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US wants neither peace nor dialogue: some voices call for disintegration of Russia

By Uriel Araujo | July 15, 2023

The US-led West is not interested in peace or in any kind of compromise to put an end to the current conflict in Ukraine. According to University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer, “Western leaders have additional goals, which include regime change in Moscow, putting Putin on trial as a war criminal, and possibly breaking up Russia into smaller states.” Journalist Anchal Vohra, writing for Foreign Policy, tells us that “Western analysts and Russian dissidents” have been publicly calling for the “decolonization of Russia itself”

Take, for example, the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (an independent US. government agency): already in 2022, Vohra reminds us, it published a report called “Decolonizing Russia”, which declared that such decolonizing should be “a moral and strategic objective.”

This extreme stance is not a “reaction” to the escalation of the ongoing conflict (but rather one of its external causes); in fact, such views are nothing new at all. Take, for instance, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the influential diplomat and foreign policy expert who served as a national advisor to former US President Jimmy Carter: he openly called for the further fragmentation of Russia (after the collapse of the Soviet state). In his 1997 Foreign Affairs piece, he called for a “loosely confederated Russia – composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic.” Brzezinski advocated all this while also speaking about  “America’s global primacy” – extending all the way over to the Eurasiatic landmass too, of course. According to him, the US should “perpetuate the prevailing geopolitical pluralism on the map of Eurasia”, so as to prevent even “the remote possibility of any one state” seeking to “challenge America’s primacy”. To put it simply, for the American establishment, Russian simply cannot be.

This attitude, distorted as it is, makes some sense, from a certain American perspective, focused on global supremacy and the pursuit and maintenance of unipolarity. This has been shaped by the geopolitical thinking of Sir Halford John Mackinder and his concept of the struggle for the Heartland, and also by US Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (and his 1890 The Atlantic article “The United States Looking Outward”). One must also add American exceptionalism to geopolitical thinking – that in turn can be traced back to the Puritan’s biblical metaphor about the “city upon a hill”.

We are talking about a nation that, according to retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix (formerly an adviser to Pentagon senior officials), engages in land wars, while also seeking naval hegemony.  Furthermore, it is actively pursuing a dual containment policy against both Russia and China, simultaneously. When it comes to Great Powers, for the United States, there can only be one.

Under this framework, Washington has consistently refused to acknowledge Moscow’s global role as the Great Power it is. American rhetoric up to early 2022 routinely described Russia as a “paper tiger” and a “declining power”. NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated on December 16, 2021 that “Russia is a power in decline, meaning the economic importance of Russia, the GDP is not keeping track with many other countries in the world”, albeit, at the same time, adding that “even an economy in decline and a power in economic decline can be a threat and a challenge.” This contradictory view could be seen mirrored in US President Joe Biden’s July 2022 dismissing remarks about Moscow “sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.” This denial attitude goes so far as to deny Russia’s role as a regional power even.

Many post-Soviet states have sought to maintain their ties with Moscow, which is exemplified by their ongoing adhesion over the last years to economic and security alliances such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and, more recently, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).  This reflects geoeconomic and geopolitical convergent interests which are a function of both geography and history: Russian civilization has a common history and has for centuries kept economic, political, and religious relations with a number of Slavic and Turkic peoples as well as many other ethnic groups.

In denial of all such basic facts and data, from an American perspective, Moscow is not to have even a “zone of influence” of its own. Moreover, for many influential US policy makers, political scientists, and thinkers (as we’ve seen) Russia should in fact cease to exist altogether as a polity.

Earlier attempts to “cancel” Russia into irrelevance or into virtual “non-existence” should thus be seen as examples of this peculiar mindset. The refusal to realistically and properly assess Moscow’s role and status in the global arena is not merely Western wishful thinking: the American Establishment seems to be unable to think of its own country outside of the context of a unipolar world. The very existence of a Russian state is thus perceived as a threat.

Rather than prolonging a proxy attrition war (which the Europeans themselves are tired of) “to the last Ukrainian”, responsible leaders should engage in good diplomacy and lots of table talks, which are needed more than ever, so as to minimize the risk of a global thermonuclear war (a scenario no one can afford). However, any such dialogue is hampered, among other things, by American exceptionalism.

July 15, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Greenwald: Ex-Spies Run Censorship Operations for Tech Giants

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 14, 2023

Former security state operatives occupy the highest positions at Big Tech internet platforms, and are responsible for censoring political content and limiting public debate, Glenn Greenwald reported on Tuesday.

Americans have been aware of security state efforts to control media narratives since the 1970s, when the Senate’s Church Committee exposed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, Greenwald told listeners of his podcast, “System Update.”

Under that program, CIA agents covertly infiltrated and influenced the nation’s largest news organizations.

Project Mockingbird’s exposure greatly embarrassed the media and the government,  as the CIA is forbidden from targeting the American public, Greenwald said.

Over the past decade, a series of whistleblowers revealed the U.S. security state has again amped up its covert targeting of American citizens, particularly since the start of the post-9/11 War on Terror.

News that intelligence agencies spied on Americans or infiltrated the news media was considered scandalous just over a decade ago.

But today, things have changed, Greenwald said. In fact, it has become common for top news outlets to openly hire former U.S. security state agents to report and comment on the news.

And in the last few months, the Twitter files and the latest Missouri v. Biden decision made clear how aggressive the censorship regime has become.

