Thursday, August 20, 2020

Zuckerberg, Facebook, & Three ‘Fact-Checkers’ Sued for Government Sponsored Censorship

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How much of what you believe is going on within the world’s current events is actually true? Do you think you would make different decisions if your perception was missing important bits of information that change any given story? This is an important question right now, as much of what people think is happening comes from mainstream media or “fact-checkers,” and much of the time, it’s only a small piece to the story that doesn’t truly inform people.

Ongoing Facebook censorship is forcing the hand of independent organizations who have had enough of the platform’s allowance of independent “fact-checkers” to decide what is true and not true on Facebook, and also for unjustly destroying the trust these organizations work for years to build.

What Happened: Children’s Health Defense, led by Robert F Kennedy Jr., has sued Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook INC, and three “fact-checkers” (SCIENCE FEEDBACK, POYNTER INSTITUTE, and POLITIFACT) for censoring CHD’s content on Facebook. CHD cited 1) FIRST AND FIFTH AMENDMENTS (BIVENS); 2) LANHAM ACT (15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)); 3) RICO FRAUD (18 U.S.C. § 1962); 4) DECLARATORY RELIEF as their official complaints.

As posted on the CHD website:

Facebook acknowledges that it coordinates its censorship campaign with the WHO and the CDC. While earlier court decisions have upheld Facebook’s right to censor its pages, CHD argues that Facebook’s pervasive government collaborations make its censorship of CHD a First Amendment violation. The government’s role in Facebook’s censorship goes deeper than its close coordination with CDC and WHO. The Facebook censorship began at the suggestion of powerful Democratic Congressman and Intelligence Committee Chairman Representative Adam Schiff, who in March 2019 asked Facebook to suppress and purge internet content critical of government vaccine policies. Facebook and Schiff use the term “misinformation” as a euphemism for any statement, whether truthful or not, that contradicts official government pronouncements. The WHO issued a press release commending Facebook for coordinating its ongoing censorship campaign with public health officials. That same day, Facebook published a “warning label” on CHD’s page, which implies that CHD’s content is inaccurate, and directs CHD followers to turn to the CDC for “reliable, up to date information.” This is an important First Amendment case that tests the boundaries of government authority to openly censor unwanted critique of government.

Why It Matters: Many Facebook users are unaware that their perceptions about world events are manufactured by powerful interests and not facts. While people utilize news platforms and social media to get their news, they often don’t have the time nor take the action of verifying the claims from any news source. Mainstream media is often blindly trusted, and anything on Facebook labeled as ‘false’ is filed away in the mental category of “never trust this website or other stories of this same topic.” These perceptions then inform the decisions people make in their lives. Everything from what politicians to support, what products are safe, whether to vaccinate their children, and so on.

Are we allowing powerful corporations, with direct interests in public acceptance and belief in certain ideas to regulate what information is true? Can we honestly say that our beliefs and perceptions around certain current events are grounded in facts? Have we been told all the facts? Or are some left out due to censorship?

The Real World Results of Censorship

The fact that Science Feedback is on this list is somewhat a personal pleasure for me, as here at CE we have dealt a great deal with the ‘fact-checking’ company. They happen to be an organization that all too often uses the ‘strawman claim’ to debunk our material. They look at a piece of content they wish to censor, they then create a claim that isn’t said in the content but relates to the content’s subject, then they proceed to debunk the claim they created. The end result is a grey box on Facebook covering the news content and claiming it’s false. This immediately kills virality and casts a great deal of doubt over our work. Since the vast majority of people don’t read fact-checking ‘debunks’, they never get to see that fact-checkers don’t actually debunk all stories, they simply make it appear that they do.

Fact-checkers have cost our company over a million dollars a year in revenue since 2017, forcing us to have to lay off more than 70% of our staff. They’ve cut traffic to our website by over 90% as well. YouTube did the same on Jan 1st 2018 when they shut off traffic to our videos.

Google also virtually shut off our search engine traffic on May 1, 2020, as seen in the graph below. Prior to this period, they had already been declining our search traffic. This was the most drastic shut-off.

The results of a coordinated effort from major tech companies to censor our work has made it incredibly difficult to provide the trusted high-value service we worked for over a decade to build. Since all of this, we have created our own platform called CETV that is the primary means by which viewers/readers can support our work.

The Takeaway

We will continue to update you with what happens with this court case as it proceeds. The ‘war on consciousness’ and public perception has been ongoing for years, but seems to be culminating as shadow government powers are exposed over the course of time. This public awakening to what happens behind the scenes in our world is a powerful and primary process in the overall evolution of humanity’s consciousness. As we expose and do away with a world built on separation, conflict, and ego, we awaken to a consciousness that wishes to create a world of unity, connection, and thrivability.

Understanding what’s going on here is all part of the process.

Reprinted with permission from Collective Evolution.

The post Zuckerberg, Facebook, & Three ‘Fact-Checkers’ Sued for Government Sponsored Censorship appeared first on LewRockwell.



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The only reason QAnon is more easy to identify as bullshit than Russiagate is that Russiagate has…

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The only reason QAnon is more easy to identify as bullshit than Russiagate is that Russiagate has been lent the illusion of legitimacy by the mainstream political/media class. The fact that Mueller was granted vast, sweeping investigative powers yet failed to indict a single American for conspiracy with the Russian government by itself completely invalidates the Trump-Russia collusion theory that monopolized mainstream attention for three years. Aaron Maté is the best resource on all things Russiagate.

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Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Tytler Cycle & Why More Government Help Leads To Less

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Tytler Cycle & Why More Government Help Leads To Less Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2020 - 17:25

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

I recently received a message from a young fan of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) suggesting it is always the “Government’s” job to ensure the care of citizens. Throughout history, the seven words which have been the hallmark of every socialist and communist system are “I’m the Government, I’m here to help.” A review of the Tytler cycle reveals why more Government help, always leads to less prosperity and freedom.

