Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Clinton Tried to Push Hungary’s Orban Into Invading Yugoslavia During 1999 NATO War, Vucic Reveals

By Ilya Tsukanov – Samizdat – 08.10.2022

On March 12, 1999, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland became the first members of the defunct Warsaw Pact alliance to be incorporated into NATO after Washington broke its commitments to Moscow not to expand the bloc eastward. Two weeks later, NATO kicked off a massive 78-day aerial bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

US President Bill Clinton attempted to prod Hungary into invading its Yugoslav neighbors during the alliance’s 1999 aerial campaign of aggression against Belgrade, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has revealed.

“In 1999, Hungary was supposed to attack Serbia with ground forces. [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban confirmed this to me and allowed me to inform the public about it. US President Bill Clinton and the British demanded from Orban that the Hungarians attack Serbia from the north to stretch our forces to Vojvodina, something Orban refused to do, putting him under great pressure,” Vucic said in an address to the nation on Saturday.

According to the Serbian president, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder helped Budapest withstand the pressure from Washington.

Orban received further criticism for rejecting a ground invasion from the British during his trip to the UK, Vucic said, with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher telling the Hungarian leader that she was greatly “bothered” by Budapest’s refusal to attack its neighbor, because it would mean that “more British soldiers will die.”

Vucic said the episode demonstrates the disconnect between the Western military alliance’s efforts to build “trust” with Belgrade, and the reality that the bloc plotted to invade his country.

Viktor Orban served his first tenure as Hungary’s prime minister between 1998 and 2002, and presided over the country’s entry into NATO, which was approved by the previous government. He served as leader of the opposition between 2002 and 2010, before his conservative nationalist Fidesz party returned to power.

The US and its NATO allies spent 78 days bombing the now-dissolved Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring and summer of 1999, launching over 2,300 missiles and dropping more than 14,000 bombs, including cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions which contaminated the Balkans with at least 15 tons of radioactive material. As many as 5,700 people were killed in the bombings, with tens of thousands more diagnosed with cancer thought to be associated with the aggression in the years and decades since. In 2017, Serbian scientist Ljubisa Rakic calculated that the amount of DU dropped on Yugoslavia was equivalent to about 170 Hiroshima bombs. The bombing was also estimated to have caused up to $100 billion in economic damage.

President Joe Biden played a key role in stoking US aggression in Yugoslavia, serving in his capacity as a senator from Delaware as one of the top hawks in Washington pushing for the conflict to be expanded into a full-on ground invasion.

October 8, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Online Safety Bill Will Only Reinforce the Regime of Government Propaganda and Censorship

Dr. Mark Shaw | The Daily Sceptic | October 6, 2022

I switched on the TV on Saturday morning at 6:30am expecting to get a mixture of different short news stories, but what followed was 26 minutes of a film on the news story of the tragic death of Molly Russell – you can watch it here.

It began with melancholic music, which continued in the background. Molly’s father said that he could see how, if one was exposed to the sort of online content his daughter was exposed to, “it could destroy you”. He described the “toxic corporate culture” at the heart of social media platforms. You could feel the father’s pain and grief. The reporter, BBC’s Angus Crawford, said the coroner ruled that “social media did play a part in Molly Russell taking her own life”.

I am truly sorry for the Russell family’s loss, but the way this story has been presented here feels wrong. The general presentation bears the hallmarks of propaganda techniques I will describe later. There is little other content than what I have described above and it is repeated ad nauseum. In Molly’s death the coroner ruled that “social media played a part” but there was no mention in this media report of any of the possible multitude of other factors that may have been involved. Such a one-dimensional synopsis may even be harmful in itself because it might misrepresent the complexities underlying suicide, giving false hope or belief, with the potential to exacerbate the myriad of other factors that can lead to mental health problems and self-harm, regardless of the reporter’s intent.

It is right that the media should devote a fair amount of news discussion to the very important subject of suicide, but this should be delivered responsibly, sensitively, without pulling at the heart-strings, and provide balanced, accurate reporting that doesn’t dumb down debate or put suicide down to singular causes. The Suicide Prevention Resource Centre lists the eight major risk factors for suicide. It seemed to me that Molly’s father and indeed Molly herself were being exploited in connection with a drive to restart the upcoming Online Safety Bill. Might this particular news story coverage be a form of propaganda?

The Online Safety Bill was put on hold at the beginning of the Conservative leadership contest. It was due to have its second reading in the House of Lords. The Bill is complex and the details of what it constitutes can be found here. There are now, however, renewed calls for it to be brought back by a number of organisations in the wake of the inquest into Molly’s death. My concern is that the Online Safety Bill will effectively reinforce the tendency towards Government-approved media propaganda. To explore the potential minefield of issues that this subject raises I want to pursue the matter from a sceptical angle and understand more about the meaning and techniques of propaganda.