The U.S. government, in part, dictates what content social media platforms ought to allow on their sites, Greenwald said. But, he added:

“There’s another element, another layer to it, which is they’ve infiltrated these Big Tech companies — these ex-CIA agents have — exactly like they’ve infiltrated corporate news outlets. They’re all over these censorship regimes.”

Greenwald said top positions at the tech firms are now held by people coming directly from intelligence agencies.

For example James Baker, who the Twitter Files revealed was involved in most censorship decisions prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, worked as general counsel for the FBI before he became deputy counsel for Twitter.

“So the FBI sent its top lawyer to go work in the part of Twitter that censored political content,” Greenwald said. “Do you understand? That’s the FBI controlling our domestic political discourse and the limits of it.”

MintPress News profiled a number of former CIA agents who now manage and develop misinformation policies for Facebook in a July 2022 article that Greenwald shared.

According to the article, the problem isn’t that these people are incompetent. “The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platforms is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what you do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.”

Greenwald said this allows the intelligence agencies to maintain significant influence over news and information flows, while maintaining “some veneer of plausible deniability.”

The U.S. government doesn’t need to tell the platforms what to do because the people making the decisions rose in the ranks of the National Security State first — “meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s,” Greenwald said, quoting MintPress News.

Greenwald said this is evidence of a multi-pronged effort, where on the one side, former security state operatives propagandize the American people on corporate media and on the other side, they control what can be said on the largest Big Tech platforms.

As a result, he said, the entire range of dissenting views is “simply banned.”

The ‘censorship-industrial complex’

The Twitter account @NameRedacted247 tracks the movement of security state operatives into social media corporations where they work on misinformation and disinformation.

The account provided a thread, which Greenwald’s team confirmed, reporting that as of December 2022, Google employed at least 165 people in high-ranking positions from the intelligence community.

Across the company there were 27 former CIA agents, 52 former FBI agents, 30 people who came from the National Security Agency (NSA), 50 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and six from the Director of National Intelligence.

Facebook had at least 115 former security state operatives in high-ranking positions — 17 from the CIA, 37 from the FBI, 23 from the NSA and 38 from DHS.

Google’s “trust and safety team,” which manages what content is allowed on the platform, is managed by three former CIA agents who control misinformation and hate speech.

One of them, Nick Rossman, referred to “anti-vaxxers” on Twitter as “Nazis” and “Confederates,” Greenwald said, asking:

“Do you think these people are objective arbiters of misinformation? Or do you think they’re using their censorship power inside Big Tech for this in the same way that people inside corporate media are using it to advance the propaganda games of these agencies against their own citizens?”

Greenwald presented a series of online profiles of people who worked in intelligence for years or decades before recently moving into their new roles in Big Tech.

Matt Taibbi reported that the companies began hiring former intelligence agents after the 2016 election when the FBI established its social media-focused task force, The Foreign Influence Task Force or FITF.

Since then, a massive “censorship-industrial complex” has grown up, Greenwald said, that includes the U.S. state, philanthropic foundations, “fact-checking” organizations, Big Tech, universities, think tanks, nonprofits and private contractors.

The ‘hallmark of totalitarianism’

But the most amazing part of this story, Greewnald said, is the lack of pushback by liberals, who used to be the primary critics of the security state. “Central to left liberal politics was the view that these agencies are nefarious,” he said. But that all changed with the Trump presidency:

“… in 2015, in 2016, the US Security state aligned itself against Donald Trump and devoted itself to sabotaging first the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.

“That’s where Russiagate came from. That’s where all of those scams came from, including the lie in 2020 if the Hunter Biden laptop was misinformation.”

And because there are now very few media outlets reporting critically on these agencies, he said, they are at “the peak of their power, more powerful than ever.”

Because of that, he said they are embedded in the biggest corporations that control information and propaganda in the U.S. — corporate media and Big Tech.

Greenwald concluded:

“This is why they’re so obsessed with destroying the few outposts of independent media, the few places they cannot control, because without those, they really do have a fully closed information system.

“And a fully closed information system is the hallmark of totalitarianism. If you can control how people think and prevent them from hearing dissent, you can control all of their actions because their actions are based in what their thoughts are.

“And if you can control their thoughts, you don’t even need to control their actions. And that is the system that is being created.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Health is being rejiggered into pandemic preparedness: Documents from the EU Commission and US government

Huge expenses and rapid deployment of mRNA vaccines for infections but maybe all other medical conditions

BY MERYL NASS | JULY 13, 2023

Europe and the USA have already bought into the Global Biosecurity Agenda aka Pandemic Preparedness.

Europe issued its report on its Global Health Agenda in March, and it isn’t about health, it is about making health the driver for the WHO/globalist agenda. No surprise I guess. But to see it in print, with lots of pretty pictures, all spelled out: well, I was surprised. Please take a look at it.

But then I stumbled on this 2021 US document, signed by Eric Lander (then the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology) and Jake Sullivan, still the National Security Advisor.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/American-Pandemic-Preparedness-Transforming-Our-Capabilities-Final-For-Web.pdf

They equate the US government’s broad pandemic preparedness initiative with the Apollo (mission to the moon) program. Was that an oops? Because didn’t the Apollo mission suck up a ton of money but wind up in a studio being filmed by Stanley Kubrick instead, to fake out us gullible Americans?

Did Lander and Sullivan (or whoever wrote this report) give us a broad hint that the “biological preparedness” they envision will suck up a lot of money but go nowhere?