In the U.S. Constitution, there are specific clauses to providing both the security and infrastructure of the country, and the issuance of currency and debt. Interestingly, there are no clauses that state the Government’s responsibility is the financial support of households and corporations hurt after decades of financial mismanagement.

Defining The Systems

However, these are the basic tenets of both communism and socialism.

  • “Communism” is a political theory advocating class war and leading to a society in which the public owns all property. Each person works, and is paid according to their abilities and needs. 

  • “Socialism” suggests a social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community.

In both cases, there is a direct relationship between the Government and the care and feeding of the population. However, given the Constitution’s writers had just fled an “Aristocracy,” they wanted to ensure America didn’t follow the same path. The founding documents established the basis from which “capitalism” was allowed to flourish.

  • “Capitalism” is an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Do you see the difference?

Since 1775, millions of Americans have given their lives in defense of the American “idea.” The tyranny and oppression which arise from communism, socialism, and dictatorships have been a threat worthy of such sacrifice. I am sure those patriots who died to ensure the “American way of life” would be disheartened by the willingness of the up and coming generations to adopt such ideals.

However, there is little denying the rise of “socialistic” ideas in the U.S. today. You can try and cover the stench by calling it “social democracy,” but in the end, it’s still socialism.

But such shouldn’t be a surprise. It is the cycle of all economic civilizations over time as we “forget our history,” or adopt a “cancel culture” mentality.

The Tytler Cycle

Scottish economist Alexander Tytler, who, in 1787, was reported to have commented on the then-new American Republic as follows:

“A democracy is always temporary; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist until the time voters discover they can vote for generous gifts from the public treasury. From that point, the majority always votes for the candidates who promises the most benefits from the public treasury. The result is that every democracy finally collapses due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations always progressed through this sequence:

  • From Bondage to Moral Certitude;

  • Moral Certitude to Great Courage;

  • Great Courage to Liberty;

  • Liberty to Abundance;

  • Abundance to Selfishness;

  • Selfishness to Complacency;

  • Complacency to Apathy;

  • Apathy to Dependency;

  • Dependency to Bondage.”

Since Tytler’s time, we’ve witnessed many formerly free countries slide inexorably into their final stages of decline. For example, the countries in the EU are further gone than the countries in North America, and Venezuela is, well, just gone.

The cycle is clearly in process in the United States as we have now cleared apathy. Demonstrations, the demand for Government support, and the abolition of “student loan debt” are all signs of the “it’s not my fault” stage.

The Rise Of Socialism (Dependency To Bondage)

How did a country which was once the shining beacon of “capitalism” become a country on the brink of “socialism?”

Changes like these don’t happen in a vacuum. It is the result of decades of poor financial choices, both personal and institutional, which led to a burgeoning divide between the wealthy and everyone else. The chart below shows the increase in the “money supply” versus GDP and the “economic composite index.”  (The composite index comprises the US Dollar index, 10-year treasury rates, and inflation which all reflect economic activity.)

Deflationary Acts

As discussed previously in “The Fed’s Actions Are Deflationary,” the 40-year process of increasing economic leverage has now led to its inevitable conclusion.

“To no surprise, monetary velocity increases when the deficit reverses to a surplus. Such allows revenues to move into productive investments rather than debt service. The problem for the Fed is the misunderstanding of the derivation of organic economic inflation.

“It isn’t just the Federal debt burden that is detracting from economic growth. It is all debt. As stated, the belief that lower interest rates would spur more economic activity was correct, to a point. However, as shown, once the debt burden began to consume more than it produced, the lure of debt turned sour.”

Look closely at the chart above. From 1950-1980 the economy grew at an annualized rate of 7.70%. To accomplish this growth rate, the total credit market debt to GDP ratio was less 150%. The CRITICAL factor to note is that economic growth was trending higher during this span, rising from roughly 5% to nearly 15%.

There were a couple of reasons for this. Lower levels of debt allowed for personal savings to remain robust, which fueled productive investment in the economy. Secondly, the economy was focused primarily on production and manufacturing, which has a high multiplier effect on the economy.  This feat of growth also occurred in the face of steadily rising interest rates peaking with the economic expansion in 1980.

The Breaking Point

As we have discussed previously in The Breaking Point,” beginning in 1980, the shift of the economic makeup from a manufacturing and production-based economy to a service and finance economy, where there is a low economic multiplier effect, is partially responsible for this transformation. The decline in economic output was further exacerbated by increased productivity through technological advances, which, while advancing our society, plagued the economy with steadily decreasing wages.

Unlike the steadily growing economic environment before 1980; the post-1980 economy has experienced a steady decline. Therefore, a statement that the economy has been growing at 5% since 1980 is grossly misleading. The trend of economic growth, wages, and productivity (5-year averages) show the real problem.

This decline in economic growth has kept the average American struggling to maintain their standard of living. It is from that perspective the rise of socialistic ideas should be of no surprise. As wages declined, families turned to credit to fill the gap in maintaining their current standard of living. This demand for credit became the new breeding ground for the financed based economy. Easier credit terms, lower interest rates, loose lending standards, and less regulation fueled the continued consumption boom.

While America on the surface was the envy of the world for its apparent success and prosperity, the underlying cancer of debt expansion and lower personal savings was eating away at its core.

More Debt Leads To Less Of Everything Else

The massive indulgence in debt, what the Austrians refer to as a “credit induced boom,” has now reached its inevitable conclusion. The unsustainable credit-sourced boom, which leads to artificially stimulated borrowing, seeks out diminishing investment opportunities.

Ultimately these diminished investment opportunities lead to widespread malinvestments. Not surprisingly, we saw it play out “real-time” in everything from subprime mortgages to derivative instruments, which was only to milk the system of every potential penny regardless of the apparent underlying risk.

