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Obama: We have to “detoxify” the “scourge of disinformation and conspiracy theories and hate online”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | June 10, 2022

Former US President Barack Obama made a fresh push for online censorship during an appearance at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit by calling for crackdowns on content that he deems to be “disinformation,” “hate,” or a “conspiracy theory.”

Before Obama took the stage, 2022 Obama Foundation Leader Sarah-Josephine Hjorth hinted at what was to come by railing against “fake news and misinformation.”

“While the increase in use of smartphones and social media first came with the whisper of renewed democratic participation, fake news and misinformation dominate the digital landscape and result in an erosion of the fabric of truth and polarization,” Hjorth said.

Shortly after taking the stage, Obama continued this theme by invoking the January 6 Capitol riot and tying it to “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

“In my own country, the forces that unleashed mob violence on our Capitol are still churning out misinformation and conspiracy theories,” Obama said.

Towards the end of his speech, Obama made a more direct call for censorship of content that’s branded as a conspiracy theory, disinformation, or hate.

“We have to take steps to detoxify our discourse,” the former President said. “Particularly the scourge of disinformation and conspiracy theories and hate online that has polluted our political discourse.”

Obama continued by demanding that technology companies “accept a certain degree of democratic oversight and accountability” and noting that he spoke at length about these issues during his April 21 speech at Stanford University.

In his Stanford speech, Obama called for “solving the disinformation problem,” welcomed social media censorship of “hate speech,” and said that content moderation “doesn’t go far enough.”

After finishing his speech, Obama invited three 2022 Obama Foundation leaders, Tudor Iulian Bradatan, Selvije Mustafi, and Federica Vinci, to the stage. He then complained about the increased amount of misinformation since he left office and the difficulty of “sorting between what’s true and what’s false, what’s journalism and what’s fabrication.”

Obama continued by claiming that the politicization of COVID issues, such as getting vaccinated or wearing masks, was “driven just by misinformation that was out there.”

“I’m wondering how…it’s [misinformation] affected you and whether you’ve seen some solutions to…help young people distinguish between what’s true and false in making decisions about how to participate and what to support?” Obama asked.

Mustafi, a national grassroots organizer at the biggest Roma movement in North Macedonia, said “there are big concerns also in our movement about how…false information and misinformation is spreading on the internet to influence decisions by some political actors or political sides.”

She added that the challenge of this kind of fake news and misinformation is that it makes people have a “different kind of opinion which is not necessarily relevant or truthful.”

Vinci, the Deputy Mayor of Isernia, Italy, described the spread of “false news” and “false noise” as “scary.”

Obama’s Copenhagen Democracy Summit and Stanford University speeches are some of the many pushes he’s made for rules that would chill online speech.

Earlier this year, the former President proposed “modifications” to online anonymity when people are “rude, obnoxious, cruel, or lie” and suggested that social media algorithms should be audited by federal inspectors to deal with misinformation.

And in previous years, Obama has called for social media regulations that curb “crazy lies and conspiracy theories” and pushed internet platforms to reduce the influence of hate groups.

June 10, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

‘Boeing falls victim to anti-Russia sanctions’

Samizdat | June 10, 2022

Boeing’s decision to pause production of its popular 737 MAX plane may be due to sanctions imposed on Moscow, air safety expert Roman Gusarov told the newspaper Izvestia. Russia provides critical parts and components to the American aircraft maker.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing had to bring production of narrow-body jets to a halt for 10 days in May due to supply-chain snarls.

“Boeing’s dependence on Russian titanium is extremely high, amounting to about 30-40%, meaning that at least every third Boeing aircraft is assembled entirely from Russian titanium,” Gusarov said, adding that apart from titanium, which is vital to aircraft engineering, the company also imports titanium products from Russian producer VSMPO-AVISMA.

The analyst added that the US aircraft manufacturer previously received nearly finished parts that were produced at a jointly-run factory in the Russian town of Verkhnyaya Salda.

In March, Boeing suspended titanium purchases from Russia, saying that it had substantial inventory of the metal and could secure additional supplies from other sources. This decision was made after Russia was hit with severe sanctions by the US and its allies.

According to Gusarov, the temporary halt in production of the 737 MAX jets could be attributable not only to the suspension of Russian titanium deliveries but also to the global disruption of supply chains. The expert added that the annual global production of up to 600 planes typically involves engaging nearly all of the global manufacturing capacity of the relevant components.

“After all, Russia has also imposed indirect retaliatory sanctions that target supplies of nonferrous metals and products of gas-to-chemicals industry, which are widely used by microchip producers across the world,” Gusarov said, adding that the products for Boeing are made by thousands of global companies.

In March, Bloomberg reported that the ban of Russian aircraft from US airspace could also hit Boeing because the company used to contract giant Antonov An-124 cargo planes, operated by Russia’s Volga-Dnepr Group, to move supplies to its plants in the US.

June 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

On Ukraine, ‘progressive’ proxy warriors spell disaster

Urging leftists to support the Ukraine proxy war, Bernie Sanders aide Matt Duss whitewashes the US role, attacks The Grayzone, and advocates dangerous militarism.

By Aaron Maté | The Grayzone | June 7, 2022

The unanimous vote by progressive lawmakers for the $40 billion Ukraine funding bill has been followed by a near-unanimous refusal to defend it. To date, no member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – with the sole exception of Cori Bush – has publicly explained why they chose to hand over billions of dollars to the weapons industry and intensify a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia.

Amid this resounding silence, Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, has stepped in to fill the void. In a New Republic article titled “Why Ukraine Matters for the Left,” Duss attempts to convince fellow progressives that the “provision of military aid” to Ukraine “can advance a more just and humanitarian global order.” Duss has only praise for a Biden administration that, in his view, “should be applauded for its judicious reaction to the Ukraine crisis.” By contrast, Duss opts to launch an attack on dissident journalists, myself included, who don’t share his enthusiasm.

To make his case, Duss omits an abundance of inconvenient facts, betraying either considerable ignorance of the Ukraine-Russia conflict or a deliberate effort to distort it.

