Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,
There is ample talk, particularly of late, about the threats posed by social media to democracy and political discourse. Yet one of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is, for obvious reasons, typically ignored in such discussions: the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus can never be adequately corrected.
The design of Twitter, where many political journalists spend their time, is in large part responsible for this damage. Its space constraints mean that tweeted headlines or tiny summaries of reporting are often assumed to be true with no critical analysis of their accuracy, and are easily spread. Claims from journalists that people want to believe are shared like wildfire, while less popular, subsequent corrections or nuanced debunking are easily ignored. Whatever one’s views are on the actual impact of Twitter Russian bots, surely the propensity of journalistic falsehoods to spread far and wide is at least as significant.
Just in the last week alone, there have been four major factually false claims that have gone viral because journalists on Twitter endorsed and spread them: three about the controversy involving Donna Brazile and the DNC, and one about documents and emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. It’s well worth examining them, both to document what the actual truth is as well as to understand how often and easily this online journalistic misleading occurs:
On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Donna Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Elizabeth Warren endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.
The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: that Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election,” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.
The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement. Unlike the journalists spreading this DNC defense, Campaign Legal Defense’s Brendan Fischer bothered to read it, and immediately saw, and documented, how obviously false this claim is:
The NBC article itself that was originally used to spread this claim now includes what amounts to a serious walk back, if not outright retraction, of the DNC’s principal defense:
DNC and Clinton allies pointed to the fact that the agreement contained self-justifying lawyer language claiming that it is “focused exclusively on preparations for the General,” but as Fischer noted that passage “is contradicted by the rest of the agreement.” This would be like creating a contract to explicitly bribe an elected official (“A will pay Politician B to vote YES on Bill X”), then adding a throwaway paragraph with a legalistic disclaimer that “nothing in this agreement is intended to constitute a bribe,” and then have journalists cite that paragraph to proclaim that no bribe happened even though the agreement on its face explicitly says the opposite.
The Clinton/DNC agreement explicitly vested the Clinton campaign with control over key matters during the primary season: the exact opposite of what journalists on Twitter caused hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, to believe. Nonetheless, DNC loyal commentators continue to cite headlines and tweets citing the legalistic language to convince huge numbers of people that the truth is the exact opposite of what it actually is:
To make the Clinton/DNC agreement appear benign and normal, the claim was quickly and widely circulated that Sanders had signed the same agreement with the DNC as Clinton had. This, too, was false – in the most fundamental way possible.
Simply put, the agreement Sanders signed with the DNC – which the Sanders camp appears to have provided ABC News in order to debunk the claim – did not contain any of the provisions vesting control over the DNC that made the Clinton agreement cited by Brazile so controversial. As ABC News put it (emphasis added):
A joint fundraising agreement between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee — obtained Friday by ABC News and signed at the start of the primary campaign for the 2016 presidential election — does not include any language about coordinating on strategic decisions over hiring or budget, unlike a fundraising memo between the Hillary Clinton team and the DNC.
It’s possible that had Sanders wanted to invoke his funding arrangement with the DNC, and then signed a second agreement, it might have included similar control provisions. But it’s also possible that it would not have. We’ll never know, because it never happened. What we actually know for certain – what exists in reality – is that Sanders never signed any agreement with the DNC that contained the control provisions that were given in 2015 to the Clinton campaign. In other words, the provisions cited by Brazile in her “rigging” allegation did not exist in any contract signed with the DNC by the Sanders campaign.
Needless to say, a tiny fraction of those who were exposed to the original falsehood (Sanders signed the same agreement as Clinton) ended up seeing this fundamental reversal, because the journalists who promoted the original falsehood felt no compunction, as usual, to provide the less pleasing correction.
Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article reporting on various claims made in Brazile’s new book. The headline, which was widely tweeted, made it seem as though Brazile delusionally believed she had a power which, obviously, she did not in fact possess: “Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden as 2016 Democratic nominee.” The article said Brazile considered exercising this power after Clinton’s fainting spell made her worry that Clinton was physically debilitated, and her campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”
But Brazile – as a result of her stinging criticisms and accusations of Clinton, Obama and the DNC – is currently Public Enemy Number One among Democrats in the media. So they seized on this headline to pretend that she claimed the power to unilaterally remove Clinton on a whim, and then used this claim to mercilessly vilify her – the chair of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, last year’s interim head of the DNC, and a long-time Democratic Party operative – as a deluded, insane, dishonest, profiteering, ignorant fabulist who lacks all credibility.
But the entire attack on Brazile was false. She did not claim, at least according to the Post article being cited, that she had the power to unilaterally remove Clinton. The original Post article, buried deep down in the article, well after the headline, made clear that she was referencing a complicated process in the DNC charter that allowed for removal of a nominee who had become incapacitated.