When credit creation can is no longer sustainable, the markets must clear the excesses before the cycle can start again. It is only then, and must be allowed to happen, can resources be reallocated back towards more efficient uses.

Such is why all the efforts of Keynesian policies to stimulate growth in the economy have ultimately failed. The ongoing fiscal and monetary policies, from TARP and QE to tax cuts, have only delayed the clearing process allowing it to grow larger. That delay on worsens the current impact and the eventual reversion.

The economy is currently requiring roughly $4 of total credit market debt to create $1 of economic growth. A reversion to a structurally manageable debt level would require a nearly $40 trillion reduction. The last time such a clearing process occurred, it was called the “Great Depression.”

The chart shows why “demands for socialism” is now “a thing.”

Conclusion

The end game of four decades of excess is upon us, and we can’t deny the weight of the debt imbalances that are currently in play. The medicine the current administration is prescribing is a treatment for the common cold; in this case, a normal business cycle recession. The problem is the economy is suffering from a “debt cancer.” Until we prescribe and implement the proper treatment, the patient will continue to suffer.

If I am wrong, then a rising percentage of Americans wouldn’t be demanding more “Government support” in exchange for their economic prosperity and freedoms.

Tytler’s cycle continues to come to fruition.

But we have a choice.

The next time the Government says, “I’m here to help,” we could politely just say “No.”



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Campuses open and COVID-19 infections spread

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Fall semester is upon us.  For roughly one quarter to one third of American higher education their students, faculty, and staff are heading to campus, even as COVID-19 infections and deaths keep rising.

As a result, some number of people spending time at those colleges and universities are getting sick.

What follows is a list of such events.  It’s not exhaustive.  It’s also a snapshot in time, what I’ve found by the night of August 18, 2020.  Tomorrow will doubtless add more.

  • Bethel College: 50 people have been infected, “including 43 students and seven faculty members.”  22 are athletes.  That’s almost 10% of the student body.
  • Boston University: 8 positive cases over the past three weeks.  Well, 12 now.
  • East Carolina University: 108 positive tests.
  • Emerson College: 1 person tested positive.
  • North Carolina State University admitted to some number of infections, either 8, 42, or 50, among fraternity and sorority houses.
  • Northeast Mississippi Community College: “‘around 300′” students are currently in quarantine… [T]he university has six or seven positive cases since school started last week and that ’25 to 28 employees’ are also under quarantine.”  That CNN article adds: “Northeast Mississippi Community College has around 3,200 students, which means around 10% of the student body is being quarantined.”
  • Oklahoma State University: 23 infections at a sorority.
  • University of Kentucky: 189 infections.
  • The University of Tennessee at Knoxville: an infection cluster created by “an off-campus party”  yielded numbers something like “at least five connected cases or 20 people in self-isolation.”
  • University of Wyoming: 38 cases “among… students and employees.”
  • Western Kentucky University: 19 infections for student and staff.

This is unsurprising, given events like this and this and this.

In Oklahoma:

Live from Stillwater, Oklahoma tonight ladies and gentleman.

This is how #OkState students are complying to off campus social distancing guidelines. pic.twitter.com/zKQu1PyMP1

— Ryan Novozinsky (@ryannovo62) August 16, 2020

Villanova University:

These two videos have been circulating on IG and group chats and have been confirmed to be from Villanova University. This is the class of 2024 on their second day of orientation. What do we expect from the rest of the school year? (2nd video below) pic.twitter.com/jXfMQq6hqZ

— Isabella Sanchez Castañeda (@Is_SanchezC) August 13, 2020

University of North Georgia:

First night back at University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. 😳😳 pic.twitter.com/VAmZ2TLvuz

— Everything Georgia (@GAFollowers) August 16, 2020

University of Alabama:

Why? We are desperately trying to protect @tuscaloosacity – We are trying to have college football season. We have been running details for 3 straight nights. @TuscaloosaPD is stretched thin between COVID-19 and these details. We will be requesting daytime help from #UAPD. https://t.co/ZHCR2XAk8F

— Walt Maddox (@WaltMaddox) August 16, 2020

 

(Before I get jumped on, I’m not sharing those stories to blame students nor to exculpate administrators, residence life, municipal authorities, parents, society, or anyone else.  That’s not the purpose of this post.  Instead I’m trying to understand what’s happening right now, and to use that understanding to better model what comes next.  Blame isn’t the theme here.)

This Washington Post article has a good roundup of such stories, as does the ChronicleThis CNN piece is actually the most informative.

Another, related post to come tomorrow as time permits.

(thanks to Rob Gibson, Eric Stoller, Futurexhighered, Lisa Durff, Jan Potvin, and others for links)



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Taibbi: The Press That Cried Wolf

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Authored by Matt Taibbi via taibbi.substack.com,

Suddenly, the Postal Service is the biggest story in America. Donald Trump’s latest “assault on our democracy” jockeyed for the lead theme on the first night of the virtual Democratic National Convention. Multiple speakers used the phrase “defund the post office” to describe efforts by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy – the latest in a long line of Trump acolytes occupying the Oil Can Harry role in news coverage – to pull a seeming postal slowdown.

Hashtags like #SaveThePostOffice are flying around social media. John Ratzenberger, the actor who played beer-drinking mailman Cliff Clavin on Cheers, recorded an Instagram video on behalf of the beleaguered service. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis described seeing a man wearing a “red cap” with “white letters” towing a postal truck away made her wonder:

Conspiracy? Outright attempt at stealing the election by denying the access of the USPS?

Pictures of mailboxes being moved or warehoused behind fencing rocketed around the Internet. Another tweet making the rounds looked like a graphic made by the postal workers’ union, and was retweeted by the likes of Hillary Clinton:

Call your Republican senators and let them know:

We won't let them dismantle the USPS—and disenfranchise millions of Americans—without a fight.https://t.co/MSJkTVxVTm pic.twitter.com/t075PrbTy8

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 14, 2020

The graphic wasn’t made by the postal union, but whatever. The post office’s journey from America’s most serially-ignored public institution to subject of a massive international sympathy campaign – the U.S.P.S. is currently the world’s largest baby trapped at the bottom of the world’s largest well – is the latest bizarro development of the Trump years, when news coverage has devolved into a never-ending procession of moral panics, some real, some less so. Which is this?

