances in towns and cities around the world, each one of them a joyful affair.

When I first saw the original video, its effect was profound. To see the sudden eruption, as if from nowhere, of… well, a mob, a glut of people, in the midst of the faceless bedraggle at the station – to see the masks carelessly pulled down or discarded, the random weaving in and out of the crowd, arms linked to the music, to hear singing at the top of fine unmuffled voices. Such a glorious upturning of safety.

But what strikes me now when I watch it is the ludicrousness of the performance, an assemblage of this and that: the tap dancer on her makeshift floor; the circus performer in his Breton top, making upside-down frog-legs; the amateur country dancers; the woman in the mask (around her eyes, not her mouth and nose!) creeping stealthily through the scene… random, heedless, a propos of nothing, not at all sensible.

If we are to unwind the Covid decision about what it is that makes us human – if we are to defuse the device of the asymptomatic spreader and refuse the life of safety to which it consigns us, then we might do worse than begin here, with the players in the Gard du Nord : and dance again and hug again and cheer again and chat again with the lively abandon that spares not a thought for the hidden health-status of ourselves or anyone else.

Dr Sinead Murphy is Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University.

May 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Don’t Be Stupid – Inform Your Decisions

By Gillian Dymond | OffGuardian | May 28, 2021

Are you tired of having to watch everything you say, in case you’re accused of “hate speech”? Do you frequently have to bite back innocently-spoken words, when someone claims to be “offended” by them? Have you become used to avoiding lively debate or expressing frank opinions on social media, for fear of finding police officers on your doorstep?

If so, you’ll be glad to know that at last there is a whole class of people you may attack with impunity; people who may be derided, slandered and ostracised to your heart’s content; people so selfish and stupid that you are fully entitled to incite hatred against them with the full blessing of your government.

These are the Great Unclean: the “anti-vaxxers” who are not just nasty spoilsports, standing between you and the ever-deferred reopening of society, but who continue to waft death and disease through a world which can only be made safe by universal, and repeated, “jabbing”.

The opportunity to indulge in virtuous hate speech has been seized with zest by household names and obscure Twitterati alike.

“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere,” enthuses Piers Morgan, “restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullshit bluff called and bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go.”

Edwina Currie has emerged from political oblivion to agree:

I hear what you say about someone exercising their freedom not to have a vaccination and they’re perfectly healthy. I don’t want them sitting next to me in the theatre. I don’t want them standing next to me at the theatre bar. I don’t want them next to me or anywhere near me or even in the same carriage on the train. So they can exercise their freedom by staying at home.”

As for the chorus of the immunologically saved on social media, here’s a sample meme:

If you’re antivax and you see me making fun of antivax people, I just want to say I’m talking about you personally and I hope you’re offended because you’re fucking stupid.”

Just try substituting one of a whole range of tenderly protected diversities for “antivax people” or “anti-vaxxers”, and watch the frisson of outrage creeping down any bien-pensant spine. But as the State extends its tolerance, even its encouragement, to our abusers, we covid sceptics, it seems, are fair game.

For there is no quarter from the government for those who are standing aloof from the stampede to get “shots into arms”, as believers in the WHO’s revised definition of herd immunity so crudely like to put it.

This is, after all, a government which, spurred on by behavioural psychologists and with malice aforethought, has industriously stirred up and exploited social disapproval as a potent means of shaming dissent and achieving maximum compliance.

Be kind, they urge you, and deprive yourself and your children of oxygen for your neighbour’s sake. Be responsible, and roll up your sleeve to receive the magic injection that will not only make you immortal but demonstrate your selfless concern for others. Don’t be stupid! Remember, having no symptoms doesn’t mean you’re not a silent super-spreader.

But do sceptics really deserve the contempt being dished out to them so freely?

Are they really so stupid?

Would any self-respecting “anti-vaxxer”, for instance, have been silly enough to come out with the nonsense spouted by the UK’s secretary of state for health, when he told us that:

If you think about it, the vaccine is a tiny bit of the virus in order to get your body to be able to respond.”

Really, Mr Hancock? Are you sure that’s what’s actually on offer here?

Perhaps Mike Yeadon, former head of respiratory research at Pfizer, can set you straight. As he pointed out to James Delingpole recently, “a tiny bit of the virus” is not what goes into these novel treatments – perhaps because, when it comes down to brass tacks, “no-one’s got any”.

What is actually being pumped into millions of arms throughout the world with such careless abandon is not, he says, “just a vaccine”. Although these gene-based medications do “ultimately raise an immune response … the way they do it is completely different from any vaccine we’ve used before … they induce the body, the cells of your body, to actually manufacture a piece of this pathogen, this infective agent. And you respond to that.”

“Anti-vaxxers” could have told you that, Mr Hancock, because they’ve done their own research, and they understand the difference between the traditional idea of a vaccine and what is currently being held up as the golden ticket to freedom. So please stop feeding us blatant untruths about what is actually being injected into all those trusting arms and making its insidious way around millions of bloodstream.

Let’s have the facts that would enable everyone to make a truly informed decision. It really doesn’t help when you fuel sectarian hatred by standing up in parliament and declaring that:

those who promulgate lies about the dangers of vaccines that are safe and have been approved … are threatening lives …”

The obvious response to that is, “those who promulgate lies about the safety of novel and incompletely tested gene therapies doled out on emergency approval only are threatening lives.”

The life of Peter Meadows, for instance: a superlatively healthy seventy-six-year-old, who, trusting government and NHS assurances that the “vaccines” were “safe and effective”, suffered an unprecedented heart attack within hours of receiving the Pfizer jab, and died a few days later: just one of over a thousand post-vaccine fatalities officially logged in the UK’s Yellow Card system to date – or perhaps, as the evidence is increasingly suggesting, of thousands of vaccine-related deaths which, unlike those ascribed to Covid, are not in line with natural mortality profiles.

It seems that those castigated for being “anti-vaxxers” are, in fact, far from stupid. On the contrary, they are the ones sensible enough to take the time and trouble to research and weigh up risks versus benefits before exposing their bodies to any of the novel gene therapies currently being hawked around as “vaccines”.

It is those who don’t search out the facts for themselves who are not using their intelligence, and who are thereby laying themselves open to the smooth sales talk of drug pushers in high places. Peter Meadows and his wife were apparently not handed even the minimal information supplied by the NHS regarding possible side effects they might suffer until after they had received their shots.

They had no idea that the “vaccines” so confidently touted by Matt Hancock were not fully tested for immediate, let alone medium- or long-term, safety, and were issued under the “black triangle” system – ie, were still “subject to intensive safety monitoring”, with the proviso that a record should be kept of all adverse reactions experienced by those acting effectively as human guinea pigs on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies.

