Twitter Update to Show Users if They Were ‘Shadowbanned’, Elon Musk Says
Samizdat – 09.12.2022
US billionaire entrepreneur and newly minted Twitter owner Elon Musk said on Friday that the company had been working on a software update to let users know if they have been “shadowbanned.”
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk said on Twitter.
In late October, Musk finalized the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Following the takeover, Musk changed the company’s day-to-day operations, including the termination of Twitter executives who were responsible for the platform’s privacy, cybersecurity and censorship, as well as about two-thirds of Twitter’s employees.
Shadowbanning is a practice of concealed restriction, when a person remains on a social media platform, but his or her content is not visible or only partly accessible to other users.
US military official targets mom over Facebook post that criticized school’s promotion of “polysexual” art
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2022
After a New Jersey mom took to Facebook to criticize posters in the entrance to a local school that promoted various sexual preferences, a high-ranking United States (US) military official from a local Joint Base accused her of causing “safety concerns” and flagged her post to state and local law enforcement.
The story was first covered by Chaos and Control which documented mom and Board of Education (BOE) member Angela Reading sharing her concerns about the posters in a public Facebook group on November 22. Some of the posters that Reading criticized promoted sexual preferences such as “pansexual” and “polysexual” (terms that refer to a sexual attraction towards people regardless of their gender).
In her post, Reading said she was “livid” after her seven-year-old daughter read the posters while attending an elementary “Math Night” and asked Reading what “polysexual” means.
“Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters?” Reading wrote in the Facebook post. “This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.”
Reading added: “How can my young children be accepting of people ‘who are sexually attracted to multiple genders’? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.”
Then the military official got involved.
Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Shilling responded to Reading’s post by accusing her of causing “safety concerns for many families.
He added that the Joint Base (McGuire, Fort Dix, and Lakehurst) has had its Security Forces “working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.”
Schilling subsequently changed the name on his Facebook account to “Chris Topher” and deleted his LinkedIn account.
In a statement to Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Joint Base confirmed that it had “notified local law enforcement about the social media exchange, which is common information-sharing practice among law enforcement entities.”
However, Carlson pointed out that “a military base is not a ‘law enforcement’ agency.”
He added: “The purpose of the military is to defend us from foreign enemies, not to police our Facebook posts.”
In an interview with Carlson, Reading said that shortly after Schilling had targeted her, the local police chief contacted the admin of the Facebook group and told her that the post “should come down.” Reading agreed to have the post taken down and then contacted the police chief directly to remind him of the First Amendment.
“We shouldn’t be utilizing government resources and our positions to pressure individuals to take down Facebook posts,” Reading said.
Reading’s story is the latest of many examples of federal and local government departments potentially violating the First Amendment by flagging posts for censorship.
Washington obstructs peace in Yemen as it profits from war: Ansarallah
The Cradle | December 8, 2022
The leader of Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, accused the US of obstructing the path for a comprehensive peace process in Yemen, calling the western nation “the root of the problem.”
“[Ceasefire talks] are stalled because of the US, who are the root of the problem, as it benefits from the war and only wants a peace deal that benefits their interests, this type of peace means surrender to us,” Al-Houthi said during a televised speech on 7 December.
“The Americans, the Israelis, the British, and their regional puppets want Yemen to be occupied and submissive to them … The enemies want to set up their bases anywhere in Yemen, control its infrastructure and make the political field subject to their interests, to the extent that they choose who can be president or prime minister,” the resistance leader went on to add.
In April of this year, Riyadh strong-armed ousted Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to give up his powers to an unelected, Saudi-appointed presidential council, led by Rashad al-Alimi, who Ansarallah leaders christened “the man of America.”
During Wednesday’s speech, Al-Houthi also accused the US-backed coalition – headed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE – of plundering Yemen’s oil and gas resources in order to keep Yemenis living in misery, while “hundreds of billions go to US and European companies.”
Last year, Yemen’s Oil and Minerals Ministry estimated that the country’s oil and gas sector has lost around $45.5 billion in revenue since the start of the Saudi-led war. According to officials in Sanaa, the kingdom deprives Yemen of at least 75 percent of the state budget revenues.
Over the past year, a large number of Saudi and Emirati oil tankers have made their way to Yemeni ports in the provinces of Shabwa and Hadhramaut in order to seize millions of dollars worth of the country’s oil.
The Saudi-led coalition not only plunders Yemen’s oil and gas from the occupied regions – in coordination with US and French troops – but also often seizes UN-approved fuel shipments headed for the Ansarallah-controlled port of Hodeidah.