In April, Trump called the U.S.P.S. a “joke” and tied a $10 billion emergency loan to a request that the it quadruple prices on packages, ostensibly as a way of sticking it to Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the “fake news” Washington Post. I hate Bezos as much as the next red-blooded American, but Trump’s comments ended up mostly serving as kindling for a later national wig-out.

On May 9th, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors announced that DeJoy, the CEO of a company called New Breed Logistics and a major Trump donor, would become the new Postmaster General. Almost immediately, DeJoy began implementing a series of moves that seemed designed to reduce the efficiency of the post office, from removing 20% of letter sorting machines to moving or removing large quantities of mailboxes. Then on July 29th, the U.S.P.S. appears to have sent letter to multiple states warning that mail-in ballots might not be received on time to be counted, because the states’ deadlines are incompatible with the postal service’s “delivery standards.”

This was followed by Trump going on Fox and announcing he was unwilling to spend money to keep funding the Post Office as part of a Covid-19 relief package, saying, “They want $25 billion… if they don’t get [it], that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because you they’re not equipped to have it.”

Even by Trumpian standards, this was a semi-crazy thing to say out loud. It gave outlets like The Week the ammo to say Trump was “sandbagging the Post Office to prevent Americans from voting by mail.” The logic is simple: about 72 percent of Democrats say they are at least somewhat likely to vote by mail, compared to 22 percent of Republicans. A slowdown of the post office means a torpedo in the hull of the Biden campaign.

By this week, images of mailboxes became synonymous with voter suppression, and the postal service supplanted the Muslim ban, “kids in cages,” Muellermania, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, the campaign to save the job of Jeff Sessions, the Ukraine whistleblower, and a dozen other episodes to become the latest all-consuming Media Fire That Never Dies.

In the Trump years, the news has been covered as an ongoing emergency, borrowing from techniques pioneered by Fox News and perfected through episodes like Benghazi. That story was blown into a frenzy for years, as Fox created the impression that litigating every detail of the Libyan mission narrative was at least 95% of what the average person should be caring about at any given moment.

CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are now following the same script with the Trump panics. The pattern is consistent. Day one involves spectacular claims of corruption. By day two, placard-bearing protesters are hitting the streets (“You can’t fire the truth!” a protester in Times Square proclaimed in the Sessions affair), celebrities are taping video appeals, and experts are quoted suggesting Trump is already guilty of crime: OPEN TREASON in Helsinki, “bribery” in Ukraine, or in this case, election interference (some are already speculating that Trump could get a year for the mail slowdown).

.@realdonaldtrump derides reports with which he disagrees as “fake news,” then buys the Russian narrative hook, line, sinker, pole and boat. https://t.co/TGHurpVDKy

An early look at Tuesday's front… pic.twitter.com/BXsoZsIT4B

— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) July 16, 2018

Almost always, by day three or four, key claims are walked back: maybe there was no direct “promise” to a foreign leader, or the CIA doesn’t have “direct evidence” of Russian bounties, or viral photos of children in cages at the border were from 2014, not 2017. By then it doesn’t matter. A panic is a panic, and there are only two reportable angles in today’s America, total guilt and total innocence. Even when the balance of the information would still look bad or very bad for Trump, news outlets commit to leaving out important background, so as not to complicate the audience response.

That’s the situation with this story, where the postal slowdown is probably more serious than other Trump scandals, but people pushing it are also not anxious to remind readers of their own histories on the issue.

Take the New York Times, currently cranking out about a feature an hour about the U.S.P.S. Paul Krugman is now telling us “The Postal Service facilitates citizen inclusion. That’s why Trump hates it.” Apparently, until recently, all decent Americans had bottomless affection for the communal spirit of the Postal Service and supported it without hesitation. Yet in April, 2012, in the middle of the Obama presidency, the Times ran a very different house editorial.

The paper argued mounting losses necessitated swift action to reduce costs. The Times worried that “lawmakers in both houses” would “procrastinate as usual,” and blasted the Senate for devising a bill that “timorously aims at part-time ‘downsizing,’ not closing, lightly used post offices.” The paper added that decreased revenue thanks to email could mean losses of “more than $20 billion a year by 2016,” and hoped that, so long as “courage trumps procrastination,” the U.S.P.S. could be granted the “flexibility of a modern business.”

If you look back, you’ll find the overwhelming consensus in both the Bush and Obama years was that a fully-staffed post office was a money pit, and “flexibility” was needed to allow the service to budget-slash its way back to relevance in the Internet age.

For a significant period – between the mid-2000s and the Trump years – it was hard to find a big-name politician who would talk about the post office at all. An exception was Bernie Sanders, whose office labored to get major news media organizations interested (I got some of those calls) in an alternative narrative about the post office.

During the Bush years, the U.S.P.S. was put on the “high risk” list by the General Accounting Office, headed at the time by a future Pete Peterson foundation CEO named David Walker who would later come out in favor of privatizing the post office. The GAO recommended cuts and other measures to address the “rapidly deteriorating” financial situation of the U.S.P.S.

But when an analysis by the Office of Personnel Management was released in November, 2002, it turned out the U.S.P.S. had a “more positive picture” than was believed. The U.S.P.S. was massively over-paying into its retirement fund, headed for a $70 billion surplus. Then in 2003 the Postal Pension Funding Reform Act was passed, which among other things forced the U.S.P.S. to pay the pension obligations of employees who had prior military service.