Propaganda might be defined as a special form of communication used especially in news media to manipulate public opinion by distorting the representation of reality. Some descriptions I’ve seen seem to embellish propaganda with a slightly positive spin, in that the ultimate aim may be for the greater good as, for example, suggested in the case of military war. I, however, can only see the term in a negative light because the whole ethos is based on deception, usually on a mass scale. The widespread use of propaganda undermines trust of those in power and eventually leaves the public confused and largely unable to establish what news is actually genuine.

Among other ‘harms’, the Bill creates incentives for social media companies to remove online content that is supposedly ‘legal, but harmful’. Is the targeting of this content simply a way of circumventing a democratic justice system for political purposes, by setting up a parallel system of censorship outside the courts of law to suppress online speech? Justice should be seen to be done and the suppression of legal content must surely be anathema to the idea of fair treatment for all members of society.

Recent articles in the Daily Sceptic and TCW have demonstrated the dire effects propaganda has in relation to the Covid pandemic regime. News of the many confirmed deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines have been buried and the professional bodies relating to healthcare (the GMC), and law (the SRA) have made it almost impossible for concerned parties to dare speak out or whistleblow. Wouldn’t the Online Safety Bill close the partially open door that challenges the mainstream media narrative and Government diktats? Isn’t a far greater harm the one where Dr. Hoenderkamp’s child patients (in the Daily Sceptic article) with confirmed post-vaccine heart damage will live with the possibly lasting consequences for the rest of their lives, and will forever wonder why they were essentially coerced into receiving a medical intervention that, based on their clinical need, was completely unnecessary? All this because they and many other children and young adults and their parents potentially do not obtain and are prevented from receiving properly informed consent – and this even before such a Bill is on the books? Isn’t the far greater harm the one in which the public have not been given all the information and warnings from experts about lockdowns and the COVID-19 vaccines because those dissenting voices and the potential whistleblowers cannot afford to do so for fear of the proposed consequences of the Bill, which will only make the situation worse?

The full list of propaganda techniques is long but here are some apposite Covid-related examples that demonstrate further harmful effects:

  • ad hominem – ‘to the person’; used against scientists opposing lockdowns and emergency inoculation;
  • ad nauseum – tireless repetition of slogans such as ‘save the NHS’, ‘safe and effective’, ‘don’t kill granny’, etc.;
  • emotional appeal and agenda setting – e.g. the death by suicide of Molly Russell;
  • appeal to authority – the deployment of the Chief Medical Officer (U.K.), Fauci (U.S.), celebrities and even the Queen (to encourage vaccine uptake);
  • appeal to fear – the instruction that, despite decades of study showing no clear benefit from mask-wearing in relation to airborne viruses, it was suddenly made compulsory in public places;
  • appeal to prejudice – that non-mask wearers and the unvaccinated will spread disease;
  • bandwagon technique – reinforcing people’s natural desire to be on the winning side, be team players and win the battle against those who refuse to join up (vaxxers v anti-vaxxers);
  • black and white fallacy – presents only two choices, e.g. lockdowns or no action, when a middle ground could have been reached as with the Great Barrington Declaration.

The obvious problem with propaganda is that it never works both ways, it only works the way those in power dictate. I don’t want a Bill that bans governments from saying that the Covid vaccine is 95% effective, extremely safe and will prevent transmission of the virus. All these claims were made by the Government at the beginning of the pandemic and have now been proved wrong. I just want the opposing views to be heard. If there is to be an Online Safety Bill, I would demand that it essentially work almost directly in the opposite fashion – by outlawing media censorship (not just online) of experts with contrarian views and by emphatically protecting whistleblowers.

An Online Safety Bill will only be practical and feasible if it can robustly answer the following:

  • How does the source making an accusation that content is harmful prove just that; what is the evidence?
  • Does the evidence stand up to scrutiny and does it take into account the possibility that things can change over time or that present unknowns will later come to light?
  • How can we be sure that those responsible for scrutinising the evidence are unbiased and accountable?
  • ‘Harmful’ to whom and to what proportion of the recipients? Might some content that is harmful to a minority be beneficial to the vast majority, and who decides?

Ofcom will be appointed as the state regulator of social media but, as I explained in my previous article, this regulatory body is clearly failing in the things it already has a duty to fulfil and should be scrapped in its current form. In business, lawyers warn that the new online rules will have a chilling effect and hit businesses unnecessarily hard.

Thus, in conclusion, I can see no way in which an Online Safety Bill can be made workable without undermining free speech and being far more harmful than any ‘misinformation’ it manages to suppress. The proposals, rather than being kicked into the long grass, should be scrapped altogether.

Dr. Mark Shaw is a retired dentist.

October 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

The buffoon delivering a permanent energy crisis

By Andrew Montford | TCW Defending Freedom | October 4, 2022

In 2017 it was announced that windfarms had agreed to sell power to the grid at just £57 per megawatt hour. It heralded, said the cutters-and-pasters of press releases in the mainstream media, a new era of cheap renewable power. A few stubborn souls pointed out that there was no sign that windfarms were getting any cheaper to build and run, but such naysayers were shunned and insulted, and the establishment carried on as if nothing had happened.