I don’t know if we went to the moon or not. But watching the astronauts at their press conference on their return to earth, I was convinced they were ashamed of their performance, rather than triumphant. Watch it.

The funding required in this report for pandemic preparedness is just over $65 Billion. To be spent over 7-10 years. But as I showed you 2 days ago, the President’s budget to Congress asks for $20 Billion next fiscal year for biopreparedness. The price has gone up.

By far the largest line item is vaccines: $24.2 billion.

This is a quote:

The development of mRNA vaccine technology and other ‘programmable platforms’3 — thanks to more than a decade of foresighted investment by the public and private sector — have been game- changing. mRNA vaccines shortened the time needed to design and test vaccines to a record-setting 314 days — far less than previous vaccines, which had taken several years. They have also been surprisingly effective against COVID-19.

Another quote from the report to justify “spending billions to save trillions” which is verbatim from the EU report linked above and from certain US documents:

In addition to protecting American lives, the annual investment is strongly justified from an economic standpoint: If major pandemics similar to COVID-19, costing the U.S. roughly $16 trillion, occur at a frequency of every 20 years, the annualized economic impact on the U.S. would be $800 billion per year. Even for somewhat milder pandemics, the annualized cost would likely exceed $500 billion

Then there is this, a vaccine timetable that is identical to the CEPI plan (Gates-Farrar being the main originators of CEPI) to get vaccines to the populace so fast that there is no time to test them in humans. In 130 days they plan to have enough vaccine for every American. Great, huh? No, it is scary.

Now you know what they are planning. We are only in the second stage of a very big battle for our bodily integrity and many other rights and freedoms, not to mention our property. Forewarned is forearmed!

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Former FBI Agent: Wray ‘Evasive’ Under Scrutiny Because Bureau Has Become ‘Ministry of Truth’

By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 14.07.2023

FBI Director Christopher Wray was grilled by lawmakers at a Thursday hearing called by the House Judiciary Committee that demanded answers about the bureau’s coordination with social media companies, its alleged abuse of a secret intelligence court, and use of informants during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol Building.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has been blasted by US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for “weaponization of the government against the American people,” which he said had eroded public confidence in the integrity of the FBI, on Thursday.

Jordan and other GOP lawmakers spent several hours interrogating the federal law enforcement chief about a number of incidents they said proved the FBI was being used as a political bludgeon against conservatives, including the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the 2016 election, a now-withdrawn memo from the FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia, that suggested spying on Catholic anti-abortion groups over domestic terrorism fears, and news that some people involved in the breaching of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, were paid FBI informants who acted as provocateurs.

In response, Wray pointed to the fact that he is a registered Republican Party member, telling lawmakers that “the idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background.”

He also rejected the GOP lawmakers’ assertions that the FBI used agent provocateurs to encourage people to commit crimes on January 6 or that the agency was protecting the Biden family by sitting on potentially incriminating information or suppressing a news story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer. However, he acknowledged the FBI’s failings in properly using the FISC, in line with previous findings by special counsel John Durham and a DoJ Inspector General’s report.

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and whistleblower over the bureau’s failure to stop the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Wray was “evasive” and had to resort to “euphemistic bromides” to defend the FBI’s reputation, because of the demands placed on the bureau by US policies.

Noting that Wray had adopted a “9/11 changed everything” mindset, Rowley pointed out that “it’s one of the few things they don’t lie about: 9/11 did change everything. Between the Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror, that now has morphed into a war on rival economic nuclear superpowers … has created all of this polarization and power mongering and control of the media through propaganda, which is what we’re talking about with the FBI now serving as liaison – if you want a nice term for it – our liaison telling social media what to censor.”

She noted that in a recent federal court order blocking the Biden administration from much of the coordination over suppressing so-called “disinformation” on social media, the judge noted there are some 80 FBI agents working in that area.

“We talked about all the work on violent crime and the FBI work against child predators, etc. I disagree that those are the priorities. The priority has been supporting the narrative. And you can see this going all the way back to Russiagate with [Peter] Strzok and all the rest, trying to do what they could on election issues, etc., and carrying through to today where 80 FBI agents are in this disinformation component.”

“He tried to say, ‘no no, it’s not about us declaring what is disinformation to the social media, it’s all about foreign influence’. So he’s trying to steer it in that direction, which makes it more difficult for the Republicans to attack. But in fact, I think it’s been acknowledged that this was a truth ministry. And in fact, that’s the Orwell term: Ministry of Truth. And that’s actually in the judge’s injunction, that the FBI is acting as a Ministry of Truth, deciding what is misinformation or not. And, of course, we’re living in an era where government propaganda has been legalized.”

Rowley turned to the subject of Ray Epps, an Arizona man who has filed a lawsuit against Fox News for pushing a story that Epps was “an undercover FBI agent and was responsible for the mob that violently broke into the Capitol and interfered with the peaceful transition of power for the first time in this country’s history,” according to the filing.

In a short video, Epps can be heard telling demonstrators they need to go into the Capitol but will probably be arrested for doing so, after which someone started chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!”

“Let me just explain a few additional points about this business of ’undercover agents,’” Rowley told Sputnik. “This was a confusing thing, some of the Congress people didn’t understand: when you ask about an undercover agent, that’s a specific meaning. That means an actual FBI special agent who has gone through the special training that they give, behavioral training, to assume a role. It goes through a whole process. So what they really wanted to ask, Ray Epps was not an undercover agent by the FBI definition. What he was, if anything, was an informant, or they call it now a ‘confidential human source’ or something like that – there’s different categories even of confidential human sources.”