A few years after that, in 2006, the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” passed with overwhelming support in both houses, forcing a series of incredible changes, the biggest being a requirement that the U.S.P.S. fully fund 75 years worth of benefits for its employees. The provision cost $5.5 billion per year and was unique among government agencies. “No one prefunds at more than 30%,” said Anthony Vegliante, the service’s executive vice president, at the time.

The bill also prevented the post office from offering “nonpostal services” as a way to compete financially. This barred it from establishing a postal banking service, but also nixed creative ideas like Internet cafes, copy services, notaries, even allowing postal workers to offer to wrap Christmas presents. Coupled with the pre-funding benefit mandate and other pension changes, this paralyzed the post office financially, making it look ripe for reform.

By 2012, those took the form of calls for the U.S.P.S. to eliminate 3,700 post offices (a first step toward eventually closing as many as 15,000) and 250 mail processing centers. Sanders, along with other Senators with large rural constituencies like Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill, managed to change the bill and save a lot of the mail processing centers. The Senate that year also cut the amount of required pre-funding for benefits and began refunding the U.S.P.S. for about $11 billion in overpayment for retirement costs.

A few years after that, in 2015, the Post Office Inspector General issued a blistering report about CBRE, the company that had served as sole real estate broker to the U.S.P.S. from 2011 on. The report found that CBRE had been selling and/or leasing post office properties at below-market prices, often to clients of CBRE – a company chaired by Richard Blum, the husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. This chronic problem had a financial impact on the Postal Service, and would have become a much bigger problem had the U.S.P.S. been forced earlier on to sell off a massive quantity of infrastructure through that broker, as originally hoped.

The thread running through all of these stories was that panic over the financial condition of the U.S.P.S. was often a significantly artificial narrative, caused by a bipartisan mix of stupidity, greed, and corruption. This high-functioning civil service organization, which provided tremendous value to the public through everything from subsidized news deliveries in the Pony Express years to the well-maintained public meeting places built in remote rural locations, has not had real backers in either party for most of the last thirty or forty years.

None of this means the Trump-DeJoy story isn’t serious. It just means that Trump is not the first person to try to gut the U.S. Postal Service. Going back decades, it’s been stuck with impossible funding mandates, used as a piggy bank by both parties in congress (which refused to let it stop making massive retirement overpayments for fear of the “adverse” impact on the federal budget), artificially prevented from expanding or innovating by lobbyists, and ripped off by connected contractors.

Combine that with the maddening sloppiness of these panic stories – one wild report after another of mailboxes ripped from the streets “right before our eyes” in a “plan to steal the election” turns out later to be another old photo or a shot of a routine maintenance operation – and it becomes increasingly difficult for nonpartisan news audiences to know what they’re dealing with.

OK so everyone has seen the "viral" photo going around of the piles of mailboxes in Wisconsin being used as evidence that Trump is sabotaging USPS. Problem is, they have been there for years: Hartford Finishing Inc. powder coats and refurbishes the old mailboxes. (1/8) pic.twitter.com/HQpAprWxoK

— Gary He (@garyhe) August 17, 2020

Is this unprecedented corruption, something a little worse than normal, or just the usual undisguised? If press outlets never dial back excesses, we may miss it when we’re actually supposed to panic.



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Australia Prime Minister Puts Citizens On Notice: All Will Likely Undergo Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccinations

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Australia Prime Minister Puts Citizens On Notice: All Will Likely Undergo Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccinations Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2020 - 11:58

For those fearing that all the prior state-enforced social distancing and lockdown protocol which hit a peak in early summer  from arresting surfers on empty beaches, to telling people they can't even jog, to police detaining moms for merely letting their children play on taxpayer bought public playgrounds — would only too easily and hastily transition to a forced vaccination regimen the moment one is rushed out despite safety or the various potential long-term side effect 'unknowns'... well,it's happening:

Australians are likely to face mandatory coronavirus vaccinations if Prime Minister Scott Morrison gets his wish.

The nation is a step closer to gaining access to a vaccine, with the Federal Government securing an international deal to produce a vaccine frontrunner locally if trials succeed.

If that happens, Mr Morrison expects Australians will have to undergo mandatory vaccination.

And no doubt other developed nations will eventually follow suit, given as we've detailed we're already to the point of colleges, schools, and office spaces in many instances requiring as a condition of return to campus or work space a COVID-19 test, or in some cases individuals are subject to weekly tests. Based on the trend, these current testing requirements will seamlessly switch to vaccination requirements, as will apparently likely happen in Australia.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, file image via Bioreports

"I would expect it to be as mandatory as you could possibly make it," PM Morrison told Melbourne radio station 3AW, as reported by the national Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday.

"There are always exemptions for any vaccine on medical grounds, but that should be the only basis," he added, clearly already attempting to bat down instances of vaccine objectors and other individual liberty or religious-based arguments.

"We are talking about a pandemic that has destroyed the global economy and taken the lives of hundreds of thousands all around the world, and over 430 Australians here," the Australian leader added.

He further confirmed the Australian government had reached deal with Swedish-British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to purchase a promising coronavirus vaccine currently under development with Oxford University.

Morrison described that the Federal Government plans manufacture it as soon as it clears clinical trails, and the drug will be free for all Australians.

A win for Big Pharma, it looks like Australia will be forcing their citizens to vaccinate despite the fact that no long term tests have ever been done with this new bastardized vaccine.

You *really* shouldn’t have allowed the government take your guns.https://t.co/M4Se6FZqXe

— Mindy Robinson 🇺🇸 (@iheartmindy) August 19, 2020

But as activists who might have legitimate concerns over the federal government mandating that a substance without an established and lengthy track record of medical use be injected in each individual's body as a precondition to participating in society (such as school or entering public buildings) would point out, it will indeed come with a "cost" in terms of freedom of conscience and an individual's right to manage risk and trade-offs for themselves.

As Australia's ABC put it, the government will rely on its "no jab, no play" precedent in terms of 'up to date vaccination' - already in effect and a requirement for children to attend everything from child care to school to a household's ability to get a Family Tax Benefit across most provinces.

