Sunday, March 31, 2019

Putin To Trump: Mind Your Own Business On Venezuela; Russian Troops Will Stay "As Long As Needed" 

Did FBI Violate Woods Procedures with Trump-Russia Probe?

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With Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe over, we have been told there will be no Trump-Russia related indictments. One of the many unknowns, since the report has yet to be released, is how far Mueller’s investigation took him in the direction of a key question: How did the false Trump-Russia narrative become so embedded not only in our media landscape, but also within the FBI? Did some intel officials violate policies or even laws?

The following story was first published in The Hill in February 2018.

For all the debate over the House Republican memo pointing to alleged misconduct by some current and former FBI and Justice Department officials, one crucial point hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.  And it relates in an unexpected way to special counsel Robert Mueller. The point is: There are strict rules requiring that each and every fact presented in an FBI request to electronically spy on a U.S. citizen be extreme-vetted for accuracy — and presented to the court only if verified. 

There’s no dispute that at least some, if not a great deal, of information in the anti-Trump “Steele dossier” was unverified or false. Former FBI director James Comey testified as much himself before a Senate committee in June 2017. Comey repeatedly referred to “salacious” and “unverified” material in the dossier, which turned out to be paid political opposition research against Donald Trump funded first by Republicans, then by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. 

Presentation of any such unverified material to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to justify a wiretap would appear to violate crucial procedural rules, called “Woods Procedures,” designed to protect U.S. citizens. 

Yet Comey allegedly signed three of the FISA applications on behalf of the FBI. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly signed one and former Attorney General Sally Yates, then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein each reportedly signed one or more.

 Woods Procedures  

Woods Procedures were named for Michael Woods, the FBI official who drafted the rules as head of the Office of General Counsel’s National Security Law Unit. They were instituted in April 2001 to “ensure accuracy with regard to … the facts supporting probable cause” after recurring instances, presumably inadvertent, in which the FBI had presented inaccurate information to the FISA court.  

Prior to Woods Procedures, “[i]ncorrect information was repeated in subsequent and related FISA packages,” the FBI told Congress in August 2003. “By signing and swearing to the declaration, the headquarters agent is attesting to knowledge of what is contained in the declaration.” 

It’s incredible to think of how many FBI and Justice Department officials would have touched the multiple applications to wiretap Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — allegedly granted, at least in part, on the basis of unverified and thus prohibited information — if normal procedures were followed. The FBI’s complex, multi-layered review is designed for the very purpose of preventing unverified information from ever reaching the court. It starts with the FBI field offices.  

According to former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, who wrote of the process last year in JustSecurity.org, the completed FISA application requires approval through the FBI chain of command “including a Supervisor, the Chief Division Counsel (the highest lawyer within that FBI field office), and finally, the Special Agent in Charge of the field office, before making its way to FBI Headquarters to get approval by (at least) the Unit-level Supervisor there.” At FBI headquarters, an “action memorandum” is prepared with additional facts culled by analytical personnel assigned to espionage allegations involving certain foreign powers.  Next, it goes to the Justice Department “where attorneys from the National Security Division comb through the application to verify all the assertions made in it,” wrote Rangappa. “DOJ verifies the accuracy of every fact stated in the application. If anything looks unsubstantiated, the application is sent back to the FBI to provide additional evidentiary support – this game of bureaucratic chutes and ladders continues until DOJ is satisfied that the facts in the FISA application can both be corroborated and meet the legal standards for the court. After getting sign-off from a senior DOJ official (finally!).”

 There’s more 

But there are even more reviews and processes regarding government applications for wiretaps designed to make sure inaccurate or unverified information isn’t used.  

In November 2002, the FBI implemented a special FISA Unit with a unit chief and six staffers, and installed an automated tracking system that connects field offices, headquarters, the National Security Law Branch and the Office of Intelligence, allowing participants to track the process during each stage. 

Starting March 1, 2003, the FBI required field offices to confirm they’ve verified the accuracy of facts presented to the court through the case agent, the field office’s Chief Division Counsel and the Special Agent in Charge. All of this information was provided to Congress in 2003. The FBI director at the time also ordered that any issue as to whether a FISA application was factually sufficient was to be brought to his attention. Personally. 

Who was the director of the FBI when all of this careful work was done? 

Robert Mueller. 

Perhaps ironically, Mueller isn’t in charge of the investigation examining the conduct of FBI and Justice Department officials and whether they followed the rules he’d carefully implemented 15 years before. Instead, Mueller is leading the probe into Russia’s alleged illegal connections with Trump associates.

Congress is looking at the wiretap process. With so much information still classified, redacted and — in some cases — withheld, there is much we don’t know. Perhaps we will eventually learn that there’s a good reason unverified material was given to the court. Maybe there was no violation of rules or processes. 

But there’s a reason Woods Procedures exist in the first place. They aren’t arcane rules that could have been overlooked or misunderstood by the high-ranking and seasoned professionals working under the Obama and Trump administrations who touched the four Carter Page wiretap applications and renewals. And unless they’ve secretly been lifted or amended, Woods Procedures aren’t discretionary. 