Five years on, and the windfarms concerned are busily selling power into the open market at anything between four and ten times the prices they had agreed. Their agreements have gone unfulfilled. The extra cost to consumers is running into billions of pounds every year.

We were tricked, big time. But we live and learn by our errors. You’d have to be pretty slow on the uptake to fall for a multi-billion-pound trick like that a second time, wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately, this is precisely what Sir John Armitt, the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, seems to have done. In fact, rather than being ‘once bitten twice shy’, he seems to be pleading ‘Bite me harder, and this time do it where is really hurts.’ Let me explain.

In an article in the Telegraph, Sir John says we need lots more renewable energy, and adds that the latest auctions ‘secured prices nine times cheaper than current high electricity prices set by gas generation’. Well, yes, but we have already seen that auction price contracts are a trick; the last round of agreements were abandoned the moment operators found they could get more in the open market. Does Sir John not know this? Can the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission really be so divorced from the realities of the energy system? Moreover, he clearly understands that the price differential between gas-fired and wind prices is mostly temporary – a function of the war in Ukraine driving up gas prices – but still believes it should motivate permanent changes to the electricity system. What can he be thinking?

Sir John’s positions on other aspects of the energy system are equally mystifying. He seems to think there is a global market for gas. But a global market would have a global price, and that is simply not the case: European gas prices are (in dollar terms) currently 70 per cent higher than UK ones and 800 per cent higher than US ones (!) Does Sir John not understand this? How can he possibly think there is a global market? Is there nobody at the National Infrastructure Commission who can put him right?

Nor is the auction price trick the only example of Sir John failing to learn from experience. In one notable flight of fantasy in his article he says that ‘reducing prices, enhancing energy security and reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 all point in the same direction’. Huh? Between 2002 and 2020, a period when gas prices were broadly flat, electricity prices for consumers roughly doubled, a function of the inefficiencies that renewables impose on every other generator and on the grid as a whole. How can he think that more renewables will bring lower prices? He understands that the gas price spike is temporary! And as for security, the electricity grid has been severely destabilised by renewables (because they have no ‘inertia’, in the jargon). A million people were left in the dark in 2019, and the grid as whole is now in danger of falling over completely. But Sir John wants more!

In similar fashion, he says we should be furiously insulating our housing stock. Yet we simply cannot get away from the fact that most of the housing stock is old and, in our humid maritime climate, needs to breathe to prevent damp and mould. Has Sir John not learned from the fiasco the last time a crash insulation programme was tried? Two million homes were damaged. Lives were ruined. Is he even aware that this happened?

On and on he goes. We should use hydrogen to store energy, he suggests, without apparently a thought to the cost involved. Can the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission really not understand that in going from electricity to hydrogen and back, two-thirds of the energy is lost? So when we start emptying the hydrogen store, it will set market prices, which will soar in response, probably to levels similar to what we see today, far, far higher than the economy can bear.

In other words, Sir John’s ideas will deliver a permanent energy crisis and a great depression. It is no more than you would expect from such an epitome of the British establishment: urbane, erudite, a consummate networker. And utterly incompetent.

October 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Covid vaccines: I just want to understand why, Dame June

By Gillian Dymond | TCW Defending Freedom | October 4, 2022

It is now nearly 11 months since Gillian Dymond started asking Dame June Raine, head of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), to explain what the organisation is doing to investigate the deaths and injuries occurring shortly after Covid-19 vaccination, and this open letter is her latest attempt to get an answer. You can read previous instalments in the saga here, here, here, here and here. 

Dear June Raine,

You have not replied to any of the previous letters I have written you regarding the nationwide rollout of novel medications against SARS-CoV-2. I suppose I should simply accept your confident public assertion that these injections are, indeed, ‘safe and effective’: but how can I, when this is contradicted by so many disturbing post-injection reactions among my friends and family? So please excuse me for writing to you again. I am writing because I want to understand. I want to understand why you are doing this. I want to understand why you think it is right to enable the mass prescription of pharmaceutical products whose short-term testing was questionable, and whose medium- and long-term effects are entirely unknown.

You enjoyed an Oxford education, and I want to understand why, with your academic training, you are choosing to ignore the caveats of numerous high-quality experts by giving these injections your blessing. My own experience of university was that an essay which failed to take a balanced overview of any question would receive short shrift. Why, my tutor would ask, had I not considered this or that other important fact or perspective, this or that other authority, before drawing my conclusions?

You are a doctor, and I want to understand why you continue to authorise the emergency use of inadequately tested medications despite the availability of successful protocols involving the early use of tried-and-trusted treatments. I want to understand why, after the emergence of viable alternatives to the novel injections in the summer of 2020, well before any ‘vaccine’ came on to the market, you chose to risk violating the basic requirement of the Hippocratic Oath, ‘First do no harm’, by blacklisting these safe and effective treatments and advocating ‘emergency’ use of the questionable and the unknown.