Morrison emphasized that anti-vaccination activists will not have a leg to stand on:

During a round of morning media, Mr Morrison repeatedly said he expected pushback from anti-vaccination campaigners.

But he repeatedly said he was the minister who introduced a "no jab, no play" rule, and his stance on vaccinations was clear and would not change.

The Australian Prime Minister at the Astra Zeneca laboratories in Sydney on Wednesday. Image source: AAP

In terms of a timeline, Morrison said he didn't expect a vaccine to be available to the public until sometime next year at the earliest. 

An essentially "forced" vaccine program would likely also roll out in the UK, Europe, and Canada, and by then debate would surely be raging in the United States (though the "debate" might be entirely precluded by then) given it remains the world's leader in COVID-19 confirmed infections.

But when Australia and Europe rolls out with mandatory programs, it's only a matter of time before the global hotspot - the US - follows suit, and backed by federal or state laws to boot.

Get ready to "show your papers". It's coming.



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Plandemic II: Indoctornation

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This is a flabbergasting film, an all-important film and very timely film, which you must view and share with everyone you know.

It is, of course being blocked by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve embedded a version from Brighteon on my site which does not display optimally, so you may choose to watch on directly on Brighteon, here.

Below are my notes on the film. If you prefer to read these notes as a PDF, they can be downloaded here.

***

The film opens with actual footage of Event 201, held 5 months prior to the pandemic in October 2019 in New York City, sponsored by the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates and Michael Bloomberg.

All the paid corporate and military shills participating in Event 201 agree that a “global response” is necessary and they only justify censorship of the “Fake News” that would out them as the culprits of this global psyop.

Mikki Willis, the director of Plandemic talks about Judy Mikovits and how the first installment of this film, featuring Mikovits was widely excoriated and suppressed in the mainstream. He wants to know why.

Judy Mikovits responds to the baseless smears against her and says she was offered millions in grants if she would publicly announce that she had made a mistake. She replied that she had already lost everything and that if she had thought there was even one person harmed because she’d failed to do something, “There was no money you could pay me to cover this up”.

David E Martin, developer of Linguistic Genomics explains, “We maintain a series of inquiries into every individual, every organization and every company that is involved, in anything that either blurs the line of biological or chemical weapons or crosses that line, in any of 168 countries.

“In 1999, there were a million patents digitized by IBM. And those million patents were the first time human innovation had been put into an electronic, digital, searchable format…In 1999, patents on coronavirus started showing up. And thus began the rabbit trail!

“In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control saw the possibility of a gold strike. And that was the coronavirus [SARS-CoV-1] outbreak that happened in Asia. They saw that a virus that they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable and in 2003, they sought to patent it.

“And they made sure that they controlled the proprietary rights to the disease, to the virus, and to its detection and to the measurement of it.

“We know that Anthony Fauci, that Ralph Baric, that the Centers for Disease Control – and the laundry list of people that wanted to take credit for inventing coronavirus are at the hub of this story.

“From 2003 to 2018, they controlled 100% of the cash flow that built the empire around the industrial complex of coronavirus.

“We know that the manipulation of the coronavirus began with [University of North Carolina Professor of Microbiology and Immunology] Ralph Baric in 1999. Ralph Baric is the researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who’s famous for his chimeric coronavirus research.

“In 2002, there was a recognition that the coronavirus was seen as an exploitable mechanism for both good and ill. On April 25th, 2003, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) filed a patent [US7776521B1], on the coronavirus transmitted to humans.

“Under 35 USC §101, nature is prohibited from being patented. Either SARS coronavirus was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it legal – or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.

“If it was manufactured, it was a violation of biological and chemical weapons, treaties and laws. If it was natural, filing a patent on it was illegal. In either outcome, both are illegal.

“In the spring of 2007, the CDC filed a petition with the Patent Office to keep their application confidential and private. They actually filed patents not only on the virus, they also filed patents on its detection and a kit to measure it.

“Because of that CDC patent, they had the ability to control who was authorized and who was not authorized to make independent inquiries into coronavirus.

“You cannot look at the virus, you cannot measure it, you cannot develop a test kit for it – and by ultimately receiving the patents that constrain anyone from using it, they had the means, they had the motive and most of all, they had the monetary gain from turning coronavirus from a pathogen to profit.

“Somewhere between 2012 and 2013, something happened. Federal funding for research that was feeding into places like Harvard, Emory, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill – that funding suddenly became impaired by something that happened at the NIH, where the NIH got this little tiny moment of clarity and said, ‘I think something about what we’re doing is wrong.’

And in 2013, the NIH said gain-of-function research on coronavirus should be suspended.

“The National Institutes of Health had a moral, social and potentially legal reason to object to research but the letters that were sent to the researchers essentially said, ‘you are receiving notice that we’re telling you to stop. And now, on the bottom of the page, we’re going to clarify what ‘stop’ means: ‘keep going.’

“But when the heat gets hot, in 2014 and 2015, what do you do? You offshore the research. You fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do the stuff that sounds like it’s getting a little edgy with respect to its morality – but do you do it the straight way? Nah. You run the money [$3.4 million] through a series of cover organizations, to make it look like you’re funding a US operation, which then subcontracts with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“The US can say, ‘China did it,’ China could say, ‘The US did it,’ and the cool thing is, both of them are almost telling the truth.

Meryl Nass, MD, pioneered research on an epidemic and proving that it was due to biological warfare. She is confident that SARS-CoV-2 was a “laboratory-designed organism.”

“I was particularly interested in a paper than came out in Nature Medicine by five scientists [“The Proximal Orgin of SARS-Cov-2”, by Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W, Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry; March 17, 2020], claiming that it was definitely a ‘natural occurrence’, rather than a lab construct.