However, the former FBI agent pointed out that “when it comes to a protest, the FBI would have been remiss not to have lots of agents being on the ground. So, even if you go back to 2008 in the Twin Cities, when the Republican National Convention occurred, I was in a library room with 20 people talking about [how] there was going to be a march against the RNC and there was going to be a peace picnic, etc. And we were in this little library room: three of the people in the room were FBI or Joint Terrorism Task Force, okay? There were only 20 people listening and two or three of them were law enforcement. One guy was hiding, he thought I might recognize him, so he was hiding behind someone else.”

Rowley noted that the FBI also designates “special events” where they dispatch agents, which even includes non-political events such as golf tournaments.

“So that’s one thing. Then the other thing is the operation of actual FBI informants. And that, of course, has to be cloaked with complete secrecy. So I don’t know if it has to be in some cases, but that’s the rule, that’s the procedure. So of course, Wray was hedging on this. He would not answer.”

“A lot of the entrapments that we saw in the War on Terror, they were issues of an informant or a source egging on a group of people to pretend that they were, you know, bombing something. And that’s the modus operandi here. And so then, of course, the source has to back out. They what they do is they egg it on and then at the end, they don’t show up at the tail end. So for the actual event, that’s a common profile. That’s what in fact, that’s what they’re trying to do. So Ray Epps actually does fit that profile, whether or not he could have been just a normal person out there and, you know, maybe he got cold feet after a while. Or, he does fit the profile. And therefore, if Tucker Carlson said, ‘What’s the explanation?’ You know, really, that’s a good question. What is the truth? And, of course, the FBI won’t tell you the truth about any informants who commit criminal acts,” Rowley explained. “They’re allowed to do that under the cloak of secrecy.”

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Free Speech Upsets Powers that Be

By Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute | July 14, 2023

The Biden administration, along with mainstream politicians and journalists, are really upset that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty has forbidden the executive branch of the central government from communicating with social-media platforms for the purpose of censoring or otherwise suppressing constitutionally protected speech. Judge Doughty’s action came in an important free-speech lawsuit filed against the government.

He wrote in an accompanying statement:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’

So-called respectable government officials, journalists, and pundits — the alleged adults in a room — consider the judge’s temporary injunction the worse thing that could possibly happen. The headline in the “progressive” publication The American Prospect screamed in panic: “Trump Judge Effectively Names Himself President.” (That “Trump judge,” by the way, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0.)

Imagine it: agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies may not even “suggest” to Facebook, Twitter, etc., that they ought to take down or hide posts that take issue with the government’s official line about … whatever. Of course, when government officials suggest something to a private party, the suggestion may be interpreted as being accompanied by the subtle threat to retaliate legally if the suggestion is ignored. Think of protection racketeer telling a shop owner, “You have a nice place here. It would be a shame if it burned down.” Get the picture?

As we know, the government has been doing stuff like this for years, whether the matter was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia’s alleged collusive 2016 election tampering, and who knows what else. According to a congressional committee, the FBI apparently even collaborated with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Americans’ frowned-on discussion of the Ukraine war on social media.

The posts that government agencies wanted suppressed included not only statements that were perhaps provably wrong  — incorrect speech per se is constitutionally protected, incidentally — but also accurate information that the government simply found inconvenient, like posts and links that might make people hesitate to get the COVID-19 vaccine, wear masks, accept totalitarian social lockdowns, or trust that the coronavirus came from a Chinese market rather than a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China.

Let’s remember that much of the challenge to the government’s take on the pandemic and other matters — criticism belittled as “tin-foil” conspiracy-mongering — turned out to be true. Contrary to the government’s position, the search for the truth requires the freedom to openly disagree and debate. That search abhors centralization, coercion, and the exclusion of anyone but the politically anointed “experts.” The right to free speech is a practical necessity if we are to pursue our well-being. Any step toward the paternalistic centralization of research and control of communication is not only immoral (by whatever standard you like) but also inimical to health, wealth, and other aspects of a fully human way of life.

In other words, as the judge acknowledged, the central government has gone to extraordinary lengths to control what the public can read and say on social media. It’s as if free speech were not a pillar of liberal philosophy and tradition — liberal in the older and best sense of a presumption of individual liberty in all spheres. Further, it’s as if the first restriction on government power in the Bill of Rights was not the absolute prohibition on the infringement of free speech and press. It’s a well-established principle of American law that the government may not pressure private parties to do what it itself may not constitutionally do. Yet that’s exactly what happened — repeatedly. It’s a disgrace. How can the government be trusted? It never could be.

Since the Biden administration, urged on by the power elite and the insecure establishment media, does not like being told that it may not violate our freedom of speech, it asked Judge Doughty to suspend his temporary injunction while the Justice Department appeals it. Judge Doughty said no. So the action moved to the appellate court. The Washington Post said that “The Justice Department’s filing signaled that it could seek the intervention of the Supreme Court, saying that at a minimum, the 5th Circuit should put the order on pause for 10 days to give the nation’s highest court time to consider an application for a stay.”