Of course, both as an academic and as a doctor, you have done no more than fall into line with the vast majority of your peers. From your point of view, it would certainly have been a bad career move to announce that the new pharmaceuticals produced at such speed and such expense had proved to be unnecessary. For ordinary doctors, things were even worse: they faced disgrace and expulsion from their profession if they failed to jab as required. As for academics, even those unblinkered by ideology kept their heads down and played along with censorship of their few dissenting colleagues, on pain of jeopardising valuable funding. Only those who had already retired, secure in an unblemished record and a reliable income, had nothing but comparatively harmless attacks on their reputations to fear when they questioned the ‘settled science’ – indeed, the very idea of ‘settled science’.  No wonder the institutions dishonoured by so much mindless kow-towing to the state-sponsored authorities who ordered them to betray their raison d’être have fallen into widespread contempt! How is it possible to respect an academic who acquiesces in censorship? How is it possible to respect doctors who fail to ensure informed consent prior to the injection of a potentially dangerous substance, or who refuse to see their unmasked patients face to face?

But, June, you are not just an academic and a doctor; you are not even just a civil servant; like me, you are a mother: and it is as a mother, above all, that I cannot understand why you have authorised the rollout of these inadequately-tested concoctions to children as young as five; children who stand in far greater danger from the injections than from the illness itself. How do you reconcile the fact that nobody has the least idea of the long-term effects of these treatments with your insistence that they are ‘safe’? How can you be sure that the risks are outweighed by the benefits, when the benefits are proving ever more debatable and the risks of long-term, potentially devastating, injury are unknown? Your own children must be well into adulthood, but would you really have advised your pregnant daughter or daughter-in-law to be injected? Perhaps you have young grandchildren. If so, have you urged them to roll up their little sleeves and be jabbed, without any qualms regarding their future health and reproductive ability?

Perhaps you are, indeed, as enthusiastic about the alleged life-saving qualities of the new medications in your private life as you are in public: in which case, given the mounting evidence against them, I sincerely wish to understand why. What do you know that is sufficient to countermand the indications of the Yellow Card scheme and justify the accumulating tragedies of those suffering serious adverse effects? Presumably you have really convinced yourself that the computer models (rubbish in, rubbish out?) are right, and that your emergency authorisation of the novel injections has saved billions of lives. If so, I would like you to help me understand why.

This issue does, after all, have wider ramifications. It is not a one-off. You have made it clear that the current roll-out is merely a precedent to similar population-wide prescriptions of mRNA medications to similar population-wide prescriptions of mRNA medications, and that the MHRA is busy ‘transforming’ itself into an enabler, rather than a regulator, of new medicines. At the very least the public deserve to be made aware that your agency is now working with the pharmaceutical industry to speed the entry of new drugs on to the market within 100 days of any proclaimed ‘emergency’, using the public as guinea pigs in ‘real-time’ testing.  Since very few of us watch MHRA board meetings, and no mention is made of such a transformation in the highly selective news bulletins fed to the public by the mainstream media, this strange departure from the precautionary principle is, like the long-term effects of the medications which will be ‘offered’ to us, largely unknown. If it were better publicised, the public might well insist that the MHRA take its place openly as an ancillary of the drug manufacturers, and demand that a genuine regulatory body, working on the time-honoured principles of long-term testing and ‘First do no harm’, take its place.

It seems to me that your transformation into an ‘enabling agency’, on the back of the ‘pandemic’, is a transformation for the worse, to the point of being a threat to the lives and health of the population. Covid-19 was struck off Public Health England’s list of high consequence infectious diseases on February 19, 2020, even before the first lockdown. Off-label remedies were speedily found to treat the illness successfully. The ‘pandemic’ existed only because it was redefined as such by the WHO and industriously promoted and kept alive by government misinformation. I want to understand why you, an intelligent woman, so easily accepted this misinformation; I want to understand why you chose to abandon academic rigour and the provisions of the Hippocratic Oath when no  emergency required you to do any such thing; and I want to understand why you are proposing to repeat this recklessness in relation to a steady stream of future products.

Please enlighten me.

Yours sincerely,

Gillian Dymond

Footnote: The now monthly (formerly weekly) Yellow Card report is a week overdue from the well-funded (by drug manufacturers, the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the Department of Health and Social Care) and well-staffed MHRA.

October 4, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Truss declares herself a ‘huge Zionist’

Samizdat | October 4, 2022

British Prime Minister Liz Truss described herself as a “huge Zionist” and “huge supporter of Israel” during a meeting with with a pro-Israeli Tory parliamentary group on Sunday.

Truss was a guest of honor at the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) event during the annual Tory Party conference in Birmingham, which she was attending for the first time in her new capacity. Talking to a crowd on the sidelines of the event, she declared her unwavering commitment to the Israeli cause, according to footage of her remarks published on social media.

“As you know I am a huge Zionist, I am a huge supporter of Israel, and I know that we can take the UK-Israel relationship from strength to strength,” she told the cheering attendees.

The CFI itself focused on part of her speech, in which she referred to “threats from authoritarian regimes who don’t believe in freedom and democracy,” against which “two free democracies, the UK and Israel, need to stand shoulder to shoulder.”