While apologia for US hegemonic projects is normal in DC foreign policy circles, Duss’ contribution is particularly noteworthy given his painstaking attempt to cast himself as an outsider. “Our political class,” Duss states, “advocates military violence with a regularity and ease that is psychopathic.” Duss’ comment is both accurate and wildly ironic, given his choice to advocate our political class’s military violence in Ukraine — with the remarkable ease that he identifies in others as psychopathic.

When it comes to how the Biden administration has handled the Ukraine crisis, Duss cannot identify a single fault. “The Biden team clearly did not seek this war,” Duss claims, and “in fact… made a strenuous, and very public, diplomatic effort to avert it.”

Duss does not explain what the administration’s “strenuous” diplomacy entailed, perhaps because even its top officials now openly admit that none existed.

In an interview with War on the Rocks, State Department counsellor Derek Chollet was asked if NATO expansion into Ukraine was “on the table” in pre-invasion contacts with Russia. “It wasn’t,” Chollet replied. The White House, Chollet explained, “made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way,” including “arms control.” (emphasis added) But when it comes to “the future of Ukraine” and its potential NATO membership, Chollet said, this was deemed a “non-issue.”

To Duss, the Biden administration’s (openly admitted) refusal to even discuss Russia’s core demands – and to only entertain issues that it deemed to be “legitimate” on Russia’s behalf – is apparently a “strenuous diplomatic effort.” If “diplomacy” amounts to enforcing US hegemony, as many in DC seem to believe, then Duss would have a case. But in the rest of the world, where diplomacy entails constructive dialogue with a semblance of parity, he does not.

Duss also takes aim at the argument, advanced by prominent leftists including former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, that a US-European pledge that Ukraine won’t join NATO “would have solved the problem” with Russia.

To refute Lula, Duss stresses that “in the weeks leading up to the war, U.S. allies, specifically German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, signaled clearly” that Ukraine’s NATO ascension “was not going to happen.” According to Duss, it is Putin who sabotaged their efforts by invading, and who “has now made that discussion moot.”

Duss omits what also happened in the weeks leading up to the war. While Germany and France did indeed float a proposal to keep Ukraine out of NATO, it was Ukraine – with US backing – that rejected it. According to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Scholtz proposed to Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 19 – five days before Russia’s invasion — that Ukraine “renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal,” signed by both Putin and Biden. But Zelensky rejected Schultz’s plan, a response that “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.” In dismissing the Germans’ NATO proposal, Zelensky joined the Biden White House, as State’s Derek Chollet acknowledged and other Biden officials made clear in public.

Ignoring US-Ukrainian rejectionism, Duss then declares that “it seems absurd to suggest that even an ironclad public pledge from President Biden that Ukraine would never be accepted into NATO would have convinced Putin to draw back the 180,000 troops he had placed on Ukraine’s borders.” Perhaps, but that very public pledge happened to be the centerpiece of Germany’s last-minute diplomatic effort – one that Duss himself invoked, and that Zelensky (along with Biden) chose to reject.

Duss’ whitewashing of the Biden administration’s rejection of diplomacy before the Russian invasion carries over to the period since.

Since Russia’s invasion, Duss says, the White House has “acted with restraint and care not to get drawn into a wider war with Russia.” While it is true that Biden has opted not to start World War III – in other words, has opted not to trigger a global suicide pact — he has done anything but act with “restraint.” One day before Duss’ article was published, Biden authorized the delivery of medium-range advanced rocket systems to Ukraine. These rockets have the capacity to strike inside of Russia; the US is acting on Ukraine’s assurance that it won’t.

Duss may support undermining diplomacy in Ukraine and shipping off billions of dollars worth of heavy weaponry instead, but this can only be described as “restraint” if the sole measure is an immediate — rather than merely prospective — nuclear holocaust.

Duss is so impressed with Biden’s handling of the war that he cannot even detect a tangible path that could end it.  “As of this writing,” Duss declares, “I have seen no evidence of a settlement in the offing—as in, a deal that Putin would actually entertain, let alone accept—that we’re refusing to ‘push for.'”

If Duss cannot see evidence of a realistic settlement that Russia could accept, then he is being willfully blind. Russia’s explicit proposals, issued before the war and after, including two weeks into the invasion, called on Ukraine to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”

It is worth noting that the latter is Russia’s only new condition: for the eight years before the February invasion, Russia formally accepted the Minsk accords, which, to end the Donbas war, would have kept the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside Ukraine’s borders, with limited autonomy.

Duss is free to argue that Russia’s terms for ending the war are unacceptable. But to pretend that Russia has not even laid out those terms, is to essentially advocate that the war never end.

By omitting Russia’s stated terms for a settlement, Duss also allows himself to erase one of the invasion’s key causes: the 2014 Maidan coup, and the ensuing eight-year Donbas war that had left more than 14,000 people dead by the time Russian forces crossed the border on February 24th.

In his 2500+ word piece, Duss makes no mention of the Donbas war and how it began: the 2014 ouster of a democratically elected Ukrainian president, with new leadership selected by Washington; the coup government’s assault on Ukraine’s ethnic Russian and anti-coup citizens, who launched a rebellion in the Donbas; the critical role of fascists and neo-Nazis in the Maidan coup and the Donbas war since; the fascist-led sabotage of the 2015 Minsk accords, which could have put an end to the conflict. By omitting this history, Duss can also omit how the US has helped undermine the Minsk agreements by siding with Ukrainian’s far-right and choosing to use the Donbas war to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain), because Ukraine’s “fight is our fight.” (Lindsey Graham).

After ignoring Russia’s stated grounds for a peace settlement, Duss goes on to disingenuously claim that the Ukrainian government has been pushing for one.

“Ukraine presented Russia with a far-reaching set of proposals over a month ago, including a commitment to ‘permanent neutrality,’” Duss claims. “Volodomyr Zelenskiy continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war.”

It is true that Ukraine presented Russia with a 10-point plan in late March. But Duss omits what happened immediately after: while Russia “signaled its preliminary support,” (RAND analyst Samuel Charap) Ukraine’s Western backers sabotaged it, and Zelensky acquiesced. In early April, Ukrainian and Russian officials were finalizing details for a Zelensky-Putin summit. But UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev and ordered him to halt diplomacy. Citing sources close to Zelensky, Ukrayinska Pravda reports that Johnson informed his Ukrainian counterpart that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” Johnson also relayed that even if Russia and Ukraine chose to sign security guarantees, the UK and its allies would not take part – rendering any such agreement worthless.