I sense desperation. The judge must have done something right. Remember that the injunction, alas, does not bar all government contact with social-media companies: he listed exceptions for actual criminality and national security. Only interference with constitutionally protected expression was included. I don’t remind readers of these exceptions to comfort them — the government will likely abuse the exceptions. I remind readers only to show that the order contains those exceptions. So what is the government so worried about? It says that the judge’s order is hopelessly vague and doesn’t address every possible eventuality. The answer is easy: if the choice is between vagueness in restricting government power and violating individual liberty, I know which I prefer. This is supposed to be America, isn’t it? Rights precede government.

Good people have enough to be concerned about when it comes to social media restricting their expression. Yes, they are private companies, and it’s easy to think of people who are so obnoxious that one wouldn’t want to encounter them online.

On the other hand, no one has reason to be confident that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (Google), etc., will use that right judiciously. That you have a right to do something does not mean you should do it. Can does not imply ought. YouTube reportedly deleted Jordan Peterson’s interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because it contains what it regards as — and well may be — misinformation about vaccines. Kennedy is challenging Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. One need not agree with Kennedy on vaccines (I’m inclined not to) to be uneasy about YouTube’s decision. We also can’t rule out that YouTube acted in anticipation of the government’s disapproval. Government casts a shadow over everything.

We mustn’t call on the government to manage social media through antitrust or regulation. We should favor real competition. But we should insist on a prohibition of government action, direct and indirect, to suppress speech on those platforms or anywhere else. Judge Doughty understands that. Let’s hope other judges do too.

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Sweden’s NATO membership not a done deal – Erdogan aide

RT | July 14, 2023

Türkiye has opened the door to the process of Sweden joining NATO but has not yet given its approval, Omer Celik, spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, said on Friday.

In a live broadcast on Haberturk TV, Celik said there was a tripartite memorandum between Türkiye, Sweden and NATO about the preconditions for membership, in which Stockholm pledged to undertake certain steps.

If the Turkish parliament is told that Sweden has produced “a strong satisfactory result” by complying with its obligations, AKP deputies will vote to ratify its membership of the US-led military bloc, Celik told Haberturk.

Asked when this might happen, Celik said “at the next session” of the parliament, meaning not before October or November.

Earlier this week, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Türkiye had agreed to support Sweden’s application after a months-long delay.

Erdogan had reportedly attempted to tie his approval of Sweden’s membership bid to Türkiye being admitted to the European Union. In return, the US has signaled willingness to unblock a sale of F-16 fighters to Ankara.

Commenting on Türkiye’s relations with the US, Celik said the meeting between Erdogan and US President Joe Biden promised “a new page,” but that remained to be seen. Relations could improve much faster if the US would change its mind about supporting Kurdish-led militants in Syria, Celik noted.

NATO had hoped to admit Sweden and Finland together before the bloc’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania this week. Finland eventually joined on its own, after Türkiye held up Sweden’s application over concerns that Stockholm was protecting Kurdish organizations that Ankara has labeled as terrorists. The US-dominated bloc technically requires the consensus of all 31 members before admitting new ones.

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

US could stop Ukraine conflict instantly – Hungary

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the NATO summit in Lithuania © Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty Images
RT | July 14, 2023

The US wants the conflict in Ukraine to continue and has failed to explain its reasons to NATO allies, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.

Orban told national broadcaster Kossuth Radio that if Washington wished, it could stop the fighting at a moment’s notice, as Kiev is fully dependent on the West in the fight against Russia.

The Hungarian leader was speaking on Friday morning, after returning from the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. During the event, the US-led military bloc declined to extend to Kiev a roadmap for membership. Hungary has stood out among members of the alliance by consistently criticizing Western policies on the Ukraine crisis.

“If the Americans wanted it, peace would come the next morning. Why Americans don’t want that is a question that puzzles the entire world,” Orban said. “We didn’t get an answer at the NATO summit.”

At this point, “Ukraine has lost any real sovereignty,” Orban claimed, citing Kiev’s devastated economy, and heavy dependence on Western allies for funding and weaponry.

Justifying its support for Ukraine, Washington has accused Russia of launching an “unprovoked war of aggression” against Kiev. US officials have said that inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Moscow is a primary goal.

Moscow, in turn, has accused the US of triggering the crisis by ignoring Russia’s long-running concerns over NATO expansion in Europe, while fostering a regime in Kiev that is hostile to Moscow. The Kremlin perceives the conflict as part of a US-led proxy war against Russia.

Orban went on to warn that if NATO were to admit Ukraine now, it would trigger a world war. He also highlighted the risks incurred by Western states sending increasingly sophisticated military hardware to Kiev.

The Hungarian leader also accused Kiev of using moral blackmail to receive Western support, but added that he does not blame Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for acting the way he does, as he is “fighting for the survival of his people.”

The prime minister predicted that the conflict will drag on, and EU nations – including Hungary – will bear the economic cost, including high inflation.

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

NATO adopts new anti-Russia defense plan

RT | July 13, 2023

NATO passed a new defense plan at the Vilnius summit on Tuesday. The whopping 4,400-page document details the defense of critical locations in case of “an emergency” and lists a potential attack by Russia as one of the biggest threats, according to German media. The bloc’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg has welcomed what he called “the most comprehensive defense plans since the end of the Cold War.”