“But the arguments they used didn’t hold a lot of water and didn’t make scientific sense. And yet – all kinds of very important people started parroting what this paper said. And so that got me scratching my head, saying, ‘Why are these people risking their reputation when it’s obviously illogical – doesn’t hold water?

“Somebody must have made them publish this and somebody must have told these other people that they have to say it’s a great piece of science.”

David E Martin: “See, the problem with all this is that the evidence is right in front of our face. And when confronted with evidence, we are told fact-checkers are somehow transcendant.”

Mikki Willis then narrates a piece about how people are too overwhelmed with their lives to research into everything that’s coming at them and the phenomenon of ‘cut-n-paste journalism’, with corporate propaganda being repeated everywhere exploits this problem. When people forward such reports, they become unwitting propagandists, themselves.

Behavioral scientist, Dr Robert Epstein and Google whistleblower, Zach Vorhies explain how Google has become the ultimate tool of mass-manipulation of all time.

Mikki Willis narrates, “What was once an efficient tool for navigating the world of information is now a network for global surveillance, data collection and social engineering.”

Mikki Willis then does an analysis of the so-called “fact-checking” organizations. Snopes was founded by a couple with no background in journalism and a lot in their background to put them into disrepute.

Snopes’ verdict that Dr Judy Mikovits’ claims that she was arrested without a warrant and held in jail for 5 days without charges was “FALSE” but Willis then produces the arrest documents showing no signatures to officiate a charge, a fact he also confirmed with two members of Dr Mikovits’ legal team. Mikovits was never charged with a crime.

Facebook’s fact-checking arm, PolitiFact is owned by the Poynter Institute, which has received substantial funding from Big Pharma allies, Google and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation. In late 2019, PolitiFact, Snopes and FactCheck.org rushed to squash all reports that the coronavirus and its treatments has been patented. They reviewed only 3 of the 4,452 publicly-available patents, which unmistakably show that SARS-coronavirus detection and treatment has been widely-patented by both the public and private sectors.

Willis then shows how Wikipedia has become completely co-opted by its rich donors. “What began as an unbiased, open-sourced platform is now weaponized to undermine the work and reputation of anyone deemed a threat to its stakeholders. And once they smear you, they lock you out from making corrections to your own bio. In summary, most independent fact-checkers are neither independent nor factual. Simply put, they are political spin machines.”

Willis gets into a discussion of the CIA’s infiltration of the news media, aka Operation Mockingbird, which has been ongoing at least since the 1960s. An old interview is shown with former CIA officer, John Stockwell, who states that Mockingbird went beyond the news and into the universities, where students organizations were created to attract radical students and how there were “5,000 university professors co-opted by the CIA to manipulate peoples’ minds. Journalists, including big-name journalists co-opted to function routinely to put out stories and biases to the world.”

Old newsreel footage of a 1952 MKULTRA memo shows that the CIA’s aim is “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will.”

Willis then explains that, “It was the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that opened the door for predatory corporations to monopolize the industries of print and broadcast.” It led to the situation we have today, where all media is controlled by a handful of corporations.

David E Martin gets into how the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act enabled private corporations to profit from taxpayer-funded research and development.

Martin says his alarms went off when he saw the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’s September 2019 publication, “World at Risk”. The GPMB is a joint arm of the WHO and the World Bank. The board includes Anthony Fauci and members from the Gates Foundation, as well as China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. They recommended that by September, two global preparedness exercises have to be completed and that one of them has to be done simulating the release of a lethal respiratory pathogen.

This then gave rise to the October 2019 Event 201. Many of those involved in the simulation are involved in the real pandemic – and profiting off of it, as well. A simulation of this magnitude would have had to have been planned at least a year in advance – and we see both Anthony Fauci in 2017 and Bill Gates back in 2015 both making public predictions about “the next pandemic”. Everything we’re seeing now was laid out in their table-top simulations – which, predictably, the fact-checking websites are claiming is “happenstance” and “unrelated”.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 2010 “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and Future Development” describes the different scenarios that could feasibly lead to the authoritarian technocracy that they so fervently desire. It is the script that we’re living out right now.

Martin explains, “We are living in a time where leadership, unfortunately is compromised. And by that, I mean that individuals are placed in power by their ability to be influenced, not their merits of leadership. Nothing could be clearer than the leadership of the World Health Organization, which besides the Gates Foundation [now that Trump pulled the US out], is funded by the big pharmaceutical companies.

The WHO is a corrupt slush fund that has been shown to spend ten times on the travel costs of their 7,000 members ($201 million/year) than it does on mental health and substance abuse ($23 million), AIDS and hepatitis ($70.5 million), malaria ($61 million) and tuberculosis ($59 million). It’s become abundantly clear that the WHO’s repeated issuing of inaccurate and bad advice is not merely the result of incompetence. Rather, the malfeasance is a direct result of the CCP deliberately buying out WHO’s leadership.

Tedros Adhanom is the first WHO Director who is not a medical doctor. In his previous role as Ethiopia’s Minister of Health, he was accused of covering up three pandemics. Tedros was also a member of a violent, Communist political party accused of crimes against humanity. He was also heavily entwined with both the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton is shown gushing about how Tedros is the “Ablest public servant I’ve ever encountered.”

Martin says, “You cannot find a person promoting [coronavirus alarmism] who’s not part of the interlocking directorates of the World Health Organization, the CDC, the NIAID or the philanthropic organizations that are the cover organizations that fund them.

“We now know that there are over 1,300 patents that are issued and held by organizations that are multiply recipients of funding, through the Gates Foundation, through Eco-Health Alliance, through the Sherlock Biosciences, back into open philanthropy and all of them also have links to Anthony Fauci’s NIAID’s funding sources.

“If you have conflicts of interest, in the funding and in the decision-making and in the inside knowledge that you have, between competing or competitor organizations, that is a violation of the antitrust laws of the United States. These are Federal crimes.”