In the past, when the FBI has presented inaccuracies to the FISA court, it’s been viewed so seriously that it’s drawn the attention of the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates Justice Department attorneys accused of misconduct or crimes in their professional functions.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/372233-nunes-memo-raises-question-did-fbi-violate-woods-procedures

To help fight government overreach, support Attkisson v. Dept. of Justice/FBI over the government computer intrusions. Click here to support.



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Friday, March 29, 2019

Court Denies EFF Effort to Obtain Classified Significant Surveillance Court Opinions

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A federal court’s ruling earlier this week has blunted a key provision of the surveillance reform law that required the government to be more transparent about legal decisions made by the United States secret surveillance court.



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Interesting article offers a theory about why #Google-&-the-Gang aren't shy about controlling our lives: They think they're smarter than everyone else. They think “I know what’s good for you so I will make you do it.” pointsandfigures.com/2019/03/29/why…

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Vm5IB7Vn_normal.jpg Dr. Robert Epstein
@DrREpstein
Interesting article offers a theory about why #Google-&-the-Gang aren't shy about controlling our lives: They think they're smarter than everyone else. They think “I know what’s good for you so I will make you do it.” pointsandfigures.com/2019/03/29/why…

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The True Size Of The U.S. National Debt, Including Unfunded Liabilities, Is 222 Trillion Dollars

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The United States is on a path to financial ruin, and everyone can see what is happening, but nobody can seem to come up with a way to stop it. According to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government is currently 22 trillion dollars in debt, and that represents the single largest debt in the history of the planet. Over the past decade, we have been adding to that debt at a rate of about 1.1 trillion dollars a year, and we will add more than a trillion dollars to that total once again this year. But when you add in our unfunded liabilities, our long-term financial outlook as a nation looks downright apocalyptic. According to Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff, the U.S. is currently facing 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, and when you add that number to our 22 trillion dollar debt, you get a grand total of 222 trillion dollars.

Of course we are never going to pay back all of this debt.

The truth is that we are just going to keep accumulating more debt until the system completely and utterly collapses.

And even though the federal government is the biggest offender, there are also others to blame for the mess that we find ourselves in. State and local governments are more than 3 trillion dollars in debt, corporate debt has more than doubled since the last financial crisis, and U.S. consumers are more than 13 trillion dollars in debt.

When you add it all together, the total amount of debt in our society is well above 300 percent of GDP, and it keeps rising with each passing year.

But for the moment, let’s just focus on the giant mountain of debt that the federal government has piled up. The U.S. budget deficit for last month was 234 billion dollars, and that was an all-time record for a single month. Our exploding debt is an existential threat to our nation, and we are literally destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.

And it isn’t just a 22 trillion dollar debt that we are leaving them with. We have also made tens of trillions of dollars worth of future promises that we expect future generations to keep. These are called “unfunded liabilities” because we do not currently have the money to fulfill those obligations.

According to official government projections, the Social Security Administration is facing a 13 trillion dollar unfunded liability over the next 75 years, and Medicare is facing a 37 trillion dollar unfunded liability over the same time frame.

Adding those two numbers together, we get a grand total of 50 trillion dollars.

Where in the world would we ever be able to get so much money when we are already drowning in debt?

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with government projections, those unfunded liability numbers are actually wildly optimistic.

Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been studying our unfunded liability crisis for many years, and according to him the real number is 200 trillion dollars

Consumers will largely bear the brunt of the country’s financial ruin, according to Kotlikoff, which is why it is crucial to give them the power to make better financial decisions.

While the United States’ official debt is $20 trillion, the fiscal gap is really 10 times larger — $200 trillion. That comes from adding in off-the-book liabilities, including debt that’s in the Federal Reserve’s hands, Kotlikoff said.

If Kotlikoff is correct, that means that the true size of the financial obligation that we are imposing upon future generations is 222 trillion dollars, and that number just keeps rising month after month.

Many pundits speak of a day when America will be bankrupt in the future, but according to Kotlikoff we are bankrupt “right now”

But Kotlikoff’s dire prognosis for the United States is enough to wake anyone out of even the deepest summer slumber.

“The evidence is in front of our eyes that we’re bankrupt,” Kotlikoff said. “It’s not bankrupt in the future. It’s bankrupt right now.”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an easy way out. Any politician that would be foolish enough to even threaten to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits would be immediately voted out of office. America’s population is rapidly aging, and about half of America’s seniors don’t have anything saved for retirement

The bad news is that almost half of Americans approaching retirement have nothing saved in a 401(k) or other individual account. The good news is that the new estimate, from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, is slightly better than a few years earlier.

Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday.

America’s seniors are counting on us to keep the promises that we have made to them.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that we are going to be able to do that for too much longer.

In the end, we are going to have to make some very tough choices. One Democrat actually started a petition to sell the state of Montana to Canada for a trillion dollars, and so far it has over 18,000 signatures. Of course we aren’t ever going to sell off pieces of our country, but we are going to have to find some way to come up with an enormous mountain of money.

When I ran for Congress last year, I made doing something about the national debt one of my top issues. Unfortunately, concern about the national debt is not a priority for either political party right now, and that is a huge mistake.

You can spend more money than you are bringing in for quite a while, but eventually a day of reckoning arrives. Anyone that has ever gone into too much credit card debt knows exactly what I am talking about. We have been on the biggest debt binge in the history of the world, and it has allowed us to enjoy a standard of living that is far beyond what we actually deserve, but the price that we will pay for such utter foolishness will be extremely painful indeed.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The post The True Size Of The U.S. National Debt, Including Unfunded Liabilities, Is 222 Trillion Dollars appeared first on The Most Important News.



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Thursday, March 28, 2019

America’s “Medical Deep State”. The Role of the CDC

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The nation’s leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC),

Global Research, March 28, 2019
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For over two decades, American families have faced an unscrupulous foe that threatens the public health and welfare. It is a rogue, unmanageable institution within our federal government, now seemingly beholden solely to private interests. Citizens have been horribly mistaken in believing that the nation’s leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), honors its mandate to protect the public from “dangerous health threats,” both domestic and foreign. We are expected to assume the CDC relies upon the most advanced and cutting-edge medical science and data to make its policy decisions. However, the agency’s history of corruption and fraud contradict its own pledge, as outlined on its website. Instead of protecting the “health security of our nation,” the CDC uses bromides and meaningless pageantry to hide its true nature.

During the past year, especially in recent months, the fear-mongering spewing forth from the CDC has become virulent. It is a classic Orwellian script. The recent measles outbreak – although nowhere near as alarming as the flare-ups of bygone eras – has been seized upon as an opportunity to brainwash the public and reshape it into obedient livestock in order to increase vaccination compliance. Worse, this disinformation campaign ignores everything we know about measles infection and the failures of the MMR vaccine.

Unfortunately, we are no longer permitted to debate the pros and cons of the measles vaccine. The CDC consistently shuts down debate when its decisions are challenged.  Physicians, medical researchers, immunologists and former vaccine advocates who challenge the loose claims for vaccine safety and efficacy are frustrated and eager to publicly debate the best vaccine advocates the CDC and vaccine industry have to offer, but none will take up the challenge because the science is so clearly not on their side.

The agency consistently fails to conduct and apply the gold standard in its own medical research and ignores the best independent peer-reviewed science. In short, this agency is a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and operates for its own financial advantage, rather than for the benefit of society. Its revolving doors are kept spinning with a constant influx of pharmaceutical industry and vaccine insiders. In fact the lines separating corporate influence and public health are grossly blurred and distorted. It is no surprise that documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests paint the CDC as rotten in its core and one of the greatest health threats to the nation. The agency, in Robert Kennedy Jr’s words, is a “cesspool of corruption.”

What you will never hear in the mainstream media is that there is another medical institution that is supposed to have been granted the responsibility to assure the CDC receives quality and reliable scientific research to use as the basis for its healthcare decisions.  The Institutes of Medicine (IOM) does not possess the CDC’s legislative clout; however, it represents a far superior body of scientists and researchers in their medical fields.

Founded in 1970, the Institute of Medicine falls under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences started by President Abraham Lincoln and Congress in 1863. The Academy was founded for the purpose of bringing together the nation’s best scientific minds to advise the government on scientific matters. The IOM was founded later to provide expert advice and reliable medical research to the White House and Congressional legislators to guide their decisions, keeping them informed about the social, economic and political impacts of healthcare. According to its principles, and unlike the CDC, IOM members deliberating on vaccine research and policies are expected to be independent and not represent private interests.

During a press conference this month at Yale University, Children’s Health Defense founder Robert Kennedy Jr presented data (watch video below) from his investigations into the CDC’s culture of medical negligence and efforts to cover up of the compelling evidence for vaccine-induced injuries, including autism. Over the course of twenty years, the IOM has monitored and reviewed the medical literature to determine the most- and least- likely injuries associated with specific vaccines and provided recommendations to the CDC. In 1991, 22 illnesses were identified, 6 were confirmed as vaccine-related and 12 remained uncertain due to insufficiently reliable studies.

Those cases with confirmed causation included learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, and childhood diabetes. This data was collected subsequent to President Ronald Reagan signing the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act, a point when autism rates started to climb exponentially. Three years later, the IOM identified 54 medical conditions, the medical literature supported 10 diseases as vaccine-induced and 38 were uncertain. Among the confirmed illnesses were seizures, demyelinating disease, sterility, transverse myelitis and, for the first time, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Again in 2011, the IOM reported a whopping 155 adverse conditions with 16 vaccine-induced injuries supported by the science, including a correlation between the DTaP vaccine and autism.

Unfortunately, the IOM holds no official authority over our federal agencies; consequently, its recommendations to the CDC to further investigate vaccines’ adverse effects went unheeded. Today, nothing has changed at the CDC. Instead, the agency has dug itself into a deeper hole of secrecy and corruption. With a budget of $11.5 billion, Kennedy notes that only a pathetic $20 million is designated for vaccine safety. The CDC is crying out for a thorough public audit.

These early IOM reports are extremely valuable. They identify many of the same childhood diseases that have grown to epidemic proportions in the intervening years, and they indict vaccines as a causal factor. Yet regrettably, the IOM has recently showed signs of becoming as compromised as other health agencies. It, too, may have become another pawn of the Medical Deep State that is infiltrating every state legislative body to pass draconian immunization laws with the end goal of vaccinating Americans by lies and even threats and force if necessary.

For example, in a 2013 report on the safety of the CDC’s Childhood Immunization Schedule, the IOM gave its stamp of approval while ignoring the fact that no vaccine trial, except for a poorly designed Gardasil trial, has conducted safety tests with a scientifically valid placebo. Nor are there credible and reliable studies to support claims that no synergistic health risks arise from administering multiple vaccines concurrently. Now the IOM, too, is basing its conclusions on junk corporate science.  Its recent reports also omit reviews of the scientific literature that note the toxicity of the aluminum adjuvant used in many vaccines, including the MMR.

Recent research conducted by Dr. Chris Exley at Keele University in the UK has uncovered the pathways by which high amounts of vaccine aluminum accumulate in brain tissue rather than being excreted. High brain aluminum levels were found in deceased autistic children whose tissues were donated for his research. Autistic children can have as much as ten times the amount of aluminum lodged in the brain compared to a normal adult. Blogging on the Hippocratic PostExley notes that Merck refuses to make its aluminum adjuvant available for researchers to conduct independent analysis.

The CDC’s crimes are a matter of public record. These are not secrets or confidential information. The documents and voices of whistleblowers within the CDC are readily found on the internet to support all of our charges against the agency. They are readily available to anyone who wishes to investigate. Unfortunately, our media has again failed to do its job in accurately reporting on federal corruption, instead becoming an instrument of the Medical Deep State and a mouthpiece to deceive the public.

CDC misconduct includes widespread corporate nepotism favoring private pharmaceutical interests, illegal destruction of clinical data that showed a correlation between the MMR vaccine and a 250 percent increase in autism among African American boys, hiring a criminal(s) to conduct fraudulent research to conceal the neurological risks of mercury-containing vaccines, the silencing of internal officials and whistleblowers, serving as the go-between on behalf of the beverage industry concerning the World Health Organization’s restriction of sugary soft drinks, etc. The CDC has fudged firearm safety statistics; that report led Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center director David Hemenway to declare that no one should trust the CDC’s estimates.

During the 1970s, it was the CDC’s Dr. Colleen Boyle who covered up the hideously toxic nature of Agent Orange and dioxin that thousands of Vietnam War veterans were exposed to. Although the IOM and Congress revealed Boyle’s chicanery, the agency duly rewarded her loyalty with a promotion.

The CDC and the vaccine industry have been colluding for a long time. In 2004, Congress accused the agency of operating as a public relations firm for private interests, rather than as a watchdog ensuring the integrity of vaccine science. That same year, the US Office of Special Counsel uncovered potential evidence that the CDC and pharmaceutical companies were destroying data linking the vaccine preservative thimerosal with neurological disorders. Senator Tom Coburn’s expose reveals the agency’s widespread budgetary mismanagement has wasted millions of tax dollars and concludes that the CDC cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.

In October 2017, Congressman Bill Posey sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions calling on him to resume efforts to extradite and prosecute Dr. Poul Thorsen for money laundering of over $1 million from the CDC. The catch is that Thorsen was contracted by the CDC to conduct fraudulent research in Denmark that would mask any association between the vaccine preservative thimerosal and autism. In 2011, Thorsen was placed on the Inspector General’s most wanted list; nevertheless, the CDC has continued to erect obstacles to extradition efforts. More worrisome, Rep Posey discovered that for at least three years after the FBI issued its arrest warrant, the CDC and National Institutes of Health continued to collaborate with Thorsen and even joint-published more junk science together.

Another misdemeanor involved the CDC providing erroneous data to Congress about its women’s health program, WISEWOMAN, commissioned to provide preventative health services to women between 40 and 65 to reduce cardiovascular disease. Native Americans were also targeted for assistance in the program. The data was cooked and enrolled far less women than the CDC reported to Congress.

These ethical violations are systemic throughout the agency and Congress has been paralyzed in any efforts to rein in the rottenness that saturates the agency’s leadership.

In 2016, a group of scientists within the agency submitted a letter stating their concerns to the CDC’s chief of staff:

“We are a group of scientists at the CDC that are very concerned about the current state of ethics at our agency. It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…. What concerns us most is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right.”

Out of fear of retribution, this group of CDC employees filed their complaint anonymously.

Over the years, Congressional subcommittees have voiced warnings to CDC officials to clean up their act. A House Government Reform Committee reported that both the CDC’s and FDA’s advisory committees for vaccines were thoroughly compromised with pharmaceutical conflicts of interest.

Another voting advisory committee member held a patent on a rival rotavirus vaccine. Neither advisory committee complies with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires a diversity of medical opinions; instead, the committees are stacked with corporate shills advocating for fast-tracking poorly developed vaccines with insufficient and untrustworthy safety and efficacy data to otherwise support their approval. In 2009, the Office of the Inspector General conducted an investigation of conflicts of interests within the CDC. The Office discovered that 97 percent of its advisors failed to declare their links to the pharmaceutical industry.

 

We have reported in the past how the CDC operates more like a private intelligence and surveillance firm rather than a federally funded public health service. In the meantime, epidemics of autism, neuro-developmental disorders, autoimmunity, childhood diabetes, febrile seizures, asthma and allergies roll on and federal health officials embrace the superstitions of vaccine magic and reside in a culture of medical denialism.

Finally, there is a fundamental question.

Would you hire someone with such an extensive rap sheet to care for your child, let alone a newborn infant? Would you trust them to undertake the correct measures in an emergency, or use sound judgment to assure your child’s well-being?  For the hundreds of thousands of vaccine-damaged children, the CDC remains a felon on the loose. And the rest of our government is less competent than inebriated Keystone cops to authorize a thorough housecleaning.

The agency displays no sincere interest in your child’s well-being and health, nor those of any American for that matter. And the mainstream media, every major network, newspaper and magazine, are similarly unconscionably complicit in preserving the CDC’s culture of deception. The entire media should be stamped with a warning as life-threatening dangers to the public health.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including Poverty Inc and Deadly Deception.

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null, Global Research, 2019

 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-medical-deep-state/5672873

 



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Russia & The Democrats: "Congratulations A$$holes!"

Dear America, You Cannot Be Pro-Freedom and Pro-Forced Vaccinations at The Same Time

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vaccinatedNo, you don't have a "right" to demand that others are vaccinated.

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FDA medical adviser: 'Congress is owned by pharma'

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/congress-big-pharma-money-123757664.html

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

BREAKING: New York County Declares State of Emergency, Bans ALL Unvaccinated Kids From ALL Public Spaces

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unvaccinatedEffective at midnight, anyone who is unvaccinated and under the age of 18, is banned from entering any public spaces such as stores, churches, schools, etc.

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The Illusory Truth Effect: How Millions Were Duped By Russiagate

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“Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy”, read the front page headline of Sunday’s New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.

There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump’s own family, leading seedy characters to “flip” on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller’s sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they’re coming around.

The question still remains, though: what the hell happened? How did a fact-free conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among mainstream Americans? How were millions of people persuaded to invest hope in a narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to be completely false?

The answer is that they were told that the Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over again by politicians and mass media pundits, and, because of a peculiar phenomenon in the nature of human cognition, this repetition made it seem true.

The rather uncreatively-named illusory truth effect describes the way people are more likely to believe something is true after hearing it said many times. This is due to the fact that the familiar feeling we experience when hearing something we’ve heard before feels very similar to our experience of knowing that something is true. When we hear a familiar idea, its familiarity provides us with something called cognitive ease, which is the relaxed, unlabored state we experience when our minds aren’t working hard at something. We also experience cognitive ease when we are presented with a statement that we know to be true.

We have a tendency to select for cognitive ease, which is why confirmation bias is a thing; believing ideas which don’t cause cognitive strain or dissonance gives us more cognitive ease than doing otherwise. Our evolutionary ancestors adapted to seek out cognitive ease so that they could put their attention into making quick decisions essential for survival, rather than painstakingly mulling over whether everything we believe is as true as we think it is. This was great for not getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers in prehistoric times, but it’s not very helpful when navigating the twists and turns of a cognitively complex modern world. It’s also not helpful when you’re trying to cultivate truthful beliefs while surrounded by screens that are repeating the same bogus talking points over and over again.

I’m dealing with a perfect example of the perils of cognitive ease right now. Writing this essay has required me to move outside my familiar comfort zone of political commentary and read a bunch of studies and essays, think hard about new ideas, and then figure out how to convey them as clearly and concisely as possible without boring my audience. This movement away from cognitive ease has resulted in my checking Twitter a lot more often than I usually do, and seeking so much distraction that this essay will probably end up getting published about twelve hours later than I had intended. Having to read a bunch of scholars explaining the precise reasons why I’m acting like such an airhead hasn’t exactly helped my sense of cognitive ease any, either.

Science has been aware of the illusory truth effect since 1977, when a study found that subjects were more likely to evaluate a statement as true when it’s been repeatedly presented to them over the course of a couple of weeks, even if they didn’t consciously remember having encountered that statement before. These findings have been replicated in numerous studies since, and new research in recent years has shown that the phenomenon is even more drastic than initially believed. A 2015 paper titled “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth” found that the illusory truth effect is so strong that sheer repetition can change the answers that test subjects give, even when they had been in possession of knowledge contradicting that answer beforehand. This study was done to test the assumption which had gone unchallenged up until then that the illusory truth effect only comes into play when there is no stored knowledge of the subject at hand.

“Surprisingly, repetition increased statements’ perceived truth, regardless of whether stored knowledge could have been used to detect a contradiction,” the paper reads. “Reading a statement like ‘A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots’ increased participants’ later belief that it was true, even if they could correctly answer the question ‘What is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots?’”

Stored knowledge tells pretty much everybody that the “short, pleated skirt worn by Scots” is a kilt, not a sari, but simply repeating the contrary statement can convince them otherwise.

This explains why we all know people who are extraordinarily intelligent, but still bought into the Russiagate narrative just as much as our less mentally apt friends and acquaintances. Their intelligence didn’t save them from this debunked conspiracy theory, it just made them more clever in finding ways of defending it. This is because the illusory truth effect largely bypasses the intellect, and even one’s own stored knowledge, because of the way we all reflexively select for cognitive ease.

Another study titled “Incrimination through innuendo: Can media questions become public answers?” found that subjects can be manipulated into believing an allegation simply by exposure to innuendo or incriminating questions in news media headlines. Questions like, for example, “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?”, printed by New York Magazine in July of last year.

What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987? https://t.co/1nYhadj0Wo via @intelligencer

 — @HamillHimself

You can understand, then, how a populace who is consuming repetitive assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions on a daily basis through the screens that they look at many times a day could be manipulated into believing that Robert Mueller would one day reveal evidence which will lead to the destruction of the Trump administration. The repetition leads to belief, the belief leads to trust, and before you know it people who are scared of the president are reading the Palmer Report every day and parking themselves in front of Rachel Maddow every night and letting everything they say slide right past their skepticism filters, marinating comfortably in a sedative of cognitive ease.

And that repetition has been no accident. CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on video nearly two years ago admitting that CNN’s CEO Jeff Zucker was personally instructing his staff to stay focused on Russia even in the midst of far more important breaking news stories.

“My boss, I shouldn’t say this, my boss yesterday we were having a discussion about this dental shoot and he goes and he was just like I want you to know what we are up against here,” Bonifield told an undercover associate of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. “And he goes, just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with it, let’s get back to Russia.”

(And before you get on me about O’Keefe’s shady record, CNN said in a statement that the video was legitimate and disputed none of its content, saying only that it stands by Bonifield and that “Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it and embrace it.”)

Zucker, for his part, told the New York Times in an article published yesterday that he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s role in promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory the way that it did.

“We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” Zucker said. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”

CNN prez Jeff Zucker: "We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did." https://t.co/DiUjr7Nkbg

 — @brianstelter

“We are not investigators”? What the fuck kind of dumbass shit is that? So it’s not your job to investigate whether what you’re reporting is true or false? It’s not your job to investigate whether the anonymous sources you’re basing your reports on might be lying or not? It’s not your job to investigate whether or not you’d be committing journalistic malpractice with the multiple completely bullshit stories your outlet has been humiliated by in the last two years? It’s not your job to weigh the consequences of deliberately monopolizing public attention on a narrative which consists of nothing but confident-sounding assertions and innuendo?

“We are not investigators.” So? You’re not dentists or firefighters either, what’s your point? That has nothing to do with the mountains of journalistic malpractice you’ve been perpetrating by advancing this conspiracy theory, nor with the inexcusable brutalization you’ve been inflicting upon the American psyche with your deliberate nonstop repetition of bogus assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions.

The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. If you think about how many advances have been made in other military fields over the last hundred years, that gives you a clear example of how sophisticated an understanding the social engineers must now have of the methods of mass manipulation of human psychology. We may be absolutely certain that there are people who’ve been working to drive the public narratives about western rivals like Russia, and that they are doing so with a far greater understanding of the concepts we’ve touched on in this essay than we have at our disposal.

The manipulators understand our psyches better than we understand them ourselves, and they’re getting more clever, not less. The only thing we can do to keep our heads while immersed in a society that is saturated with propaganda is be as relentlessly honest as possible, with ourselves and with the world. We’ll never be able to out-manipulate the master manipulators, but we can be real with ourselves about whether or not we’re selecting for cognitive ease rather than thinking rigorously and clearly. We can be truthful with our friends, family, coworkers and social media followers wherever untruth seems to be taking hold. We can do our very best to shine the light of truth on the puppeteers wherever we spot them and ruin the whole goddamn show for everyone.

It may not seem like a lot, but truth is the one thing they can’t manipulate, whether it’s truth about them, truth about the world, or truthfulness with yourself. The lying manipulators got us into this mess, so only truth can get us out.

________________________

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Hogwashed: A Sullen John Brennan Suggests He May Have Received "Bad Information" On Collusion

Ecuadorian Embassy Detains US Journalist As Julian Assange Raises Hell Over Full Body Search: Report

Monday, March 25, 2019

With Mueller Done, WSJ Urges "Probe The Real Scandal"

Many Are Calling For The Media To Be Held Legally Accountable For Relentlessly Lying To The American People About Russian Collusion

ORIGINAL LINK

Now that the Mueller investigation is over and his report has shown that there was absolutely no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the focus is rapidly turning to those that endlessly propagated extremely damaging conspiracy theories about the president of the United States. For 675 days, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC engaged in a fake news binge unlike anything that we have ever seen before in all of U.S. history. They relentlessly pushed out news story after news story touting that we would soon have “evidence” that Trump had colluded with the Russians when there was no evidence at all. They kept telling us that “indictments are coming”, that “the noose is tightening” and that “the walls are closing in on this administration” when none of that was ever true. The entire Russian collusion narrative was a piece of fiction created by Hillary Clinton’s campaign team to explain her shocking election loss, but once it was embraced by the mainstream media and pro-Clinton members of federal law enforcement agencies it quickly snowballed out of control. Now the time has come for the mainstream media to be held accountable for lying to the American people on a massive scale, and later in this article I will explain how this can be done.

And I am certainly not the only one calling for the mainstream media to be held accountable. Other prominent conservative voices are also calling for accountability

Donald Trump Jr lamented “more than two years of non-stop conspiracy theories from CNN, MSNBC, BuzzFeed and the rest of the mainstream media” and added: “It’s my hope that honest journalists within the media have the courage to hold these now fully debunked truthers accountable and treat them with the scorn and ridicule that they so deserve.”

Sean Hannity, a Fox News host in frequent contact with the president, was quick to assist. He issued a series of ominous warnings, variously concerning conspiracy theories, lies and attempts to rig elections.

“CNN, MSNBC, and the mainstream media have lied to the the [sic] American [sic] for [two] plus years,” Hannity said in a tweet. “Now they will be held accountable.” Another post took a cavalier approach to punctuation: “MSNBC CONSPIRACY NETWORK LIARS FAKE NEWS CNN LIARS NY TIMES WAPO LIARS.”

We are talking about a mountain of lies that is absolutely colossal. According to Axios, more than half a million articles were pumped out by the mainstream media over the course of the Mueller investigation…

Since May 2017, 533,074 web articles have been published about Russia and Trump/Mueller, generating 245 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on Twitter and Facebook, according to data from social-media analytics company NewsWhip.

The reason why tens of millions of Americans expected President Trump to be impeached was because it had been pounded into their heads day after day after day.

But it was a complete and utter lie the entire time.

Anyone with half a brain could see very early in the investigation that there was nothing there. When I ran for Congress, I told the entire state of Idaho during a televised debate that the Mueller investigation was nothing more than a witch hunt and that it should be immediately shut down. But of course that didn’t happen, and Robert Mueller spent 675 days turning over every rock that he possibly could, and after all that time he never found any evidence of collusion with Russia.

Sadly, the lack of evidence didn’t stop the mainstream news networks from relentlessly pounding on this story night after night

From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (the last night before special counsel Robert Mueller sent his report to the Attorney General), the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage, most of it (1,909 minutes) following Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017.

That’s an average of roughly three minutes a night, every night, for an astonishing 791 days — a level of coverage normally associated only with a major war or a presidential election. In fact, TV reporters devoted more airtime to the Russia investigation than any of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives — immigration, tax reform, trade, North Korea, ISIS, the economy, veterans’ affairs, the opioid epidemic, to name but a few. Since his presidency began, nearly one-fifth (18.8%) of all of Trump’s evening news coverage has been about this one investigation.

Clearly the mainstream media has greatly wronged the American people.

So what can be done?

Well, President Trump himself once suggested a potential remedy

“With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” Trump, a Republican, wrote in a post on Twitter on Wednesday.

In this day and age when everyone is so concerned about “fake news”, why can’t we challenge the broadcast licenses of all the big mainstream news networks?

After all, they all willingly participated in propagating the biggest fake news hoax in all of U.S. history even after it became exceedingly clear that it was a giant sham.

Even former members of the mainstream media are declaring that it is time for some serious accountability. For example, in his latest Reality Check Ben Swann absolutely ripped his former colleagues in the mainstream media to shreds.

And one of the biggest names in the mainstream media, Matt Taibbi, says that the “sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around” absolutely dwarfs the lies that were told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.

The mainstream media certainly deserves to collapse, and nobody should mourn them when they are gone.

Once upon a time in America, the news media consisted of highly trained journalists that tried really hard to stick to the facts.

But now it is filled with political hacks that don’t even try to hide their hatred for President Trump and Republicans.

A “media revolution” is just one of the areas we need to tackle if we are to have any hope of ever turning this country around. If we want to be a nation of integrity, those that have greatly violated our trust must be held accountable.

One of the things that I greatly appreciate about President Trump is that he is the first president in modern American history to stand up and call the mainstream media a bunch of liars.

Because that is precisely what they are, and America would be a much better place if all of the big media companies were to go out of business.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The post Many Are Calling For The Media To Be Held Legally Accountable For Relentlessly Lying To The American People About Russian Collusion appeared first on The Most Important News.



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When Are We Going to Tackle the For-Profit Monopolies Which Censored RussiaGate Skeptics?

ORIGINAL LINK
We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.
The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what's dangerously real is the censorship that's being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo's Big Con.
This site got a taste of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship back in 2016 when a shadowy fake-news site called PropOrNot aggregated every major alt-media site that had published anything remotely skeptical of the coronation of Hillary Clinton as president and labeled us all shills for Russian propaganda.
Without any investigation of the perps running the site or their fake-news methodology, The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos' plaything) saw fit to promote the fake-news on Page One as if it were journalistically legitimate. Why would a newspaper that supposedly values the integrity of its content run with such shameless fake-news propaganda? Because it fit the Post's own political agenda and biases.
This is the essence of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship: sacrifice accepted journalistic practice, free speech and transparency to promote an absurdly obvious political and social agenda.
If there was any real justice in America, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be wearing prison jumpsuits for what Facebook and Google have done to American democracy. Both of these monopolies have manipulated news feeds, search results and what individuals are shown in complete secret, with zero public oversight or transparency.
The damage to democracy wrought by Facebook and Google is severe: free speech no longer exists except in name, and what individuals see in search and social media feeds is designed to manipulate them without their consent or knowledge--and for a fat profit. Whether Facebook and Google are manipulating users for profit or to buy off Status Quo pressures to start regulating these monopolistic totalitarian regimes or to align what users see with their own virtue-signaling, doesn't matter.
What matters is that no one can possibly know how Facebook and Google have rigged their algorithms and to what purpose. The typical corporation can buy political influence, but Facebook and Google are manipulating the machinery of democracy itself in three ways:
1. They are secretly censoring alternative media and skeptics of the status quo narratives.
2. They are selling data and ads to anyone interested in manipulating voters and public opinion.
3. They are providing data to the National Security organs of the state which can then use this data to compile dossiers on "enemies of the people," i.e. skeptics and dissenters who question the "approved" context and narrative.
That's a much more dangerous type of power than buying political influence or manipulating public opinion by openly publishing biased "commentary."
We all understand how America's traditional Corporate Media undermines democracy: recall how every time Bernie Sanders won a Democratic primary in 2016, The New York Times and The Washington Post "reported" the news in small typeface in a sidebar, while every Hillary Clinton primary win was trumpeted in large headlines at the top of page one.
But this sort of manipulation is visible; what Google and Facebook do is invisible. What their algorithms do is invisible, and the shadow banning and other forms of invisible censorship cannot be easily traced.
A few of us can trace shadow banning because we have access to our site's server data. Please consider the data of Google searches and direct links from Facebook to oftwominds.com from November 2016 and November 2018:
Nov. 2016: Google Searches: 36,779
Nov. 2016: links from Facebook: 9,888
Nov. 2018: Google Searches: 12,671
Nov. 2018: links from Facebook: 859
Oftwominds.com has been around since 2005 and consistently draws around 250,000 page views monthly (via oftwominds.com and my mirror site on blogspot, which is owned/operated by Google. Interestingly, traffic to that site has been less affected by shadow banning; Coincidence? You decide....).
Given the consistency of my visitor traffic over the years, it's "interesting" how drastically the site's traffic with Google and Facebook has declined in a mere two years. How is this shadow banning not Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship? It's akin to China's Orwellian Social Credit system but for private profit.
It wouldn't surprise me to find my photo airbrushed out of group photos on Facebook and Google just as the Soviet propaganda organs did when someone fell out of favor in the 1930s.
Fortunately, oftwominds.com isn't dependent on Facebook or Google for its traffic; other content creators who were skeptical of RussiaGate are not so fortunate. One of the implicit goals of shadow banning and filters is to destroy the income of dissenting sites without the content creators knowing why their income plummeted.
Strip dissenters of their income and you strip them of the ability to dissent. Yea for "free speech" controlled by for-profit monopolies!
Where's the "level playing field" of free speech? As long as Facebook and Google are free to censor and filter in secret, there is no free speech in America. All we have is a simulacrum of free speech in which parroting "approved" narratives is promoted and dissent is censored/banned--but without anyone noticing or even being able to tell what's been filtered, censored or banned.
So when are we going to tackle privately held monopolies which are selling user data to the highest bidder, obliterating free speech in secret and manipulating news feeds and search to promote hidden agendas? I've argued (see links below) that the solution is very simple:
1. Regulate Facebook and Google as public utilities. Ban them from collecting and selling user data to anyone, including federal agencies.
2. Allow a modest profit to each firm via display adverts that are shown equally to every user.
3. Require any and all search/content filters and algorithms be made public, i.e. published daily.
4. Any executive or employee of these corporations who violates these statutes will face criminal felony charges and be exposed to civil liability lawsuits from users or content providers who were shadow-banned or their right to free speech was proscribed or limited by filters or algorithms.
There is no intrinsic right for privately held corporations to establish monopolies that can manipulate and filter free speech in secret to maximize profits and secret influence. We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.
I recently addressed these invisible (but oh-so profitable) mechanisms in a series of essays:
My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format.


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Go to my main site at www.oftwominds.com/blog.html for the full posts and archives.


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Apologies to President Trump | TheHill

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/435552-apologies-to-president-trump

Leaked Documents Show the Government Tracking Journalists | NBC Southern California

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/Source-Leaked-Documents-Show-the-US-Government-Tracking-Journalists-and-Advocates-Through-a-Secret-Database-506783231.html

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million

What happens after rich kids bribe their way into college? I teach them

ORIGINAL LINK

A professor at an elite US school says an influx of unskilled and entitled students is monopolizing faculty time: ‘they will eat you alive’

If you think corruption in elite US college admissions is bad, what happens once those students are in the classroom is even worse.

I know, because I teach at an elite American university – one of the oldest and best-known, which rejects about 90% of applicants each year for the small number of places it can offer to undergraduates.

Continue reading...

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Federal Regulator: Wall Street Stock Trading Plunged 88.6 Percent in Q4

ORIGINAL LINK

Quarterly-Bank-Holding-Company-Trading-R

by Pam Martens, Wall St On Parade: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of national banks, which includes the largest banks on Wall Street, quietly issued its quarterly report on trading in cash instruments and derivatives on Friday. The report contained a shocker: stock (equity) trading had plunged 88.6 percent in […]

The post Federal Regulator: Wall Street Stock Trading Plunged 88.6 Percent in Q4 appeared first on SGT Report.



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