The document addresses two “main threats – Russia and terrorism,” and accuses the former of being “the greatest and most immediate threat to the security of allies and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic region,” according to Germany’s Bild tabloid.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also called on his country and the other NATO members to “arm ourselves against a threat to our territory,” Bild added. The new plan also lists the military capabilities the bloc’s members must demonstrate, including new member Finland and applicant, Sweden.

The document reportedly claims a “violent” and “revisionist” Russia could potentially attack NATO territory. “We recognized that we could indeed be faced with an Article 5 situation again, in which part of NATO territory is under direct attack,” a military bloc official told German news agency, dpa.

To counter the supposed ‘Russian threat,’ the bloc plans to massively increase its Response Force (NRF) from the current 40,000 troops to over 300,000, comprising land, sea and air units, as well as rapidly deployed Special Forces.

The bloc also plans to significantly increase weapons production and stockpiling. The new strategy includes a “new Defense Production Action Plan to accelerate joint procurement, boost production capacity, and enhance Allies’ interoperability,” the NATO statement said.

According to Bild, the bloc would seek to build up armored “heavy forces,” and deploy more long-range artillery systems and missiles, as well as air defense systems.

NATO also plans to enhance what it calls ‘deterrence measures’ by sending additional forces to the Baltics and Eastern Europe. Battlegroups comprising 1,000 soldiers are to support the national armies of the Baltic States and Poland, Bild reported, citing the document.

The UK will be responsible for Estonia, Canada for Latvia, Germany for Lithuania, and the US for Poland, the German media outlet said. Berlin also plans to station a brigade of 4,000 soldiers in Lithuania, according to the German media.

Germany is also reportedly expected to serve as the NATO logistics hub in case of a major conflict. The bloc is also considering establishing a second Land Command, in addition to the existing station in Türkiye’s Izmir. Wiesbaden in Germany is being considered as a potential location since it already hosts a large US base, Bild reported.

Russia repeatedly stated that it considers NATO’s buildup on its borders as well as the bloc’s expansion to the east a threat to its national security. It also named preventing Ukraine from joining the bloc among the main reasons for launching its military operation in the neighboring country in February 2022.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden mobilizes reservists

RT | July 14, 2023

President [?] Joe Biden announced on Thursday that up to 3,000 members of the US military’s Selected Reserve will be activated as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, the informal designation for Washington’s efforts to support Kiev in the ongoing conflict.

Biden has authorized the Defense and Homeland Security departments to “order to active duty any units, and any individual members not assigned to a unit organized to serve as a unit of the Selected Reserve, or any member in the Individual Ready Reserve mobilization category and designated as essential” by the department regulations.

The number of mobilized reservists is “not to exceed 3,000 total members at any one time, of whom not more than 450 may be members of the Individual Ready Reserve,” according to the White House.

Biden’s executive order cites section 12304 of Title 10 of US Code (General Military Act), allowing the president to call up reservists for situations “other than during war or national emergency,” including named operations or cases of “a use or threatened use of a weapon of mass destruction; or a terrorist attack or threatened terrorist attack” in the US that results or could result in “significant loss of life or property.”

The US military, however, described the mobilizations as merely expanding entitlements and access to funding. Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, the Joint Staff director of operations, told the reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that the order “benefits troops and families with increases in authorities, entitlements and access to the reserve component forces and personnel.”

“This will not change current force-posture levels in Europe,” European Command (EUCOM) spokesman, Navy Captain Bill Speaks, said in a statement about the order, explaining that it is intended to “ensure long-term resilience in EUCOM’s continued heightened level of presence and operations.”

Operation Atlantic Resolve is the informal name for actions the US military has taken since April 2014, after Crimea rejoined Russia following the Washington-backed coup in Kiev.

The Selected Reserve consists of personnel who can be immediately mobilized in the event of an emergency. Members of the IRR are trained soldiers, some of whom have recently left active duty, but still have reserve obligations. Homeland Security is involved because the US Coast Guard is under its jurisdiction.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

The appropriations committee marked up their bill and the budget for the WHO remains at zero!

MERYL NASS | JULY 13, 2023

Furthermore, there is also in the bill no money for operationalizing the Pandemic Treaty unless it goes through the Senate for approval:

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw

By Lucia Sinatra | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2023

College COVID vaccine mandates remain some of the most coercive mandates ever declared. While most colleges have now rescinded their mandates, some colleges refuse to let go, and Santa Clara University in California is one of the most oppressive.

In late April 2021, after most incoming freshmen had committed, SCU announced that all students were required to get COVID vaccines for fall enrollment or after full approval, whichever was later.

Then by mid-summer, SCU announced that students would be required to receive the vaccine even if it remained authorized only for emergency (EUA) and despite the fact that the CA Health and Safety Code codifies the Nuremberg Code. Section 24172 states

“(t)here is, and will continue to be, a growing need for protection for citizens of the state from unauthorized, needless, hazardous, or negligently performed medical experiments on human beings. It is, therefore, the intent of the Legislature, in the enacting of this chapter, to provide minimum statutory protection for the citizens of this state with regard to human experimentation and to provide penalties for those who violate such provisions.”

SCU (and many other CA colleges and universities) are in direct violation of this Code for removing informed consent by mandating EUA medical treatments.

Despite lack of efficacy or adequate safety data for this overwhelmingly healthy young adult population, in December 2021, SCU mandated the booster, midway through the academic year when students would have no choice but to comply or leave tens of thousands of dollars behind. SCU’s three-dose requirement remained through the 2022-23 school year.