Zelensky clearly received the message, as Duss’s own source makes clear. When Duss claims that Zelensky “continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war,” he links to a Reuters article that reveals such an “offer” to be hollow. Zelensky, Reuters reports, said he would only negotiate with Putin if Russia first withdrew entirely from Ukraine – an obvious non-starter. “Get out of this territory that you have occupied since February 24,” Zelensky said. “This is the first clear step to talking about anything.” Zelensky also “ruled out suggestions… that Ukraine should make concessions for the sake of securing a peace agreement that would allow Putin to save face.”

Thus, returning to Duss’ rendering, Zelensky’s “far-reaching proposals” were immediately rescinded under Western orders, and Zelensky’s “offer to negotiate” was premised on a condition that would have made negotiations impossible.

None of this is to suggest that Russia was justified in launching an invasion of Ukraine. To defend the use of force, which has been so catastrophic, Russia has to meet a high burden of evidence that, in my view, it has not. But one does not need to defend Russia’s invasion to see through Duss’ attempt to whitewash the US role in provoking and prolonging it.

Tellingly, Duss is openly hostile to journalists who have reported on the context that he has omitted. Out of nowhere, Duss introduces an attack on The Grayzone, the Max Blumenthal-founded news outlet that I work for. While Duss has nothing but praise for Biden, he has nothing but ad hominems for us (“pernicious authoritarian agitprop,” “atrocity-denying grifters” “click-baiting provocateurs”). After sharing this vitriol, he then immediately declares that engaging with us is “wasting time.”

I feel the same way about his juvenile name-calling, but interested readers can judge for themselves whether his insults are supported by facts. (He links to two “sources,” one a Medium blog post that, true to the neo-McCarthyite norm, peddles innuendo that The Grayzone is funded by Russia, among other smears).

If Duss is genuinely concerned about wasting time, he also might reflect on why he devotes ample space to paying lip service to progressive principles, only to ultimately endorse policies that flagrantly violate them. “Centering opposition to U.S. imperialism and militarism is an entirely appropriate starting point,” Duss states. Yet Duss’ desired end point would see leftists center U.S. imperialism and militarism, with disastrous results: among them, prolonging a proxy war against a nuclear armed power, threatening a worsening global food crisis, and sentencing more Ukrainians to death.

Even putting aside US complicity in the Ukraine proxy war and its dangers for the planet, progressives like Duss might wish to consider the likely political consequences. One obvious guide is the election of 2016, when Donald Trump won over a significant portion of voters by claiming to oppose the military interventionism that Duss is now urging progressives to embrace. Having seemingly learned nothing from 2016, Democrats in 2022 are again ceding anti-war sentiment to Republicans, 68 of whom voted against the $40 billion Ukraine bill in the House and Senate (versus zero Democrats).

As at least some Republicans vote against the proxy war, Biden has defended the domestic pain caused by his Ukraine proxy war by blaming “Putin’s Price Hike” and trying to argue that “defending freedom is going to cost.” Biden’s defense of “freedom” in Ukraine is now costing him a transatlantic flight to grovel at the feet of the Saudi autocracy, in the hopes of staving off a humiliating cost in the November midterms.

Continuing his mealy mouthed approach, Duss both claims to support diplomacy while simultaneously declaring it to be unattainable. The US, he says, “should certainly be actively engaged in finding a diplomatic path to end the war, and avoid committing to maximalist aims that could foreclose one.” But yet, according to Duss, “for the moment that path is unclear.”

If the path toward peace for Ukraine is unclear to Duss, then that can only be because he has chosen to erase the factual background and the diplomatic solutions on offer, thereby reinforcing the “maximalist aims” that he claims to oppose. Duss’s proxy war apologia will certainly win him a warm reception in establishment DC circles. For the US progressive movement, Ukraine, and the rest of the planet, it only spells disaster.

June 10, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Where’s the Emergency? 18 Congress Members Demand Answers as FDA Set to Approve COVID Shots for Kids Under 5

The Defender | June 8, 2022

Members of Congress today demanded answers from Dr. Robert M. Califf, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as the agency reviews Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for COVID-19 shots in children age 5 and under.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) is meeting on four separate occasions in June to discuss additional EUAs that would provide cradle-to-grave COVID-19 shots — and to consider a “Future Framework” that will permanently lower the bar for safety and efficacy, according to Toby Rogers, Ph.D.

A letter signed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) and 16 other members of Congress today asked Commissioner Califf 19 questions about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for young children.

The questions focused on the youngest children (6 months to 5 years) due to the Congress members’ concerns about what they called the FDA’s “one-size-fits-all” approach to the vaccines.

“The data show that the risks of serious adverse outcomes for COVID for children five and under is very low and as such the standard for evaluating EUA interventions must be very high,” the letter states.

“We believe it is prudent and necessary that the FDA provide answers to a number of questions before approving EUA vaccines for children under age 5, including more than 70% of whom are already seropositive for COVID-19.”

The VRBPAC meetings began Tuesday. The meeting schedule is:

  • June 7 — EUA for Novavax’s COVID-19 shot for adults.
  • June 14 — Amendment to Moderna’s EUA to include primary series to children and adolescents 6 through 17 years of age.
  • June 15 — Amendment to Moderna’s EUA to include primary series for children 6 months to 5 years and amendment to Pfizer’s EUA to include the primary series to children 6 months through 4 years of age.
  • June 28 — Proposed “Future Framework” for COVID-19 shots.

The Congress members’ letter presses the FDA to address unanswered questions regarding the risks and benefits of administering COVID-19 vaccines to children.