Moreover, thanks to the normalization agreement signed between Israel and the UAE, Tel Aviv has been deploying troops to the Arab world’s poorest nation.
“They do not want an army that protects the independence and sovereignty of Yemen, they only want groups of fighters under the command of Emirati and Saudi officers, who themselves are under the command of American, British, and Israeli officers,” Al-Houthi said about the increased presence of hegemonic powers in Yemen.
“We cannot accept for Yemen to be occupied, or for the Americans, British, Emiratis, and Saudis to come and set up bases wherever they want,” the resistance leader stressed, before adding that Yemen’s enemies want the country to join the group of Arab nations who have normalized ties with Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people and of several of Yemen’s allies in West Asia.
“Iran did not attack us. Rather, it declared solidarity with our people, a position distinct from all other countries … [The enemies] want us to be hostile to Hezbollah, which took a most honorable position with us. They want us to be hostile to the free people of Iraq who have done nothing against us,” Al-Houthi declared.
He went on to highlight that Sanaa will not be hostile to any Islamic country “for the sake of America and Israel … We are not like the Saudis, Emiratis, and Al-Khalifa in Bahrain, we do not receive directives from America.”
Al-Houthi finished his speech by hinting at the military response of Ansarallah and the Yemeni Armed Forces against any escalation, saying that “any next round of fighting will be greater than all previous ones.”
We Must Not Forget the U.S. War on Afghanistan
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 8, 2022
When the Pentagon used NATO to provoke Russia into invading Ukraine, it had to know that one of the great benefits to such an invasion would be that it would enrich U.S. weapons manufacturers, who, of course, are an important, integral, and loyal part of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure.
And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal,
The world’s biggest arms makers are scaling up production of rocket launchers, tanks and ammunition as the industry shifts to meet what executives expect to be sustained demand triggered by the war in Ukraine.
The Pentagon has committed more than $17 billion in weapons and services to Ukraine, most of it drawn from existing stocks. It has also awarded about $3.4 billion in new contracts to replenish domestic and allies’ stocks.
The Pentagon knew that when it was forced to exit Afghanistan, where it had used a massive amount of weaponry for some twenty years to wreak death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country, its loyal army of arms manufacturers might begin to suffer. The crisis that the Pentagon has ginned up in Ukraine has clearly helped to alleviate that suffering.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine had another beneficiary — the Pentagon itself. That’s because before Americans had a real opportunity to focus on the Pentagon’s 20-year deadly and destructive debacle in Afghanistan, everyone began focusing exclusively on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, the entire Afghanistan misadventure has been relegated to a memory black hole.
But we really still need to do some serious soul-searching, examination, and analysis of the Afghanistan debacle. We cannot let the Pentagon use the crisis that it has ginned up in Ukraine as a way to shift our attention away from what happened in Afghanistan. It would be a grave mistake to just “move on” from Afghanistan and permit the Pentagon to focus our attention exclusively on the evil Russians and their invasion of Ukraine.
It is important to focus on the Constitution, the document that President Biden and the Democrats and even some Republicans have suddenly discovered and begun revering. It requires a congressional declaration of war before a president can legally wage war. There was never a congressional declaration of war against Afghanistan. That made the Pentagon’s war against Afghanistan an illegal one under our form of constitutional government.
Equally important, if President George W. Bush had sought a declaration of war from Congress, it is a virtual certainty that he would not have been able to secure it. That’s because Bush would not have been able to provide any evidence whatsoever of Taliban complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Without any evidence of such complicity, it is difficult to imagine Congress issuing a declaration of war against Afghanistan, especially knowing that such a war would inevitably wreak massive death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country.
Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified under the principle of “self-defense.” But that claim necessarily depended on showing that the Taliban regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks. No such evidence existed, and Bush knew it. Thus, if he had gone to Congress and sought a declaration of war based on “self-defense,” he would have gone there empty-handed insofar as evidence is concerned.
In fact, if Bush really believed that the Taliban regime had attacked the United States, he would never have gone to the United Nations seeking its approval to defend itself by invading Afghanistan. No president would do that.
What about the “harboring” charge? Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified because Afghanistan was “harboring” Osama bin Laden. Bush’s claim is without validity. To warrant a “harboring” charge, Bush would have to provide evidence that the Taliban regime had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and was knowingly conspiring with bin Laden to provide him a base to plan the attacks. Bush knew that he had no evidence to support such a charge.
What Bush actually meant by his “harboring” charge was that the Taliban was refusing to comply with Bush’s unconditional extradition demand for bin Laden. But under international law, the Taliban regime had every right to refuse Bush’s extradition demand. That’s because there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. When there is no extradition treaty between two nations, neither one is required to comply with an extradition demand from the other.
What about the claim that the 9/11 attacks were an “act of war” and, therefore, the United States had the legitimate authority to invade Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden, who was living in Afghanistan?
It was a bogus justification for invading Afghanistan. Under U.S. law, terrorism is a criminal offense, not an act of war. That’s why terrorism prosecutions are brought in U.S. District Courts. No nation has the legitimate authority to invade another nation to kill or capture a suspected criminal who is residing in that country.
One of the most notorious terrorists was a CIA man named Jose Posada Carriles. He is widely considered to be one of the people who brought down a Cuban airline with a bomb over Venezuelan skies. He later safely ensconced himself in the United States.
When Venezuela demanded Posada’s extradition, U.S. officials protected him by refusing to comply, notwithstanding the fact that there was an extradition treaty between Venezuela and the United States.
Would interventionists who supported the deadly and destructive invasion of Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden have supported a similar deadly and destructive Venezuelan invasion of the United States to kill or capture Posada? I think not.
Using NATO to gin up the crisis in Ukraine is bad enough. While U.S. arms manufacturers are clearly a beneficiary of that crisis, so is the Pentagon because it has caused people to forget what the Pentagon did to the people of Afghanistan and to just “move” on to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We must not let that happen, especially given the massive death and destruction that the Pentagon wreaked in its immoral and illegal war against an impoverished Third World country.
Von der Leyen’s Special Tribunal As Fascist Theatre
By Christopher Black – New Eastern Outlook – 08.12.2022
On Wednesday November 30, Ursula Von der Leyen, the German president of the European Commission, stated that the European Union will set up a specialised tribunal, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. The French foreign ministry and Kiev regime echoed her remarks.
“We are ready to start working with the international community to get the broadest international support possible for this specialised court,” Von der Leyen said.
That this proposal is the opening scene in a staged drama for the entertainment and manipulation of the western public is apparent from the fact that there can be no “backing” of such a tribunal by the United Nations since only the Security Council has any possible jurisdiction to approve such a tribunal and clearly, both Russia, and China, which can expect the same treatment for itself from the West as Russia, will veto any motion in the Security Council to establish such a body.
If Von der Leyen is intending to rely on a vote in support by the UN General Assembly, then one wonders what her knowledge of the UN Charter is since the General Assembly votes have no legal force. But we can suppose that they may float such a proposal hoping the US and EU can coerce, bully and bribe a sufficient number of servile nations to give their stamp of approval so that they can claim they have the support of the “international community,” that is themselves and the nations under their sway.
The UN Charter does not provide any jurisdiction for the creation of quasi-judicial bodies under Chapter VII, which states that the only means permitted to be used against nations in violation of international law are military and economic, not judicial. The fact that the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the ICTY and ICTR, were created is a sad testimony of how the UN system can be abused. The Security Council had no powers under the Charter to create them and acted outside its powers when it did so, or as lawyers like to say, it acted ultra vires of its powers. That Russia did not veto the creation of these tribunals in the early 90’s can be explained by the fact that Russia had then a government that was weak and under the direct influence of the Americans and other NATO countries. It would never have allowed it if Presidents Putin or Medvedev had been in charge at the time.
The Chinese, however, realised the problem, expressing a willingness to vote for it only with the caveat that the adoption of the resolution should not prejudice China’s position on future resolutions on the subject. On 23 May 1993, when the UNSC was engaged in debate on Draft Resolution 827, which established the ICTY and adopted its statute, the Chinese representative explained his affirmative vote after the resolution was adopted by stating that China disputed the approach for the establishment of the tribunal by way of a UNSC resolution, rather than a treaty, with the latter route being the one China had preferred all along. He explained that, resembling a treaty, the statute should have been “negotiated and concluded by sovereign States and ratified by their national legislative organs. “Otherwise, its implementation would bring problems, unspecified, in both theory and practice.”
Secondly, the Chinese representative expressed the hope that this resolution would be a one-off exercise in setting up an ad hoc institution, and should not constitute a precedent. With that consideration in mind, Resolution 955, which approved the establishment of the second tribunal in 1994, for Rwanda, was obviously not agreeable to China as a repetition of the resolution-based approach, and China abstained in the voting on the resolution.
The fact that these tribunals were illegally created under the UN Charter and so in law do not exist was raised time and again by a number of defence lawyers representing accused at those tribunals. Of course, our arguments were dismissed out of hand and those of us that persisted were threatened with consequences. Nevertheless, as a matter of law the judgements and decisions of the ‘judges” of those tribunals are all invalid and have no force or effect.
And just as the Germans first proposed and pushed for the creation of the ICTY it is again the Germans who are pushing for the creation of another kangaroo court whose sole purposes will be to put out propaganda against Russia, to cover up their own war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine since 2014, and to attempt to justify their aggression against Russia and their support of fascists in Ukraine.
The idea for special war crimes tribunals originated with the United States Department of the Army in the early 1990’s, which alone should tell you something about its true purpose. The rhetoric used to justify such a body to the general public was of course heavily seasoned with concerns for “human rights” the “dignity of the individual”, “genocide” and “democracy,” just as it is now.
In order to accelerate the break up of Yugoslavia into quasi-independent colonies, principally of Germany and the United States, it was necessary to discredit their leaderships. An effective propaganda weapon in such an exercise is of course a tribunal with an international character which the public will accept as a neutral instrument of justice but which is controlled for political ends. NATO has the same objective with regards to Russia now.
Yugoslavia was the first experiment in using a quasi-judicial international body to attack the principle of sovereignty. And as the Americans have learned so well, the best way to get your domestic population behind you as you proceed to break another country, economically and militarily is to get them to hate those in power in that country. The Serb leadership was targeted, and transformed into caricatures of evil. There were comparisons to Adolf Hitler, a comparison used with surprising frequency by the United States against the long list of nations it has attacked in the last 50 years, though sometimes they are just labelled as common criminals, like Manuel Noriega, or mad, like Ghadaffi, if the leader or the country is too small to make the Hitler comparison stick. I think Saddam Hussein was the first to be compared to Hitler, and declared a common criminal and a madman all at the same time. We are hearing the same vile rhetoric about President Putin from western leaders and the mass media, which indicates what their ultimate objectives are.
Again, the European Union, Britain Canada and the USA are targeting another world leader, President Putin, and his government for the same reasons as they did President Milosevic, political ones. In this regard it is important to remember that in a statement to the Secretary-General of the United Nation, Mr. Boutros-boutros Ghali, on January 21, 1994, Antonio Cassese, the first President of the ICTY, made the Tribunal’s political character quite clear when he said in reference to the role of the Tribunal, “The political and diplomatic response (to the Balkans conflict) takes into account the exigencies and the tempo of the international community. The military response will come at the appropriate time.” In other words, the Tribunal is considered a political response. He went on to state, “Our tribunal will not be simply “window dressing” but a decisive step in the construction of a new world order.”
There you have it. Von Der Leyen on behalf of the EU and NATO is proposing the creation of another politically motivated kangaroo court, an illegal tribunal, without any jurisdiction, as part of the continuing US and NATO effort of establishing global hegemony, the construction of their new fascist world order, a tribunal to be used to fabricate indictments, conduct show trials, to propagandise against Russia, its leadership and people, while covering up and excusing their own crimes and justifying their aggression against Russia and the world. This use of what is nothing less than criminality to further more criminality is proof that the EU and NATO have openly adopted the techniques and ideology of fascism.
For once President Putin is “indicted” by this fake tribunal, there will be no possibility that any Western leader or government will be able to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the military conflict with him or any other Russian leader “indicted” with him nor negotiate over Russia’s security concerns. As with President Milosevic, President Putin will be labelled a criminal, and all possibility of negotiation, whether with the USA or EU, on resolution of the military conflict will be permanently blocked. Their intention is to make negotiations a complete impossibility. This means that war will be the only avenue for the resolution of the strategic political issues at stake. This is, in fact, the position of the Kiev regime with their mantra, “No negotiations with a war criminal.” And now it is the position of the EU and NATO. It is clear what their intentions are.
In this regard, Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian State Duma stated on December 1,
“The French Foreign Ministry’s statements about the beginning of work with the European and Ukrainian partners for creating a special tribunal for investigating Russia’s actions in Ukraine have no legal basis; this idea has a rather political dimension, the chairman of the State Duma’s international affairs committee.’
“The French Foreign Ministry’s statements to the effect that work has begun on creating an international tribunal for Ukraine have no legal basis and are rather political. There is no legitimate basis for the creation of an ad hoc tribunal. Implementing such an initiative will be impossible without trampling international law underfoot,” Slutsky told the media.
He added, “Preventing the truth about the true background of the Ukrainian crisis from reaching the European and American audiences is a matter of survival for today’s Western politicians in power. Otherwise, their own voters will oust them,”
He rightly pointed out that if an international tribunal is to be created in earnest, “there should be Ukrainian war criminals and their patrons from Washington in the dock.”
“The United States and its NATO allies, since the Second World War, have bombed the territories of more than 20 sovereign states, interfering in their state system and their sovereignty. This is what should be condemned at last. Then there will be far fewer causes for the conflicts like the one in Ukraine,”
And he is right. Once again Russia and the world are up against fascism in all its ugly forms and the more that time passes, the uglier the actions become, and the uglier they become, the more dangerous. But in the West, we see little reaction to all of this. There are few protests on the streets and those only in some EU countries suffering the consequences of their illegal sanctions on Russia.
In the USA, UK, in Canada there are no protests of any real significance; a few individuals here, some there. But the masses go along with the propaganda they are fed every day, even clamouring to be fed even more of the poison that warps their minds and reduces them to compliant automatons; unaware of reality, unconscious of the supporting role they play in the fascist theatre that they are both actors in and spectators of. The West has sunk into darkness, and now, only from the East does light illuminate the world.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events
EU had better become more independent from US to overcome crisis
By Lucas Leiroz | December 8, 2022
As the security crisis and energy instability worsen in Europe, mainly in Germany, the unfeasibility of continuing the current European model of automatic alignment with American foreign policy becomes increasingly evident. American rivalry with Russia, passively embraced by European states, seriously violates EU’s interests and places the entire bloc under a serious threat.
Germany is the most economically important country for the EU and at the same time the most dependent on Russia. Without any energy sovereignty and dependent on the partnership with Moscow to supply its internal market, Berlin sought for decades to maintain pragmatic relations with Russia, capable of overcoming any political or ideological rivalries, aiming exclusively at the well-being of the German people and the local economy. But this stance has been completely abandoned.
During the early days of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, Germany was the first country to try to somehow resist American pressure for sanctions, at least as far as energy is concerned. But the Scholz government was absolutely unable to resist pressure from Washington and quickly “surrendered”, favoring the American anti-Russian strategy and harming German interests.
Obviously, without the energy to power its industry, the negative effects have already started to be seen in Germany, but the situation will only get worse as winter gets more severe in Europe. With high energy prices and no prospect of improvement in the short term, as well as under a strong crisis of legitimacy with constant mass protests, the country is truly immersed in a severe crisis which consequences spread beyond national borders, since, with the largest European economy weakened, the whole EU is affected.
However, energy and economy are just some of the problems facing Berlin. The German adherence to American sanctions was not the only anti-strategic attitude taken by the government, which also strived to become one of the biggest arms suppliers for the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, to the point of causing irreversible damage to domestic military reserves.
Before the Russian operation in Ukraine, military experts already frequently reported the obsolescence of the German military apparatus and its inability to defend the country, whose only hope in a possible conflict situation would be to rely exclusively on the “goodwill” of its NATO partners. Now, with Berlin sending its few weapons to Kiev and with an industry weakened by the energy crisis, unable to continue replenishing stocks, the situation is even more hopeless, placing Germany at a very serious level of subservience to the US.
In fact, on December 8, 2022, Olaf Scholz marks one year in the German government, and, as we can see, his administration so far has been a real disaster for the strategic interests of the German state and the entire EU. To sum it up, it is possible to say that his rise to power marked the decline of any German participation in the proposal of a “sovereign” Europe. Earlier, Angela Merkel was an active advocate of increasing the EU’s political autonomy, despite her close ties with the US. Merkel even became Emmanuel Macron’s main partner when the French president announced in his Sorbonne speech the project of achieving a “European sovereignty”.
As a politically stable and considered for years the “de facto” leader of the EU, Merkel tried to make Germany the economic pillar of a more independent Europe in relation to the US. Macron has emerged as an important ally, considering France’s military power – having even proposed the creation of a European army outside NATO. Thus, both countries together would have the conditions to lead a new shift in the bloc, making it a more “distant” ally of the US, defending its own interests without automatic alignment. But the fragility of the Scholz government prevented any process in this direction.
Scholz’s weakness and unpopularity caused his government to passively accept foreign impositions and escalate participation in the Ukrainian conflict, harming its own economy and people. More than that, Scholz passively accepted the humiliation imposed by the West in the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines. Several intelligence reports point to the involvement of the US, UK and Poland in the sabotage, and even so Germany remains inert and submissive.
These events hindered any idea about “European sovereignty”. Macron’s project for the continent has lost force and today France acts more independently. Germany was unable to play a leading role in managing a new future for the European bloc and has consolidated itself over the last twelve months as an American satellite state, also reflecting its subservience to other European states, economically weaker, which did not have any posture other than increasing the irrational automatic alignment with the US.
As a result, Europe loses the opportunity to become an independent bloc amidst the rise of a multipolar world. At some point in the near future, European leaders will try to reverse the mistakes that are being committed now, but they will find it much more difficult. Weakened, the US-led NATO will become more reactive and aggressive in the future, seeking to retain all zones of influence it still has. And, as Washington has already made clear with the Nord Stream attacks, sabotage and aggression are possible options for forcing Europe to maintain its submissive posture.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
US defense bill authorizes more Ukraine and Taiwan aid
RT | December 7, 2022
US lawmakers have reached a compromise on the National Defense Authorization Act, agreeing to approve $45 billion more in overall military spending in 2023 than President Joe Biden had requested, as well as multiple provisions for new “security assistance” to Ukraine and increased cooperation with Taiwan.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees released their final draft of the NDAA on Tuesday night following lengthy negotiations, seeking to bring it up for a vote in the House by the end of the week. The massive spending bill would devote a total of $858 billion for next year’s defense budget, with lawmakers arguing the increase compared to 2022 is needed due to soaring inflation and costly arms shipments to Kiev.
In addition to setting out basic yearly funding for the Defense Department and the Department of Energy, which manages America’s nuclear arsenal, the latest NDAA would approve another $800 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative – $500 million more than President Biden’s initial request.
Since February, the Biden administration has approved more than $19 billion in direct military aid for Kiev from the Pentagon’s stockpiles, and the bill seeks additional funding to boost production and replenish the US military’s dwindling stocks.
US officials also agreed to require periodic reports from the Pentagon in the “short and medium term” on US arms sent to Ukraine, after several Republican lawmakers raised concerns that American weapons were not being properly tracked on reaching the country’s chaotic battlefield.
The new spending bill also authorizes the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, which is designed to “increase security cooperation” with the island and would allocate up to $10 billion for that purpose over the next five years. The latter provision is likely to trigger condemnation from Beijing, which considers Taiwan part of its sovereign territory and has repeatedly urged Washington to halt all direct dealings with Taipei.
Another project targeting China, the US Pacific Deterrence Initiative, will receive another $11.5 billion in new investments under the current draft legislation. The Pentagon has noted the initiative aims to confront the supposed “multi-domain threat” posed by Beijing and expand the US military footprint in the Indo-Pacific region.
Considered ‘must-pass’ legislation due to its increasingly wide scope, versions of the NDAA have been approved by US lawmakers every year since 1961. The measure is also frequently described as a “legislative vehicle,” as Republicans and Democrats usually seek to include a range of issues unrelated to defense in each year’s spending bill.
Why Doctors Push COVID-19 Vaccination so Hard
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | December 7, 2022
Patients commonly ask me why their other doctors push COVID-19 vaccination so hard still to this day with alarming safety statistics, loss of efficacy, and now a complete lack of human trial data with the bivalent boosters?
The answer may come by following a money trail from HHS and CDC called “COVID-19 Community Corps” that early in 2021 made undisclosed individual payments to hundreds of organizations to promote mass vaccination. There were notable medical groups including the American Medical Association, American Association of Family Physicians, American Association of Nurse Practitioners, American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Student Association.
More investigation is likely to reveal that federal money received was temporally linked to e-mail blasts, town hall meetings, and many other activities pushing mass vaccination.
Could COVID-19 Community Corps money to the AMA have been the reason why the AMA launched its campaign to “abolish” the use of ivermectin in 2021 so the public would be panicked into taking more shots?
How could the pediatric associations take federal money before the clinical trials for their patients were completed or the vaccines approved via EUA?
Did they promote the vaccines to pediatricians before clinical trial results were known?
Finally, how could federal dollars flow to gynecologists/obstetricians when pregnant women and those of childbearing potential where excluded from randomized trials reported just a few months before the HHS initiative?
These broad acts of public bribery, corruption, and vaccine racketeering worked to put millions of lives danger as we learned about the risks of COVID-19 vaccination in 2021.
As we sit here today, the CDC VAERS system through November 25, 2022, is reporting 15,508 US deaths after COVID-19 vaccination, 22% occurred within 96 hours of the shot. There have been 15,505 Americans disabled, 9266 with heart damage, and 356,269 office visits, urgent care encounters, or hospitalizations attributed to vaccine side effects.
Never again can we allow our public health agencies use unchecked financial power to promote any medication or vaccine to healthcare providers. Corruption and indoctrination are deadly.
The Constitution Has Already Been Terminated
By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | December 6, 2022
If there is one point on which there should be no disagreement, it is this: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law.
Then again, one could well make the case that the Constitution has already been terminated after years on life support, given the extent to which the safeguards enshrined in the Bill of Rights—adopted 231 years ago as a means of protecting the people against government overreach and abuse—have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.
Consider for yourself.
We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.
We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.
We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Moreover, we continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
We no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government.
We have no due process. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. If the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
We are no longer presumed innocent. The burden of proof has been reversed. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
We have lost the right to be anonymous and move about freely. At every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Likewise, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient
We no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Rather, we are ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
We have no guardians of justice. The courts were established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the courts have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live.
We have been saddled with a dictator for life. Secret, unchecked presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—now enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
Unfortunately, we have done this to ourselves.
We allowed ourselves to be seduced by the false siren song of politicians promising safety in exchange for relinquished freedom. We placed our trust in political saviors and failed to ask questions to hold our representatives accountable to abiding by the Constitution. We looked the other way and made excuses while the government amassed an amazing amount of power over us, and backed up that power-grab with a terrifying amount of military might and weaponry, and got the courts to sanction their actions every step of the way. We chose to let partisan politics divide us and turn us into easy targets for the government’s oppression.
Mind you, the powers-that-be want us to be censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. They want our speech and activities monitored for any sign of “extremist” activity. They want us to be estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. They want taxation without representation. They want a government without the consent of the governed.
They want the Constitution terminated.
“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.
After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.” Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when we forget that, when we allow the “Me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution, there can be no surprise when tyranny rises and freedom falls.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
CDC and Census Bureau had direct access to Twitter portal where they could flag speech for censorship
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 7, 2022
Emails between an employee at the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Twitter have revealed that at least one CDC staff member and the US Census Bureau had access to Twitter’s dedicated “Partner Support Portal” which allows approved government partners to flag content to Twitter for censorship.
The emails were released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal and show Twitter enrolling a CDC employee into this portal through their personal account in May 2021 (pages 182-194).
On May 10, 2021, the CDC’s Carol Crawford sent Twitter employee Todd O’Boyle a list of example posts highlighting “two issues that we [the CDC] are seeing a great deal of misinfo about.” O’Boyle responded by saying that enrolling in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal is the best way for Crawford to get posts like this reviewed in the future.
Crawford asked O’Boyle if she could enroll in the portal with her personal Twitter account and on May 27, 2021, O’Boyle confirmed that Crawford had been enrolled in the portal.
In other emails, Crawford asked O’Boyle whether the federal government could flag “COVID misinformation on the portal using the existing census.gov accounts that have access” and questioned how to flag “misinformation” via the portal.
June 2021 emails (pages 359-360) also show another CDC employee attempting to enroll in a Facebook portal but getting error messages. While these emails don’t describe the portal, it appears to be Facebook’s content takedown portal which is similar to the Twitter portal and allows government agencies to flag content for censorship.
Additionally, a February 4, 2021 email (pages 354-355) shows Facebook’s US Head of Public Policy, Payton Iheme, asking Crawford whether she’s aware of the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) misinformation work.
“I saw that DHS/CISA is planning /possibly working on COVID-19 misinfo concerns?” Iheme wrote to Crawford. “Are you aware of that aspect?”
This email was sent more than a year before the DHS announced its controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” in April 2022.
Another revelation from this email is that Iheme acknowledges the focus on misinformation “growing among members of Congress.”
These emails provide more evidence of the Big Tech-Biden administration censorship collusion that’s currently facing a legal challenge over potential First Amendment violations.
“In recent months, millions of Americans have witnessed the peeling of the ‘misinformation’ onion,” Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel, said. “Beneath each layer of shocking details about a partnership between the federal government and Big Tech is yet another layer of connections, conspiracy, and collaboration between power centers that seek to suppress information from the American people. We are proud to play a leading role in fighting for the rights of all Americans and revealing this vital information to the American people.”
We obtained a copy of the emails for you here.
The emails also shine a light on the government departments that have access to these direct Big Tech censorship portals. Previous reports and document releases have shown that the California Secretary of State’s Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC) has access to the Twitter portal while the DHS and the New Zealand government have access to the Facebook portal.
Nigerian Army Preformed Over 10,000 Forced Abortions
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | December 7, 2022
Nigerian soldiers fighting against a jihadist group regularly ordered women to be given abortions without their consent, according to a new Reuters investigation. The US has provided Nigeria with billions in military aid, weapons and training.
Victims and soldiers told Reuters that women and girls in the custody of Nigeria’s 7 Division were given injections to terminate their pregnancies. Some victims were killed by the abortions, and women who resisted were beaten. It is unclear when the program started,” but had existed since at least 2014.
One of the over thirty survivors that spoke with the outlet said victims – while undergoing abortions – were not provided medical treatment. “That woman was more pregnant than the rest of us, almost six or seven months. She was crying, yelling, rolling around, and at long last she stopped rolling and shouting. She became so weak and traumatized, and then she stopped breathing, she said. Adding, “they just dug a hole, and they put sand over it and buried her.”
The 7 Division operates in the country’s northeast, fighting against the Salafist group Boko Haram. According to the Quincy Institute’s Nick Turse, Nigeria’s military is heavily dependent on America. “Since 2000, the U.S. has provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security assistance and military weapons and equipment sales to Nigeria and has conducted more than 41,000 training courses for Nigerian military personnel to support counterterrorism efforts aimed at defeating Boko Haram and the Islamic State,” he wrote in May.
While the Reuters report is shocking, Nigerian armed forces have a history of human rights abuses. “Impunity, exacerbated by corruption and a weak judiciary, remained a significant problem in the security forces, especially in police, military, and the Department of State Services,” the State Department wrote in its 2021 human rights report on Nigeria. Adding, “the military arbitrarily arrested and detained – often in unmonitored military detention facilities – persons in the context of the fight against Boko Haram and ISIS-WA in the North East.”
The abuses have not deterred several American presidents from supporting Abuja. Barack Obama authorized millions in funding to support the Sahel nations’ fight against Boko Haram. Under Donald Trump, American troops conducted multiple training courses for Nigerian soldiers fighting Salafists. President Joe Biden has already authorized a nearly $1 billion sale of attack helicopters to Abuja.
Nigeria denied the claims made by Reuters. The outlet said the 7 Division adopted the tactics out of a belief it would help eliminate Boko Haram. “Central to the abortion program is a notion widely held within the military and among some civilians in the northeast: that the children of insurgents are predestined, by the blood in their veins, to one day take up arms against the Nigerian government and society.” The report continued, “four soldiers and one guard said they were told by superiors that the program was needed to destroy insurgent fighters before they could be born.”
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From the Archives
Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Oct. 7 Forever Marks The Big Reveal: ‘We See You, Israel, We Revile You, We Reject You!’
- Meet the US generals and admirals advancing Israeli policy
- Israel’s Straw Widow Protocol: The Kill Zones Where Civilians Were Labelled ‘Terrorists’
- Leading Israeli Think Tank Publishes Psychotic Israeli ‘National Security’ Doctrine
- Are the United States and Israel in Decline-and-Fall Mode?
- Why Hamas Really Attacked Israel on Oct. 7
- Declassified UK exposes British man who fought for ‘Israel’ in Gaza
- West’s death cult in a theater near you
- How the Yandex ‘Russian bots’ lie fell apart
- Burnham’s ‘Russia did Brexit’ ruse crumbles
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza’s “ceasefire” death toll passes 1,500 – Daily Update
- Activists Abused By Israel Return to New Freedom Flotilla Mission
- 60 Minutes won’t tell the full truth about Israeli settler violence
- Nearly 50,000 women, girls killed or severely injured in Gaza since October 2023: UN Women
- ADL is working with AI companies to suppress alleged ‘antisemitism’
- Israeli occupation forces using social media surveillance unit to target hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank
- Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine
- Israeli Attacks Kill Five in Gaza, Including a four-year-old and a woman
- Air Force Major Who Called for Trump’s Impeachment Held in Solitary Confinement
- It’s a Genocide, I’m Into It’: Seinfeld Mocks Protest over Palestinian Children Killed
- No Tricks Zone
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- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
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- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