In complete disregard for the end of the emergency declarations, in early April 2023, when most universities like nearby Stanford were announcing the end of their COVID vaccine mandates, SCU updated its requirement for incoming freshmen.

On May 8th, one week after the fall 2023 enrollment deadline, SCU quietly updated its COVID vaccine policy to require one bivalent dose for incoming freshmen (but not returning students) regardless of how many COVD vaccines they had previously taken. SCU backdated this announcement to May 1st thinking no one would take notice, but in private emails from incoming students we learned that some were furious. We encouraged them to withdraw and accept another offer.

On May 31st, SCU updated its policy again. They now require either three previously taken monovalent doses or one bivalent dose for all community members. As with the University’s previous mandates, SCU offers no religious exemptions and limited medical exemptions for students even in the most extreme of circumstances as explained below. Faculty and staff, however, are permitted to request exemptions.

SCU’s policy is determined by its opaque “COVID-19 team,” believed to be led by campus physician Dr. Lewis Osofsky, who also holds several positions at Santa Clara County Medical Association (SCCMA). SCCMA partners with the Santa Clara County Public Health Department (SCCPH) to maximize COVID-19 vaccinations. Santa Clara County is one of the most vaccinated counties in the country, with more than a third having received the bivalent booster, twice the national average, and 88.5 percent having received the primary series.

Osofsky’s positions in the SCCMA include chair of the Professional Standards and Conduct committee, tasked with promoting high ethical standards for physicians and investigating disputes involving unethical conduct. This is ironic, as Osofsky is believed to be a driving force behind SCU’s ethically-indefensible mandate. Medical ethics would require, at a minimum, both transmission prevention and a proven benefit for students. An antibody increase from vaccines, with no established antibody level correlate of protection, wanes in mere weeks, and cannot support the ethics of a mandate. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that the “greater the number of vaccine doses previously received the higher the risk of COVID-19.”

It is alleged that Osofsky has improperly denied student medical exemptions. In a March 2022 lawsuit filed against SCU, Harlow Glenn, one of the student plaintiffs, claims that she had serious adverse reactions to her primary series COVID vaccines, including an emergency room visit due to leg paralysis and abnormal bleeding. According to the complaint, Osofsky refused to grant her a medical exemption for the required booster and actively interfered with her doctor-patient relationship by contacting her private doctors to persuade them to retract their medical exemption documentation.

Such aggressive tactics are nothing new for Osofsky, as he apparently employs them against patients in his private pediatric practice. Parents have complained in online reviews that Osofsky’s office forced vaccines and didn’t listen to their concerns. As it turns out, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians in private practice a $40,000 bonus for every 100 patients under the age of 2 that they fully vaccinate, if at least 63 percent of the patients are fully vaccinated (including the annual flu vaccine).

Osofsky’s roles with SCCMA, which is in partnership with the SCCPH whose goal is to maximize COVID vaccination, as well as his aggressive private practice approach to vaccination, have likely played a large role in SCU’s continued COVID vaccine mandates.

On June 14, 2023, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed their opening brief against SCU in the Sixth Appellate District in California. It is expected that SCU will oppose the appeal and insist on its right to demand that students submit to EUA boosters to “protect the campus community.” Protect the community? That justification went out the window long ago when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that the COVID vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission. Recently released documents confirmed that Walensky actually knew this information in January of 2021, well before colleges announced COVID vaccination requirements.

Given that the emergency is officially over, and the shots have proven to be both ineffective and in some cases harmful, now more than ever, SCU must defend the science and ethics behind their refusal to drop them.

In the absence of such transparency, we are left to assume that Osofsky, along with SCCMA and SCCPH, must be using SCU students as mere pawns to achieve their unscientific and authoritarian vaccination goals and quotas.

Lucia is a recovering corporate securities attorney. After becoming a mother, Lucia turned her attention to fighting inequities in public schools in California for students with learning disabilities. She co-founded NoCollegeMandates.com to help fight college vaccine mandates.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Democrats, Republicans Face Off During U.S. House Hearing on COVID Origins and Possible Cover-Up

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 12, 2023

Two coauthors of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper that asserted, just months into the pandemic, that COVID-19’s origins were “clearly” natural rather than lab-made faced questioning Tuesday during a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.

The hearing investigated “whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly and perhaps biasedly tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), committee chair, said in opening remarks.

“We are examining whether scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or perhaps its funding of risky gain-of-function coronavirus research,” he said.

Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., denied the allegations in written testimony submitted prior to the hearing as “absurd and false.” And in more than three hours of questioning Tuesday by committee members, they insisted their conclusions in the paper were based solely on the “scientific process.”

Republicans’ questioning focused on demonstrating the Nature Medicine paper was coordinated and unduly influenced by government officials.

Lawmakers laid out evidence that all of the authors initially expressed serious concerns the virus may have leaked from a lab and of how that position changed just a few days later after a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D.

The scientists drafted their paper “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” within a few days of the call and published it the following month. The early drafts were shared with Farrar, Collins and Fauci, Paul Thacker reported.

Prior to yesterday’ hearing, the panel’s Republican majority issued a report, “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-up,” asserting a coordinated effort by Fauci and others to downplay the lab-leak hypothesis and suppress scientific discourse.

The report was based on 25 hours of testimony by the authors of the Proximal Origins paper and a review of 8,000 pages of documents, including subpoenaed emails and slack messages that had not yet been revealed publicly.