They ask the FDA to explain, among many other things:

  • What the cardiac risk factor is for children who receive EUA COVID-19 vaccines.
  • Why the FDA recently lowered the efficacy bar for COVID-19 vaccines for the youngest children.
  • When the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will provide the public with more details on children’s serious adverse outcomes from COVID-19 infections.
  • If it is possible that administering the vaccines in young children could predispose them to increased risk from future novel COVID-19 variants.
  • How many children ages 5 and under with and without pre-existing medical conditions have died from COVID-19 or its variants.

Finally, the letter asks Commissioner Califf to “please list the medical emergencies [among] children 0 to 4 years old that enables the FDA to approve the COVID vaccine for children using its EUA.”

Children’s Health Defense calls for action

Mary Holland, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) president and general counsel, called the FDA’s Future Framework proposal “quite possibly the worst idea in the history of public health.”

Children under 18 with no comorbidities have virtually no risk of death from COVID-19, according to a November 2021 study published in Nature.

A July 2021 preprint paper found children have a 99.995% recovery rate, and the vast majority of children have minimal symptoms.

The Nature study described how children between 3 and 11 years of age mount effective, robust and sustained immune responses to COVID-19.

The CDC’s own data show that at least 75.2% of children ages 0 to 11 and 74.2% of adolescents ages 12 to 17 already have superior natural immunity.

There is no clinically significant health benefit from the mRNA vaccines, according to Moderna. Reporting on its ​​Phase 2/3 KidCOVE study, the company said, “the absence of any severe disease, hospitalization or death in the study precludes the assessment of vaccine efficacy against these endpoints.”

Preliminary data showed the shots were only about 44% effective at preventing symptomatic infection in children 6 months to 2 years old, and 37% effective in children ages 2 to 5 — both below the 50% level that regulators generally called the minimum level for EUA approval in 2020.

In New York, officials observed that Pfizer’s efficacy against Omicron plummeted from 68% to 12% after 7 weeks in children ages 5 to 11.

“These shots are dangerous and carry very real risks,” Holland said.

Studies show vaccinated children face a substantial risk of myocarditis. Moderna’s EUA application, originally filed in June 2021, has already been held up because of a clear safety signal for myocarditis, which prompted a number of European countries to prohibit its use in young people.

Additionally, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System or VAERS has more than 48,500 reports of adverse events in children, including 112 deaths (as of May 27), and a growing number of reports of encephalopathies, clotting issues, diabetes and neurological problems in children following COVID-19 shots.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

June 10, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Do vaccine rollouts correlate to disabled americans?

el gato malo – bad cattitude – june 10, 2022

i have long been friends with ben. he’s done a lot of great work, runs a fantastic site on US all cause mortality, and has broken open a number of important issues around covid.

this may be another.

and it was not up for an hour before twitter not only marked the tweet as disinformation and locked ben out of his account all for asking a simple question that pretty much leaps out of this data.

the data comes from the FRED tool run by the st louis federal reserve bank. they are a well respected and high quality government run data source.

hard to see the problem with the data.

clearly, their issue is with the conclusion.

and, well, streisand effect and all, well, it caught my attention because naughty kitties love reading banned books.

correlation does not and cannot prove causality, but it can sure give us some strong hints, especially when we already know how off the charts the adverse event rate from these vaccines have been.

and boy is this timing provocative…

so, being the kind of gato to want to play with the data myself, i downloaded the set and graphed it.

as can be seen, this series was very stable for the prior 5 years. the dotted red line is the average value from 6/16 to 2/20, right before covid starting having effect.

this data comes from the current household survey. the drop for covid is likely a drop in survey response but as can be seen, it rapidly normalized.

then covid vaccination started.

the first callout is when vaccinated reached 1%.

the second is when boosters reached 1%.

i chose this convention because each has a sort of long tail at a very low level leading in but rose rapidly after reaching 1% so it seemed like the best inflection point for maximum relevance.

as can be seen, the timing is highly suggestive.

and it makes sense.

seeing this:

without a rise in disability reports would be surprising. we see 14k permanently disabled in VAERS. and we see a rise in the disabled rolls of 1.8 million. that’s pretty close to the 1-2% capture rate (more like 1%, but also likely capturing other categories as well, so hard to be precise) for reporting we’ve seen around other VAERS issues (besides death which seems to get better counted)

so it feels like we’re in a ballpark here.

and it does not look like “long covid” because the original covid strains were more severe and yet we saw no evidence of this disability spike pre-vaccines.

we can zoom in and really see the issue. data used is fred and owid. obviously, there is some chart crime here with the scaling, but the overall relationship is remarkable. this is basically what ben plotted.

the second sharp upleg in october also interested me so i checked it against this:

it’s easy to take up trending series and lay their scales so they look correlated. the real test is bi-directionality. and this looks to be most damning of all. i took % vaxxed each month and subtracted the prior month to get “% of population vaxxed in month.” this should give us a sense of the people at risk of vaccine complications at any given time. to this i added the same treatment to the booster series to get a total % of population getting a vaccine each month.

i then plotted this series against disability.

  • the vaccination series started to get steep in feb 21. disability got steep in april 21.
  • vaccination peaked in may. disability peaked in june.
  • vaccination started to rise again after august.
  • disability began to rise again after october.
  • then vaxx dropped off after jan 2022 and disability flattened out in mar 2022.

2 month lag, 1 month lag, 2 month lag, 2 month lag. 4 separate inflections all tracked in near identical and highly plausible timeframes for vaccine injury. we’re starting to get past “suggestive” here.

this zigs, zags, then zigs again, then zags again all as predicted if it were causal and all with the sort of lag you’d associate with reporting, 1-2 months. (all 2 mo save may-jun 21)

the disability series can be a little noisy month to month, but the big trends are all there.

based on what we know about side effects this looks to be an odds on hypothesis at this point. i can see no better fit to the data.

anyone seeing flaws here? what are we missing? is there another explanation?

“the vaccines just put 1.8 million americans into disability” is a big claim.

i want to stress, this is still a hypothesis and this is my first run through with this data so i want to let people chew on it and see what else emerges before making claims that are too strong.

but this is also REALLY provocative and unless i have really missed something, warrants research and explication, not censorship.

please spread the word and let’s get some eyes on this.