The Post then amended its story to reflect that she made no such absurd claim in her book, but rather noted that “the DNC charter empowered her to initiate replacement of the nominee” and that “if a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC.” The Post then added this note to the top of the article:
Journalists on Twitter spent hours yesterday mocking, maligning and attacking the reputation of Brazile for a claim that she simply never made – all because a tweeted headline, which they never bothered to read past or evaluate, made them think they were justified in doing so in order to malign someone who has, quickly and bizarrely, become one of the Democrats’ primary enemies.
From the time WikiLeaks began last year publishing emails and documents from the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox, Clinton officials and their media supporters have constantly insinuated, and sometimes outright stated, that the WikiLeaks documents were frauds because they had been altered. What was most notable about this accusation was how easy it would have been proven had it really been true: all anyone had to do was show the actual, original email that they sent or received, and then compare it to the altered WikiLeaks version, and that would have been proof that WikiLeaks archive was unreliable.
But that never happened. Never once did any of the dozens of Democratic Party operatives who sent or received the emails published by WikiLeaks point to a single specific case of an alteration – something that, obviously, they would have eagerly done had they been able to. As Politico noted last year (emphasis added):
Clinton’s team hasn’t challenged the accuracy of even the most salacious emails released in the past four days, including those featuring aides making snarky references to Catholicism or a Bill Clinton protégé describing Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.” And numerous digital forensic firms told POLITICO that they haven’t seen any proof of tampering in the emails they’ve examined — adding that only the hacked Democrats themselves could offer that kind of conclusive evidence.
Similarly, when PolitiFact tried last year to fact-check the Clinton campaign’s claims that the documents were doctored, they noted: “The Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent.”
Nonetheless, the desire to believe this persisted. And this week, AP published a report that countless journalists seized upon to claim that proof finally had emerged that the WikiLeaks documents had been altered. The claim in the AP report is incredibly simple and limited. It does not involve any claim that WikiLeaks altered any documents, or that any of the emails it published were frauds; rather, the claim is that Guccifer, on one of the documents that he published, placed a “CONFIDENTIAL” watermark that did not appear on another version:
The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document .
Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.
There are so many reasons to question whether this actually happened. To begin with, the fact that one version of the document is without a “Confidential” watermark doesn’t mean no version has one; it’s common to add watermarks of that sort for different purposes and different recipients. Moreover, AP’s only basis is an anonymous source claiming the document has been altered, along with the version that lacks the watermark. This is very far from proof that Guccifer “airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.”
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Guccifer did, in fact, add a “Confidential” watermark to this document, and did so to entice journalists to view the document as more appetizing. This does not remotely justify the claim that any of the documents and emails published by WikiLeaks were materially altered and were thus unreliable.
First, Guccifer adding a watermark to a document he circulated does not mean that any of the emails published by WikiLeaks in its archive was altered. It’s long been known that Guccifer altered the documents’ metadata to hide its path, but nobody ever tried to cite that as proof that anything published by WikiLeaks was fraudulent (indeed, PolitiFact cited Guccifer’s alteration of metadata when concluding there was no evidence that the WikiLeaks documents themselves had been altered).
Second, this has no bearing on the content of the emails or documents themselves published by WikiLeaks, which to date nobody has demonstrated have been altered in the slightest. Third, if it were the case that any of the emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were fraudulent, it would still be incredibly easy to prove: all anyone would have to do is produce the original and show how the WikiLeaks version was altered; why – a full year after WikiLeaks began publishing these documents – has nobody done this, despite the overwhelming incentive that exists to expose this?
In sum, evidence that the content of any of the WikiLeaks emails was altered is nonexistent, while there is overwhelming reason to believe none has been (beginning with the fact that, as easy it would be to do so, no proof has been provided after all this time). Nonetheless, as a result of journalists’ conduct on Twitter this week, the false claim that emails and documents in the WikiLeaks archive were proven to be altered is now viral and will remain fixed in people’s belief system forever:
There’s no way to prove the negative: that no emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were altered. But one should demand actual evidence before affirming this claim. And despite the ease of providing that proof, and the long period of time that has elapsed, none has been provided. But, unsurprisingly, that did not stop the claim that it had been proven from going viral this week on Twitter – all based on the tenuous claim that Guccifer added a “Confidential” watermark to one of the documents he circulated.
It can certainly be menacing for Russian bots to disseminate divisive messaging on Twitter. But it’s at least equally menacing if journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are using that platform constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public’s mind.
As part of her ongoing “Thank God You Didn’t Elect Me” tour, Hillary Clinton made her debut on Australian television last night in an interview with the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson. Though she didn’t repeat her infamous “17 intelligence agencies” lie, which she’d continued to regurgitate long after that claim had been conclusively debunked, there were still plenty of whoppers to be heard.