What is more, a “high volume” of such adverse reactions were anticipated by the apparently unconcerned UK government before the roll-out began.

Although the Royal Pharmaceutical Society is quick to state that the black triangle label “does not indicate that the product is unsafe for use in patients”, the common-sense response to such a claim, after careful examination of the Yellow Card data, must surely be, “Oh yeah? And now pull the other one!”

In fact, a Pubmed paper advising the US as to whether or not the black triangle system does indeed promote “more judicious prescribing” of new medications, concludes that, “Accelerated drug approvals could cause more uncertainty about drug effectiveness and safety, but specific labeling of newly approved medicines is unlikely to promote more judicious prescribing.”

How much more accelerated could approval be, than the emergency approval accorded to the new coronavirus “vaccines”? And how much less judicious their prescribing, encompassing, as it does, the wholesale jabbing of populations throughout the world, including young people and children, who are at little to no risk of succumbing to the disease, let alone dying of it? It is depressing to learn that Peter Meadows’ daughters had understood enough about the uncertain nature of the hastily concocted “vaccines” to urge their parents not to have the jabs.

Unfortunately, like so many others, the couple were swayed by a longing to return to their old normal, and by peer pressure whipped up by the likes of Matt Hancock and SAGE, rather than by the reasonable concerns raised by their daughters after careful scrutiny of the facts.

So, once more: just how stupid are anti-vaxxers? Interestingly, a recent paper by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online found that, contrary to their popular denigration as “covidiots”, and to the embarrassment of the researchers themselves, covid sceptics “practice a form of data literacy in spades”.

Many of them “express mistrust for academic and journalistic accounts of the pandemic, proposing to rectify alleged bias by ‘following the data’ and creating their own data visualisations.” What they value is “unmediated access to information” and they “privilege personal research and direct reading over ‘expert’ interpretations.” And “Most fundamentally,” say the MIT team, “the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution.”

Exactly.

In which case, their dismissal of the WHO’s presumption, in claiming to be custodians of “The Science”, is hardly surprising. Nonsense, say the sceptics. Science can never be above questioning. It is not a bundle of rubber-stamped, government-approved dogmas, handy for facilitating some political or commercial agenda.

Like all forms of human knowledge, science remains eternally incomplete, the evolving construction of many minds researching truth in a continuing process of discovery: forming hypotheses, and attempting by all means possible to disprove those hypotheses; seeking to explain or resolve anomalies, but never holding any theory sacrosanct which further investigation might yet prove false; adapting to the gradual unfolding of new perspectives, as fresh evidence shakes the foundations of old paradigms.

It is the alleged “covidiots” and “anti-vaxxers” who, while they may not be scientists themselves, understand the principles on which the scientific method is based. As the MIT study admits, to complain that these irritating people “need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as uninformed and inexplicably extreme. This study shows the opposite: they are deeply invested in forms of critique and knowledge production they recognise as scientific expertise.”

All the same, the authors of the study seem to find the concessions they are compelled to make disturbing. “(H)ow do these groups diverge from scientific orthodoxy,” they wonder, “if they are using the same data?” Since all right-minded facts should show decent respect for the statutory consensus, surely anyone inducing them to defect in support of alternative, unsanctioned conclusions must be employing underhand methods?

“We have identified a few sleights of hand that contribute to the broader epistemological crisis we identify between these groups and the majority of scientific researchers,” the defenders of the true faith plead: and they shake their heads at the way “these groups skillfully manipulate data to undermine mainstream science,” quoting as examples the sceptics’ “outsize emphasis on deaths versus cases” and their suspicion of the officially promoted confusion of deaths “with” and “of” covid: both very good reasons, less partial analysts might say, for questioning the figures being spewed out ceaselessly by the government-funded mainstream media, and taken by a terrorised public to be gospel truth.

Yet it’s not just annoying amateurs, with their absurd claims that actual facts should trump any institutionally-coerced consensus, who question the official “narrative” – and, indeed the very existence of a pandemic, as traditionally understood before the WHO decided to “re-imagine” the term, on 4th May 2009, in anticipation of the projected swine-flu apocalypse (in the event, a damp squib, but a useful practice-run for the present resounding success).

After accumulating hard evidence in interviews with over a hundred eminent scientists and other experts, the Corona Investigation Committee, a team headed by Dr Reiner Fuellmich, are likewise challenging the means – essentially, a fraudulent PCR test capable of manufacturing cases on demand and fuelling the myth of the “asymptomatic superspreader” – by which the global coup and its predestined outcome, the push to “get jabs into arms”, have been so artfully engineered.

Dr Fuellmich – a lawyer qualified to practise in both the States and Europe – has already taken on such giants as Deutschebank and Volkswagen. We can only hope that the evidence which he and the rest of the Committee have gathered so painstakingly over the past year and shared with lawyers all over the world will continue to result in court cases where facts will triumph over consensus, vindicating the unvaccinated of “stupidity” before they are forced by the uninformed to wear yellow stars and find themselves rounded up in camps for the unclean.

And that those behind the coup, along with all who enabled and enforced their unlawful actions by “just following orders”, are brought to justice before an international tribunal, to be charged with what the Corona Committee describes as “the greatest crime against humanity ever committed.”

May 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

Israel Rejects Cooperation With UN Human Rights Council Commission, Foreign Ministry Says

Sputnik – 27.05.2021

Israel refuses to cooperate with the commission on Gaza and Israel, the creation of which is envisaged by a UN Human Rights Council resolution, and rejects the resolution itself, claiming that it acted in accordance with international law and ethical standards, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Earlier in the day, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for the creation of a commission of inquiry to investigate violations in the Gaza Strip and Israel.

“Israel rejects outright the resolution adopted today (Thursday, 27 May 2021) by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a body with a built-in anti-Israel majority, guided by hypocrisy and absurdity. Any resolution that fails to condemn the firing of over 4,300 rockets by a terror organization at Israeli civilians, or even to mention the terror organization Hamas, is nothing more than a moral failure and a stain on the international community and the UN,” the statement says.

The ministry noted that Israeli security forces had acted in accordance with the highest ethical standards and in accordance with international law, protecting their citizens from Hamas attacks.

“Israel cannot and will not cooperate with such an investigation,” the statement says.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the resolution a mockery of international law.

“Today’s shameful decision is yet another example of the UN Human Rights Council’s blatant anti-Israel obsession. Once again, an immoral automatic majority at the Council whitewashes a genocidal terrorist organization that deliberately targets Israeli civilians while turning Gaza’s civilians into human shields. This while depicting as the “guilty party” a democracy acting legitimately to protect its citizens from thousands of indiscriminate rocket attacks. This travesty makes a mockery of international law and encourages terrorists worldwide,” Netanyahu said.

The resolution adopted on Thursday by the UN Human Rights Council, inter alia, calls for the urgent creation of a permanent independent international commission of inquiry, to be appointed by the president of the UN Human Rights Council, to investigate all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel before and after April 13, 2021, as well as all root causes of recurring tension, instability and protracted conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression on the basis of national, ethnic, racial or religious affiliation.

May 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine | Leave a comment

Switch to Remote Learning Caused Large Increases in School Dropout and Learning Losses in Brazil

By Noah Carl • Lockdown Sceptics • May 28, 2021

Back in April, I wrote about a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that Dutch students made “made little or no progress while learning from home”. Now researchers have reported a similar finding in Brazil.

As in the Dutch study, the researchers used rigorous methods to gauge the impact of remote learning on student outcomes. In other words, they didn’t just compare outcomes in 2020 to those the year before.

In São Paulo State (where the study was based) state schools switched to remote learning only at the end of the first quarter, and they continued to teach remotely thereafter. This allowed the researchers to compare the change in outcomes between the first and last quarters of 2020 to the change in outcomes between the same two quarters of 2019.

They looked at two different outcomes: high dropout risk (i.e., whether the student had any math and Portuguese grades on his school record in the relevant quarter), and standardised test scores.

When comparing the change in 2020 to the change in 2019, the researchers found large increases in school dropout and learning losses.

Furthermore, they exploited a natural experiment to gauge the impact of switching back to in-person learning. In the fourth quarter of 2020, some municipalities allowed high-schools but not middle-schools to switch back. This allowed the researchers to compare middle- and high-schools in those municipalities with respect to the change in 2020 versus the change in 2019.

Consistent with the previous result, they found that switching back to in-person learning was associated with higher standardised test scores.

In the authors’ own words, their results show that “the societal costs of keeping schools closed in the pandemic are very large”. As such, they argue that “the public debate should move from whether schools should be open or not to how to reopen them safely”.

May 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Brazil, Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Vax Passports: Where Your State Stands

Alliance for Natural Health | May 27, 2021

As more Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19, and vaccination recommendations extend to younger and younger Americans, we are starting to see more efforts to require vaccination as a condition of receiving services, as we’ve seen at American universities. This endangers autoimmune patients who are more at risk of serious adverse events following COVID vaccination. States can take a stand for medical freedom and privacy rights. To prevent de facto vaccine mandates that endanger millions of patients, we must encourage state leaders to take action to protect our health.

Ten states, so far, have taken steps to restrict or ban the use of vaccine passports, electronic applications that display an individual’s vaccination status or COVID lab test results. Many have done so through executive orders signed by the governor: Arizona, Florida, Texas, South Carolina, South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. Three states have passed legislation along similar lines, including Utah, Indiana, and Arkansas.

These policies have important differences. In Florida and Montana, executive orders prevent businesses, in addition to state institutions, from requiring patrons to provide proof of vaccination to gain entry or service from the business. In Idaho, Arizona, South Dakota, Utah, South Carolina, Arkansas, Indiana, and Texas, the ban on vaccine passports is generally limited to entities of the state government or (in the case of Texas) any business that receives state funds.

Legislation is pending in the following states to prevent discrimination based on vaccination status and/or to prevent the use of vaccine passports: FL, NC, OK, HI, OR, RI, TX, WI, PA, and VT.

Texas State Senator Bob Hall, one of the sponsors of a bill preventing discrimination in Texas, had eloquent words to share about vaccine passports: “[My bill] aims to give Texans the peace of mind of knowing that their ability to navigate, participate, and function without being required to undergo an experimental medical procedure as a condition of that engagement is protected by law.”

Some governors have made positive statements, though have not yet taken action to prevent vaccine passports. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp tweeted, “I do not and will not support any kind of state-mandated vaccine passport… the decision to receive the vaccine should be left up to each individual.” Governor Pete Ricketts of Nebraska said “Nebraska will not participate in any vaccine passport program. This concept violates two central tenets of the American system: freedom of movement and healthcare privacy.” Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced “I oppose vaccine passports. The COVID-19 vaccine should be a personal health choice, not a government requirement.”

Some states are moving in the other direction. Hawaii is allowing fully vaccinated Hawaiians to travel between islands without quarantine and other testing rules, with plans in the works to launch a vaccine passport system. New York has already launched the Excelsior Pass, a voluntary app that allows people to upload negative COVID-19 test results or proof of vaccination. Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut said he expects “some type of passport or validation … probably led by the private sector,” and that more planning will occur once vaccinations are open to everyone. Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina said his administration is exploring the development of vaccine passports.

We’re already seeing how this can play out. In Israel, for example, the government issues “green passes” allowing access to social, cultural, sporting events, gyms, restaurants, etc., to individuals who have either recovered from COVID or have had the vaccine. Green passes must be renewed every six months.

We are all eager for life to return to “normal” following extended lockdowns and isolation. But vaccine passports are not the answer. We cannot deny rights and privileges to those, such as autoimmune patients, who choose not to receive a medical procedure due to a legitimate medical concern.

Action Alerts!

Florida and Montana residents, thank your legislators for banning vaccine passports. Take Action!
If you live in a state that banned vaccine passports only in state institutions (AZ, AR, ID, IN, SC, SD, TX, and UT), thank lawmakers for taking action but urge them to extend the ban on passports to businesses in the state. Take Action!
All other states: urge your lawmakers to take action to ban vaccine passports in your state. Take Action!

May 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Coexistence in Israel’s ‘mixed cities’ was always an illusion

By Jonathan Cook | Axis of Logic | May 26, 2021

Last weekend Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “terrorists” those Palestinian citizens who have been protesting decades of state-sponsored discrimination. Vowing that “anyone who acts like a terrorist will be handled like one”, he said: “Arab law-breakers are attacking Jews, burning synagogues and Jewish homes.”

Netanyahu has been far from alone in his denunciations of nearly two weeks of protests inside Israel by the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian by origin. They are the remnants of the Palestinian people, most of whom were ethnically cleansed at Israel’s founding in 1948.

Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, who is usually seen as far more moderate than Netanyahu, has called Palestinian protesters inside Israel a “bloodthirsty Arab mob” and described their actions as a “pogrom” against the Jewish community.

Both have remained largely silent about the wave of even greater violence against Israel’s Palestinian minority, both from the police and armed Jewish far-right gangs.

General strike

On Tuesday the Palestinian minority observed a general strike in protest at the wave of violence being directed at Palestinians in the region, most especially in Gaza. There, more than 200 people – and more than 60 children – have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.

At the same time, the minority’s main political body, the Follow-Up Committee, called on international organizations to protect Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens from the combined – and seemingly coordinated – backlash by Israel police and mob Jewish mobs.

Adalah, a leading legal organization for the minority, echoed the Follow-Up Committee, saying the Israeli government was “giving a free hand to racist and violent oppression” Arab citizens have been left with no alternative except to appeal to the nations of the world to force Israel to protect them”.

In the main sites of confrontation, in a handful of what Israel misleadingly terms “mixed cities”, it is Palestinian citizens who have been paying the steepest price.

These cities, several of them close to Tel Aviv, are historic Palestinian communities most of whose inhabitants were expelled in 1948. Even since, the small ghettoized Palestinian populations left behind have been aggressively “Judaized” – in what amounts to a long-term process of Jewish ethnic and religious gentrification to erase their presence.

Danger of pogroms

The first death from the clashes in the “mixed cities” was a Palestinian citizen who was shot in Lod, near Tel Aviv, by a group of Jewish residents. All the suspects in the murder are reported to have been released after the police minister, Amir Ohana, was among the senior politicians expressing outrage at the arrests.

Another early incident involved a Palestinian taxi driver being dragged from his car south of Tel Aviv by hordes of masked Jews who beat him savagely in front of Israeli TV cameras and hundreds of onlookers, with police nowhere in sight. Earlier, the same mob rampaged through the town of Bat Yam smashing any stores that looked like they were owned by Palestinian citizens.

Despite Netanyahu and Rivlin’s claims, it is Palestinian communities inside Israel that have been in far more danger of pogroms than the Jewish majority.

In the balance of power, the state’s security forces are tribally Jewish, the government and policy-makers are all Jews, a large proportion of the Jewish citizenry own weapons, and the media speaks for its Jewish population, not its 1.8 million Palestinians.

In a sign of the growing dangers, the Israeli media reported this week that applications for gun licenses – usually available only to Jewish citizens – had risen seven-fold.

Ohana, the police minister, has suggested Jewish citizens act as a “force multiplier” for the police – that is, they should be allowed to take the law into their own hands. And footage has shown police and armed far-right Jewish gangs cooperating in attacks on Palestinian communities in the mixed cities, even as those cities were supposed to be under curfew.

‘Reload the gun magazine’

Like Netanyahu, leading Israeli media figures have been openly inciting vigilante-style violence against Israel’s Palestinian minority.

In one example, a senior TV anchor, Dov Gil-Har, equated the protests by Palestinian citizens against state-sponsored discrimination with historic pogroms against Jews. Earlier, he had suggested to his Jewish viewers – 80 per cent of the country’s population – that the solution to the protests was to “reload the gun magazines”. When challenged by a Palestinian interviewee, he added that he might use his own weapon on the protesters.

The constant message to the Jewish majority has been the Palestinian public are a menace and that it may be necessary for Jews to take the law into their own hands.

And this has been happening just after the violent far-right – Jewish fascists – made unprecedented ground in March’s election, securing six seats in the 120-member parliament and possibly a place in government if Netanyahu can engineer a coalition.

Liberal incitement

But worrying as the direct incitement by Israeli politicians and the media against the Palestinian minority is, it is being strongly reinforced by a much more subtle “othering” by Israeli Jewish liberals. They have masked their own incitement in the more refined language of archeological preservation, Jewish-Arab coexistence, and religious tolerance.

In official Israeli discourse, the “mixed cities” – with Haifa the showroom – have long been presented as rare places where Jewish and Palestinian citizens live in close proximity, offering a potential model for greater understanding and cooperation between the two populations.

The flip side is less often highlighted: the “mixed cities” are just about the only communities where Jewish and Palestinian citizens have some sort of daily interaction.

In the rest of the country, Israel has imposed strict residential segregation. Palestinian citizens are confined to some 120 overcrowded, communities where they are starved of land, planning permits, industrial areas and classrooms for their children.

Herded together

But even in the “mixed cities”, there is no real mixing.

Before Israel’s creation on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, cities like Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Lod (Lydd), and Ramle were some of the most important in Palestine.

Israel’s leaders made it a priority to drive almost all of the Palestinian residents out of these cities during the Nakba and into exile, as part of a policy of making sure there was no educated, urban elite to organise political or diplomatic resistance to its ethnic cleansing campaign.

Today, most of the Palestinians in the “mixed cities” are descended not from the original families living there but from refugees who got trapped in them as they were trying to flee to safety in 1948. The Israeli army often herded the refugees together into the poorest areas of these historic Palestinian cities – neighborhoods Jews did not want to inhabit – while Israel decided what to do with them.

The descendants of the refugees still live in these deprived neighborhoods, typically renting from Amidar, an Israeli state-run property company. For decades, Amidar has denied them permission to renovate or improve their homes. It is usually only too ready to evict them if a state agency or Jewish investors decide these Palestinian families are in the way of a “Judaization” project.

Which is the necessary background for understanding the way the Israeli media, including a respected liberal newspaper like Haaretz, has been engaging in its own covert incitement when covering the latest events in the “mixed cities”.

Much attention has been given to the torching by Palestinian protesters of synagogues and yeshivas, or Jewish seminaries. The sight of Torah scrolls being evacuated from charred buildings has encouraged the Jewish public to conclude that these attacks were driven by antisemitism – a variation of the fear that Palestinians want to push the Jews into the sea.

Preposterously, Lod’s mayor compared these scenes to Kristallnacht – the notorious night of Nazi pogroms against German Jews in 1938 – as if Israel’s Jewish majority were not protected by one of the strongest armies in the world.

But there are practical, far more mundane reasons why synagogues and yeshivas were among the first buildings attacked in Lod.

Settler outposts in Israel

Over the past three decades, Israel’s main effort to “Judaize” the “mixed cities” has been waged through a religious war of attrition. A section of the settler population has been encouraged to “redirect” their attention from the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel. They have slowly encroached into the “mixed cities” as local municipalities and state agencies have lured them with special funding for their extremist seminaries and synagogues.

Homes and land are being taken over in Palestinian neighborhoods to house these new fanatical outposts of the main West Bank settlements inside Israel.

That has had very damaging consequences. The religious extremists have tried to whip up more nationalist sentiments among the local Jewish population of the mixed cities, increasing tensions with Palestinian neighbors. Just as is happening in East Jerusalem’s Old City, these Jewish religious fanatics are seeking to drive Palestinian families out of their own communities.

For years there has been especial anger in Jaffa about the takeover by Jewish religious extremists of the Palestinian parts of the city. That culminated weeks before the current clashes with an attack by two brothers on the head of a yeshivathere.

Even the Israeli court that examined the indictment against the brothers ultimately rejected police claims that the attack was antisemitic. Like many other families, the brothers have been fighting eviction from their home by a government agency. The attack reflected their anger that religious extremists are seeking out, and being offered, new properties in their neighborhood.

Following the incident, Palestinian families held a demonstration chanting: “Jaffa for Jaffans, settlers out.”

The huge resentment among Palestinians in the “mixed cities” towards these new religious occupiers can be explained by the urgent desire for self-preservation, not antisemitism.

‘Barbarians at the gate’

Similarly, the Israeli media have been aghast at the attacks on important archeological sites in places like Acre and Lod. The media’s barely veiled thesis is that these attacks have revealed Palestinian citizens to be, as Israeli Jews long suspected, barbarians at the gate. The impression has been cultivated that the minority’s behavior is little different from the Taliban blowing up the Buddhist Bamiyan statues.

Last week the Israel Antiquities Authority’s chief scientist, Gideon Avni, told Haaretz : “In Acre, an entire life’s work, meant to capture world attention through its archaeological value, went down the drain. In Lod, they [Palestinian residents] tried to destroy the attempt to empower and lift up the city as a center of antiquities.”

But again, there are good practical reasons why Palestinian residents of the “mixed cities”, especially in Lod and Acre, would be targeting archeological sites.

The Palestinian cities now defined as “mixed” are mostly located next to or over Roman, Crusader and Mumlak ruins.

Israel destroyed the Palestinian character of these communities from 1948 onward by expelling most of the Palestinian population, and then gradually Judaized their [environs] as public spaces. Archeology, like religion, has been weaponized against the Palestinian inhabitants of the “mixed cities” to assist in their erasure.

Archeology theme parks

Israel’s politicization of archeology has focused on layers of history unrelated to, and meant to overshadow, its recent Arab Palestinian past. Further, archeological preservation and related tourism ventures have become the pretext for yet again ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their historic cities.

The clearest example has occurred in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Israel Antiquities Authority has allied with a settler organization, Elad. Together, using highly dubious archeological evidence, they have been creating a Disney-style “Kingdom of David” theme park within and below a Palestinian neighborhood called Silwan.

The City of David site has been expanding for more than three decades, aided by the government and Jerusalem municipality. Dozens of armed Jewish settler families have moved into the neighborhood in violation of international law.

In the latest development, Israel is preparing to evict many dozens of Palestinians in the coming weeks as it expands the City of David.

It was these moves that in part fueled the tensions that sparked the current Palestinian protests inside Israel and the rocket fire from Gaza.

Lod mosaic attacked

Watching Silwan’s long-running oppression through archeology, Palestinians in the “mixed cities” have seen a strong echo of their own experiences. The main difference is that the archeological assault inside Israel focuses not only on Jewish history but embraces any historical period that distracts from Palestinian heritage.

Israel has misleadingly sold these archeological projects as “tourism development” and “urban renewal”, often claiming they are designed to improve “Jewish-Arab relations”.

One of the targets of the current protests was a soon-to-be-opened museum for the Lod Mosaic, a world-renowned, almost complete Roman mosaic found in 1996. It had been traveling the world until belated funding meant it could be housed in a poor Palestinian-majority neighborhood next to the old city where it was unearthed.

Although the mosaic was unharmed in last week’s attack, the new building’s glass frontage was smashed.

The residents’ resentment towards the new Lod Museum needs to be understood in two contexts: decades of obscuring the Palestinian heritage of Lod, as well as the visibility of its current Palestinian population; and the investment by Israeli authorities in projects to bring tourists to Lod, even as they continue to neglect local Palestinian residents, who suffer from high levels of poverty.

Lod’s old city was mostly destroyed in the 1950s to erase its Palestinian character. The streets, even in Palestinian neighborhoods, have been given Hebrew names.

Lod municipality recently unveiled plans to renovate another historic site, a Mamluk khan that was used as the city’s main market until 1948. Over the heads of the local population, it is due to be turned into a Judaized cultural space, housing cafes and arts and crafts shops.

And as with Silwan, Lod is developing local tour programs – sometimes in coordination with incoming settler populations – that highlight an ancient Jewish heritage and ignore the city’s Palestinian past and present.

Or as a report from Emek Shaveh, an Israeli organization of dissident archeologists, recently concluded: “The city of Lod thus erases once again the city’s glorious heritage and views its Arab residents as a nuisance.”

Families face eviction

In Acre, archeology has become an even more overt weapon to be used against the local Palestinian population. Since 1948, they have been largely confined to the seafront old city, where they were long ignored and mired in poverty.

But while the United Nations’ decision to designate the old city a World Heritage Site 20 years ago came to the rescue of the ancient buildings there, it did little to help the local inhabitants. In fact, their situation has become even more precarious as Israel, Jewish investors and foreign countries have poured money into the old city’s “development”.

Overseeing these projects are the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Acre Development Corporation, neither of which have consulted with the local or national Palestinian leaderships in Israel.

Gideon Avni, of the Antiquities Authority, told the Haaretz newspaper: “These symbols [in Acre] are being destroyed in front of our eyes.” Another unnamed expert echoed him: “Gangs of looters have systematically destroyed property after property.”

One of the main targets in Acre was the Antiquities Authority’s conservation center, supported by the Italian government.

The old city of Acre was built in the 18th century by a Palestinian ruler, Daher el-Omar, atop the ruins of an earlier Crusader city. But the Israeli authorities have been sidelining this important Palestinian layer – just as it has excluded the local Palestinian population – to encourage tourists to head into the underground, Crusader Acre.

Even when Palestinian heritage is being preserved in Acre, it has been repackaged as “Ottoman” – presented to Israeli Jews and tourists as a legacy of Turkish colonial influence rather than as the cultural and architectural artifacts of local Palestinians who lived under Ottoman rule.

One of the most visible Palestinian buildings is the well-preserved Khan al-Umdan, once the city’s main market, located in the harbor.

It has been sealed off for years as the Development Corporation has been finding investors to turn it into a luxury hotel. Palestinian families living in the warrens of alleys around the khan are facing eviction so as not to detract from the new ambience the Israeli authorities hope to create for tourists.

Disneyfication of Acre

Aiding this process have been wealthy Jewish investors, such as Uri Jeremias. They have been the driving force behind the gentrification of Acre’s old city above ground to take advantage of the new tourism. Jeremias’s small empire started with a fish restaurant on the seafront and has expanded to include a popular ice cream parlor and an ambitious hotel called the Efendi.

As the name suggests, the Efendi has contributed to the Disneyfication of Acre, remaking some of the old city’s most impressive Palestinian buildings into a hotel where tourists can experience generic “Ottoman” splendor, shielded from the poverty outside and from any trace of meaningful Palestinian heritage.

It is not surprising that Jeremias’s properties were also attacked, as was another hotel, the Arabesque.

In a fawning portrait in the Haaretz newspaper, Evan Fallenberg, owner of the Arabesque, was able to present his hotel as simply a site of cultural and economic renewal, and a symbol of “Jewish-Arab coexistence”. He called it “a labor of love shared by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike”.

Referring to his assumptions about Acre as a “model of successful coexistence”, Fallenberg added: “What gave me hope over the past few years is that this was some kind of microcosm of what could happen in this country, and it’s in danger of being lost now.”

Illusion of coexistence

But that coexistence model in the “mixed cities” was always an illusion, one that the protests finally served to smash. Coexistence worked for one ethnic group only, Jews. It was built on the continuing Judaization of these historic Palestinian communities to erase their Palestinian heritage and drive out their Palestinian populations.

Tourism and archeological preservation were simply more convenient, image-conscious ways to go about Judaization in the 21st century. They attracted less attention and international opposition than Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations and wholesale community demolitions of the previous century.

By stripping out this context – of Israel’s ongoing Judaization of Palestinian communities inside Israel – Israeli liberals have only deepened the incitement against Palestinian citizens. They have confirmed the picture presented by the right, whether it be President Rivlin’s “bloodthirsty mob”, Netanyahu’s “terrorists”, or the mayor of Lod’s “Kristallnacht”.

In doing so, Israeli liberals have offered their own form of legitimacy to the rationalizations by Jewish far-right gangs for their violence against Palestinian citizens: that they are protecting Jews and Jewish honor, that they are averting pogroms.

In defense of a non-existent coexistence, Israeli liberals have thrown their hand in with the far-right, exposing the Palestinian minority to the very real threat of Jewish pogroms.

The author lives in Nazareth, Israel.

May 27, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

The unseen evil of Covid restrictions … a dehumanising denial of physical contact

By Frank Palmer | The Conservative Woman | May 26, 2021

THERE should have been more outrage at the inhuman restrictions placed on us since March 2020.

The cat is now out of the bag about the psychological tricks used by the Government’s behavioural psychologists, with the collusion of the MSM – the terror tactics, the mixed messages creating uncertainty and insecurity, the successful attempts to polarise people, the gaslighting.

However, the full significance of the physical restrictions – the ‘social’ distancing, the prevention of meetings, the covered faces, the outlawing of affectionate hugs or handshakes – has not, I believe, been deeply enough understood.

The latter goes far beyond mind games, and has taken place in a modern culture that had already become increasingly depersonalised.

Long before Covid, face-to-face contact, or even telephone contact, with banks and other institutions (including GPs) was made progressively difficult. Staff at railway stations, banks and supermarkets were being replaced by machines. Enforced online accounts have been reducing us to disembodied digits. ‘Faceless bureaucrats’ abound.

In the streets, there was less and less eye contact or courtesy, with zombie faces headphoned, or glued to smartphone screens.

Aversion to physical contact was implied in the everyday language of ‘personal space’, ‘safe spaces’, and – in the cowardly euphemism for ending a relationship – ‘I need some space’.

‘I understand/sympathise’ was being replaced with ‘I know where you are coming from’ (a locution which already presupposes spatial remoteness).

Meanwhile, with online ‘socialising’ you don’t see or meet a person, you see a screen with an image, an increasing replacement for the real McCoy, a fantasy engagement devoid of the moral and emotional risks involved in engaging with a person ‘in the flesh’.

And of course, you have absolute control, where this simulacrum of a human presence can be ‘ghosted’ at the click of a mouse.

The upshot is that people are increasingly reduced to abstractions, which can obliterate the need for integrity in the way they are treated. A power-mad government can therefore easily reduce us to what Johnson called ‘pure mathematics’, or pieces on a chessboard.

In proper human interaction, the reality of the other person consists in their physical presence. We are embodied persons, with all the moral implications that generates.

Our moral imperatives are not mere mental abstractions. They are infused with references to our embodied nature, one sign of which is that our moral perceptions are not unrelated to our aesthetic sensibilities, which involve our sensory capacities.

Our reaction to wrongdoing or evil is not simply cerebral disagreement, it involves visceral repulsion. There are overtones of our sensitivity to beauty and ugliness in being appalled at the repulsiveness of greed, the slime of dishonesty, the filth of obscenity, and the stench of corruption.

We are not mere ‘rational beings’ (even Mr Spock has some feelings ). Our moral perceptions seem connected to a series of aesthetic contrasts between pure and impure, clean and dirty, savoury and unsavoury, harmonious and discordant, sweet-smelling and foul-smelling, and natural and unnatural (which are not for us mere ‘value-free’ biological categories).

That is not to say that our morality can be reduced to aesthetics. I merely emphasise a point about our embodied condition.

Professor Anthony O’Hear has reminded me of the significance of the following remarks of Simone Weil in her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force …

‘The human beings around us exert just by their presence a power which belongs uniquely to themselves to stop, to diminish, or modify, each movement which our bodies design. A person who crosses our path does not turn aside our steps in the same manner as a street sign, no one stands up, or moves about, or sits down again in quite the same fashion when he is alone in a room as when he has a visitor.’

The reference to (physical) presence is what is vital here. We meet people ‘in person’, and this presents a challenge to our self-centred tendencies in accepting the ‘reality’ of other people.

There are some things which are basic and primary to any further sophisticated views we reach about human beings. In one of his philosophy lectures, Professor David Hamlyn once asked: ‘How does an infant acquire the concept of a person?’

Pat came the answers from students about the ratiocination (the process of exact thinking or reasoning) involved in conceptual development.

‘No’, said Hamlyn, ‘the infant acquires it through being treated as a person. By being cuddled and burped, by being smiled at … and so on.’

In his essay Eine Einstellung zur Seele (An attitude towards a soul), Peter Winch argues that our primary reactions to people are ‘unreflective and primitive’, that these reactions are ‘part of the primitive material out of which our concept of a human person is formed’.

It seems to me that these instinctive reactions are present when we walk with someone and automatically match our steps to theirs, we harmonise with their facial expressions, and these reactions are not derived from ratiocination, nor from intellectually inferred beliefs about what it is to be human.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, challenges the idea that we infer mental states from bodily behaviour by saying: ‘We see emotion … we do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom.

‘We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features – grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face.’

He also makes the telling observation that ‘we don’t see the human eye as a receiver, it seems not to let something in, but to send out …’

Again, our embodied nature is revealed in such expressions as ‘lending someone a sympathetic ear’, ‘being touched or moved by generosity’ or ‘my heart goes out to you’.

In the 19th century, after the prison reforms of 1835, ‘silent treatment’ was used in some US prisons as an alternative to physical punishment.

It consisted of forbidding prisoners from speaking to one another, calling them by numbers rather than by their name, and making them cover their faces – all to dehumanise them and break their will.

The physical restrictions, the prevention of interaction, and the face coverings imposed upon us by this government are equally unethical, if not downright evil.

But, for the reasons given earlier, so many people cannot see this. They have been forcibly alienated from their own nature and will no doubt uncritically accept their reduction to trackable digits on the biometric identity passes being planned – the price of their future so-called freedom.

May 26, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Israel carries out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, robs them of their homes, yet pretends it’s the victim

By Richard Medhurst | RT | May 25, 2021

The Israelis are seeking to reframe their occupation of Palestine as something else, in order to hide their inhumane oppression. What’s happening in Gaza is not a ‘war’ nor a ‘conflict’, but a brutal military colonization.

Israel launched its latest offensive against the Gaza strip on May 10, bombing the Palestinian enclave by land and air. For several weeks prior, tensions had swelled in occupied Palestine, as Israeli forces cracked down on Palestinian protesters. At the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, protests began against restrictions that Israel imposed on gatherings during the Holy Month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Palestinians also marched against Israel’s plans to evict families living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and the protests became intertwined.

While Israeli mobs marched through the streets unimpeded, damaging Palestinian-owned stores and chanting “Death to Arabs,” Palestinians were met with a brutal backlash from Israeli police, culminating in Israeli forces storming the Al-Aqsa mosque, firing tear gas and rubber coated bullets at people as they prayed, injuring more than 90.

Israel’s desecration of the third holiest site in Islam drew international condemnation and Hamas, which runs Gaza, demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the mosque. This was ignored, so Hamas responded with rockets. Israel then began its offensive, which continued for eleven days. Thousands of reservists were also called up, prompting fears of a ground invasion.

Israel’s Dahiya doctrine: ‘punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’

Like previous wars against Gaza in 2009 and 2014, Israel purposely targeted public and health infrastructure – a hallmark of its military strategy, and a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Israel put a desalination plant out of action which provided water to hundreds of thousands. Electricity lines were cut leaving barely five hours of power a day. Water mains were damaged so that sewage overflowed onto streets. The main road leading to al-Shifa hospital, the enclave’s biggest, was bombed, and other clinics were damaged. The only laboratory able to do Covid-19 tests was rendered inoperable.

Health workers and residents described horrific scenes of loved ones and neighbors buried alive under rubble, and of having to dig out dead bodies. By the end of the assault, 12 Israelis had died; while 242 Palestinians were killed, among them 23 girls and 43 boys. Around half were women and children.

Several Palestinian families were entirely wiped out. Dr Ayman Abu al-Ouf, one of Gaza’s most renowned medical specialists, was killed in an airstrike on his home, alongside 12 members of his family.

The IDF’s twitter account proudly tweeted a graphic saying, “200+ terrorists neutralized.”

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, almost 2,000 Palestinians were wounded. It was reported that at least 2,000 housing units were destroyed and an additional 15,000 homes damaged.

Several residential buildings were completely leveled by airstrikes. On May 15, Israel bombed the offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera in Gaza. This was met by silence and feigned concern by Western liberal democracies, whose appreciation of a free press did not extend to Palestine that day.

Disproportionate force has always been a core pillar of Israel’s military, known as the Dahiya doctrine, which dates back to the 2006 war against Lebanon, and which was ruthlessly implemented against Gaza in 2009 and onwards.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with two million Palestinians living on a tiny strip of land under blockade from Egypt and Israel since 2007. Its residents live at the mercy of a military occupation that bombs them with impunity, shielded by Western nations who whitewash its crimes.

On several occasions at the United Nations Security Council, the Biden administration blocked the release of a statement calling for a ceasefire because the language condemned Israel – which Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz thanked the US for in a tweet.

The animosity between Benjamin Netanyahu, whose 12-year tenure as Israel’s prime minister had been at risk, and his political rivals vanished once the strikes began. The attack on Gaza and Hamas bought him a little more time in office.

Protests in support of Palestine erupted worldwide. In London, 100,000 people took to the streets in solidarity. Palestinians themselves held a general strike on May 18. Shops closed as people marched in record numbers against Israel’s crimes. Two people were killed and over 100 were wounded by Israeli occupation forces who fired water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets at them.

After 11 days of incessant air strikes from Israel and rocket fire from Hamas, a ceasefire was finally brokered by Egypt, entering into effect on May 21, 2am local time. Israel continued its bombings until the last minute. In the days after, Israeli police again entered the compound of Al-Aqsa mosque, firing tear gas and providing armed escorts to Jewish settlers who showed up in an act of provocation.

While the shelling may have stopped for now, the blockade and occupation have not. Gaza remains the world’s largest open-air prison, its residents unable to leave or rebuild, as generations continue to live in the ruins of one conflict after the other.

‘Israel’s right to defend itself’

A point often raised in Western political discourse is “Israel’s right to defend itself.” What of the Palestinian people? Do they not have a right to defend themselves? Are they expected to just tolerate apartheid, occupation and violence? How can a colonizer speak of defending themselves, when their very presence and occupation is an act of oppression? When one speaks of defense, then it is surely the unequivocal right of Palestinians to defend themselves, as millions of them remain stateless on their own land, dispossessed of their homes and human rights.

Israel claims to only target “terrorists” and “militants,” yet half the casualties, if not more, are always civilians. Decimating infrastructure and residential buildings is not defense. Leveling schools, hospitals, UN buildings and the offices of the international press is not defense. One of the most advanced militaries in the world unleashing its wrath on a civilian population without an army, let alone an air force or navy, is not defense. This is offense; it is cruel, barbaric aggression in its most violent form.

In a recent conversation I had with Palestinian Ambassador to Austria Salah Abdel-Shafi, he eloquently summarized how the Palestinian issue poses a fundamental problem for so-called Western liberal democracies who claim to champion human rights and equality, while giving Israel carte blanche as it denies Palestinians their human rights and levels their homes with no repercussion.

Israel is never held to account and sits above international and humanitarian law, annexing, colonizing and killing with impunity.

Its entire existence depends on ethnically cleansing Palestine and robbing Palestinians of their homes to make way for settlers from around the world. Israel wants to control the narrative around its actions, pretending that it is a victim and that this is all about Hamas.

This is naught but an attempt to reframe the occupation of Palestine and Israeli apartheid as something else in order to hide the oppression and inhumane behavior. What’s happening in Palestine is not a ‘war’ nor a ‘conflict’, it is a brutal military occupation which seeks to ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to make way for Jewish settlers. It’s colonization. The Palestinian cause is fundamentally rooted in human rights; in anti-imperialism and anti-racism. It is and always has been the story of resistance against colonizers.

Richard Medhurst is a British journalist born in Damascus. Owing to his coverage of international relations, US politics, the Middle East and Julian Assange extradition he has built a successful YouTube channel and hosts a program on Press TV.

May 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Facebook is suppressing ‘facts’ that are flagged as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’: whistleblowers

RT | May 25, 2021

Facebook is taking aggressive steps to sideline any content, including factual material, critical of Covid-19 vaccines, two insiders have revealed to Project Veritas. The tech giant claims the policy was publicly announced.

The conservative media watchdog organization published a purported internal Facebook memo concerning “Vaccine Hesitancy Comment Demotion.” The policy aims to “drastically reduce user exposure to vaccine hesitancy,” the document states.

Another document leaked to Project Veritas discusses how to flag and categorize “non-violating content” that raises questions about vaccination, “thereby contributing to vaccine hesitancy or refusal.”

Comments can be “demoted” if they are flagged as directly or indirectly discouraging people from getting vaccinated. It doesn’t matter if the content is factually accurate, Project Veritas reported, citing the leaked documents.

According to the reported policy, “shocking stories” about side effects linked to the vaccines can be suppressed, even if they are “potentially or actually true events or facts that raise safety concerns.” The company explains that such content should be discouraged because it could “present a barrier to vaccination in certain contexts.”

Facebook is also said to target comments that claim vaccination is not necessary due to low Covid-19 death rates, or argue for natural herd immunity against the virus, as such views are considered “indirect discouragement” that could hurt immunization efforts.

One of the Facebook whistleblowers who reached out to Project Veritas said that anyone who questions the “narrative” of “get the vaccine, the vaccine is good for you” will be “singled out.”

A second company insider, identified as a data center technician, said that Facebook is working to censor all content that can be deemed critical of vaccines.

“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” the whistleblower told Project Veritas.

In response to the leaked documents, a Facebook spokesperson told the media watchdog that the company “proactively announced this policy on our company blog and also updated our help center with this information.”

In February, the platform said it was expanding its efforts to combat “false claims” about Covid-19 vaccines. Under the initiative, Facebook said it would remove content that claims “vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against” or that argues the jabs are “dangerous.”

The content crackdown comes amid growing concern about side effects that have been linked to the vaccines. Numerous countries temporarily suspended their rollout of the AstraZeneca jab amid reports of blood clotting in people who received it. The pharmaceutical company has insisted the vaccine is safe, a position that has been echoed by the EU’s drug regulator. However, some have argued that there is insufficient data to show that the vaccines represented on the market are safe and effective long-term, as their rollout was fast-tracked amid the pandemic.

May 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook, Human rights | Leave a comment

Telegraph: UK Needs “Vaccine Force” To Produce Jabs “On Tap”

By Richie Allen | May 24, 2021

Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph editorial focused on vaccine production. The newspaper claimed that the UK should set up a “Vaccine Force” in the same way that we maintain a standing army in peacetime.

According to the editorial:

One of the big lessons from this crisis is that vaccines are essential, one of modern civilisation’s greatest inventions and must be deployed far more efficiently and ruthlessly than Britain’s public health establishment had previously fathomed.

Ruthlessly? I’ll come back to that. The Telegraph claims that the country needs to be better prepared for pandemics and flu-seasons to come and that vaccine work and human challenge trials should begin immediately. The paper says:

We need to be much better prepared next time a new virus emerges. Like this time, vaccine work must begin straight away; but the difference must be that we need immediate human challenge trials.

It was a remarkable achievement that it took just 11 months for vaccines to start being injected; but next time the target should be closer to three.

We need massive production and distribution capacity on tap, at all times, just as we maintain a standing army even in peacetime. Never again should an epidemiological challenge lead to the country being locked down for months on end.

The Telegraph’s message is pretty clear. The paper wants the country to set up a vaccine army that will run mass-production facilities and human trials forever more. It wants this new army or “force” to be ruthless in its endeavours.

This, says the paper, is the only way to avoid lockdowns in future. Lockdowns are intolerable and devastating for the economy and health. The only answer, says The Telegraph, is to have vaccines “on-tap.”

By ruthless, the paper might mean that there should be little or no red-tape to prevent these vaccines reaching our arms. Maybe the paper means that the UK should be ruthless in dealing with refuseniks, because after all, refuseniks delay the end of restrictions.

I’m betting that The Telegraph didn’t come up with the idea of a “Vaccine Force” all by itself. But then again, what the hell do I know? I do know this. We really are here now.

May 24, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

OSHA Pulls Guidance Stating Employers May Be Held Liable For ‘Adverse Reactions’ If They Mandate Vaxx

By Chris Menahan | InformationLiberation | May 23, 2021

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration threw workers under the bus over the weekend by pulling their new guidance which stated that employers they may be held liable for “any adverse reactions” if they mandate employees take COVID-19 vaccines “as a condition of their employment.”

On April 20, OSHA released a new FAQ on their website stating that if employers require their employees to be vaxxed “then any adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related” (and therefor must be recorded for, at the very least, worker compensation claims).

OSHA appears to have caved to political pressure and scrapped their own well-thought-out, pro-worker guidance after just one month so as not to “disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts.”

Their FAQ now states:

DOL and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency’s position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.

OSHA was created to protect workers’ rights and instead it’s trampling all over them on behalf of Big Pharma.

“Encouraging COVID-19 vaccinations” comes before protecting workers’ rights.

Despite OSHA’s disgraceful actions, OSHA states on their own FAQ that their “guidance is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations.”

Employees are not under any legal obligation to take experimental mRNA shots. Employers who attempt to force these shots on their workers are going to get sued and the case may go all the way to the Supreme Court.

May 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, OSHA, United States | Leave a comment

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Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News

By Alan MacLeod | MintPress News | October 16, 2024

One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions. … continue

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