Truss’ position on Israel is well known, and she promoted it during her campaign to become the new Conservative leader and prime minister. Among the policy changes that she pledged to effect in office was to review the relocation of her nation’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Former US President Donald Trump did the same thing during his tenure in the White House.

The British PM made the same promise last month, during a meeting with her Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. Pro-Palestinian groups and the Palestinian leadership have condemned the idea.

October 4, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

PayPal to expand its speech restriction rules in November

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 1, 2022

On the heels of its censorship spree in the UK – that received backlash so great it got the attention of lawmakers – PayPal is rolling out a new agreement that gives itself more censorship powers and the ability to strip income from those who don’t abide to its speech rules.

Violation of the “Acceptable Use Policy constitutes a violation of the PayPal User Agreement and may subject you to damages, including liquidated damages of $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation,” PayPal writes.

PayPal’s clause about taking users’ funds for a violation of its rules has long been established. But, as published on September 26th and to be effective on November 3rd, 2022, PayPal will add restrictions to its acceptable use policy that go beyond illegal activities and fraud and into the realm of policing speech.

The updated policy prohibits users from using PayPal for activities that:

“Involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable … (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) … (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation … or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.”

Big Tech platforms are increasingly finding ways to punish people’s speech under the guise of banning 🛡 “misinformation,” and making themselves as the arbiters of truth in deciding what is and isn’t true.

Backlash at PayPal in the last week caused it to backtrack on its censorship of the Free Speech Union, its founder Toby Young, and his news website The Daily Sceptic after pushback from both sides of the British political spectrum.

Critics argued that the removal of the accounts was view-point discrimination.

PayPal never gave a specific reason for the suspension of the accounts. They only said that the accounts had violated the acceptable use policy.

After the accounts were removed, a spokesperson for the financial services provider said: “Achieving the balance between protecting the ideals of tolerance, diversity and respect for people of all backgrounds and upholding the values of free expression and open dialogue can be difficult, but we do our best to achieve it.”

PayPal was accused of ignoring the fact that defending someone’s right to free speech is not the same as promoting their views.

“Forgive me if I don’t leap for joy,” Young told The Telegraph after the accounts were reinstated. “The last two weeks have been a nightmare as I’ve scrabbled to try to stop The Daily Sceptic and Free Speech Union going under. PayPal’s software was embedded in all our payment systems, so the sudden closure of our accounts was an existential threat.”

PayPal has a strong history of censorship. In June, it banned the account of evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright who researches the differences between the sexes.

Free speech advocacy groups have criticized PayPal for the lack of transparency and its lack of due process when freezing or closing accounts. The groups argue that the company should give users details on the policy that has been violated and an opportunity to appeal the decision.

When Dr. Wright asked why his account was suspended, he was told to “submit a subpoena.”

October 1, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Ivor Cummins interview with Dr. Aseem Malhotra

The Fat Emperor | September 28, 2022

Just back from London where I attended Dr. Malhotra’s press conference, covered by GB News etc.
– he has a new peer-reviewed published paper out, and it’s a super resource to read and share – link here, free to download: https://insulinresistance.org/index.php/jir/article/view/71
(part 2 here:  https://insulinresistance.org/index.php/jir/article/view/72

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

September 30, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Hey, Covidian! Leave Those Kids Alone

BY FRASER KRATS | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

As my beleaguered teaching colleagues and I try to get our school communities into the swing of things once again this new academic year, I find myself to be merely, powerlessly wishing that no more grotesque permutations of the Covid Madness return for a third consecutive winter. ‘Home-learning’ in particular was, of course, disastrous for children in a myriad of ways. On a purely practical level, it was fairly tricky for the teachers too, so I do believe that most of the profession hopes to avoid the insidious perfidy of forced absences or outright closures. Granted, I would prefer my colleagues to be motivated in these desires by an understanding of the abhorrent, casual neglect of children’s fundamental needs over which we were forced to preside for two years. But I’ll have to be content if the Department for Education will just let us stay open.

Belatedly, conventional wisdom has it that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the school-aged population. Perhaps if the undistorted version of that truism was more widely accepted – that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the healthy population – some teachers (and their unions) might find that their selfish and flawed but unending clamour for ‘more to be done’ lost its sympathisers.

It’s been a typically warm and sunny September thus far, but a small number of our students remain curiously attached to their face-coverings, sporting them lesson in, lesson out, as I look on aghast but unable to order their removal. The so-called harmless, cost-free non-pharmaceutical intervention continues to wreak its harms.

For those of us who have, by now, long fought Covid restrictions, it might feel like a further, renewed battle this Autumn to see off the prospect of the Return of the Madness. After all the hammer-blows of Spring 2020, we ordered our thoughts, picked our battles, identified our sacrifices, practised our polemics, marshalled our arguments and, eventually, took to the fray. For many of us with little or no previous experience in politicking, we may even have learnt some tricks about the art of discourse and debate along the way.