June 10, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

US government admits participation in Ukrainian biolabs

By Lucas Leiroz | June 10, 2022

In a recent statement, US government officials finally admitted that the country helped to build and maintain biolaboratories on Ukrainian soil over the last two decades. The declaration comes from the Pentagon, which reinforces the military importance of the program of biolabs abroad. However, US officials still insist on the evidently fallacious narrative that the laboratories were intended for “peaceful” use.

In an online statement on Thursday, June 9, US Defense Department’s representatives said that Washington has been involved in the activities of 46 biolabs within Ukrainian territory, whose objectives, according to them, would be to act cooperatively with local experts in order to improve Ukraine’s biological safety and human and animal health.

“The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades (…) “This work, often conducted in partnership with outside organizations, such as the WHO and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), has resulted in safer and more effective disease surveillance and detection (…) Ukrainian scientists have acted consistent with international best practices and norms in publishing research results, partnering with international colleagues and multilateral organizations, and widely distributing their research and public health findings”, Pentagon’s spokespersons said.

The representatives also emphasized that there was no research being carried out in Ukraine involving the use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. In this sense, the use of the biolabs would be restricted to activities related to the search for peaceful medical knowledge and without any military purpose, which seems contradictory, considering that there were US military personnel operating in these facilities, such as in all US biolaboratories in other countries.

In fact, if the function of the biolabs really existed only in a non-military way, the units could be managed by civilian institutions of the US government, instead of having the active participation of the armed forces and intelligence agencies. Furthermore, in this case, the American health authorities would be the ones called upon by the government to provide public clarification on the case, not the Pentagon. In the current conjuncture, the American authorities seem to contradict themselves successively, unable to hide the obvious truth that the country was producing biomedical research of a military nature in Ukraine.

In addition, the security policy surrounding the research carried out there raises suspicions about its possible peaceful use. Although in the statement it is claimed that the US acted in partnership with Ukrainian and international organizations, there was no publicity of data on the results of research in these units. In fact, the very existence of the laboratories had previously been denied by some American authorities – although some specific people, such as the Undersecretary Victoria Nuland, have also admitted, showing how there are continuous contradictory statements by the US government.

It seems that in the current situation, after Russia has exposed so much data about the clandestine activities of such labs and their supporters, there is no longer any way Washington can deny the existence of the activities, so it tries to maintain damage control through a “partial confession”, admitting the existence but denying the use for production of biological weapons.

Furthermore, even if we consider all the Pentagon’s statements true, many questions will remain unanswered. The sources of funding for the laboratories, according to data presented by the Russians, involved a wide network of private agents, including Big Pharma companies, such as Pfizer and Moderna, and Hunter Biden himself, son of the US president, known worldwide for carrying out illegal activities in Ukraine. None of this has been clarified by the Pentagon or any other American authority so far.

In addition, by not answering about private funding sources, the US government raises even more suspicions on the possible biological weapons research. It is true that there was American public money applied in the operations of the biolabs, but Russia denounces the existence of private investments that have not been recognized by the US so far. This means that there were at least two sources of funding for such activities. One of these sources was the US government itself, which supposedly financed peaceful biomedical research, while the other source, which involves pharmaceutical companies and corrupt agents, remains unofficial and, consequently, without clear purposes. Certainly, it was the private source that financed illegal research with bioweapons, which could not be included in official US state accounting documents. There are many questions Washington has yet to answer.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

June 10, 2022 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Arctic Council Decisions Made Without Russia to Be Illegitimate – Ambassador to US Antonov

Samizdat – 09.06.2022

WASHINGTON – Russia is concerned about plans to resume the work of the Arctic Council without its participation and warns that decisions made in this format will be illegitimate, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said.

Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the United States earlier announced their intention to resume work in the Council on a limited basis – within the framework of projects that do not involve Russia.

“Such a step cannot but cause concern not only for Russia as the current chairman of the Council, but also for the entire international community interested in the further sustainable development of this region. We state that this unique format of interstate interaction continues to be politicized,” Antonov said.

“Decisions on behalf of the Arctic Council, made without our country, will be illegitimate and violate the principle of consensus stipulated by its governing documents,” he warned.

The work of the Council was suspended on March 3 in light of the events in Ukraine.

June 9, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US ‘Acknowledged’ Tehran is Not Looking to Build a Nuclear Bomb: Iranian Foreign Minister

By Dhairya Maheshwari – Samizdat – 09.06.2022

Iran has rejected a resolution adopted by the IAEA’s Board of Governors (BoG) censuring it for not disclosing the site of three uranium enrichment facilities. Tehran claims that the IAEA’s findings are based on inputs from Israel, as the agency’s director general Rafael Grossi met the Israeli PM in Tel Aviv this month.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has claimed that the US and its Western allies have “acknowledged” that Tehran isn’t looking to build a nuclear bomb.

“The United States and the West know that the atomic bomb has no place in Iran’s Islamic beliefs,” Abdollahian remarked during an address to Indian Islamic scholars in New Delhi, as per a video released by Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday. The visiting Iranian FM was speaking through a Hindi translator.

The foreign minister kickstarted his maiden three-day visit to India on Wednesday, meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval on the opening day.

“The West once acknowledged in the nuclear talks that they could ignore all their problems with Iran’s nuclear programme as long as Iran stopped supporting Palestine and recognised Israel,” Abdollahian remarked at the gathering.

“With such incorrect excuses, the West sought the recognition of Israel by the Islamic Republic of Iran in order to achieve their goals, which, of course, failed,” the top Iranian diplomat added.

Abdollahian declared that in spite of the Western countries’ appeals, Iran remained steadfast in supporting “the cause of Palestine”.

“Iran considers it its religious and moral duty to support the liberation of Holy Quds (Jerusalem) and is fully committed to it,” added the dignitary.

Abdollahian told his audience that he wanted to give them a sense of ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Western powers, seeking to bring the US back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Former US President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled Washington from the pact in 2018, but his successor Joe Biden has indicated his willingness to reverse the controversial decision.

Tehran Slams US, EU Allies for ‘Political Resolution’

The Iranian Foreign Minister’s remarks came hours after the 35-member Board of Governors (BoG) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling upon Tehran to take “urgent steps” to comply with the IAEA’s nuclear safeguards.

The resolution was co-sponsored by the US and the E3 allies—Germany, the United Kingdom and France. Russia and China were the only countries which opposed the resolution, while three nations, including India, abstained from the IAEA vote.

The resolution was floated after a report this month from IAEA’s Director General Rafael Grossi claimed the “presence of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at Turquzabad, Varamin and Marivan”.

Grossi has said that the three sites weren’t previously disclosed under ‘Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol’ negotiated between Tehran and IAEA in March.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry has rejected the resolution as “political, incorrect and unconstructive action”.

“The adoption of the resolution, which is based on the hasty and unbalanced report of the Director General of the IAEA and based on the Zionist regime’s false and fabricated information, will only weaken the process of Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Tehran has claimed that the locations cited by the IAEA DG had been cleared by the agency “once and for all” in December 2015 and weren’t supposed to be covered under the March 2022 pact.

June 9, 2022 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Greek Court Overrules Decision to Comply With US Request to Seize Cargo of Iranian Oil Tanker

Samizdat – 09.06.2022

An Iranian tanker carrying oil was stopped off the Greek coast at the request of the US, based on unilateral sanctions targeting Iran’s oil trade. Tehran condemned Athens for bending to Washington’s orders and lambasted the impounding as an act of state piracy.

A Greek Appeals court overruled an earlier ruling that had prompted impounding of Iranian tanker Lana’s oil cargo in favour of the US, Iran’s embassy in Athens has stated. The confiscation of the cargo was earlier appealed by Tehran.

It is unclear if either Athens or the US will be challenging the decision of the Appeals court, however, an anonymous source claimed in an interview with Reuters that it might not be easy to achieve.

“The action for the reversal of the ruling was accepted by the court. It will be hard to overrule [the appeal court’s ruling]”, the legal source claimed.

The oil in question was removed from Luna to another vessel hired by the US authorities in May as the court was still reviewing Tehran’s appeal. It was then supposed to be moved to the US, but it is unclear if the ship transporting the Iranian oil, which now must be returned to the owner, has reached US shores.

Iran’s embassy in Greece expressed hope that the crude can still be returned. The embassy said that it is conducting “intensive consultations” with Athens to “ensure full implementation” of the court’s latest ruling.

“With God’s grace, the entire oil shipment will be returned [to Iran],” the embassy said.

The tanker Luna itself has since been released and arrested by Greek authorities again. The first time the ship was arrested was in April in a response to the order coming from the US, which slapped sanctions on Iran’s oil industry and now hunts for its oil tankers around the world. The second arrest, however, is related to unpaid towing services, according to report by Reuters citing a lawyer representing an unnamed company behind the arrest order.

Iran condemned the actions of Athens, equalling them to state piracy and vowing to respond. Several weeks later Iran seized two Greek ships sailing on the fringes of Iranian national waters, accusing both of “maritime violations”. Athens slammed the arrest of the ships sailing under its flag, while several media outlets alleged that their arrest could have been a retaliation for impounding Luna’s cargo.

Iran’s top security official: Retaliatory measure best way to defend country against bullying

Press TV – June 9, 2022

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) says the change in Greece’s approach to illegal confiscation of an Iranian tanker on the US order proves that retaliatory measure is the best way to protect the country against bullying.

Ali Shamkhani made the remark in a Thursday tweet after reports indicated that a Greek court has overturned an earlier ruling that allowed the United States to confiscate part of a shipment of Iranian crude on an Iranian-flagged vessel seized in the European country’s territorial waters.

“The action for the reversal of the ruling was accepted by the court,” a source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. “It will be hard to overrule that (the appeal court’s ruling).”

The change in Greece’s behavior came after Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) retaliated Athens’ measure by seizing two Greek ships in the Persian Gulf for violations of rules and regulations. Tehran had already announced that it was going to take “punitive action” against Athens.

Reacting to the Greek court’s verdict, Shamkhani said, “The change in Greece’s behavior following Iran’s proportionate and powerful reaction to illegal seizure of its tanker on the US’ order, along with scores of other experiences, proves that the sole way to defend the country’s rights in the face of bullying, both in the case of JCPOA and in the [International Atomic Energy] Agency is retaliatory measure.”

Iran’s embassy in Athens on Thursday confirmed that the Greek Appeals court has overturned the initial ruling on the confiscation of Iranian oil following intensive follow-up.

“With God’s grace, the entire oil shipment will be returned [to Iran],” the embassy tweeted.

It added that the issue will remain on the agenda of “intensive consultations” between Iran and Greece to “ensure full implementation of the ruling.”

The embassy emphasized that preserving the Iranian nation’s rights is a red line.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry late last month summoned the Greek chargé d’affaires to protest the seizure of the Iranian-flagged vessel and confiscation of its crude cargo.

The ministry official condemned Greece’s “unacceptable” surrender to “illegal” US pressures and said the “seizure of the cargo of the ship” with the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran was “an example of international piracy.”

June 9, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | Leave a comment

Google tells Congress the proposed antitrust bill would hinder its censorship efforts

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | June 9, 2022

Google continues to lobby and campaign against legislative efforts aimed at curbing its monopolistic power, this time openly, in a blog post.

Google claims that antitrust legislation – whose goal is to loosen the stranglehold it has on the market and competitors – would prevent it from censoring “disinformation.”

In the past months, the tech giant has used other avenues as well, from (🛡 fake) grassroots support that it purports to have, to spending millions on professional lobbyists in Washington DC.

In all this, Google has gone for all sorts of “targeted” arguments in an effort to make sure the bipartisan bills never become law. Lawmakers and voters had the chance to hear that if Google is not allowed to run its business unimpeded, exactly as it’s doing now, anything from innovation to national security would suffer.

And now, no doubt addressing that part of its audience that is particularly concerned with the specter of arbitrarily, if at all, defined “disinformation” as internet’s “greatest ill” – this time in the context of geopolitics – Google claims that the bills under consideration in Congress, would, if passed, prevent it from censoring disinformation.

VP of Google’s Privacy, Safety and Security Royal Hansen, claims that the legislation is a risk for US security, for that of its users, while it doesn’t address problems that “Americans care the most about.”