The evidence showed that in conversations with one another, the Proximal Origin authors expressed a lack of certainty about their singular conclusion but feared the political fallout of giving credence to the lab origin hypothesis.

Democrats vehemently countered the Republican assertions, insisting Fauci and Collins had no role in the findings. They produced their own report — “They Played No Role” — drawing on the same evidence to conclude that “that there was no cover-up of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and no suppression of the lab leak theory on the parts of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”

In the highly partisan hearing, the Democrats used their time to accuse Republicans of having a “vendetta,” of “weaponizing” the origin discussion, using “extreme rhetoric” and of making “baseless allegations” that they claimed were responsible for the public’s loss of faith in public institutions.

Ranking Democrat Dr. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) repeatedly accused the Republicans of “confirmation bias” in their assertion that the lab leak is the more probable origin of the virus and of making “conspiratorial accusations without proof,” rather than “pursuing an objective analysis of the virus’s origins that is free from political interference.”

The ‘Proximal Origins’ fallout

The paper in question, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” played a key early role in shutting down debate about the origin of the virus.

Top public health officials used the paper as “independent science” to influence public discussion of the topic. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted the findings on the agency website. And in an April 17, 2020, press briefing at the White House, when asked whether COVID-19 had come from the Wuhan lab, Fauci cited the paper’s conclusions as definitive.

The paper had a major impact in the scientific community and the popular press, spurring thousands of articles declaring the lab-leak theory to be implausible or a conspiracy theory.

But communications obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know, and a memo released in March by the congressional subcommittee have since showed that Collins, Fauci and Farrar of the Wellcome Trust played a key, previously undisclosed role in persuading the scientists to write the paper.

The FOIA requests also revealed that all of the paper’s authors had privately expressed suspicions that the virus was engineered or about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses and work on them at low biosafety levels, US Right to Know reported.

‘Proximal origin of a cover-up’ vs. ‘they played no role’

Republicans questioned the scientists on their rapid shift from thinking that the virus was likely lab-made to their certainty, professed in both drafts and final versions of the paper, about its natural origins in a matter of days.

Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) quoted a communication from Garry where he said:

“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from, from the bat virus or one very similar to it to, uh, COVID-19 where you insert exactly four amino acids, 12 nucleotides and all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function.

“I just can’t figure out how this all gets accomplished in nature.”

She said, “So then within a matter of days, something changed, and that’s what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of, what happened within that three day period between the conference call and the paper that all of a sudden you did a 180.”

In response to repeated questioning on this topic, Andersen and Garry insisted their change in thinking was based on “the scientific process.”

They said new evidence emerged that changed their thinking, that their shift in thinking “evolved over time from early hypotheses to later conclusions published in the paper.” And that their shift had nothing to do with pressure from Fauci, Collins or Farrar.

Rather, Andersen said their paper presented “an agnostic view of what the evidence actually does tell us.”

Garry testified that Collins and Fauci had very little input at the Feb. 1 teleconference and he thought they were just on the call “to gather information” from the experts.

Andersen and Garry along with several of the Democratic committee members repeatedly emphasized that Farrar — not Fauci or Collins — coordinated the call and provided the authors with significant guidance on the paper. Andersen said, “I describe him as a father figure” for the paper, Andersen said, “because I think that captures it.”

Ruiz and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) both suggested Farrar’s role in organizing the call exonerated Fauci and Collins, effectively disproving the idea that there was political interference in the findings.

But, Farrar — former director of the Wellcome Trust and currently chief scientist at the World Health Organization — has been a central figure in dismissing the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory,” Sam Husseini reported.

In February 2020, along with Peter Daszak, 25 other scientists signed a letter in The Lancet that dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said.

Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) questioned whether this continued certainty about natural origins today made sense given that it contradicted the testimony by former director of the National Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe told the committee that, “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the spillover side would be nearly empty, nearly empty.”

Ruiz claimed that most government agencies — four of them — deny the lab leak theory with low confidence. But the FBI and the Department of Energy have also determined with moderate confidence that the virus most likely originated in a lab.

Democratic members alleged the Republicans’ effort to investigate the politicization of the investigation of the origins of the pandemic inhibited the work of preparing for “the next pandemic.”

Ruiz said the Republicans’ actions had also led to “threats against scientists and public health officials.” Anderson agreed, saying “the misinformation, dis and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats” similar to those undergone by Peter Hotez, and alleged that he is on a “kill list.”

Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) said that such investigations “are actually creating a very chilling effect on the scientific process,” which hinders the ability of scientists and public health officials to thoroughly investigate and study future disease outbreaks.

She suggested that in the future the researchers should “double think what they put on their slack messages and channels and their emails and their text threads.”

But just last week the House subcommittee began investigating Dr. David M. Morens, a 25-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), after it was revealed he used his personal email address to evade FOIA requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19, The Defender reported.

Wenstrom broke the news in the meeting that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also involved in the investigation.

Near the end of the hearing, both Garry and Andersen confirmed that they had been consulted by the CIA and FBI about the origins of COVID-19.

Wenstrup concluded by saying,“We’re exploring a potential coverup. That is what we are doing.”

He added, “You receive federal dollars, we appropriate those. Congress appropriates those federal dollars. We have a responsibility of oversight on behalf of our constituents and the very taxpayers that pay you. Sorry about that. But it’s our job whether you like it or not. And I take it seriously.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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