I am not referring here to my professional life of course. In my professional life I am – quite rightly – not permitted to express my personal or political ideologies or opinions to students.  No good and proper teacher would dream of doing so – unless of course you suddenly, naively found that your beliefs fell in line with the government propaganda of the day. If you happened to support the mantra “Hands, Face, Space”, you could plaster it across every TV screen and vacant stretch of wall in the whole place. If you were minded to promote social distancing, or face coverings, or bubbles, or ‘don’t kill granny’, or healthy 12 year-olds giving their own consent to being tested for Covid before entering the building, or any other similar paean to the dreaded virus – exhort it from the corridors, folks!  If you were an Assistant Head, you might even have the surprising chutzpah to lead a series of science-themed assemblies (to 1,200 impressionable young minds) in which you vaingloriously celebrated the disingenuous and risible proposition that Professor Sarah Gilbert’s AstraZeneca vaccine “saved 2 billion lives”.

No – when I refer to my endeavouring anew to muster awareness of the risk of restrictions this winter, I’m talking about in my personal life, away from school.

There is a danger for those of us who have resisted the mainstream Covid narrative for two-and-a-half years that we forget quite how completely and devastatingly uninterested the compliant majority are in our version of events. Many may have shifted their positions slightly, faced with ever more piles of evidence (from their own preferred sources) of the damage needlessly done. Surely, it would be hard to find someone who would embrace it all quite so gleefully all over again.

But the big arguments are not won; the wider population are still just not listening. Family members try to gently talk us down; friends tactlessly avoid the subject altogether or just silently disappear from view; some colleagues regard me warily and with increasing wryness as a bit of a crank. They all seem to manage to tell themselves that none of it really affects them and, with a special kind of inward-looking perspective, I suppose they can make that be true.

So we keep talking and waiting and wondering where the socially palatable prima facie evidence to incontrovertibly back us up and help us definitively put a stop to all this might come from. I continue to posit theories, based on my understanding of basic principles of human decency and common sense. Anecdotes, ideas and experiences should be part of our arguments and, after all, when that single piece of elusive, critical, confirmatory data lands – why should anybody ever believe what any expert says these days anyway?

Some older adults – I overhear them in crowded cafes – are delightedly and obediently getting in line for their fifth (count ‘em!) Covid jab, and some disconcerting individuals in the High Street and park remain devotedly wedded to their face-covering. They don’t seem one bit ashamed or embarrassed by the many peculiar and ridiculous things their Government forced them to do for a good while there. Is that just it for them? Over and Out, Shut Up, Move On.  Are these things, this history, these awful, ungodly consequences we’re all living with, just a permanent feature of the rest of their lives, no questions asked?

There are certainly those who seemed to revel in the whole drama of it all, those who still reel performatively, sanctimoniously backwards in doorways when you dare to step near; those who complied without thought and still appear blissfully ignorant of any possibility of error or mishap or downside and who probably watch too much TV; those who spewed the new terminologies of their epoch with uneasy, faltering confidence: ‘flatten the curve’, ‘viral load’, ‘third wave’, and – my personal favourite – ‘asymptomatic’.

Is it possible that this merry, obstinate lot are the very same people who seem in recent times also to be lurching emptily but enthusiastically from one cause to another? ‘Stay Safe everyone!’ ‘Respect this virus!’, bang a kitchen pan and ‘Save the NHS!’, erect a flag and ‘Stand with Ukraine!’, buy some frozen Chicken Kievs, close everything when it’s hot and etcetera and blah, ad infinitum.

Could it be that the common thread which connects all the headline-followers, the unquestioning, the frighteningly readily compliant, is a lack of something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives? Might there be a link between the modern world’s malaise, the tragic lack of connection and community, and a very public hankering after connection and community? You don’t know your neighbour, you’re not invested in your town, you couldn’t possibly overcome the awkwardness involved in helping the elderly lady down the road – why not get your phone out instead to prove how good you are at Joining In and Helping Out?

If people don’t have a potentially perilous stake in something close, precious and valuable, or anything at all to believe in which reaches them viscerally, it seems as though they might just keep scrambling around, somewhat manically and pathetically, for Another Good Cause to get behind.

And if I’m right about all of that, then the solution to the real Covid problem lies with people and professionals who don’t know they’ve got a problem.

Get a life. Get a community. Get some meaning. And do not force a single school kid to stay at home again this year.

Fraser Krats is a secondary school teacher.

September 28, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

What’s the Best Way to Rein in Companies Like PayPal?

Dr. David McGrogan – The Daily Sceptic – September 27, 2022

It is encouraging that Tory MPs are taking seriously the threat to an open society posed by PayPal’s demonetisation of UsForThem, Toby Young, the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic. And it is more encouraging still that they are likely to respond to the threat through legislation – possibly through an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill. It is vital, however, that they get this response right, and understanding the purported legal basis for a company like PayPal excluding a user from its services is crucial in this regard.