Despite the context of the writeup, Hansen for some reason mentions “privacy, child safety, and inflation.” This Google exec packs a lot of FUD into just a few sentences, to also warn users that some of their favorite products like Search and Maps will get broken – if Google is made to abide by possible future antitrust laws.

Among many other usual talking points that supposedly outweigh the need to regulate Big Tech’s business models Hansen talks about the danger of “rolling back” Google’s “war on disinformation” – that is, the unprecedented levels of censorship visible particularly on YouTube.

These last years, the topics were mostly Covid and US elections, but those are getting a little old; and so Hansen brings the war in Ukraine into the mix – as another reason why the digital market should not be a fair and level playing field for startups and other competitors.

“By prohibiting us from ‘discriminating’ against competitors, the bill would prevent us from taking action against purveyors of malicious content,” writes the Google exec. “Since Russia invaded Ukraine, we have been able to move quickly to limit Russian propaganda and disinformation, even as that content has migrated to new channels. The proposed legislation could undermine this work.”

June 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Enjoying Your Membership in the Mass Shooting of the Day Club?

Made-to-order censorship from the people who brought you 9/11

Helen of desTroy | June 9, 2022

When Nina “Mary Sloppins” Jankowicz predictably crashed and burned as the standard-bearer for the Biden administration’s Ministry of Truth, most people with two brain cells to rub together rejoiced. This was a logical response to aesthetic terrorism, as the gratingly-voiced compulsive liar being shoved in our face was a clear example of the narrative managers adding insult to injury. But anyone who thought we had heard the last of Washington’s Disinformation Governance Board was sadly mistaken. The creature which has replaced Jankowicz is significantly more horrifying, a nightmarish Nosferatu whose mommy was in the Mossad, who’s played a starring role in some of the most heinous crimes against humanity of the last two decades.

sleep tight

I’m talking, of course, about Michael Chertoff.

While there’s no direct smoking-gun proof that the current Mass Shooting Of The Week Club is connected to the Disinformation Governance Board, Chertoff has something of a history of weaponizing extremely dodgy incidents of “terrorism” to advance his agenda, whether that’s getting the Patriot Act passed after 9/11 or having the full nude body scanners manufactured by his company the Chertoff Group’s client Rapiscan (yes, the horrifically invasive body scanner company actually had the word “rape” in the name) installed in airports across the US after the “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab supposedly tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his big-boy panties aboard an airplane.

The Chertoff Group’s client list is positively bursting with the sort of company that would benefit from a rash of mass shootings, and Chertoff himself sits on the board of the Jeffrey Epstein-backed Carbyne911, a firm perhaps most notable for its many links to Israeli intelligence, the cartoonish way in which Tel Aviv has sold it as precisely the solution to America’s mass shooting ‘problem,’ and the ease with which it can be turned into a Trojan horse for the Unit 8200 alumni who founded it, allowing Israeli spies to slurp up a wealth of sensitive information without even having to deceive their targets. Carbyne911 turns the user’s phone into an audio/video transmitter in much the same way as infamous Israeli spyware firm NSO Group’s Pegasus malware did, except Carbyne911 is installed deliberately by the user, ostensibly to keep them “safe” – and activating one device activates all other devices in the area that have Carbyne911 installed, potentially giving the company access to an entire building’s worth of sensitive audio-visual data. The company also sells its services for non-emergency purposes, allowing it to keep its foot in the door for those slow times between mass shootings, and in addition to the US, Israel and Mexico, it has offices in Ukraine, which is surely just a coincidence…

Chertoff, one of the architects of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 torture policy, is also well-known for his utter lack of humanity – something that would have been inculcated in him from a young age if his mother Livia Eisen was, as many qualified investigators believe, an early Mossad member. One would have to look far indeed for anyone more likely to inaugurate a “mass shooting of the day” campaign in order to strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights once and for all, or have certain political views declared illegal and elevated to the level of domestic terrorism – all while making a buck for his Chertoff Group security industry clients. Guilford County, North Carolina reportedly plans in the wake of this sudden outpouring of senseless FBI-adjacent violence to begin installing body scanners at its 19 high schools and 23 middle schools, and with the bidding process open you can bet that Rapiscan or its parent company OSI Systems will be taking a big bite out of the taxpayer’s wallets in that state – if not, in reality, out of crime.

Setting up one mass shooting after another is quite clever, from the point of view of pure evil. Researchers digging through the exhaustive amount of evidence indicating at least one “retired” FBI agent had explicit advance knowledge of where, when, how, and with what weapons Payton Gendron was going to shoot up a supermarket in Buffalo will have their work cut out for them simultaneously researching the constantly-shifting stories fed the public by Uvalde, Texas authorities following the shooting at Robb Elementary School, where a kid supposedly so poor his peers mocked him mercilessly for it was suddenly able to afford over $5000 worth of high-end guns and ammo (we know the prices because he supposedly sent the receipt to one of his online “friends” – who couldn’t possibly have been another agent who wanted to make sure his donations to his little buddy in Uvalde were being well-spent! surely there’s an innocent reason CNN deleted that claim from their current version of the story!) while also keeping an eye out for any possible anomalies at the New Orleans graduation shooting and the Tulsa hospital shooting and the Pittston, PA Wal-Mart shooting and the Los Angeles high school shooting—which all took place in a 48-hour span. By the time the identity of Gendron’s FBI pal is confirmed, will anyone even remember who he is?

They won’t, of course, certainly not in the US’ goldfish-memory news cycle. But the ideas slipped into Gendron’s word salad of a manifesto will be added to the list of unacceptable views the holding of which makes an individual a terrorist in the eyes of the government. Unreadable mashups of copypaste, memes, and gearhead masturbation like his magnum opus make it clear that these incidents are being deployed as de facto shopping lists for ideas the narrative managers want removed from circulation. Gendron (or rather, the intelligence agents who programmed him to open fire inside a Buffalo supermarket last month) is not only obsessed with so-called assault rifles and military-grade body armor, “he” also appears to be capable of basic levels of pattern recognition regarding the activities of international financial cartels with a tendency to hide behind a certain ethnic group who use the religion to which they supposedly belong and its members as human shields for all manner of atrocities, then accuse anyone who notices of “antisemitism” for having eyes, ears and a functional brain. This phenomenon has been observed and described by scholars for centuries, and its perpetrators are sick of ordinary people noticing, hence their decision to shoehorn it in between an array of juvenile “white supremacist” cliches in the hope of having any mention of this reality declared “hate speech.”

This sort of thing is hardly new. The intelligence agents who crafted Gendron’s “manifesto” followed a long tradition of guilt-by-association when they larded it with credibility grenades largely consisting of the kind of dull-edged racism one generally sees in the kind of person who, in the absence of any real accomplishments of his own in which he can take pride, falls back on his ancestry, which he embraces with an overblown “pride” as if an accident of birth is an adequate substitute for achievement. No one with a functioning critical capacity actually believes these types are a threat before the FBI puts a gun in their hands and points them at the nearest pressure point. But throwing a bunch of bodies on the pile has ginned up a new round of well-funded outrage, perhaps best exemplified by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who leveraged the death toll to pass a law against the contents of the manifesto so incomprehensible and unpopular even the media establishment can’t find anything nice to say about it.

Now anyone who expresses any of the ideas espoused by someone who later goes on a shooting rampage – whether he’s gently guided by an FBI agent (or a rumored yet frustratingly citation-deficient online cheerleading section) or merely motivated by revenge on an ex-girlfriend or a doctor who may have made a mess of his back surgery – becomes that much easier to tar and feather with the all-purpose “hate speech” brush.

For the parasitic elites and the intelligence agencies, who generally work hand in hand anyway, expressing such “white-supremacy-adjacent” ideas will be seen as a precursor to embarking on yet another mass shooting rampage, deemed “pre-crime” under the Domestic Terrorism bill recently passed in the House and only a few more mass shootings away from being rammed through the Senate. Anyone expressing such ideas can be imprisoned for their own “safety,” in the same way as was laid out in the Trump administration’s proposed HARPA and DEEP programs. HARPA proposed monitoring an individual’s electronic devices for signs of mental illness, which could be acted upon to neutralize the individual without evidence they would so much as hurt the proverbial fly; DEEP would similarly intervene against individuals deemed to be “mobilizing toward violence,” deploying “court ordered mental health treatment,” electronic monitoring, and every other tool in the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-prison toolbox against individuals who’ve done nothing except set off what has become an absurdly sensitive set of pre-crime “red flags.” Given that the mass shooting of Columbine was believed by those closest to the perpetrators to be triggered by their use of antidepressant drugs, the idea of funneling would-be shooter types into psychiatric care instead of as far away from it as possible is ironic at best, a sick joke at worst.

And given the ever-yawning definition of Domestic Terrorism in 21st century America, the only way to escape the tightening net of absurdly punitive speech laws will soon be to curl up in the fetal position at the feet of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as he lies sleeping, like a loyal pet, in order to prove oneself clean of ideological sins.

Thus, while the seemingly endless stream of mass shootings unfolding over the last two weeks is clearly designed to encourage Americans to beg their government to take their guns away, anything, anything to make it stop, for the children, et cetera, it’s also designed to encourage Americans to shut up those mean people online, because if they can’t convince the half of the population that owns guns to chuck them over an increasingly absurd series of “mass shootings,” taking away their right to complain is a sufficient consolation prize.

Playing chicken with dead kids is the sort of sick game only a Michael Chertoff could win, and given the absolute cowardice that sets in when anything about a mass shooting – even really obvious things like retired FBI agents befriending the shooters and being publicly told where and when they would commit their acts in time to prevent them – is questioned, he is likely to come out on top if we allow this insanity to continue without asking the obvious questions – not just about who benefits (that much is clear) but about who is setting these events up one after another to go off in a carefully timed string like fireworks on the 4th of July (and we can expect a biiiiiiig mass shooting that day, just to hammer their point home).

June 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Leaked documents expose US ‘Ministry of Truth’

Samizdat | June 9, 2022

The US government planned to use its now-shelved Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) to make social media platforms remove posts the government deemed false, according to leaked documents obtained by opposition lawmakers.

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Josh Hawley (Missouri) cited the whistleblower files in an open letter to Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas published on Wednesday, in which they pressed for more details on the controversial DGB.

The department “planned to coordinate efforts to leverage ties with social media platforms to enable the removal of user content,” the senators said in a press release, adding that it sought to use Big Tech sites to “enforce its agenda.”

First floated in April, the board was quickly paused after a strong public backlash in which critics likened it to a state-run ‘Ministry of Truth’. The lawmakers said the leaked documents raised “serious concerns” about the initiative.

“The DGB was established to serve as much more than a simple ‘working group’ to ‘develop guidelines, standards, [and] guardrails’ for protecting civil rights and civil liberties,” they wrote. “In fact, DHS documents show that the DGB was designed to be the Department’s central hub, clearinghouse and gatekeeper for Administration policy and response to whatever it happened to decide was ‘disinformation.’”

Grassley and Hawley argued that the Biden administration has offered no clear definition of “disinformation,” and that the DHS board had shown serious bias even in its earliest stages, despite assurances it would remain apolitical.

In particular, they pointed to author and ‘Disinformation Fellow’ Nina Jankowicz, chosen to head the DGB, claiming she is “a known trafficker of foreign disinformation and liberal conspiracy theories.”

Jankowicz may have been hired chiefly due to “her relationship with executives at Twitter,” the senators claimed, adding that the leaked documents show the White House planned to “operationalize” connections with social media companies to “implement its public policy goals.”

Draft briefing notes prepared in late April indicate that a senior DHS official, Robert Silvers, planned to meet with Twitter executives to discuss the disinformation board, though it remains unclear whether the scheduled meeting ever took place.

The two senators urged Mayorkas to divulge more information about the department’s goals for the DGB, including whether it ever asked social media firms to “censor, flag, add context to, or remove” user posts or ban accounts. They also requested documents and communications related to Jankowicz, and called on the government to give its definition for actionable disinformation, saying it should “identify who exactly is ultimately responsible for making this determination.”

June 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment