Silicon Valley and WEF-Backed Foundation Announce Global Initiative for COVID-19 Vaccine Records
Multiple airlines are now testing a digital health passport, called CommonPass, that will store health information needed for travel on a secure, easy-to-update app. The Commons Project
By Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| January 15, 2021
Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, alongside healthcare companies, US intelligence contractors and the Commons Project Foundation, recently launched the Vaccination Credential Initiative. The initiative’s ambitions reach far beyond vaccines and will have major implications for civil liberties.
On Thursday, tech giants with deep ties to the US national-security state—Microsoft, Oracle, and the MITRE corporation—announced that they had partnered with several health-care companies to create the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) to advance the implementation of digital COVID-19 vaccination records.
According to a Reuters report, the VCI “aims to help people get encrypted digital copies of their immunization records stored in a digital wallet of their choice” because the “current system [of vaccination records] does not readily support convenient access and sharing of verifiable vaccination records.”
The initiative, on its website, notes that the VCI is a public-private partnership “committed to empowering individuals with digital vaccination records” so that participants can “protect and improve their health” and “demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.” The initiative is essentially built on a common framework of digital vaccination “wallets” called SMART Health Cards that are meant to “work across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries” as part of a new global vaccination-record infrastructure.
The host of the VCI website and one the initiative’s key backers is the Commons Project Foundation. That foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), runs the Common Trust Network, which has three goals that are analogous to those of VCI. As listed on the WEF website, the network’s goals are (1) to empower individuals by providing digital access to their health information; (2) to make it easier for individuals to understand and comply with each destination’s requirements; and (3) to help ensure that only verifiable lab results and vaccination records from trusted sources are presented for the purposes of cross-border travel and commerce.
To advance these goals, the Common Trust Network is powered by “a global registry of trusted laboratory and vaccination data sources” as well as “standard formats for lab results and vaccination records and standard tools to make those results and records digitally accessible.”
How CommonPass works, thecommonsproject.org
Another, and related, Commons Project Foundation and WEF partnership is CommonPass. CommonPass, which is also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.” Current members of CommonPass, including JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, United Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic, are also members of the Common Trust Network.
This overlap between the Commons Project Foundation/WEF partnerships and the VCI illustrates that the WEF itself is involved with the VCI, albeit indirectly through their partners at the Commons Project Foundation. The Commons Project Foundation itself is worth exploring, as its cofounders, Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins, have long-standing ties to the RAND Corporation, the US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the International Rescue Committee, as noted in this article published last year by MintPress News. The IRC, currently run by Tony Blair protégé David Milliband, is developing a biometric ID and vaccination-record system for refugees in Myanmar in cooperation with the ID2020 Alliance, which is partnered with CommonPass backer, the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition, the ID2020 Alliance funds the Commons Project Foundation and is also backed by Microsoft, one of the key companies behind the VCI.
Wearable IDs for your Health and your Wallet
Overlap between digital vaccination records, promoted via initiatives such as CommonPass and VCI, and the push for a new global digital-identity system is no coincidence. Indeed, the developer of VCI’s SMART Health Cards framework at Microsoft Health, Josh C. Mandel, noted in his overview presentation on that framework that digital identity is integral to the digital vaccination-record effort. SMART Health Cards, as of now, are expected to include a person’s complete name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information, though it is possible and likely that more personal information will be required as the initiative advances, given that VCI states that these identifiers are merely a starting point.
While advertised as digital vaccination records, SMART Health Cards are clearly intended to be used for much more. For instance, public information on the framework notes that SMART Health Cards are “building blocks that can be used across health care,” including managing a complete immunization record that goes far beyond COVID-19 vaccines, sharing data with public-health agencies, and communication with health-care providers.
Vaccine Credential Initiative partners, vaccinationcredential.org
Yet, this framework will not be limited to health-care information, as Mandel has said. In his presentation, he notes the application of SMART Health Cards could soon be used as IDs for commercial activity, such as renting a car. The VCI framework’s use of the term “digital wallet” to refer to its digital vaccination record is also suggestive of future connectivity to economic activity. Efforts to link digital identity, not just to economic activity but also to health data, have recently escalated, for example with the piloting of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (aka GAVI)–Mastercard–Trust Stamp partnership in Africa. That program, first launched in 2018, links Trust Stamp’s digital-identity platform with the GAVI-Mastercard Wellness Pass, a digital vaccination record, and Mastercard’s click-to-pay system run on AI technology called NuData. Mastercard and GAVI are both partnered with the ID2020 Alliance, which includes VCI member Microsoft.
Given the reasonable speculation that such platforms would utilize digital currency, specifically cryptocurrency, for financial activity, it is worth noting that VCI member Microsoft filed a patent in 2019 that would allow “human body activity,” including brain waves and body heat, to mine (i.e., generate) cryptocurrency. This, of course, would link biometrics to financial activity, among other things.
Such a system, as laid out in the Microsoft patent, would likely require the introduction of wearables in order to be implemented. Notably, numerous wearables for contactless identity, digital travel passes, and payment devices have recently been launched. Examples include DigitalDNA, Proxy, and FlyWallet. FlyWallet is particularly notable as their latest product, Keyble, is a wearable that combines digital identity through fingerprint authentication, which enables both contactless payments and health applications, such as vital-sign monitoring and data sharing with insurance companies and health-care providers.
Sponsored by Spooks and Silicon Valley
The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the United States, particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.
Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting “actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health” from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project Baseline has become an important component of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through its COVID-19 testing activities. While Verily has not addressed this possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in 2013, Google Genomics was founded with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud servers. Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.”
Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.
Google and the majority of VCI’s backers—Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic, the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare—are also prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir, as well as a myriad of health-care and health-record companies. The coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health data under the guise of combatting COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19 through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members. That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet secretive, contractor for the US government, specifically the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.
Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. Google, through its partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. US military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International (ATI), have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.
Predictive COVID-19 diagnosis is also an ambition of another company that backs VCI, Salesforce. Salesforce is one of three companies that created COVID 360, which Salesforce senior vice president Bob Vanstraelen describes as a “free full Coronavirus treatment solution for patients and citizens at risk” that is hosted on Salesforce Health Cloud and was by Deloitte’s Israel branch and the Israeli intelligence-linked AI firm Diagnostic Robotics. COVID 360 uses the Diagnostic Robotics clinical-predictions platform and applies it to COVID-19 so that “government agencies or caretakers” can identify individuals “in proximity to a potential positive coronavirus case” and mandate coronavirus testing and/or treatment regimes, based on a risk profile generated by COVID 360. Diagnostic Robotics and Salesforce are both members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition.
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff, inclusivecapitalism.com
Salesforce founder, chair, and CEO Marc Benioff was previously a vice president at Oracle. Oracle, another VCI backer, was created as a spin-off of a CIA project of the same name, and its top executives have close ties to the outgoing Trump administration and also to Israel’s government. While Benioff’s pre-Salesforce history to a CIA-linked company like Oracle is significant, Benioff’s close ties to the World Economic Forum also deserve greater scrutiny.
Benioff is not only a member of the WEF’s board of trustees, but he is also the inaugural chair of the forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a “revolution” that its architect and WEF founder Klaus Schwab defines as a merging of humans’ physical, digital, and biological identities. Benioff is also the owner and cochair of Time magazine, which recently ran an entire issue focused on promoting the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the WEF-backed Great Reset.
Benioff also serves on the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a collaboration between the Vatican and oligarchs to create a “more inclusive, sustainable and trusted economic system” for the twenty-first century. Alongside Benioff on the council are well-known figures such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild (close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons), Mark Carney (UN special envoy for Climate Action and former Governor of the Bank of England), and William Lauder (executive chairman of Estée Lauder, nephew of Mega Group member Ronald Lauder) as well as the top executives of MasterCard, Visa, Dupont, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, BP, and Bank of America. Also present are the heads of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Benioff and others mentioned in this article are perfect examples of the cross-pollination between groups of oligarchs and their associated foundation and organizations and how these networks are working together to pursue a common agenda. While the push for combining digital identity with vaccination records and economic activity appears, superficially, to be the efforts of various organizations and groups, the same individuals and entities appear time and again, pointing to a coordinated push to not only implement such a system, but manufacture consent for such a system among the global population.
The effort to manufacture consent for an all-encompassing digital identification system is notable given that its main “selling point” thus far has been coercion. We have been told that such a system is necessary, or we will never be able to return to work or school, we will never be able to travel and we will be prohibited from participating normally in the economy. While this system is being introduced in this way, it is essential to point out that coercion is a built-in part of this infrastructure and will be used to modify human behavior to great effect, reaching far beyond just the issue of COVID-19 vaccines if implemented.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
UN’s call for ‘climate emergency’ is an invitation to misery in developing countries
By Vijay Jayaraj – Global Warming Policy Forum – 14/12/20
A declaration of climate emergency (as per UN’s emission reduction requirements) will dent the developmental goals and increase energy prices. Besides, it will also result in the tax payers funded transition to a less reliable energy system, a recipe for a potential economic collapse.
A precursor to the 2021 COP26 meeting in the UK
Speaking at the Climate Ambition Summit to mark the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, UN chief Antonio Guterres implored, “Today, I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached.”
He further clarified that,
We need meaningful cuts now to reduce global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. This must be fully reflected in the revised and strengthened Nationally Determined Contributions that the Paris signatories are obliged to submit well before COP26 next year in Glasgow.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed 11.6 billion pounds of UK’s overseas aid to support green technology. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan pledged not to build any new coal plants in the country.
Support for the UN leader’s call also came from the Chinese President Xi Jinping. He said China will cut down carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by over 65% by 2030, in comparison to 2005. Given its status as the leading coal consumer and empowerer of fossil fuel technology in other developing countries, it remains to be seen how President Xi will reconcile his 65% commitment with Beijing’s fossil ambitions and energy intensive industries.
Speaking at the same event (virtually), the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India will reduce emission intensity by 21% in comparison to the 2005 levels. Earlier this year, Modi had indicated that the country is aiming to reduce its carbon footprint by 30% to 35% and increase the use of natural gas, without setting a deadline for the same.
Even as per its ambitious scenario to reduce emissions, India will not be able to achieve a 45 percent reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 2010 levels without compromising on its aggressive energy policy that has enabled the country to achieve an energy surplus in recent years.
Studies on the relationship between GDP and energy growth indicate that “It is very difficult to reconcile reductions in carbon dioxide emissions with continued economic growth, especially in poor and medium rich countries,” as most of the world’s primary energy comes from fossil fuels.
A call for 45 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emission will be suicidal for the energy sectors in the developing world, most of which depend on coal, oil, and Natural gas. 84% of the world’s primary energy comes from Fossil fuels (2019) and just 11% coming from Renewables. Though the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption may appear to be reducing by a small margin each year, the absolute value of consumption keeps increasing each year.
Despite the rapid addition of renewable technology globally, the year-on-year change in primary energy consumption value for both renewable and fossil sources were almost the same in 2019, i.e., an increase consumption of around 960 TWh for both the sources. The actual fossil fuel consumption has technically increased and will continue to increase in future, as developing economies are wary of falling back into the dark ages of energy poverty.
Riding on the renewable energy myth
Developing nation’s precaution with green transition has a reason. Gueterres claimed that “Renewable energy is getting less expensive with every passing day.” But the claim is disputed, at least as per the current state of renewable technology, their backup mechanisms, and the evidence from the existing green grids.
Data from renewable energy dominated states like California and from countries like Germany and UK, show that excessive investment and dependency on renewable energy has actually resulted in increased electricity prices.
Renewable energy like wind and solar, which in many instances is installed with subsidies from taxpayer’s money, ends up charging the taxpayer more for their electricity use, thus technically costing the taxpayer not once but twice.
A ‘green’ Covid recovery will imperil developing countries
Gueterres insisted that, “the recovery from COVID-19 presents an opportunity to set our economies and societies on a green path in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
He is not alone in suggesting a marriage of COVID-19 recovery stimulus and green energy transition. The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset program suggests the same, with global leaders like Justin Trudeau already endorsing it.
Developing countries are unlikely to join this call for green transition, despite Xi’s tall pledges. India, for example, is likely to become the most populous country in the world by 2030 and it will have to risk millions of poor people falling back into the extreme poverty category if it were to amend its commitments to Paris agreement as per Gueterres’ suggestions.
With COVID-19 lockdowns adversely impacting the country’s economy (a negative growth in GDP and a long road to arrive at pre-COVID-19 levels), it is unlikely that the country’s leadership will commit to any significant CO2 reduction targets before the COP26 meetings in the UK.
India’s Economic Survey 2018-2019 categorically stated, “While there has been a tremendous increase in renewable energy capacity, fossil fuels, especially coal, would continue to remain an important source of energy.” The survey added, “Further, considering the intermittency of renewable power supply, unless sufficient technological breakthrough in energy storage happens in the near future, it is unlikely that thermal power can be easily replaced as the main source of energy for a growing economy such as India.”
This is likely the reason why Prime Minister Modi refused set a deadline for India’s proposed 30-35% reduction in emissions. India had recently doubled its mining exploration activity by implementing about 400 new projects. The mining sector is considered important to the country’s ambition to become a USD 5 Trillion economy. According to India’s Central Electricity Authority, 50% of India’s electricity generation in 2030 will continue to come from coal.
Does climate alarm justify extreme calls for energy transition?
Despite the heightened focus on emission reduction commitments, the elephant in the room has been the science used for justifying these emission reductions in first place.
During his speech, Gueterres asked “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” Well he may be right! This is indeed a “dramatic” emergency, not a scientific one!
If we were to assess the key indicators that determine quality of life, it is evident that many of those metrics have improved drastically since the industrial revolution, despite the contrasting storyline portrayed in the mainstream media.
Life expectancy (age to which a new born baby is expected to survive), access to clean drinking water, access to affordable and reliable electricity, access to nutritious food at affordable prices, agricultural crop productivity per acre and farmer incomes are some of the key metrics that show us that the world has improved a lot, especially in the past 3 decades. We are not in a climate emergency!
The only reasoning provided for a future climate catastrophe is the temperature projections from computer climate models, collectively known as CMIP (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project). The UN uses the most recent versions of CMIP (5 & 6) to frame climate policy decisions and the mainstream media and academic institutions regard these models as the gold standard in climate forecasting.
The models are designed to forecast future temperatures, based on greenhouse gas emission scenarios. This is how the UN predicts future temperatures and the reason why Gueterres has called for an emission reduction. But the models are hypersensitive to emissions and thus have been faulty since inception.
Recent research has shown “that climate models overstate atmospheric warming”. The warming projected by these models have been found to be 4 to 5 times faster than the actual temperature observations on ground. Even if the developing nations refuse to commit to UN’s carbon neutrality initiative, there won’t be a significant impact on the climate.
So, the call by Gueterres is not only pseudo-scientific in its climate assumptions but also dependent on unreliable and unaffordable green energy. The call for emission reduction will be economically damaging and to a severe extent in the developing countries.
Moreover, it completely excludes the possibility of economies becoming stronger in the future, potentially making them more resilient, thus developed enough to adapt to climatic challenges. The prescribed reduction mechanisms and the war on fossil fuels could actually stifle their ability to mitigate and adapt to future temperature changes.
It will be interesting to see how Xi, Modi and others in developing world put their commitments into practice, and how it will impact the current energy forecasts which project an increasing reliance on fossil fuel in their respective economies.
Jack Dorsey, the CIA and Twitter Censorship in the Age of Covid-19
By Vanessa Beeley |
Unlimited Hangout| December 10, 2020
Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, has embedded himself in some of the most powerful global influencer complexes. His techno-mining of African potential and the increasing use of Twitter as a surveillance tool for the corporatocracy have generated the opportunity for Dorsey to play an increasingly pivotal role in the roll-out of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
In Part 1 of this series on the emergence of the “celebrity humanitarianism” complex of the 21st century and its role in the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, I covered the evolution of Hollywood actor Sean Penn from anti-Iraq-war activist to establishment narrative endorser and advocate for the predator class factions dominated by the Clinton family cabal and globalism.
Penn was one of the three men together on a beach holiday that was featured in a Daily Mail article in November 2020. Another of the three global influencers strolling on the beach with Penn was “technology entrepreneur” and the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey’s meteoric rise to fame as a leading innovator in the world of data technology began to falter in 2016/17 when 247 Wall Street listed Dorsey among the twenty worst CEOs in America. In this article, I will investigate Dorsey’s involvement in the narrative management of Covid-19 and his potential contribution to the roll out of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset that has been accelerated by the Coronavirus “pandemic” exercise.
Like Penn, Dorsey is a supporter of the Democratic Party. Dorsey broke ranks with the billionaire bloc to donate $ 5600 to Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign after the June 2019 Democratic debates. Dorsey cites Gabbard’s anti-war stance as the reason for his support. Dorsey also contributed to the campaigns of Andrew Yang and Jay Inslee. Dorsey commends Yang for his “focus on artificial intelligence and automation” (emphasis added). Dorsey has also endorsed the philanthrocapitalist “climate change” portfolio – in a tweet Dorsey says that Gabbard and Yang’s “voices are important to surface in debates”, adding:
“Along with systemically addressing climate change and economic injustice, these are the key issues of global consequence I want to see considered and discussed more.”
Dorsey as well as the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, were subpoenaed to a US Senate hearing in November 2020, where their platforms were accused of anti-conservative bias after their effective suppression of the Hunter Biden China scandal. Of the two social media platforms, Twitter was deemed to be the most aggressive in its censorship of the New York Post article.
US conservatives were outraged that a story critical of Joe Biden, with potential to turn the election in favour of Donald Trump, was being buried by platforms as influential as Twitter and Facebook. Dorsey’s rationale for this unprecedented censorship had been that Twitter policies prohibit “directly distributing content obtained through hacking that contains private information”. Dorsey later back-pedalled but by then, the story had effectively been “disappeared” and damage to the Biden campaign had been successfully limited.
Dorsey’s apparent absorption into the transnational billionaire complex controlling the global response to the Covid-19 “pandemic” and orchestrating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, will be explored throughout this article.
From Square to Covid-19 – Dorsey transfers $ 1 billion to “disarm the pandemic”
In addition to Twitter, Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, a digital payments platform. In April 2020, Dorsey transferred an alleged 28% of his wealth from Square to his Start Small LLC (SS) to fund Covid-19 relief globally. The $1 billion donation represents the most significant “philanthropic” donation made by the tech-billionaire during his entire career.
One month after the launch of SS, Dorsey announced on Twitter the disbursement of $87.8 million to a number of initiatives apparently responding to fall-out from Covid-19 response measures. The disbursements included $600,000 to help develop “high impact digital learning tools to support special needs students and English language learners who are most affected by the crisis and will experience the most learning loss during school closures”.
The reality is that none of these measures would be necessary if scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, medical staff and experts opposing the disproportionate response to a virus [seemingly] less deadly than seasonal flu had been taken into consideration by the institutions and governments rolling out the draconian “lockdown” of global populations in preparation for the Great Reset. Dorsey’s and Twitter’s role in ensuring the censorship and de-platforming of dissenting voices is also examined in this article.
Let us not forget that “a report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus ‘pandemic’, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $ 82 billion in just 23 days” as picked up by journalist, Cory Morningstar, who is also cited below.
In May 2020, Dorsey donated $10 million to Sean Penn’s CORE response which supported CORE’s national expansion of Covid-19 drive-through test sites “into Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans and the Navajo Nation”. The origins of the CORE initiative are examined in detail in Part 1 of this series. Dorsey is also credited with persuading Penn to join Twitter in May 2020.
As Dorsey stated in his April 2020 tweet:
“After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and [Universal Basic Income] or UBI.”
Dorsey’s involvement in the promotion of UBI demonstrates his endorsement of measures which are designed to shore up economic privilege for members of the global billionaire cartels while asset-stripping and disenfranchising the working classes and what remains of an already decimated middle class in the West.
Cory Morningstar, one of the foremost voices speaking out about the unprecedented power grab being facilitated by the Covid-19 narratives, gave me this statement with regards to the covert threat of UBI:
Covid-19 is the catalyst for the Great Reset, in which universal basic income plays a securing role. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the strategic solution to protect the ruling classes from Molotov cocktails and global civil unrest by those being methodically dispossessed of their occupations, dignity and self-preservation – the working class, much middle class, peasantry, artisans, and those that comprise the informal economy that presides in the Global South. Disclosures on coming “disbanding of existing safety-net programs” are not included in the foundation-funded marketing campaigns.
When UBI begins to be rolled out globally, one can expect public healthcare to slowly disappear, replaced by privatized services (largely Telehealth). Further, UBI payments will be linked to benefits via blockchain – ensuring full spectrum compliance and servitude of whole societies. Billionaires are supporting/financing UBI marketing campaigns for good reason: it is preferable to pay a pittance to the citizenry than to risk losing the social license that allows for the continued decimation of the Earth, coupled with the continued exploitation of those most oppressed and vulnerable.
The real motive behind Jack Dorsey’s interest in Africa
Dorsey’s focus on UBI and girl’s health and education is mirrored, coincidentally, by the interests of the Clinton Foundation in Africa. Dorsey had been planning to relocate to Africa for six months in 2020, plans that were apparently derailed by the Coronavirus crisis although a more likely obstacle was investor concern that his pivot to Square and the opportunities presented for digital payment remodeling in Africa’s cash-based society would lead to his neglect of Twitter.
In 2015, Bill and Chelsea Clinton led an entourage of powerful elite sponsors of the Clinton Foundation to Africa for Bill Clinton’s 12th visit to the resource-plundered continent. Dorsey joined the Clintons, Microsoft (via Bill Gates), Facebook and Google in a bid to ensnare the developing market sector into their accelerator programmes and debt enslavement campaigns. Visa, Mastercard and Salesforce are also establishing venture investments in African start-ups.
According to “Witney Schneidman, a Brookings fellow with the Africa Growth Initiative and former deputy secretary of state Clinton administration”, Dorsey was in the right place at the right time. In November 2019, Dorsey tweeted that Africa “will define the future (especially the bitcoin one)” The African continent comprises 54 countries with a combined population of 1.3 billion people with the highest population growth rate in the world. The world’s largest population of people without banks, trading in cash. Ripe for exploitation by the world’s robber barons and financial-tech-carpet-baggers.
In November 2020, Dorsey was the closing keynote speaker for the Africa Fintech Summit sponsored by Dedalus Global and Ibex Frontier. Dorsey is described as a “futurist”, a “visionary”, and one of the “biggest influencers in tech ecosystems worldwide”. “With an unbanked population of 66% and a credit card penetration rate that averages 1.5%, the applications for crypto in sub-Saharan Africa can only help solidify Dorsey’s interest in the continent” (Africa News )
Dorsey is investing in the reinvention of colonialism as smart growth, the new-age digital colonialism. The Facebook’s internet footprint in Africa and its Orwellian ambitions for that continent are covered in detail in this article by investigative journalist, Cory Morningstar. Morningstar has showed in her recent and past work how the billionaire class seeks to facilitate the absorption of the Global South into a paternalistic, inherently racist, Global North power structure that will suck the lifeblood out of these nations via “philanthropic” channels that have been constructed to mine data, resources, livelihoods and cultural infrastructure until it is an overpopulated, micro-managed colony with no access to development unless it is plugged into the predator class mothership.
“As Africa meets the 4IR Fourth Industrial Revolution], its youth will be one of its most important assets” – August 2020, World Economic Forum: How can Africa succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Dorsey, the Clintons and the technological “disruption” of Haiti
Dorsey’s history of rubbing shoulders with the Clinton clan goes way back. Just as Sean Penn was heavily involved with the Clinton’s rapacious policies in Haiti, Dorsey was a keynote speaker at the Haiti Tech Summit in 2018, an event that is also described as the “Davos of the Caribbean”. The summit was organised by the Global Startup Ecosystem which, according to their website, “hosts the world’s first and largest digital accelerator- supporting 1000 companies from 90 countries every year”. Target regions are Africa, America, Asia, Europe, Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East.
Taken from their website, in 2017, GSE launched a 13 year initiative to accelerate emerging market ecosystems every year until 2030 in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The “iconic” Haiti Tech Summit was the pilot launch. The company was projecting 54 tech summits in 2020, to be held virtually and “across all major hubs globally”. Alongside Dorsey at the 2018 Haiti Tech summit were representatives from other Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook and YouTube. The end of summit message from the summit’s founder and GSE’s co-founder, Christine Souffrant Ntim, informed the audience that Haiti “was ready for disruption”. This is an unfortunate choice of words considering the decades of “disruption” that have been inflicted upon the semi-colonised island by a series of US administrations, dominated by the Clintons’ exploitation policies targeting Haiti.
Screenshot from Haitian Times video report on the Tech Summit 2018.
This is nothing less than implementation of UN Agenda 2030, an agenda that aims to privatise and seize control of land, resources, energy, education and to digitalise the world we live in, to bring us all into city-based data colonies that can be easily controlled and manipulated for the benefit of the vulture class – the billionaire elites who perceive this world to be their exclusive bread basket and the “little people” as the “useless” expendables.
GSE’s website lists Dorsey as a member of their speaker network that includes Ben Horowitz and Sophia, the world’s celebrity robot. Horowitz is co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in technology start-ups, and their better-known investments include GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. GSE partners include LinkedIn, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Forbes. GSE’s mission is to “prepare individuals and organisations for the digital age” according to Einstein Ntim, managing partner at GSE – a goal completely in line with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Covid-19-facilitated Great Reset.
Dorsey and the Transition Integrity Project – Berggruen Institute
Dorsey’s involvement with the Berggruen Institute (BI) is an indication of his collaboration with some of the most powerful neoconservative influencers in US politics. BI is another transformational future-shaping conglomerate “promoting long term answers to the biggest challenges of the 21st Century”. Nicolas Berggruen is the co-founder and chairman of BI. Berggruen has been pivotal in the restructuring and reinventing of “democracy” for the new digital age. Berggruen used the institute as a launch pad for a number of government reform projects. These include the 21st Century Council which brought together former heads of state – with Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, Helle Thorning Schmidt and Nicolas Sarkozybeing just a few of names on the list. Dorsey was a member of the 21st Century Council and is one of Berggruen’s “people”.
Berggruen established the “Think Long Committee for California” in 2010. The committee included such neoconservative and “progressive” luminaries as Condoleeza Rice and Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and its purpose was to effectively create a new set of rules for governance, using Agenda 21 Sustainable Development grants to impose regional governance.
Soros/Berggruen/von der Leyen
In 2012, Berggruen’s Council for the Future of Europe met in Berlin to discuss Europe Beyond the Crisis. Speeches were given by former UK Labour Party leader and criminal globalist, Tony Blair, billionaire influencer and transnational interventionist, George Soros and George Papandreou, former PM of Greece and last in a long line of corrupt imperialist sycophants. Dorsey has effectively embedded himself into one of the most influential and predatory of the neocon cartels. Dorsey is a minor in the billionaire circle but a major in identifying the foremost power hubs.
Berggruen is also behind the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), recently covered by investigative journalist, Whitney Webb, for Unlimited Hangout who described the TIP as:
“A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios.”
Another sinister Berggruen programme is the “Transformations of the Human” which has all the hallmarks of a transhumanism agenda. The concept involves the placing of philosophers and artists in key research sites “to foster dialogue with technologists”. The “aim of the program is to render AI and Biotech visible as unusually potent experimental sites for reformulating our vocabulary for thinking about ourselves” which could be interpreted as reprogramming humanity. The findings will be fed back into the “production of both AI and biotech and to thereby contribute to both human and non-human flourishing” or perhaps to merge the two?
As investigative journalist, James Corbett, warns “are we ready to give up our humanity” to succumb to the “ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities?”. The redesigning or genetic modification of the human condition is not science fiction, it is the bedrock of the ideology of those who rule this world behind the facade of government.
As Julian Huxley, an influential English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist wrote, in the last century:
“… unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …”
Huxley invented the term “transhumanism” just before he became President of the British Eugenics Society, 1959-62. Huxley was also the first Director General of UNESCO.
Author, Dean Koontz, described the age of Transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution very succinctly:
“We live in hubristic age, when politicians imagine themselves to be messiahs and when many in the sciences frankly discuss their dreams of creating a “post-human” civilization of genetically engineered supermen, ignorant of the fact that like minds have often come before them and have left no legacy but death, destruction, and despair.”
Dorsey’s close ties to those whose purpose is to reinstate a Silicon Valley-backed Democrat as US President and to oust President Trump who, to some degree, slowed down the global military interventionism of the neocon camp in Washington as well as Twitter’s record of protectionism of the Biden election campaign are perhaps what, currently, make Dorsey an accepted member of the overclass.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that Nicholas Pacilio, senior communications manager at Twitter, who deleted Trump tweets claiming (correctly) children are almost immune from Covid-19, was formerly the press secretary for Kamala Harris, Biden’s pick for vice president. Twitter’s proclaimed neutrality is rendered nonsensical by all the above and by their collaboration across the board with global influencers whose futurist agenda is reliant upon the acceptance of official Covid-19 narratives.
Dorsey’s anti-conservative Twitter censorship policy is also supported by online petition giant, Avaaz, who were instrumental in the fomenting of conflict in Syria from the outset in 2011 and well versed in the art of selling hate for Empire.
Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey – investing in civil unrest?
Dorsey and Covid-19 impresario, Bill Gates, are alleged indirect funders of the BAIL Project (BP). The project was established to bail out protestors who participated in the George Floyd demonstrations and riots. BAIL is reported to have connections to Antifa, an organisation associated with stoking civil unrest and being “primary instigators of violence at public rallies” according to declassified Department of Homeland Security and FBI studies from 2016, the first year of Trump’s presidency. While many of the reports linking Dorsey to BAIL and BAIL to Antifa can be described as “conservative”, Dorsey’s Start Small initiative has donated to Black Lives Matter, suspected to be another of the billionaire co-opted organisations designed to harness and control black power globally.
The Audacious Project (housed at TED) was seed-funded $ 250 million by Gates, Skoll and Dalio Foundations. The BAIL Project was one of the five recipients of $ 50 million funding from the Audacious Project and is partnered by TED directly according to their own website. The Audacious Project, “a new model to inspire change”, is yet another node in the philanthrocapitalist complex wreaking havoc globally under the pretext of building a better future for all. In reality, such groups are building a system that will make the world’s wealthiest class even wealthier and will give ever increasing control over the global resource inventory.
When the connection is made to the Transition Integrity Project and Gates and Dorsey’s suspected involvement in BAIL and potentially Antifa, it makes sense that these narrative builders of the Covid-19 paradigm would be behind the scenes of the planned civil unrest in the US.
Further evidence of Twitter’s role as a surveillance tool for US intelligence agencies and influencers on Covid-19 response came when The Intercept exposed the AI start-up Dataminr and that company’s involvement in the monitoring of the Floyd protests and provision of that data to police and security forces nationwide. While both Twitter and Dataminr deny any engagement in domestic surveillance, these accusations followed on from the 2016 controversies that aligned Twitter with the CIA as investors in, or partners of Dataminr. The Twitter-Dataminr collaboration permitted Dataminr to scan every public tweet as soon as it was published, giving them advance warning of any incoming protests or dissident action.
Despite the denial of surveillance activity by both Twitter and Dataminr, “monitoring activities and forwarding information to the police is clearly surveillance” explained Andrew Ferguson, author of “The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement.”
In 2016, Twitter allegedly asked that Dataminr stop providing intelligence agencies with Twitter tools and content but as TechCrunch reported:
“… Dataminr isn’t ending its relationship with the government altogether: Dataminir still counts In-Q-Tel, the non-profit investment arm of the CIA, as an investor. Dataminr has taken investment from Twitter, too, highlighting some of the conflicts that remain as tech companies fight for more transparency and autonomy from government control.”
Dataminr’s Yale leadership is believed to still have a $ 255,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The protestations of Twitter and apparent withdrawal from US intelligence blood-hounding by Dataminr appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to put the public off the scent.
However, perhaps even more relevant to the Twitter censorship of Covid-19 dissident media, scientists and medical experts, and famously, David Icke, all of whom were challenging establishment “science”, is perhaps also related to its partnership with Dataminr. In late 2016, Twitter told TechCrunch that Dataminr “uses public Tweets to sell breaking news alerts to […] government agencies such as the World Health Organisation” although the “not for surveillance” caveat was thrown in.
The billionaire complex apprentices, managing narratives for their mentors
Penn and Dorsey are not in the upper echelons of the ruling elite circles. They are the keen instruments of power, eager to please and to do the bidding of those in positions of power they perhaps aspire to one day. The wealthiest people in the world are providing funding for the Covid-19 response, with good reason. It is the portal to the world vision they have been working towards for decades, perhaps even centuries.
At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 2020, historian and philosopher, Yuval Harari, gave talks on the future of humanity. Harari talks about the “useless class”, he describes the data colonies that will be formed under some projected “dictator.” In the world, Harari envision, if a dissident’s mind can be read by a centralised AI data hub, he can be arrested for non-compliance with the dictatorship.
Of course, the global dictatorship is already here with the Covid-19 measures, the obligatory masking, martial law, the Army deployed to roll out testing and vaccines, mandatory vaccines (you will not be able to function in society without one), the incarceration of the elderly, the destitution and isolation of children in schools and distance learning, digitalised education systems. The future according to this totalitarian, neo-feudalist system is bleak for humanity unless we collectively wake up.
Penn and Dorsey are just two of a collection of useful pathways to the Great Reset. They are the fear-stokers and narrative managers, ensuring that people fear death, fear their own powerlessness against a “virus” that stalks them even in their own home.
As journalist, Peter Koenig, described earlier this year:
“The virus is just a clever idea to use an invisible enemy for instilling fear, worldwide, by this minuscule, insanely rich and psychotically power-hungry elite to put the entire world population to its knees. FEAR that obliterates the human immune system and may bring about a range of illnesses far worse than covid-19, including cancer, coronary diseases, diabetes – and much more.”
It is time to recognise that death is an inevitable part of our existence as human beings, that visions of immortality offered by those who will distort and twist humanity out of shape to create a dystopian future for all but the very privileged few, are nothing but the erosion of all that is human. Being human is what will enable us to fight back. When we remember what we cherish as human beings, a smile, a hug, the comfort of touch and the warmth of human interaction perhaps we will start fighting before we lose what makes us who we are to the vision of those who see us as ultimately expendable.
UN Dubs Self ‘Trusted’ Pandemic News Source, Teams Up With World Economic Forum To Encourage ‘New Social Norms’
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/28/2020
The United Nations has ‘launched a counter-attack’ against coronavirus misinformation – by teaming up with the World Economic Forum to battle coronavirus misinformation and other ‘potentially dubious content.’
“When COVID-19 emerged, it was clear from the outset this was not just a public health emergency, but a communications crisis as well,” says Melissa Flemming, the UN’s head of global communications.
During the #COVID19 pandemic, the wrong information can be deadly.
Join me in taking the #PledgetoPause before sharing and help stop the spread of misinformation online. https://t.co/Rj0dg5OiZb pic.twitter.com/xeX8hoisXv
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) October 20, 2020
“We’re trying to create this new social norm called ‘pause – take care before you share’ – she continued, adding “We’re equipping people, through this new social norm, with a bit of ‘information scepticism’.”
The new initiative also seeks to rope social media influencers into spreading ‘real news’ about the pandemic – which we assume means nothing to do with hydroxychloroquine, incredibly low fatality rates for most people below retirement age, or anyone even slightly opposed to business-killing lockdowns.
One also has to wonder how the UN and WEF would cover egregious flip-flops from global health authorities on everything from transmissibility to mask use.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
Regardless, the UN’s campaign is steadfast in their self-determined authority as arbiters of all things COVID.
“So far, we’ve recruited 110,000 information volunteers, and we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders‘ in those spaces where misinformation travels,” said Flemming.
The Great Pretext… for Dystopia
In their World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.
Viewing the virtual-reality film “Collisions” at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2016. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Diana Johnstone | Consortium News | November 24, 2020
By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).
In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest coronavirus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.
The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.” We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”
Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.
“Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus … will thus speed the relentless march of automation…” Really?
“The pandemic may increase our anxiety about sitting in an enclosed space with complete strangers, and many people may decide that staying home to watch the latest movie or opera is the wisest option.”
“There are other first round effects that are much easier to anticipate. Cleanliness is one of them. The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.”
This is the voice of would-be Global Governance. From on high, experts decide what the masses ought to want, and twist the alleged popular wishes to fit the profit-making schemes they are peddling. Their schemes center on digital innovation, massive automation using “artificial intelligence,” finally even “improving” human beings by endowing them artificially with some of the attributes of robots: such as problem-solving devoid of ethical distractions.
Engineer-economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, founded his World Economic Forum in 1971, attracting massive sponsorship from international corporations. It meets once a year in Davos, Switzerland – last time in January 2020 and next year in May, delayed because of Covid-19.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum, on Jan. 21, 2015. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A Powerful Lobby
What is it, exactly? I would describe the WEF as a combination capitalist consulting firm and gigantic lobby. The futuristic predictions are designed to guide investors into profitable areas in what Schwab calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)” and then, as the areas are defined, to put pressure on governments to support such investments by way of subsidies, tax breaks, procurement, regulations and legislation. In short, the WEF is the lobby for new technologies, digital everything, artificial intelligence, transhumanism.
It is powerful today because it is operating in an environment of State Capitalism, where the role of the State (especially in the United States, less so in Europe) has been largely reduced to responding positively to the demands of such lobbies, especially the financial sector. Immunized by campaign donations from the obscure wishes of ordinary people, most of today’s politicians practically need the guidance of lobbies such as the WEF to tell them what to do.
In the 20th century, notably in the New Deal, the government was under pressure from conflicting interests. The economic success of the armaments industry during World War II gave birth to a Military-Industrial Complex, which has become a permanent structural factor in the U.S. economy.
It is the dominant role of the MIC and its resulting lobbies that have definitively transformed the nation into State Capitalism rather than a Republic.
The proof of this transformation is the unanimity with which Congress never balks at approving grotesquely inflated military budgets. The MIC has spawned media and Think Tanks which ceaselessly indoctrinate the public in the existential need to keep pouring the nation’s wealth into weapons of war. Insofar as voters do not agree, they can find no means of political expression with elections monopolized by two pro-MIC parties.
The WEF can be seen as analogous to the MIC. It intends to engage governments and opinion manufacturers in the promotion of a “4IR” which will dominate the civilian economy and civilian life itself.
The pandemic is a temporary pretext; the need to “protect the environment” will be the more sustainable pretext. Just as the MIC is presented as absolutely necessary to “protect our freedoms,” the 4IR will be hailed as absolutely necessary to “save the environment” – and in both cases, many of the measures advocated will have the opposite effect.
Public street art on 6th Street in Austin, Texas, depicting the impact of Covid-19 closings. (Leah Rodgers, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
So far, the techno-tyranny of Schwab’s 4IR has not quite won its place in U.S. State Capitalism. But its prospects are looking good. Silicon Valley contributed heavily to the Joe Biden campaign, and Biden hastened to appoint its moguls to his transition team.
But the real danger of all power going to the Reset lies not with what is there, but with what is not there: any serious political opposition.
Can Democracy Be Restored?
The Great Reset has a boulevard open to it for the simple reason that there is nothing in its way. No widespread awareness of the issues, no effective popular political organization, nothing. Schwab’s dystopia is frightening simply for that reason.
The 2020 presidential election has just illustrated the almost total depoliticization of the American people. That may sound odd considering the violent partisan emotions displayed. But it was all much ado about nothing.
There were no real issues debated, no serious political questions raised either about war or about the directions of future economic development. The vicious quarrels were about persons, not policy. Bumbling Trump was accused of being “Hitler,” and Wall Street-beholden Democrat warhawks were described by Trumpists as “socialists.” Lies, insults and confusion prevailed.
A revival of democracy could stem from organized, concentrated study of the issues raised by the Davos planners, in order to arouse an informed public opinion to evaluate which technical innovations are socially acceptable and which are not.
Cries of alarm from the margins will not influence the intellectual relationship of forces. What is needed is for people to get together everywhere to study the issues and develop well-reasoned opinions on goals and methods of future development.
Unless faced with informed and precise critiques, Silicon Valley and its corporate and financial allies will simply proceed in doing whatever they imagine they can do, whatever the social effects.
Serious evaluation should draw distinctions between potentially beneficial and unwelcome innovations, to prevent popular notions from being used to gain acceptance of every “technological advance,” however ominous.
Redefining Issues
The political distinctions between left and right, between Republican and Democrat, have grown more impassioned just as they reveal themselves to be incoherent, distorted and irrelevant, based more on ideological bias than on facts. New and more fruitful political alignments could be built through confrontation with specific concrete issues.
We could take the proposals of the Great Reset one by one and examine them in both pragmatic and ethical terms.
(Bob Mical, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
No. 1 – Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a great increase in the use of teleconferences, using Skype, Zoom or other new platforms. The WEF welcomes this as a trend. Is it bad for that reason? To be fair, this innovation is positive in enabling many people to attend conferences without the expense, trouble and environmental cost of air travel. It has the negative side of preventing direct human contact. This is a simple issue, where positive points seem to prevail.
No. 2 – Should higher education go online, with professors giving courses to students via internet? This is a vastly more complicated question, which should be thoroughly discussed by educational institutions themselves and the communities they serve, weighing the pros and cons, remembering that those who provide the technology want to sell it, and care little about the value of human contact in education – not only human contact between student and professor, but often life-determining contacts between students themselves. Online courses may benefit geographically isolated students, but breaking up the educational community would be a major step toward the destruction of human community altogether.
No. 3 – Health and “well-being”. Here is where the discussion should heat up considerably. According to Schwab and Malleret: “Three industries in particular will flourish (in the aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness.” For the Davos planners, the three merge.
Those who think that well-being is largely self-generated, dependent on attitudes, activity and lifestyle choices, miss the point. “The combination of AI [artificial intelligence], the IoT [internet of things] and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will model how we are and feel […] precise information on our carbon footprints, our impact on biodiversity, on the toxicity of all the ingredients we consume and the environments or spatial contexts in which we evolve will generate significant progress in terms of our awareness of collective and individual well-being.”
Question: do we really want or need all this cybernetic narcissism? Can’t we just enjoy life by helping a friend, stroking a cat, reading a book, listening to Bach or watching a sunset? We better make up our minds before they make over our minds.
User being monitored in a biometrics lab. (Grish068, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
No. 4 – Food. In order not to spoil my healthy appetite, I’ll skip over this. The tech wizards would like to phase out farmers, with all their dirty soil and animals, and industrially manufacture enhanced artificial foods created in nice clean labs – out of what exactly?
The Central Issue: Homo Faber
No. 5 – What about human work?
“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labor market.”
This replacement has already been underway for decades. Along with outsourcing and immigration, it has already weakened the collective power of labor. But clearly, the tech industries are poised to go much, much further and faster in throwing humans out of work.
The Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have “suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses.”
Cutting labor costs has long been the guiding motive of these innovations, along with the internal dynamic of technology industry to “do whatever it can do.” Then socially beneficial pretexts are devised in justification. Like this:
“As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening with call centers will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.”
“Consumers may prefer…”! Everyone I know complains of the exasperation of trying to reach the bank or insurance company to explain an emergency, and instead to be confronted with a dead voice and a choice of irrelevant numbers to click. Perhaps I am underestimating the degree of hostility toward our fellow humans that now pervades society, but my impression is that there is a vast unexpressed public demand for LESS automated services and MORE contact with real persons who can think outside the algorithm and can actually UNDERSTAND the problem, not simply cough up preprogrammed fixes.
“Corporate agility in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” session held in Tianjin,China, September 2018. (World Economic Forum, Faruk Pinjo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
There is a potential movement out there. But we hear nothing of it, being persuaded by our media that the greatest problem facing people in their daily lives is to hear someone exhibit confusion over someone else’s confused gender.
In this, I maintain, consumer demand would merge with the desperate need of able-minded human beings to earn a living. The technocrats earn theirs handsomely by eliminating the means to earn a living of other people.
Here is one of their great ideas. “In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programs to large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air.” What a great alternative to paying human deliverers a living wage!
And incidentally, a guy riding a delivery bicycle is using renewable energy. But all those robots and drones? Batteries, batteries and more batteries, made of what materials, coming from where and manufactured how? By more robots? Where is the energy coming from to replace not only fossil fuels, but also human physical effort?
At the last Davos meeting, Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari issued a dire warning that:
“Whereas in the past, humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance… Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class’ – not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.”
No. 5 – And the military. Our capitalist prophets of doom foresee the semi-collapse of civil aviation and the aeronautical industry as people all decide to stay home glued to their screens. But not to worry!
“This makes the defense aerospace sector an exception and a relatively safe haven.” For capital investment, that is. Instead of vacations on sunny beaches, we can look forward to space wars. It may happen sooner rather than later, because, as the Brookings Institution concludes in a 2018 report on “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” everything is going faster, including war:
“The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time … thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen. Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action.”
So, no danger that some soft-hearted officer will hesitate to start World War III because of a sentimental attachment to humanity. When the AI platform sees an opportunity, go for it!
“In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail. Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decision-making to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.”
Americans have a choice. Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it.
The future is shaped by investment choices. Not by naughty speech, not even by elections, but by investment choices. For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command over how and for what purposes capital is invested.
And if private capital balks, it must be socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the only way to conserve decent human life. It is what real politics is about.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
As Boris Johnson announces Britain’s ‘great reset’, were the Covid ‘conspiracy theorists’ right all along?
By Neil Clark | RT | October 7, 2020
The UK Prime Minister’s remote speech to his party conference saw him dismiss the idea of returning to normality. Is he using Covid-19 to follow the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda, as many have warned?
‘It’s not really about public health or a virus. They have another agenda.’ That’s what the so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ have been saying since March, when the first British lockdowns were imposed and our lives were turned upside down.
Those ‘conspiracy theorists’ were denounced, as always, as ‘cranks’ and ‘flat-Earthers’ but here we are in October, and, let’s face it, there is absolutely no sign, despite very low numbers of deaths ‘with’ Coronavirus, that we are returning to anything like normal. In fact, in his keynote speech yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson specifically ruled out a return to normal, not even with a vaccine.
“After all we have been through, it isn’t enough just to go back to normal. We have lost too much. History teaches us that things of this magnitude – wars, famines, plagues, events that affect the vast bulk of humanity, as this virus has – they do not just come and go. They can be the trigger for economic and social change.”
When I heard Johnson utter those words I thought, ‘where have I heard this stuff before?’ Well, the answer is in the book ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret. They too, like Johnson, invoked the Second World War as the trigger for fundamental changes, not only to the global order and global economy, but to society and the way human beings interact with one another. Like Johnson, they don’t want to return to normal. “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is never.”
Instead, Schwab and Malleret want a world changed forever by a virus which they admit is only ‘mild’ compared to others in history. Covid-19 is seen as the catalyst for the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.
As to where all this is heading, I recommend you read Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’, and his earlier ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, but please don’t do so late at night, because they will probably give you nightmares. Schwab’s elitist Davos-man utopia is a trans-human, socially distanced, utterly soulless dystopia for the rest of us. Think of the most terrifying sci-film you’ve ever watched and that still doesn’t go anywhere near it. And the worst thing is that it is sold to us as some kind of ‘progressive’ vision.
Johnson, in his speech yesterday, showed he’s a fully-signed up ‘Great Resetter’. It was, for me, the most chilling oration ever made by any British prime minister at a party conference.
The man who justified a national lockdown in March on a purely temporary three-week basis to ‘flatten the curve’, and ‘protect the NHS’, and who said in the summer, after the lockdown had lasted three months, that he hoped Britain would return to ‘significant normality’ by November, now tells us: “We have been through too much frustration and hardship just to settle for the status quo ante – to think that life can go on as it was before the plague; and it will not… We are resolving not to go back to 2019.”
For Johnson, using the globalists’ phrase ‘Build Back Better’, this is the time to launch Britain on the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. “From internet shopping to working from home, it looks as though Covid has massively accelerated changes in the world of work… as old jobs are lost and as new ones are created… The Covid crisis is a catalyst for change…” he said.
Did Schwab actually write his speech? It looks like it. Although Johnson didn’t use the phrase ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, he did mention a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ twice.
Johnson foresees a future in which every home in Britain relies on wind power (he certainly produces a lot of that), and “instead of being dragged on big commutes to the city” people can “start a business in their home town… and bring up their children in the neighbourhoods where they grew up themselves.”
Working from home is here to stay, with “gigabit broadband,” shopping from home, conferencing from home… in fact, let’s do everything from home. Who needs to meet other human beings? Not that there’d be anywhere to meet, with pubs, cinemas and theatres all closed down due to the never-ending coronavirus restrictions.
Johnson pledged to make Britain “the greatest place on Earth” but to me it sounds more like hell. The question, as ever, is who benefits?
The World Economic Forum, founded by Schwab, has been incredibly influential when it comes to the changes we’ve already seen in 2020, and what is being openly planned for the future. It was the WEF which co-hosted the ‘Event 201’ conference in New York in October 2019, which modelled a fictional global pandemic.
It was at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos on January 24, 2020 that Bill Gates’ Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) held a press conference to announce a ‘new partnership’ to develop vaccines for the virus, when the number of confirmed worldwide cases was still in the hundreds.
It was the WEF’s Schwab who declared in June: “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.”
It was the WEF that in July was promoting a Covid-19 ‘Health Passport’ app, the ‘brainchild’ of one of its ‘Young Global Leaders’, as the future for travel and attending events.
And for those who don’t have the app or a ‘negative‘ test result? Well, you can just stay at home.
If you take a look at the ‘founding partners’ of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution you’ll see names such as Microsoft, Palantir, Facebook, Netflix and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Yes, that’s right, hi-tech online giants and hi-tech multi-billionaires supporting a big shift towards a stay-at-home, ‘do everything on the Internet’ society.
Is it a ‘conspiracy theory’ to say that Covid-19 is being used as a convenient opportunity to introduce long-planned changes to the economy and society, when those pushing for such changes like Schwab openly talk of there being a “rare but narrow window” for a major ‘reset’?
Actually, after Johnson’s speech yesterday, the biggest ‘conspiracy theorists’ now are those who DON’T think the British government is working to another agenda.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
Not Fact Checkers
By Iain | In This Together | February 28, 2020
Fact Checkers claim they check facts for you, so you don’t have to. The dictionary definition of a fact is:
“Something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information”
The legal definition of a fact is:
“An actual and absolute reality, as distinguished from mere supposition or opinion; a truth, as distinguished from fiction or error.”
Like reality and truth, a fact is absolute. It never changes, it is immutable and eternal. Our understanding of the facts may differ because we only have the available evidence to inform our knowledge of the facts. The availability of evidence is vital if we are to have any hope of knowing the facts. Our access to evidence doesn’t change the facts, it merely limits or expands our knowledge of them.
The definition of knowledge is:
“[Noun]… awareness, understanding, or information that has been obtained by experience or study, and that is either in a person’s mind or possessed by people generally.”
Vital Access to Information
Access to information is the key component for developing knowledge of the facts. Knowledge doesn’t mean we always get the facts right, but we have no chance if information is limited or deliberately restricted.
Some facts are relatively easy to understand. The boiling point of water is a fact we can physically measure with consistent results. Others are more difficult to know and therefore less certain from our perspective. For example, history comprises of nothing other than facts but for us to know what they are we need to sift through the evidence, some reliable some not, to build our knowledge of the historical facts.
The same is true with current affairs and public issues. The facts are fixed but our knowledge of them is determined by our access to information. Information is subject to many competing forces. Censorship, propaganda, commercial interest, fabrication, omission and basic human error all combine to distort, obfuscate or over emphasise information (evidence). This makes knowing the facts about contemporary public issues just as tricky as knowing the historical facts, often more so.
Fortunately, we can all employ critical thinking skills, cross reference the evidence from various sources and decide the facts for ourselves. Thanks to the current iteration of the internet, the logical pursuit of information, forming our own balanced judgments of the facts, has never been more accessible for ordinary folk. The process called thinking is the service the fact checkers are selling.
Fact checkers claim their knowledge of the information (evidence), which identifies fact, is both complete and indisputable. They are certain about what happened, thoroughly understand all the relevant circumstances, have a complete grasp of reality, knowledge of all the relevant information and are accurately able to determine what is fact.
In short, they say they possess the truth. If you disagree with them, you don’t know the truth and are therefore wrong, regardless of the evidence you cite.
If you rely upon the fact checkers for your facts you must accept this. You no longer need to think critically or examine the evidence yourself. The fact checkers will do the hard work for you. They will tell you what the information is, give you your knowledge and cement the facts in your mind. All you need do is “Google it.”
What Do Fact Checkers Do?
The State has decided people are incapable of critical thinking and can’t tell the difference between facts and disinformation. Further, they propose legislation that will fundamentally change the nature of the internet. It is in this political environment that fact checkers have been commissioned to discern the facts and present the truth to the confused public.
In 2014 there were just 44 Fact checkers worldwide. As of June 2019 there were 188. While the whole of Africa, Asia, Australasia and South America have 67 fact checkers between them, the much smaller geographical and less populated regions of Europe and North America have 121. So there must be more incorrect information in the U.S. and Europe than anywhere else in the world.
Fact Checking is a rapidly changing startup industry. In 2014 nearly 90% of Fact Checkers were directly funded by mainstream media corporations. Today that figure has dropped to just 56% with many more claiming they are independent. We are going to look at how independent they are.
Some independent fact checkers, such as the UK’s Full Fact, have been given charity status. The UK Charity commission accepted Full Fact’s charitable purpose:
“To provide free tools, advice, and information so that anyone can check the claims we hear about public issues.”
Fact Checking?
Fact Checkers make money by fact checking for multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), wealthy charitable foundations and the mainstream media. Global corporations, notably the tech giants, are under considerable political pressure to employ fact checkers and devise ways of stopping the spread of so called disinformation. Disinformation being anything that questions official narratives.
Recently Facebook announced that its subsidiary Instagram was working with fact checkers to deploy a rating system. They will apply a rating “label” to all information as either true, partly false or false. Information rated as partly false or false will then be removed from search results and associated hashtags denied. Once the label is activated Facebook and Instagram bots seek out all “matching” content and label it accordingly. Thus effectively removing the offending information from the public domain.
The public will then be redirected to the correct information:
“… If something is rated false or partly false on Facebook, starting today we’ll automatically label identical content if it is posted on Instagram (and vice versa). The label will link out to the rating from the fact-checker and provide links to articles from credible sources that debunk the claim(s) made in the post.”
“Credible sources”, as far as most International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) fact checkers are concerned, often means the mainstream media (MSM) who they cite while seemingly oblivious to the MSM’s never ending stream of fake news.
Independent Fact Checkers?
For fact checkers to have any credibility they need to be scrupulously unbiased, thoroughly independent and as objective as possible. Any evidence that they are not means they are not fact checkers at all but rather political organizations that offer an opinion. If they are paid by people or groups with clear agendas then they have no credibility and everything they say needs to be treated with caution. We would still need to exercise due diligence and examine the evidence ourselves to establish if the fact checkers opinions are indeed facts.
When the UK Government Foreign and Commonwealth Office established the Open Information Partnership (the Expose Network) they suggested their network of actors use approved fact checking services, such as Full Fact in the UK, who are members of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). Poynter’s major funders include the Charles Koch Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Omidyar Network (Luminate), Google and the Open Society Foundation.
Therefore it is a fact that the IFCN, the “official” trade organisation for “approved” fact checkers, is funded by, among others, the multinational corporation Koch Industries, the C.I.A (NED), globalist venture capitalists (Omidyar), aggressive internet monopolists (Google) and globalist currency speculator & social change agent George Soros (Open Society). Nearly all of the fact checking signatories to the IFCN code have similar agenda driven backers. Members include Politifact, Full Fact, StopFake and AP Fact Check, to name but a few.
Full Fact, for example, list their corporate members to include the City of London Corporation (the UK financial sector and a global center for international finance), the global corporate law firm King & Wood Malleson, St Jame’s Place Wealth Management (a huge global capital investment firm), and the defence contractor Rolls Royce. Their funding partners include Google, The Omidyar Network and the Open Society foundation. They even wrote a policy proposal paper called “Tackling Misinformation In an Open Society.”
Full Fact’s trustees include former BBC Director of News and Current Affairs James Harding. James was responsible for one of the most egregious pieces of fake news war propaganda in modern history when he oversaw production of the BBC’s fake documentary Saving Syria’s Children.
BBC Fake Documentary To Promote War
Chair of the board of trustees is Conservative Party donor Michael Samuel and he is joined by fellow Conservative Lord Inglewood and Labour Peer Baroness Royal. The political establishment is well represented when it comes to making sure we have the right facts.
Another Full Fact trustee is Lord Sharkey Liberal Democrat Peer and former strategic adviser to once UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Clegg joined Facebook in October 2018 to become Facebook Head of Global Affairs. In January 2019 Full Fact became approved third party fact checkers for Facebook and in September 2019 Nick announced that Facebook won’t “fact check” politicians in the same way that it fact checks the general public. Speaking of Facebook’s approach to the political class Clegg said:
“From now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.”
Obviously this carte blanche doesn’t extend to the general public. Presumably because we are all disinformation agents.
Another Full Fact trustee Tim Gordon was also an advisor to Nick Clegg. He co founded Best Practice AI which was the first UK AI firm invited to join the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council (GAIC). The GAIC bring together representatives from tech giants including Microsoft , IBM and Google’s Chinese division with British government ministers, such as former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Wright, who attending their council meeting in 2019.
GAIC is one of six WEF global councils focused upon technology and the fourth industrial revolution. Their stated purpose is:
“… to provide policy guidance and address governance gaps.”
So as Full Fact rolls out automated AI fact checking, fully funded by regular WEF attendees Pierre Omidyar and George Soros, with the full support of GAIC members Google, it is good to know these projects are rooted firmly in Full Fact’s independence. As they only report the facts they state on their website:
“Full Fact fights bad information. We’re a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners who find, expose and counter the harm it does.”
“Bad information” is information that questions government policy agendas and harms globalist interests. These interests are defined for government by global institutions like the World Economic forum, where government ministers attend to get their orders. Independent, in Full Fact speak, must mean “employed by global corporations and oligarchs.”
The extensive political, intelligence, non governmental and globalist network steering Full Fact is by no means unique to them. A cursory glance at the supporters of the other fact checking signatories to the IFCN reveal a similar web of globalist and corporate interests in practically every case. The IFCN, and its members, are paid by people with overt political, financial and social agendas. Independence is non existent and consequently the fact checkers claims of objectivity need to be treated accordingly. They have no credibility at all.
Not Fact Checking
Get Your Facts Straight
If fact checkers check facts then you would at least expect them to report the evidence accurately. However, all too often, they don’t. For example, AP Fact Check are IFCN members who report that World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) collapsed on September 11th 2001 as a result of fires. This “fact” was first reported by AP Fact Check on 13/06/2017 and remains as their statement of fact today (28/02/2020.)
The engineering department of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) undertook a 4 year long study into the collapse of WTC7. The UAF report is currently open to peer review and cites the evidence it is based upon. It was published in draft form in mid September 2019 and the findings were officially announced at the same time. It categorically states:
“… fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse.”
The UAF study represents the most thorough, up to date, scientific analysis of the collapse of WTC7. Incomplete peer review of the UAF report is no reason for AP Fact Check to ignore it. The NIST report, the sole source for the fire collapse theory, has never been peer reviewed. Anyone using AP Fact Check to check the facts about the collapse of WTC7 would be wrong if they believed AP Fact Check. AP Fact Check haven’t got their facts straight.
This is a common problem with so called fact checkers. Due to the political nature of their role, all too often they stray into opinion rather than fact. There’s nothing wrong with that except the fact checkers falsely claim their opinions are facts not opinions. What’s worse is that the Internet is being policed and information censored on the basis that the fact checkers opinions are facts.
In January this year the HighWire released a video which contrasted clips of Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist for the World Health Organisation (W.H.O). The Video was titled “W.H.O. Chief Scientist Caught Lying To The Public.” Their was no commentary in the Highwire video, viewers were simply presented with the two clips of Dr. Swaminathan. It was left to the viewers discretion to decide if they believed Dr. Swaminathan was, in fact, lying.
In the first clip, from an official W.H.O. vaccine promotional video, Dr. Swaminathan states:
“We have vaccine safety systems. Robust vaccine safety systems … [The] WHO works closely with countries to make sure that vaccines can do what they do best: prevent disease without risks.”
The second clip records Dr. Swaminathan’s address to the U.N. Global Vaccine Safety Summit in 2019. She informs the summit:
“… We really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries…..we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine… One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the cause of deaths are, but in most cases, there is some obfuscation at that level.”
Creating Truth Policy
These two mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true. If one is, the other is a lie. Vaccines cannot both “prevent disease without risks” while “deaths….have occurred due to a particular vaccine.” The intention to deceive is an evident fact. Yet Facebook’s automated fact checking labeling system flagged the video as ‘PARTLY FALSE‘ and directed users to two articles from two credible sources which both presented specious, illogical arguments to discredit the factually accurate HighWire video.
In September 2019 climatologists and environmental experts protested to Facebook after its fact checkers labelled the article “The Great Failure of the Climate Models” as ‘FALSE.’ The article was blocked and users could not share it. The information in the article was censored. The article was based upon the work of scientists and statisticians and was factually accurate. Facebook not only labelled the article FALSE they directed readers to a dubious, poorly evidenced source, calling that “credible.”
Facebook removed the FALSE label shortly after receiving the protest letter, without explanation or apology. They clearly accepted their fact checking wasn’t checking any facts at all, simply censoring factually accurate information. However, in the fast paced modern information environment, the damage was done, and the political objective achieved.
This is not fact checking. This is political opinion masquerading as fact checking, deceiving the public into believing something is factually accurate (or inaccurate) when, in fact, it isn’t.
Poynter and the IFCN also confuse their opinion with fact. In May 2019 Poynter were forced to issue an apology, of sorts, to a number of media organisations after they issued an index of ‘unreliable’ media sources. When some of the listed organisations inquired about the basis for Poynter’s unfounded accusations, requesting Poynter and the IFCN provide some evidence to back up their claims, Poynter quickly removed the suggested “blacklist.”
Poynter’s IFCN make a great deal out of their fact checking principles so it’s a shame they didn’t apply any when they issued their blacklist. Poynter’s managing editor, Barbara Allen, said the purpose of the blacklist was as follows:
“… to provide a useful tool for readers to gauge the legitimacy of the information they were consuming… We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology. We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report.”
This was tantamount to the IFCN admitting they chose who to put on their blacklist based upon their feelings. When we look at who funds the IFCN it’s pretty clear who those feelings lean towards.
When requested to evidence their decision the IFCN, guardians of the fact checking industry, couldn’t provide any. They had no relevant information, had no evidence to back up their opinion and were simply stating something as a fact when it was nothing of the sort.
Just because an organisation claims they are a fact checker it doesn’t mean they check facts. They are essentially establishment stooges whose role it is to police information and make sure the wider public doesn’t have access to any evidence that challenges official narratives and policy decisions. These fallible groups of people, no better informed than anyone else, are being used by the internet giants, at the behest of government, to censor what we can say online.
Let’s ignore the establishment’s fact checkers and hang on to our critical thinking skills for a while. It looks like we are going to need them more than ever.
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Book Review
Woolsey’s Silly Conspiracy Theory
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 25, 2021
R. James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton, has just come out with a new book about the Kennedy assassination that is straight out of a 1964 time warp. Co-authored by the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, a two-star general of the secret police in communist Romani who later defected to the United States, the book, entitled Operation Dragon, posits an old 1964 conspiracy theory that some people in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling back in 1964 — that the communists conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK.
In the process, Woolsey does what the mainstream press has done for 60 years — he simply ignores the mountain of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have uncovered since the 1960s that inexorably points the finger of guilt at the U.S. national-security establishment, which was conducting all sorts of Cold War national-security regime-change operations in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
That was perhaps the biggest benefit of the shroud of national-security state secrecy that was imposed on the Kennedy assassination. The malefactors knew that if they could just keep a secrecy cap on the assassination and its aftermath, there was a good chance that their assassination and cover-up could succeed.
There is no better evidence of this phenomenon than the autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment performed on the body of President Kennedy just a few hours after his death.
What does Woolsey say about the autopsy? He says nothing. He doesn’t mention it at all, just as the mainstream press never mentions it. Total, absolute silence. Instead, Woolsey keeps his mind firmly embedded in an old 1964 assassination conspiracy theory — that those evil communists conspired to kill President Kennedy because they hated him so much. … continue
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves, their government, and their marvelous “family values”. Washington officials are careful to distinguish between the explosives the US drops from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially-designated enemies (ODE) are depraved enough to use. The US government speaks sternly of WMD, defining them as nuclear, chemical and biological in nature, and “indiscriminate” (meaning their use can’t be limited to military objectives), as opposed to the likes of American “precision” cruise missiles. This is indeed a shaky semantic leg to stand on, given the well-known extremely extensive damage to non-military targets, including numerous residences, schools and hospitals, even from American “smart” bombs, in almost all of the bombings listed below.
Moreover, Washington does not apply the term “weapons of mass destruction” to other weapons the US has regularly used, such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs, which can be, and often are, highly indiscriminate. … continue
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