To get some preliminary matters out of the way, it is important first to distinguish a financial services provider like PayPal from a social media outfit like Twitter or Facebook/Meta. There is a case to be made (although it is ultimately not one I would concur with) that it is legitimate for a social media operator to exclude people who express opinions deemed undesirable by its owners. I agree, for example, with the position that the Supreme Court adopted with respect to the baker in the famous ‘gay cake’ case; it is unconscionable for the law to force the owner of a private company to propagate a message that would conflict with said owner’s sincerely held beliefs. I think large social media providers are fundamentally different from the baker in that case, but I can at least understand the basis on which somebody would argue that Twitter booting, say, Andrew Tate, is essentially the same as a Christian baker refusing to bake a cake bearing a message supporting gay marriage (or, let’s say, a hypothetical Muslim printer refusing to print a satirical magazine bearing an image of the prophet). But there is no sense in which PayPal can be construed to be said to be in this position. PayPal does not serve to propagate messages of any kind; nor are its users even publicly known or identifiable for the large part; whether or not the Daily Sceptic is a customer of PayPal places no requirement on the latter to associate itself with the expression of any view whatsoever. It is a different kettle of fish.

It is also important to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons for a business like PayPal seeking to exclude users who express certain kinds of views that might be connected with criminal offences, even indirectly. To use an obvious and extreme example, there would be nothing wrong with PayPal closing an account it discovered to be connected to an organisation dedicated to sharing positive perspectives on paedophilia; while a group of paedophiles getting together to talk about how wonderful their predilection is would not (I think) in itself constitute a criminal offence, it is easy to see why PayPal would wish to avoid coming within a barge-pole’s distance of any suggestion it was knowingly assisting such a group. However, this kind of concern clearly would not apply with respect to the FSU, UsForThem, the Daily Sceptic or Toby personally.

A company like PayPal cannot therefore fall back on these kinds of excuses in behaving as it has done. And in any case, we can all what is really going on here – it’s nothing to do with matters of conscience or a legitimate attempt to ‘de-risk’ with respect to potentially criminal behaviour. (It is notable, for example, that PayPal appears to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about the risks of being seen to be associated with precisely the kind of paedophile support group I mentioned earlier.) This is simply a case of somebody at PayPal wishing to send a statement: “We’re on the side of the good guys, and if you’re not on our side, mind your P’s and Q’s.” The fact that a very important set of elections is due to take place in the US in November undoubtedly has something to do with this.

It is therefore entirely legitimate for Parliament to legislate to prevent this kind of behaviour, and the question thus becomes: what form should such legislation take?

Looking at the underlying purported legal justification for PayPal’s conduct will give us an answer. The recent closure of the accounts of the Daily Sceptic et al seems to have been done on the basis that these respective parties have violated their respective User Agreements with PayPal. The User Agreement, it must be said, has not been particularly clearly drafted, but this much at least is clear: PayPal may close a user’s account if the user is in breach of its terms. The specific breaches themselves in this case were not, however, made particularly clear. Initially, it seemed that PayPal was accusing the Daily Sceptic et al of breaching its Acceptable Use Policy – namely item 2 (f) of that document, which prohibits the user engaging in ‘the promotion of hate, violence or other forms of intolerance’. This obviously wouldn’t stick, though, and subsequent statements by PayPal have suggested that the accounts were closed on the basis that the Daily Sceptic et al were ‘providing false, inaccurate or misleading information’, which is on the list of ‘restricted activities’ in the User Agreement proper.

The haphazard way in which PayPal appears to have conducted itself is suggestive that the decision was made to close the accounts first, with the justification being worked out afterwards. But we do now know what its legal representatives would trot out as the purported contractual basis for closing the accounts in question: being in breach of the User Agreement by engaging in the restricted activity of providing false, inaccurate or misleading information.

And this in turn would allow us to identify the remedy in the creation of a relatively short Act (or amendment to the Online Safety Bill). I am not a Parliamentary drafter, but my suggestion would be something along the lines of:

A provider of financial services may not by reference to any contract term terminate or suspend the provision of services to a user on the basis of that user spreading false, inaccurate or misleading information, or similar, unless it is satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the spreading of said information would in itself constitute a criminal offence in the laws of England and Wales.

This would quite neatly prevent PayPal or any other such provider from doing this kind of thing in future, while allowing such operators to ‘de-risk’ for the legitimate reason of avoiding any connection to the commission of crime. The consequence would simply be to make a term of a contract between a financial services provider and a customer purporting to allow termination on the grounds of the spreading of false information, etc., unenforceable, and the legislation could be worded to give this immediate effect.

Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.

Stop Press: Allysia Finley has written a good comment piece for the Wall St Journal about why the Supreme Court may well uphold the law in Texas prohibiting large social media companies from blocking speech based on viewpoint.

September 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

PayPal Could Be Legally Prevented From Banning People For Their Political Views

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | September 26, 2022

Although PayPal has been banning conservatives and right-wingers for years, its recent move to terminate accounts operated by the Free Speech Union and other groups in the UK that opposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates has apparently been a step too far.