From her ridiculous claim that the aggressively protested DNC convention was “very positive” to her completely baseless assertion that Bernie Sanders “couldn’t explain his programs” during the primaries, Clinton did a fine job of reminding us all why the average American finds her about as trustworthy as a hungry crocodile. But while she has blamed her loss on James Comey and Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and self-hating women and the media and uninformed voters and voter suppression and her campaign staff and the DNC and campaign finance laws and Jill Stein and the Electoral College and Anthony Weiner and sexism and Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton reserved the lion’s share of her deceit for the organization she hates most of all: WikiLeaks.
Here are five lies that Clinton told about the outlet during her ABC interview:
Hillary Clinton: The Interview
WikiLeaks Spy Files Russia, Part 1 #SORM #FSB #SpyFilesRU https://t.co/CJMQVrNXef
THREAD: 2 yrs ago, I wrote an article highlighting the then 647,208 @wikileaks docs relating to Russia. https://t.co/WvdD2wB8ph #SpyFiles
— @Suzi3D
“And if he’s such a, you know, martyr of free speech, why doesn’t WikiLeaks ever publish anything coming out of Russia?” Clinton asks of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, mere weeks after WikiLeaks published a massive leak drop on Russian domestic surveillance. Prior to that WikiLeaks had published hundreds of thousands of critical documents pertaining to Russia. She lied, and there’s no way she didn’t know she was lying.
On Clinton's "timing" conspiracy theory. That we had a pending publication about to launch on the election was everywhere in the media for days. We were meant to launch that morning. It is the Trump tape that was moved forward from Monday to Friday. https://t.co/Mo6PbJoTpV
Assange to release 'one million' documents before US election
“WikiLeaks, which in the world in which we find ourselves promised hidden information, promised some kind of secret that might be of influence, was a very clever, diabolical response to the Hollywood Access [sic] tape,” said Clinton in response to a question by Ferguson about the fact that WikiLeaks dropped the first Podesta emails shortly after the “grab them by the pussy” audio leak surfaced on October 7.
This is another blatant lie. Assange had been promoting an incoming leak drop for days prior to October 7, as evidenced in articles like this one by Reuters titled “WikiLeaks’ Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election”. Everyone knew the leaks were coming. According to NBC sources who spoke with TMZ, it was the release of the Access Hollywood tape that was moved forward to the 7th.
RELEASE: 19,252 emails from the US Democratic National Committee https://t.co/kpFxYDoNyX #Hillary2016 #FeelTheBern
RELEASE: the first 2050 of well over 50000 emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta https://t.co/rpK9rbJ8ah #Podesta #imWithHer
Throughout the interview, Clinton babbled about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, babbled about Russian propaganda, babbled about the content of the leaked emails being twisted into something false — babbled about everything except the undeniably incriminating things found in those documents. Whenever you get Clinton talking about WikiLeaks, she insists that the problem wasn’t the revelation of an appalling amount of corruption, but a Kremlin-backed propaganda campaign to make perfectly innocuous emails look bad.
This has been a longstanding tactic by the Democratic establishment in response to the embarrassing 2016 leak drops. The absurd narrative that the DNC and Podesta emails were squeaky clean and only painted to look incriminating by Russian propaganda is required in order for the Democrats to have their “WikiLeaks cost us the election” narrative while also keeping their “we did absolutely nothing wrong” narrative. It’s the only way they can have their cake and eat it too.
In reality, the conspiring and “us vs. them” language between DNC officials in their leaked emails unquestionably reveals a blatant violation of Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC Charter, which promises the American people that the DNC Chairperson (who was included in and participated in many of these emails) “shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.” This plainly did not happen, as a glance at some of the nastiest emails reveals. The DNC Charter was revised with this promise to prevent a DemExit after the 1968 fiasco in Chicago, and in 2016 they undeniably broke this promise.
And as bad as the DNC Leaks were, the later leak drops were far more incriminating. From Donna Brazile serving as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing multiple debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, to an email from a CitiGroup executive instructing Obama what cabinet picks (who would then go on the shape policy for dealing with Wall Street crooks after they caused the 2008 global financial crisis) he was permitted to choose from prior to his election in 2008, to the Clintons taking bribes from Qatar and Morocco and knowingly accepting funds from political bodies that arm ISIS, to evidence that the DNC was stacking the deck for Clinton as early as 2014, to a suggestion that the Clinton campaign had some sort of “leverage” over Bernie Sanders, to Clinton promising a group of Goldman Sachs executives that she would lie to the American people for their benefit by assuring them that she understood the importance of having both a “public position and a private position” when it comes to economic matters, there was more than enough shocking data there to rightly hurt Clinton’s approval rating.
So this notion that fake news and Russian propaganda were needed in order for the WikiLeaks releases to hurt the Clinton campaign are blatantly deceitful. Clinton wasn’t hurt by fake news and Russian propaganda, Clinton was hurt by the truth.
Hillary Clinton has a friend in her war against WikiLeaks perfect authentication record. Vladimir Putin. https://t.co/90Q1DjSEFG
Russia 'mafia state' - Wikileaks
Intelligence officials for the Obama administration, including Obama himself, have been clear that there is no clear tie between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence. In reality, WikiLeaks has been publishing dirt on Russia for many years, has stood in solidarity with dissident Russian activists, and is not doing the bidding of Kremlin intelligence anywhere outside the psychotic delusions of Clintonists whose cognitive comfort depends on seeing Darth Putin lurking in every shadow.
The Only People Who Still Believe In Russiagate Are Those Who Desperately Need To
SARAH FERGUSON: Isn’t he just doing what journalists do, which is publish information when they get it?
HILLARY CLINTON: I don’t think so.
I think for number one, it’s one stolen information, ah and number two, if all you did was publish it, that would be one thing.
But there was a concerted operation ah between ah WikiLeaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to, as I say, weaponise that information, to make up stories, outlandish, often terrible stories that had no basis in fact, no basis even in the emails themselves, but which were used to ah denigrate me, my campaign, ah people who supported me, and to help Trump.
…
A total outright lie! So, I think that, you know, I have no objection to accurate information being ah published; I mean that’s what a First Amendment, that’s what freedom of information is.
Contrary to lies circulated by establishment propagandists like Malcolm Nance, WikiLeaks has a pristine record for publishing authentic documents and has never had to retract any of its material due to inauthenticity. If Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks influenced “the perceptions and views of millions of voters” is true, then those perceptions and views were influenced by truth.
CIA Director Pompeo Doesn't Understand the First Amendment
WikiLeaks, like the New York Times or the Washington Post or any other outlet which publishes leaked documents, is indeed protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This extends to international outlets because the Constitution does not bestow rights upon US citizens but actually forbids the US government from restricting any press. Contrary to what CIA scumbucket Mike Pompeo has suggested, free speech is an inalienable human right that every human being is naturally entitled to, not something the government magnanimously grants some people but not others.
As we’ve discussed previously, Hillary Clinton needs to keep coming back in and lying her ass off because her campaign promised the end of the world if she lost. Since they can’t just admit that Trump is actually just a garden variety Republican hack like any Bush or Reagan, and that they lied about the entire thing to scare everyone into supporting her, she needs to keep lying to everyone so they don’t blame her for helping to elect a walking armageddon. People are scared, and Clinton is legacy-minded, so she needs to keep lying to stave off the embarrassment of being blamed for losing to Trump.
That’s all this is. That’s all this has ever been.
— — —
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By Dr. Mercola
I've written many articles discussing vaccine safety and freedom of choice. The encouraging news is that while we've faced more than 180 legislative attempts in the states to add more vaccine mandates and restrict or eliminate vaccine choices in the U.S. in the past two years, we've successfully defeated all but a few. As noted by Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC):
"What we've seen in the last few years is a very orchestrated attack on vaccine laws that allow people to have choice … We've had some of the most restrictive and oppressive vaccine laws. We do have exemptions in the laws and that's what they want to eliminate. They want to eliminate all choice.
We have organized, and — through the NVIC advocacy portal, which people can sign onto — we've kept people informed by monitoring all the bills in the States. We have been able to generate enough opposition to not lose, despite more than 180 bills this last legislative session trying to add more vaccine mandates, trying to monitor vaccine status of everyone, trying to restrict or eliminate exemptions — we defeated all of those bad vaccine bills.
The only bill that passed was a meningococcal vaccine mandate in Indiana for college students. This is an incredible accomplishment, but the heat is on. We're going to see another mass attempt in 2018 to take away exemptions."
Americans are no longer alone in our fight for medical freedom of choice, as the aggressive push for mandatory vaccinations has gone international. Part of the problem is that governments are making business deals with vaccine makers. The Gates Foundation is also very much involved in the global mass-vaccination agenda.
Australian parents now forfeit child care and nontaxable child benefit payments unless their children receive all government-mandated vaccines.1 As in California, they also cannot attend day care or preschool unless fully vaccinated.2
Italy suddenly added 10 vaccines to the mandated vaccination schedule for children,3 whereas before they had none. Noncompliance will result in a hefty fine, and unvaccinated children will be barred from attending preschool. France is also threatening to add more vaccine mandates.
"There's this global push to take away all vaccine exemptions," Barbara says. "I think people need to take it seriously because they're not going to stop. Why? Because the global vaccine market is a $27 billion business right now. The projection is $55 billion by 2021 and $70 billion by 2024, which means they aim to double the market within eight years. It's a serious situation.
The big four are Pfizer and Merck, which are U.S. companies; GlaxoSmithKline, which is a U.K. company; and then there's Sanofi-Pasteur [in] France. They've had the lion's share of the market. They clearly have all gotten together. They made deals with governments around the world.
Right now, in the U.S., it's 'No shots, no school.' It's 'No shots, no medical care,' because there are pediatricians who refuse to provide medical care to children who have not gotten all the government recommended vaccines. Then there's the 'No shots, no job for health care workers.'
I predict that what we're going to see is 'No shots, no driver's license; no shots, no passport; no shots, no ability to get into, for example, a stadium to watch a football game.' Anywhere you go out in public, you're going to have to prove that you've had the vaccines. That's what I think is going to happen if we don't hold the line here."
People are waking up (and standing up) to these issues, and because of that, the vaccine industry is really ramping up attempts to quench opposition as quickly and as firmly as possible. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the new vaccine mandates in Italy, for example. "They know they're in trouble if they don't make the laws restrictive so that people can't function in society unless they have all the government recommended vaccines," Barbara says.
It's also worth remembering that while we talk about protecting informed consent rights and freedom of choice when it comes to vaccination, this concern does not end there. The far broader issue is the process by which corporations are trying to achieve their means, which ultimately entails giving them unlimited power. Barbara explains:
"In 2015, I called it the 'Vaccine Culture War.' Truly, I believe that's what it is. The vaccination issue is at the center of a larger culture war. The outcome of this culture war — which is an attack on autonomy, on privacy, on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion — will determine how we're going to live not just in this country, but around the world in the 21st century.
If the governments and the big corporations, which have gotten together financially, continue down this path where they limit individual freedom, we're going to have a situation that's very much reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' and George Orwell's '1984.' You look at the apocalyptic visions that are coming out of Hollywood. Often, entertainment and literature are harbingers — they sense something.
You see a lot of apocalyptic type movies coming out. People can sense there's something that's not right, and they're anxious. You can feel the sort of collective angst not just in this country but around the world, particularly in developed countries where there's a high education status.
We've seen the media — which seems to be increasingly controlled by governments and by large institutions — come down on the idea … that you cannot dissent from what you're supposed to be believing and how you're supposed to act.
Certainly, the holistic health care movement is also at the center of this. They do not want anyone to be able to take control of their own health, because this would diminish the profit-making of the corporations that are wed to the [medical model]. The medical model now is very wed to drugs, vaccines and use of products that have a lot of serious side effects. They don't want people to talk about that."
In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, Fisher was a consumer representative on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Vaccine Advisory Committee, which reviews new vaccines being licensed by the FDA. Through the years, she took notice of the slow erosion of licensing standards pharmaceutical companies have to meet to prove safety and effectiveness of their vaccines. "In the last decade, it's just gotten worse," she says.
With Congress' passing of the 21st Century Cures Act in December 2016 — which was a huge assault on FDA licensing regulations — the floodgates for next-generation genetically engineered vaccines in the research pipeline opened wide. These vaccines, Fisher believes, will "profoundly change the way our immune systems function."
"They're going to change our DNA. They're going to, in my opinion, compromise the biological integrity of the human race. This is a serious issue when you have almost no standards in place to make sure these very different types of vaccines (with novel adjuvants that hyperstimulate the immune system) are safe. To not have proper regulations in place is a tragedy.
For those who want to use all the government recommended vaccines, it is a tragedy. It is a tragedy for those who cannot withstand the process of vaccination because of genetic, epigenetic and environmental risk reasons. The Institute of Medicine has acknowledged that there is individual susceptibility.
The problem is they haven't done the research to find out who the high-risk people are. This mandatory one-size-fits-all approach to vaccination, I have always said, is a de facto state-sanctioned selection of the genetically and biologically vulnerable for sacrifice. That is an immoral policy. It should not stand in any government in any country, and yet we have that."
Californians were promised there would be a flexible medical exemption available if the religious and philosophical exemptions were removed, yet that promise was not kept. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) limited the medical exemption to the point that 99.99 percent of people simply cannot qualify.
The medical exemption does not even recognize regression after a vaccination as justification to qualify for a medical exemption for subsequent vaccines. Doctors giving medical exemptions to at-risk patients are also being harassed and threatened with medical license removal.
"If you insist that doctors take away their professional judgment and insist they conform to government policy, nobody gets a medical exemption. What is that? That's tyranny. That is fascism. When you can't even have a doctor exempt a child they believe is at risk, that is tyranny.
That is taking away a basic freedom, the right to life, the right to autonomy. It's a violation of informed consent rights. Informed consent has been defined as a human right since 1947, after The Doctors Trial at Nuremberg. This is a very serious assault on basic human rights. People have got to get involved," Barbara says. "They've got to talk to their legislators and say, 'We will not have these kinds of laws. Not in America.'"
The justification by public health officials for enforcement of mandatory mass-vaccination laws is a utilitarian one that individuals can be forced without their consent to risk their lives or the lives of their children for "the greater good." However, buying into this concept is dangerous indeed, as it ignores an important historical lesson.
At the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded that the state, science, and the medical community cannot sacrifice some individuals "for the greater good" of the rest. The utilitarian philosophy maintains that for the greater happiness of the majority, a minority can be sacrificed. The Nuremberg Tribunal said this is not a moral public policy and issued the Nuremberg Code, which defined the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk-taking affirming the individual's natural right to autonomy.
Informed consent to medical risk-taking is a human right. Vaccines carry risks that can be greater for some people. To force everyone — particularly when there's no way of knowing who might be at risk — that's utilitarianism, and it should not be allowed to anchor public health policy. It's a pseudo ethic and an inhumane and immoral policy.
The Supreme Court decision that cemented utilitarianism as an anchor of public health policy in the U.S. was the 1905 case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts. Jacobson thought he was genetically predisposed to having a reaction to the small pox vaccine, and was refusing the mandate to get vaccinated.
The court decided the state did have the right to insist on mandatory vaccination, without exceptions. The U.S. government is now applying that more than century-old utilitarian Supreme Court decision to every vaccine that pharmaceutical companies produce and the Centers for Disease Control adds to the childhood vaccination schedule.
"It's not just small pox vaccine that has been mandated. They went on to all the rest of the vaccines — diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles-mumps-rubella, pneumococcal, meningococcal and influenza. All the vaccines now are supposed to adhere to the small pox model that was decided in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts," Barbara says. "Who gave them the right? …
My family could be wiped out because we have autoimmunity in my family. We are vulnerable. We have severe allergies. My father had to wear a penicillin bracelet. My mother died of lupus. What they're doing is they're going to wipe out whole families if they continue to force people to use all the vaccines that the drug companies produce."
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 shielded doctors and other medical workers giving vaccines from lawsuits when individuals are injured or die from government recommended and mandated vaccines, and drug companies selling vaccines also received partial liability protection under the 1986 law.
Then, in 2011, the Supreme Court effectively removed all remaining civil liability from vaccine manufacturers, which means Americans are now in a situation where there is forced vaccination with extremely few medical exemptions, and zero liability for those manufacturing, selling and administering vaccines that are required for school attendance and, in the case of day care and health care workers, for employment.
Without personal and spiritual belief vaccine exemptions in public health laws allowing parents to take a more cautious approach, children are absolutely going to be sacrificed. This is why we cannot allow informed consent protections to be stripped from vaccine policies and laws.
Two-thirds of those seeking compensation for vaccine injuries or death from the federal National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) are dismissed — in large part because the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice do not want to admit how many people are being harmed by vaccines.
They consider every award made to the vaccine injured in the federal compensation program to be an admission that vaccines can cause harm, which they believe leads to a loss of public confidence in the safety of vaccines.
Today, many fewer children are compensated for their vaccine injuries, which includes permanent brain and immune system damage, because government officials responsible for developing, licensing, recommending and promoting vaccination, don't want to admit children are being hurt by the vaccination program. Today, the majority of payouts in the VICP are to adults injured by the flu vaccine. Despite these limitations, the program has paid out nearly $4 billion for vaccine injuries and deaths since 1988.
For the past two years with the leadership of NVIC and grassroots organizing through the online NVIC Advocacy Portal at NVICAdvocacy.org, we've successfully held the line, preventing further erosion of vaccine exemptions in the U.S. But the assault on our freedoms continues.
Fortunately, we have two levels of government in the U.S. — state and federal. Many other nations do not have this kind of check and balance on centralized government authority. The federal government regulates vaccines and makes vaccine use recommendations; however, most vaccine laws in the U.S. are state laws, Americans have the ability to work with their state legislators and educate them about the importance of protecting flexible medical, religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions.
Legislators who have been educated about vaccine issues are more likely to vote the right way when vaccine-related bills come up. If we all actively participate in the legislative process, "we can retain at least some degree of freedom in most of the states," Barbara says.
If you have remained uninvolved thus far, I urge you to join the NVIC's Vaccine Advocacy Portal. The reason I urge you to do this is because in the past decade, the majority of the corporate-controlled mainstream media have ceased to include NVIC's knowledgeable perspective in public discussions about vaccine safety and choice.
So, it's really going to be incumbent upon us to spread the word. Surveys in the U.S. show more than 90 percent of parents are worried about vaccine safety, and the primary reason for this is personal experience.
It's rare to find a person who doesn't know someone — either a child or an adult — who has been adversely affected by a vaccine these days. Side effects are not rare. They're happening daily. These are powerful experiences, and when added together with others sharing similar stories, they become increasingly difficult to dismiss, no matter what the official response is.
"I believe it will be the mothers across the world who will stop this. They are the ones who are, by and large, demonstrating in Italy. Although, thankfully, 21st century fathers have really stepped forward. They're joining now. That, to me, is so exciting, because I do believe that we can turn this around.
But we have to be awake and we have to take action. [The NVIC portal] lets everybody know what's going on in the country about vaccines and vaccine laws, and tells them how they can get involved," Barbara says.
As mentioned, the vaccine issue is merely the tip of the iceberg. If we lose all rights to make decisions about vaccination, then other freedoms will be taken away shortly after that. There's absolutely no reason to think a corporate-controlled government wouldn't continue eroding personal freedoms. Mandatory vaccinations are just one profit stream; there are many others that would require the removal of the right to self determination, which includes being free to make independent health choices.
So, if you're a fan of personal autonomy, then you'll want to be really active in this issue. Resistance is also necessary if we're going to have any hope of securing the possibility of health for future generations. So, in addition to joining the NVIC Vaccine Advocacy Portal, please consider making a donation to the NVIC. During Vaccine Awareness Week, I will double-match your donations to this crucial cause. In other words, for every $1 you donate, I will match it with $2.
In what was otherwise a mediocre jobs report, in which the establishment survey reported that a lower than expected 261K jobs were added to the post-Hurricane economy, the biggest surprise was not in the Establishment survey, but the household, where the unemployment rate tumbled once more, sliding to a new cycle low of 4.1%, for all the wrong reasons, because a quick look at the participation rate metrics showed that in October there was a sharp decline, with the labor force part. rate sliding from 63.1% to 62.7%, back to 4 decade lows...
"This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.:
- from "Highlights of the Findings of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report", Nov. 3 2017
Surprising many "climate watchers", on Friday the Trump Administration allowed the release of a sweeping federal climate report that began under President Barack Obama and concludes that humans are the primary driver of climate change, causing higher temperatures, sea level rise, agriculture problems and more. The report - whose executive summary alone is 34 pages - found the Earth is undergoing its warmest period “in the history of modern civilization,” fueled primarily by rising levels of carbon dioxide. It was released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is mandated by Congress to report every four years on the state of climate change.
The massive study - which is the first volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, was years in the making and involved contributions from more than a dozen federal agencies - is meant to be an authoritative assessment of the current state of climate change science.
However, what has caught pundits by surprise, is that many of the report’s conclusions directly contradict the Trump administration’s publicly held positions on climate change.
Case in point: Trump officials like EPA chief Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have said they can’t be sure whether human-caused greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the primary cause of climate change. And yet the Climate Assessment plainly states that is the case. “This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” it says. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
"Globally averaged, annually averaged surface air temperature has increased by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Centigrade, over the last 115 years," David Fahey, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and one of the leading authors of the report, told reporters. "This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization."
While it concedes that greenhouse gas emission growth has slowed in recent years, it concludes it’s not enough to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, the limit at which scientists expect the worst effects of climate change to be irreversible.
The report also cites “thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world” that show evidence of a warming globe, including “changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor.” The study also includes dire warnings about the impact of climate change on human activities.
Heavy rainfall, which causes flooding, is expected to increase over the rest of the century, and heat waves will become more frequent. Severe weather events like forest fires and drought will grow more prevalent, and sea levels will rise “by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–to-4 feet by 2100.”
Severe weather events like forest fires and drought will grow more prevalent, and sea levels will rise “by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–to-4 feet by 2100.”
The study is the fourth time this century that federal scientists have put together a report on the impacts of climate change around the globe and in the United States.
What has perplexed analysts, is what was contained in the study, or rather what wasn't: this year’s assessment comes amid concerns that the White House would work to undermine the study’s conclusions. As we reported at the time, scientists shared a draft version of the study with The New York Times in August, seeking extra publicity for its findings in the hope of rebuffing any attempt to water it down.
"Of course there are perhaps fears. We’re all citizens and scientists at the same time. But I think whatever fears we had weren’t realized," NOAA scientist Fahey said. "The word ‘interference’ might have been a threat, but it never materialized. This report says what the scientists wanted it to say."
In an attempt to preserve some ambivalence, the White House issued a statement that “the climate has changed and is always changing” and pointed to a line in the report that concluded the future of climate change depends primarily on “remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth's climate to [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
The report said, with “very high confidence,” that the magnitude of climate change will also depend on the “amount of greenhouse gases emitted globally” over the next few decades.
“The administration supports rigorous scientific analysis and debate and encourages public comment on the draft documents being released today.To address climate change as well as other risks, the U.S. will continue to promote access to the affordable and reliable energy needed to grow economically, and to support technology, innovation and the development of modern and efficient infrastructure that will reduce emissions and enable us to add
The bottom line, and what may spark controversies among Trump supporters, is that the central premise of the report, that climate change is real and that humans are to blame, contradicts previous statements of President Donald Trump and many high-ranking members of his administration, who have questioned the scientific findings regarding climate change. The EPA had no immediate comment.
Barrett Brown is currently out of prison and on probation after getting an over five year sentence for essentially linking online to hacked documents (and a supposed threat to an FBI agent that resulted during the investigation for the linking).
Brown tweeted today that the Department of Justice (DOJ), who are seeking to collect the nearly $900,000 in restitution he was found to owe Stratfor (the company whose hacked docs Brown linked to) is preventing him from getting any future money for a book he is working on for Farrar Straus & Giroux.
In an email from Brown's literary agency I've seen, publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux is reported to have said that they have been told by the DOJ to disburse no further money from the book to Brown without the government's permission.
The next installment on Brown's advance is due soon, though this demand has not yet technically prevented money from reaching Brown's hands. Brown says his own lawyers have not been able to tell him whether the DOJ has the power to hold such moneys owed him in limbo as long as they want with such a demand.
According to Brown, his restitution order mentions he should pay "not less than 10 percent" of his gross monthly income toward that restitution. It simultaneously says that stating such a limit that apparently satisfies his obligation "shall not affect the ability of the United States to immediately collect payment in full through garnishment" and a list of other legal means.
At this link, an infuriating phone conversation can be heard between Brown and Emily Shutt with the DOJ out of the Dallas U.S. Attorney's office. She upholds the general principle that they can do whatever they want when it comes to trying to squeeze money out of Brown.
That link also contains a copy of an "application for a writ of garnishment" sent to Barrett's literary agency, Writer's House, demanding money from them. That document says, for what it's worth, that the amount Brown has to pay "is limited to the lesser of (i) 25 percent of disposable income for a week; or (ii) the amount by which disposable earnings for a week exceed 30 times the federal minimum hourly wage." (How they calculate how book advance earnings should be measured against "a week" is unclear. Books are written over many months.)
Brown thinks it is not at all coincidental that his book is highly critical of the DOJ's actions in prosecuting him. (I reported back in April on how Brown was temporarily taken back into custody for talking to the press without explicit Bureau of Prisons permissions; that post contains a brief assessment with links of his entire tortured legal saga.)
Brown figures what makes his case perhaps unique to the DOJ is that in most other cases, the agency "isn't...trying to complicate publication of a major book that will provide new information on criminality from its office," said Brown in an email today.
As far as Brown knows, a similar insistence on garnishment or holds on his income has not gone to one of his other sources of income, D Magazine. "If this was really about getting restitution for Stratfor, they would have been put through this same process," Brown suggests. "But D Magazine is run by Wick Allison, the former National Review [publisher] who was the one to pay $10,000 to that NYC firm to get me out when I was arrested in April, so they're probably reluctant to expose themselves to that."
This move of the DOJ's indeed might have a chilling effect on his ability to express his criticism of them, he says.
"The great majority of my income comes from these staggered advances, and any other income I try to make would result in further subpoenas and writes of garnishment for whatever outlet I write for," he says. "Even if I got a job at a burger joint, that money would likewise be denied to me indefinitely via this same process. I'll be out of money in a month. It's difficult to write a book under those circumstances, and it's difficult to get further work when the DOJ can force any employer to spend a great deal of time responding to subpoenas and ignoring further requests for direction."
He's unhappy but not surprised: "But given that they had me arrested without charges for giving an interview to Vice back in April, and only let me out when one of my other publishers hired a major law firm to threaten to take it to a judge and demand cause, these people know that they can get away with these things without prompting the degree of press coverage necessary to force them to stop their harassment campaign. This is the price we pay when we aggressively pursue corruption in law enforcement and intelligence; these people know they're immune to consequences."
Detailed background on Brown's legal travails can be found at the Free Barrett Brown website. The founder of that website is involved in an ongoing lawsuit against a U.S. Attorney for seeking via subpoena private information on everyone donating to his legal defense fund, claiming that demand violated both the First Amendment and Stored Communications Act.
President Trump has been actively tweeting this morning as he heads to Asia, but one of his messages particularly caught our eye... That cannot be, right? And considering the source was once a well-sponsored, well-respected contributor to many of these organizations, we were shocked. So we decided to do a little fact-checking.
TheLastAmericanVagabond.com
What America might want to know right now is: how come Hillary Clinton doesn’t have any legal problems? Why aren’t DOJ investigators examining the financial records of the Clinton Foundation? You would think somebody would want to find out how over $120 million of Russian “charitable donations” ended up on its ledgers around the time that Secretary […]
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