The horrible truth is that the Big Pharma companies have bribed everybody and are holding the entire medical industry hostage, from the medical schools to the regulators to the journals and outside of paying fines as a cost of doing business, they have no accountability, whereas such CEOs used to do jail time.

This can all be traced back to the Rockefellers, who became the godfathers of the pharmaceutical industry, when they promoted patentable petroleum-based chemicals as the gold standard, to replace the herbal medicines that had been administered for centuries. More than anyone, physicians are the victims of the stranglehold of Big Pharma on the medical industry.

Big Pharma is not just holding the medical industry hostage, they are now holding the entire planet hostage with lockdowns pending the release of a vaccine.

Mikki Willis then reminds us of Bill Gates’ extremely well-connected, Federal Reserve banker background and about how, contrary to legend, he did not invent the original Microsoft operating system. By the early 2000s, Gates was universally reviled for his mercenary, back-stabbing business practices against competitors and his closest associates, alike. Then the Government’s antitrust case against him, in which he lost did nothing to improve his horrendous reputation.

To turn that around in 2000, he put $100 million into the founding of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which succeeded in transforming his public persona from the world’s most ruthless monopolist to the world’s most generous philanthropist. His net worth soon doubled and he became the richest man in the world.

In 2019, Gates declared that vaccines were the greatest investment he had ever made, turning $10 million into $200 million worth of economic benefit. Willis explains, “As a top donor to both the WHO and CDC, no one man has more power than Bill Gates to influence and control the health and medical freedom of all people.”

Ronald Reagan’s signing of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, granted total immunity to vaccine manufacturers. To this day, when someone is injured by a vaccine, it is the US taxpayer who pays for the damages.

India paid a very high price after the highly-unethical administering of the Gardasil vaccine to young ethnic minority girls. They were told they were being given a “cure for cancer” but many were severely injured and seven died. The Gates Foundation denied involvement and there was no recourse for tens of thousands of young women. The Indian government studied what happened and issued a scathing report, which resulted in the Indian Parliament’s vote to kick the Gates Foundation out of the country.

A 2018 study found that 491,000 children in India suffered paralysis as a result of the Gates-supported oral polio vaccine administered between 2010-2017. As usual, the US-based fact-checking websites rushed to bury the story. Somehow, the Gates Foundation has managed to get back into India, sponsoring clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Neither Bill nor Melinda Gates is trained in medicine and yet they control GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. GAVI is now being sued by some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations for the unconscionable harm they have caused through their vaccine programs. Many Africans and Black Americans are beginning to wake up to this problem.

Willis says that it would take hours to list all of the questionable initiatives backed by Bill Gates. But here are some highlights:

  1. Stratospheric-Controlled Perturbation Experiment (aka Geoengineering), Bill Gates is the one of the primary funders of geoengineering, to dim the atmosphere in order to “mitigate” Climate Change. Critics have called this a “Global Genocide Experiment”.
  1. EarthNow Global Surveillance Project, which will launch 500 satellites fitted with video cameras to provide real-time, 24/7 monitoring of all people everywhere.
  1. Quantum Dot Tattoo, developed with MIT is a system to inject vaccines under your skin, along with your medical records, that can be scanned by authorities using a cellphone app, as part of the “Immunity Passports” scheme for those who have “proof” of recovery from COVID-19.
  1. Oxitec, a biotech company funded by Bill Gates has been approved to release GM mosquitoes in various US states to help fight malaria. According to the NIH website, there are programs being developed to allow human immunization through mosquito bites.

Last but not least is Bill Gates’ questionable association with Jeffrey Epstein, which he denies. However, a New York Times investigation revealed that not only did Gates initiate a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, long after he had already been convicted of sex crimes but that the two were in the process of co-founding a multi-billion-dollar charitable fund.

Willis asks, “Why would one of the richest men in the world choose to partner with the world’s most notorious pedophile?”

It’s important to understand that the COVID-19 vaccines are currently being developed under the PREP Act, which was passed in the wake of 9/11 and the Anthrax Scare and it gives blanket liability protection to the entire medical industry, in order to “encourage expeditious development and deployment of medical countermeasures during a health emergency.”

Mary Holland, Vice Chair & General Counsel of Children’s Health Defense warns, “If you take COVID-19 vaccines, you are absolutely on you own. If you’re permanently injured, if you lose your job, if your healthcare expenses go through the roof, tough luck.”

David E Martin says, “This isn’t a vaccine story, this is a population-management story. If your goal is to make this beautiful Earth that we live on an exclusive playground for the entitled few, then populations that get in the way are a problem.

“It is the empirical impulses of individuals who have decided that by outranking the rest of humanity, they can dictate upon humanity the conditions of their existence.”

As Lord Sumption, former jurist on the UK’s Supreme Court said in reference to the almost total lockdowns seen imposed in countries all over the world due to the coronavirus, “When human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrendered their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. That’s what I fear we are seeing now.”

David E Martin says, “This is a cognitive-dissonant moment that is being imprinted in your brain, just like ‘Remember the Great Depression’, ‘Remember 9/11’. We are being conditioned to have the excuse for unbelievable acts of tyranny, which will be justified by ‘Remember 2020.’

“And your loved ones; those that die, those that are infected, they’re being used as cannon fodder, which is the ultimate desecration of their honor and integrity.

“And this is also a test of humanity, to see how much of our liberty we will let go, before we finally draw the line under ‘ENOUGH’.

“This is not a time for us to go in a mob frenzy. Find the perpetrators and haul them into the town square an pillory them. This is a moment for us to recognize that every decision that is being made today by any of the conspiring parties made perfect sense in each increment, when each one of those decisions was made.

“The sum of those decisions’ incremental steps has led to devastation, because they lost touch with their fellow humanity. But that’s an invitation for each one of us to examine how we’re living and how not a single decision we make – not one – in any moment is without consequence.

“This is our moment to reclaim our humanity.”

Alexandra Bruce

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

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