Following the controversy, dozens of Conservative Party MPs, including Michael Gove, David Davis and Sir Iain Duncan Smith, signed an open letter to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Business Department demanding that PayPal be legally barred from imposing discriminatory practices.

The letter asserts that it is “hard to avoid construing PayPal’s actions as an orchestrated, politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views on these topics within the U.K.”

This morning, the London Times also published a powerful piece by Jawad Iqbal which highlighted the dangers of allowing PayPal to abuse such powers.

“This is censorship by corporate diktat: the company sets its own rules and interprets them as it sees fit. It appears oblivious to the notion that it is wrong in principle to withdraw vital services from people because of their political views. Would it be acceptable for a supermarket to refuse to serve a customer because of their politics or for a high street bank to refuse to make a payment to a company it deemed politically objectionable?” asked Iqbal.

After questions were asked in Parliament about the issue, a new law could be on the cards that would put an end to PayPal’s crusade against dissident viewpoints.

“Conservative backbenchers are considering launching an amendment to upcoming financial legislation in the House of Commons that would ban companies from freezing campaigners’ accounts,” reports the Telegraph.

“One source said ministers are likely to accept the amendment to the law because Conservative backbenchers will support it.”

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has also demanded answers from PayPal.

The familiar old argument from leftists, who apparently now vehemently support monopolistic transnational corporations using their might and vast resources to impose censorship, is that “PayPal is a private company and can ban who it wants.”

However, at least in the UK, that isn’t strictly true.

PayPal is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which mandates “All firms must be able to show consistently that fair treatment of customers is at the heart of their business model.”

Fair treatment of customers clearly isn’t at the heart of PayPal’s business model, it’s literally the exact opposite.

September 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

PayPal shuts account of group who fought to keep schools open during pandemic

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 22, 2022

UsForThem, a UK parents’ group that campaigned to keep schools open during the pandemic, has been banned from PayPal because of “the nature of its activities.” The group says that after the ban, it is unable to access thousands of pounds in donations.

“We were completely taken aback to learn that PayPal was discontinuing our services ‘due to the nature of [our] activities’. No prior warning or meaningful explanation was given, and despite them saying we could withdraw our remaining balance, we cannot,” said the group’s co-founder Molly Kingsley to The Telegraph.

“UsForThem has only ever been fully transparent about the organization’s aims, and our mission statement is on a prominent page of our website for all to read. That makes clear that our core focus is campaigning for children to be prioritized in public decision-making.

“If something about that mission offends PayPal, why could they not be transparent about that? For a small volunteer organization, this has a significant impact on our ability to operate, as presumably was intended.

“It is extremely hard not to draw the conclusion that this is a politically motivated cancellation of an organization that in some way offends PayPal.”

Toby Young, Free Speech Union’s founder, also claimed PayPal banned his account for political motives. The Free Speech Union’s account was also banned, as well as the account of the non-profit Gays Against Groomers.

September 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

UK to double military spending amid cost-of-living crisis

Samizdat | September 25, 2022

Britain will boost its military spending considerably in the coming years, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has revealed, despite the fact the nation is facing an economic crisis stemming from Covid-19 measures and London’s sanctions on Moscow.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph published on Sunday, Wallace said the British government will shell out at least £52 billion ($56.5 billion) to shore up the military, which is “actually going to grow.” The plans are in keeping with Prime Minister Liz Truss’ campaign promise to boost defense spending.

According to the official, Britain’s annual defense budget will amount to £100 billion by 2030.

Wallace also took aim at former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and the Treasury for what he described as a “corporate raid” of the armed forces which started back in the 1990s. He claimed that the Treasury had even tried to “stipulate the size of the Army.”

“My department has been so used to 30 or 40 years of defending against cuts or reconciling cuts with modern fighting, they’re going to have to get used to a completely different culture,” the defence secretary noted.

Wallace expressed confidence, however, that Sunak’s successor in the office, Kwasi Kwarteng, would show more understanding toward the military’s needs.

The defence secretary, who retained his post after Liz Truss defeated Sunak in the race to become prime minister in early September, told journalists that the new leader’s willingness to spend more on the military was one of the key factors for him in deciding which candidate to back for prime minister.

“The reason I supported Liz Truss was that the risks we were prepared to tolerate in the middle of the decade are not risks I want to tolerate any more in light of Russian aggression,” Wallace said.

Addressing world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York, Truss reiterated her campaign pledge to spend 3% of GDP on defense by 2030.

According to Bloomberg, the new prime minister reversed former PM Boris Johnson’s plans to slash the military by 9,500 personnel.

Commenting on the changes, which are expected to be unveiled by the end of 2022, Downing Street clarified that they were needed to “stand firm against coercion from authoritarian powers like Russia and China.”

The decision comes despite the UK government’s interest payable on debt hitting the highest level on record, as reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) earlier this week. Inflation, food, and energy prices have also soared, while the British pound and consumer confidence have hit the lowest levels in decades.

September 25, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »