Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden was again insisting that the scandal involving Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation despite the direct refutation of that claim by the FBI. No mainstream reporter bothered to ask the simple question of whether this was his son’s laptop and emails, including emails clearly engaging in an influence peddling scheme and referring to Joe Biden’s knowledge. Instead, media has maintained a consistent and narrow focus. Indeed, in her interview, Leslie Stahl immediately dismissed any “scandal” involving Hunter in an interview with the President on 60 Minutes. It was an open example of what I previously noted in a column: “After all, an allegation is a scandal only if it is damaging. No coverage, no damage, no scandal.”
In her interview with Joe Biden, CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell did not push Biden to simply confirm that the emails were fake or whether he did in fact meet with Hunter’s associates (despite his prior denials). Instead O’Donnell asked: “Do you believe the recent leak of material allegedly from Hunter’s computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign?”
Biden responded with the same answer that has gone unchallenged dozens of times:
From what I’ve read and know the intelligence community warned the president that Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden. And so when you put the combination of Russia, Giuliani– the president, together– it’s just what it is. It’s a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about. What is he running on? What is he running on?
It did not matter that the answer omitted the key assertion that this was not Hunter’s laptop or emails or that he did not leave the computer with this store.
Recently, Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid wrote the quiet part out loud by telling the media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”
Let that sink in for a second. It does not matter if these are real emails and not Russian disinformation. They probably are real but should be treated as disinformation even though American intelligence has repeatedly rebutted that claim. It does not even matter that the FBI has seized the computer as evidence in a criminal fraud investigation or that a Biden confidant is now giving his allegations to the FBI under threat of criminal charges if he lies to investigators.
It simply does not matter. It is disinformation because it is simply inconvenient to treat it as real information.
ORIGINAL LINK Dorsey, Zuckerberg Defend Their Section 230 'Freedoms' In Prepared Testimony Ahead Of HearingsTyler DurdenTue, 10/27/2020 - 14:45
Less than a week before the election, the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google are set to face a grilling tomorrow by Republican senators who accuse the tech giants of anti-conservative bias.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai agreed to testify remotely during a hearing of The Senate Commerce Committee after being threatened with subpoenas.
Beyond questioning the CEOs, senators will examine proposals to revise Section 230 - the long-held legal protections for online speech - an immunity that critics in both parties say enables the companies to abdicate their responsibility to moderate content, exposing their biases, which has become increasingly transparent as the Hunter Biden laptop stories are reported (and censored)
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg takes a more measured tone in his testimony (excerpt, emphasis ours):
...the debate about Section 230 shows that people of all political persuasions are unhappy with the status quo. People want to know that companies are taking responsibility for combatting harmful content—especially illegal activity—on their platforms. They want to know that when platforms remove content, they are doing so fairly and transparently. And they want to make sure that platforms are held accountable.
Section 230 made it possible for every major internet service to be built and ensured important values like free expression and openness were part of how platforms operate. Changing it is a significant decision. However, I believe Congress should update the law to make sure it's working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue about how we might update the law to deal with the problems we face today.
At Facebook, we don't think tech companies should be making so many decisions about these important issues alone. I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators, which is why in March last year I called for regulation on harmful content, privacy, elections, and data portability. We stand ready to work with Congress on what regulation could look like in these areas. By updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what's best about it—the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things—while also protecting society from broader harms. I would encourage this Committee and other stakeholders to make sure that any changes do not have unintended consequences that stifle expression or impede innovation.
Twitter's Jack Dorsey is more aggressive, warning ironically that "Section 230 is the Internet's most important law for free speech and safety. Weakening Section 230 protections will remove critical speech from the Internet." -(excerpt, emphasis ours)
Twitter's purpose is to serve the public conversation. People from around the world come together on Twitter in an open and free exchange of ideas. We want to make sure conversations on Twitter are healthy and that people feel safe to express their points of view. We do our work recognizing that free speech and safety are interconnected and can sometimes be at odds. We must ensure that all voices can be heard, and we continue to make improvements to our service so that everyone feels safe participating in the public conversation—whether they are speaking or simply listening. The protections offered by Section 230 help us achieve this important objective.
As we consider developing new legislative frameworks, or committing to self-regulation models for content moderation, we should remember that Section 230 has enabled new companies—small ones seeded with an idea—to build and compete with established companies globally. Eroding the foundation of Section 230 could collapse how we communicate on the Internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies.
We should also be mindful that undermining Section 230 will result in far more removal of online speech and impose severe limitations on our collective ability to address harmful content and protect people online. I do not think anyone in this room or the American people want less free speech or more abuse and harassment online. Instead, what I hear from people is that they want to be able to trust the services they are using.
I want to focus on solving the problem of how services like Twitter earn trust. And I also want to discuss how we ensure more choice in the market if we do not. During my testimony, I want to share our approach to earn trust with people who use Twitter. We believe these principles can be applied broadly to our industry and build upon the foundational framework of Section 230 for how to moderate content online. We seek to earn trust in four critical ways: (I) transparency. (2) fair processes. (3) empowering algorithmic choice, and (4) protecting the privacy of the people who use our service. My testimony today will explain our approach to these principles.
As AP reports, Trump signed an executive order this year challenging the protections from lawsuits under a 1996 telecommunications law. A provision known as Section 230 has served as the foundation for unfettered speech on the internet.
“For too long, social media platforms have hidden behind Section 230 protections to censor content that deviates from their beliefs,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the committee chairman, said recently.
The head of the Federal Communications Commission, an independent agency, recently announced plans to reexamine the legal protections, potentially putting meat on the bones of Trump’s order by opening the way to new rules. The move by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Trump appointee, marked an about-face from the agency’s previous position.
The unwelcome attention to the three companies piles onto the anxieties in the tech industry, which also faces scrutiny from the Justice Department, federal regulators, Congress and state attorneys general around the country.
A Project Veritas hidden camera captured a political consultant in Texas coercing an elderly voter to change her vote (Video screenshot)
A political consultant in San Antonio, Texas, was caught on a hidden camera in a Project Veritas undercover investigation coercing and bribing voters to vote Democrat, violating Texas and federal law.
In an exchange in a video published Tuesday, Raquel Rodriguez examines an elderly woman's ballot and convinces her to change her vote from Republican Sen. John Cornyn to Democratic challenger MJ Hegar.
"You can do, you can vote for whoever you want, but our conversation that we had, you said you were voting for Hegar, 'cause you were going straight Democrat," Rodriguez says. "You said you're voting straight Democrat per our conversation, so that when you're voting for the straight Dem - ‘cause that's what you want to do, correct?"
In the video, Rodriguez shows the woman how to change her vote by crossing out the line for Cornyn and putting her initials next to the line, so "they know it was done accidentally."
The Project Veritas journalist who accompanied Rodriguez says: "So, John Cornyn, she voted for John Cornyn and then you made her—"
Rodriguez, who says she's "technically" working for Republican U.S. House candidate Mauro Garza, interjects, "That's my job."
After the voter "corrects" her ballot, Rodriguez presents her with a shawl as a gift.
Rodriguez said she has a gift budget of $2,500 and also she gives voters rosaries, diabetic socks and wallets.
"That's illegal. I could go to jail," Rodriguez acknowledges to the Project Veritas journalist. "If I go to prison, I do not look cute in stripes ... I will hate you forever."
Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe said his team "discovered a voter fraud system positioned to swing Texas in 2020."
"These so-called 'ballot chasers' use a mix of gifts and coercion to work down their list of targeted voters and make sure they vote for their paymasters," he said. "The actions violate both federal and state law and constitute a direct threat to the integrity of our election-based republic."
Rodriguez says to the undercover journalist she "can honestly say I'm bringing in at least 7,000 votes to the polls."
She said she drops off "bundles of ballots at different post offices to avoid suspicion."
"I go through the entire city. I'll take 20 (ballots) here, 30 here, 40 here."
Mask hysteria has swept across many states in America and countries around the world. It has become divisive and political. Many are obsessed with the public wearing masks, from young children to even those who have already been positive. Mask mandates have been introduced in many states in the US
ORIGINAL LINK
When we recently described the upcoming “Unprecedented monetary overhaul” which will come in the form of the Fed sending out digital dollars directly to “each American”, we explained that:
The BBC is preparing an attack against journalists, former diplomats, academics and scientists who challenge the dominant pro-war narratives against Syria underpinned by the pseudo-humanitarian White Helmets.
The British public broadcaster has sent out requests for comments to those who have dared to expose the role the UK government and its intelligence agencies have played in the destabilization of Syria, which look more like neo-McCarthyist charge sheets. The producer of an upcoming Radio 4 documentary series had been in email and telephone conversation with the author of this article, as well as Peter Ford, former UK ambassador to Syria, and members of the Working Group on Syria, Media and Propaganda (WGSMP) since June 2020. The result of those conversations, during which the evidence emanating from serious scientific research and on-the-ground testimony was presented to the producer, was a familiar list of accusations of “conspiracy theorism” and suggestions of “incentivized” Russian or Syrian bias.
2. I stand by my statements to that effect. This was threat fm BBC:
"That you call the White Helmets a ‘legit target’ in order to back the right of the Syrian and Russian military in their efforts to bomb them." .....
Fellow independent journalist Eva Bartlett has spent long periods of time inside Syria, reporting from many of the most high-risk areas during the Syrian Arab Army allied campaigns to liberate swathes of Syrian territory from the US coalition-proxy occupation. She had this to say about the email she received a few days ago:
“The questions emailed to me by the BBC evidence a predetermined intent to character assassination. This approach shows an utter lack of journalistic integrity on the part of the BBC.
The BBC's hostile insinuations against me arrogantly infer that neither I nor the Syrians I interview think for ourselves, but are puppets of the Syrian and Russian governments. My journalism dates back to 2007 and is quite extensive, with 13 years of on the ground experience, from Palestine and Syria, to Venezuela and eastern Ukraine, and elsewhere.
My focuses have been on giving voice to Syrians disappeared by corporate media, highlighting the terrorism they endured by terrorist groups which the West dubs “rebels,” and highlighting war propaganda by outlets such as the BBC.”
It was clear from the BBC’s line of questioning that this was not a genuine investigation into the life and times of White Helmets founder, and former British military intelligence officer, James Le Mesurier. It is effectively a damage limitation exercise designed to discredit the evidence that points to the White Helmets being a propaganda construct with extremist connections funded by the US/UK coalition to vilify the Syrian government and allies, thus justifying military intervention by proxy and aggression against a sovereign nation. The aggression includes economic sanctions that have devastated the Syrian economy and caused widespread poverty and food insecurity among the Syrian people.
The upcoming BBC programme – ‘Mayday’ – appears to be an attempt to whitewash British intelligence operations inside Syria. Operations that were recently further exposed following the leak of alleged UK Foreign Office documents, reported by Grayzone, which detailed the extent to which the UK government provided media and PR support to the armed groups in Syria. Those groups effectively include Al Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) affiliates such as Jaysh Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham, who are responsible for the horrific bloodshed and devastation of infrastructure in the areas they invaded and occupied.
The UK and EU government-funded Mayday Rescue organisation was established by Le Mesurier to provide an intermediary management of the funds the UK government was providing to the White Helmets as they embedded themselves with armed groups in extremist-controlled areas throughout Syria, more recently exclusively in Idlib, the last remaining and “largest Al Qaeda haven since 9/11.” Le Mesurier died in November 2019 having fallen from the balcony of his Istanbul home which he shared with his third wife, Emma Winberg. Three days before his death, which was ruled a suicide, Le Mesurier had reportedly admitted to defrauding Mayday Rescue of funds provided by UK and European governments.
It is also worth a reminder that the Dutch government had withdrawn funding from Mayday Rescue in 2018 following an extensive investigation that had concluded a lack of assurances that funds were not being hijacked by the armed groups in Syria, including Al Qaeda.
White Helmets are an arm of the terror movement in Syria. They are heroes to #ISIS but not to any humanitarian. https://t.co/9hlxvSY8gJ
The BBC pins its arguments on the view that the White Helmets are a “humanitarian” organisation – an Oscar-winning illusion that has been dismantled by some of the most acclaimed independent journalists and researchers of our time, including Cory Morningstar, Rick Sterling, Eva Bartlett, Stephen Kinzer, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Gareth Porter, Ray McGovern, Phillip Giraldi, Craig Murray and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, to name just a few.
Former White Helmets says all you need to know about this natural born liar. The image is from Yemen; the Russian bombers were photoshopped in. How this known Al Qaeda sympathizer was allowed to live in NYC is beyond me. Below find the original photo. See anything different? pic.twitter.com/rgJaM701Xo
The former UK ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, also received the BBC bill of indictment and he issued this statement in response:
“The BBC have systematically tried to suppress views on Syria which run counter to the standard one-sided narrative. This programme's efforts to smear dissenters takes BBC conduct to a new low. By alleging conspiracy theorising where there is only evidence-based reporting and analysis, the BBC is showing its frustration at being unable to stifle truth-telling.
The only conspiracy here is whatever coordination has taken place between the BBC and British authorities responsible for failing to achieve regime change in Syria despite throwing many millions of taxpayer money at the effort. Why is the BBC not drawing attention to the biggest failure of British foreign policy since Suez, as judged by its self-proclaimed objective of removing Assad, rather than busying itself with trying to take down unsupported individual dissenters who have ranged against them the vast wealth and resources of the establishment?
The charge of biggest failure since Suez as judged by its own objective of regime change is stinging because palpably true, and will with luck get some play in the follow up. It's an angle that has been largely lost in the welter of detail.”
On October 5, the US and UK envoys to the UN Security Council (UNSC) led the campaign to ban the former Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) director general, Jose Bustani, from briefing the UNSC meeting presided over by Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia. Nebenzia accused the US/UK-led truth-suppressors of bringing the UNSC into disrepute. One week later, the BBC, a de facto UK-state-media outlet, kicked off its attack on the individuals responsible for highlighting the corruption of the OPCW and the fraud that was the final report on the alleged Douma chemical attack in April 2018.
One member of the WGSMP, Paul McKeigue, has published his conversations with the producer. Regarding the Douma incident, McKeigue informs us that “a reader of this correspondence could reasonably conclude that [..]Raed Saleh (White Helmets leader) has something to hide, and further that [the BBC producer] is, for some reason, colluding with him by helping him to avoid having to respond” to questions regarding the whereabouts of the bodies of the alleged chemical weapon attack victims. Part of my response to the BBC also alludes to the apparent suppression of evidence:
“A BBC producer, Riam Dalati, has stated publicly that the Douma hospital scenes, the site of the alleged chemical weapon attack in Syria, 2018, were staged. As has been pointed out repeatedly to Riam Dalati and the BBC, if the hospital scenes at Douma were staged so too were the films of the deceased in the Douma apartment block. The BBC have never reported this information, nor has it passed the information obtained by its producer to either the OPCW FFM or the IIT. It is extraordinary and completely unjustifiable that the BBC should be withholding this vital information from a UN linked organisation.”
Dr. Piers Robinson, the co-founder of the WGSMP, accused the BBC of suppressing truth:
“The BBC is also attempting to smear academics researching alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria as ‘conspiracy theorists’, even though their work has been supported by the leading chemical and biological weapons expert the late Julian Perry Robinson and vindicated by whistleblowers and leaks from the OPCW itself. The BBC is not engaging in journalism but rather suppression of the truth.”
In conclusion, the BBC is not an honest broker. Our work as journalists and researchers is to mine for the truth. The BBC’s output, especially with regards to foreign affairs, is produced in lock-step with UK foreign policy objectives. In the context of the war against Syria, this has resulted in a pattern of omission and censorship that has underpinned UK FCO efforts to foment conflict within Syria and to overthrow the internationally recognised Syrian government.
The result has been an illegal war that has caused death and suffering for millions of Syrian people. Regarding the UK/US intelligence-incubated, Al Qaeda-linked, White Helmets, the BBC could be considered complicit in manufacturing consent for another “humanitarian war” through their lack of “rigorous journalism” and omission of the facts surrounding this UK state-client-propaganda-manufacturer. Just as the BBC defended the WMD “dodgy dossier” that decimated Iraq and led to the deaths of millions of Iraqis, we now see the BBC rallying around the chemical weapon “dodgy dossier” that has enabled the prolongation of the barbaric war against the Syrian people.
The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out.
Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential.
No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the US attack was a war of aggression, based on lies, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured.
We learned that the US military classified anyone they killed in Iraq as “enemy combatants.” We learned that more than 700 Iraqi civilians were killed for “driving too close” to one of the hundreds of US military checkpoints – including pregnant mothers-to-be rushing to the hospital.
We learned that US military personnel routinely handed “detainees” over to Iraqi security forces where they would be tortured and often killed.
Ten years after Assange’s brave act of journalism changed the world and exposed one of the crimes of the century, he sits alone in solitary confinement in a UK prison. He sits literally fighting for his life, as if he is successfully extradited to the United States he faces 175 years in a “supermax” prison for committing “espionage” against a country of which he is not a citizen.
On the Iraq war we have punished the truth-tellers and rewarded the criminals. People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts. In fact, they got off scot free and many even prospered.
Julian Assange explained that he published the Iraq War Diaries because he “hoped to correct some of the attack on truth that occurred before the war, and that continued on since that war officially ended.” We used to praise brave journalists not afraid to take on the “bad guys.” Now we torture and imprison them.
President Trump has made a point of singling out the US attack on Iraq as one of the “stupid wars” that he was committed to ending. But we wouldn’t know half of just how stupid – and evil – it was were it not for the brave actions of Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Journalism should not be a crime and President Trump should pardon Assange immediately.
Below is my column on Fox regarding the recent remarks of NBC analyst Jon Meacham explaining how Trump supporters suffer from “lizard brains.” The statement is indicative of a long-standing trend in the media of insulting and biased comments about Trump supporters. Analysts seem to have dispensed with any notion of restraint or reason in such attacks.
What is most troubling is that there are students who support Trump at Vanderbilt and there have been complaints for years about an increasingly hostile environment for conservative students. Taking a professor who has publicly dismissed your political views as the result of a lizard brain is hardly welcoming.
Here is the column:
We recently discussed how Vanderbilt professor and historian Jon Meacham gave a quiz in his course on the 2020 Election in which students were asked “Was the Constitution designed to perpetuate white supremacy and protect the institution of slavery?” You had to answer “yes” or get points deducted.
It appears that the final exam in the class could prove even more demanding for any intellectually honest student if Meacham asks about the voters themselves. The NBC analyst this week declared that President Trump and his supporters are examples of being controlled by what is called “the lizard brain.”
It only got worse from there.
Meacham addressed a simple question of whether Trump helped himself with his base in the second presidential debate Thursday night. It is impossible on NBC, however, to refer to Trump voters without some derisive or insulting precursor. Meacham did not disappoint his audience.
“I think Trump did himself good with his base tonight,” Meacham said.
“The question for America is how big that base is. There is a lizard brain in this country. Donald Trump is a product of the White man’s, the anguished, nervous White guy’s lizard brain.”
Meacham was referring to a primitive part of the brain in psychological literature: “Many people call it the ‘Lizard Brain,’ because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.”
Of course, even with the lead held by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the polls, roughly half of this country still supports Trump (or at least rejects Biden, who Meacham has endorsed). That is a lot of lizard people.
What is striking is that Meacham is supposed to give what NBC, MSNBC and PBS present as neutral, scholarly analysis. But his comment about Trump supporters having lizard brains captures why conservative or independent voters view the networks as biased and gratuitously insulting.
Indeed, these comments show that networks like NBC are now focusing entirely on Democratic and liberal viewers — writing off half of the American people as gag lines.
There appears to be no point that is too insulting or raw for national commentary so long as it is an attack on Trump or those who support him.
I did not vote for Trump, and I have regularly criticized him in columns and blog posts. However, I have watched the stereotyping of Trump supporters at media conferences for years. It suggests that roughly 63 million people in this country who voted for Trump in 2016 are knuckle-dragging racists.
The media have simply never tried to see any nuance or gain any insight into what is motivating Trump supporters. It is easier to dismiss them as a whole as racists and lizard people.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has declared that Trump supporters as a whole are racists. That common stereotyping of Trump supporters is uncontested, even as the media object to Trump’s generalizations about other groups.
Miami Herald columnist and NBC analyst Leonard Pitts wrote a column headlined:
“No, it’s not the economy, stupid. Trump supporters fear a black and brown America.”
The narrative has moved beyond Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” to now portraying all Trump supporters as open racists.
“Make America Great Again” hats are denounced by academics as the symbol of “modern day hitlerjugend” and hate speech.
What is most distressing about Meacham’s comments is that he is an incredibly talented and insightful academic. But it is hugely popular to degrade Trump’s supporters on television. That can create its own conditioning reward system.
It is also popular in academia today to rewrite history to fit a narrative, like declaring simplistically that the Constitution was designed to perpetuate White supremacy and protect the institution of slavery. No nuance. No objectivity.
Following this logic, if you believe Trump is a threat, it follows that his supporters are threats. That actually sounds familiar. You could almost say that it sounds like … well … the lizard brain.
An article headlined “Why Your Lizard Brain is Keeping You Stuck and Specific Tools To Start Connecting” could be distributed as a self-help guide for network analysts.
The article states:
“When you’re acting in one of these fear-based modes — whether you fight, flee or freeze — you can’t remember any of the great communication tools you’ve learned or the tips or strategies you’ve been practicing because you can’t access the part of the brain where that stuff is saved! Brain imaging has shown that when the amygdala is activated by negative emotions, it actually interferes with the brain’s ability to solve problems (or figure out how to get unstuck). But here’s the good news: positive emotions and thoughts do the opposite; they help you with creative problem-solving and strategic thinking.”
In other words, it is possible that tens of millions of voters are not lizard people, but people with opposing views. Yet, once Trump supporters are shown or discussed, it triggers these intense negative emotions in analysts who respond with fight and flight impulses.
Once you accept that, you can access parts of “the brain where that stuff is saved” from your training and your scholarship. You know. Like history.
A couple of recurring conspiracy theory themes keep being circulated to me, they are specific to Canada but I’m sure these are typical across all locations. I find these maddening because there is plenty of factual, well sourced and scientifically verified counterfactuals to draw from when being critical of the near universal mishandling of pandemic response by national governments worldwide.
For lockdown skeptics, embracing or amplifying fact-free hysterical conspiracy theories makes them look like lunatics, so they should stop doing that.
Allow me to dispense with the two big Canuck-themed conspiracy theories and then inject some much needed sanity into the conversation via a recent Triggernometry podcast with guest Ivor Cummins.
These conspiracies are:
#1) The Federal Government RFP to build “internment camps”
It sounds bad, doesn’t it. “Federal Quarantine / Isolation Sites” you mean like this kind of thing, nationally?
That’s actually a screen grab from Amazon’s Utopia series, which is a reboot of an earlier BBC series by the same name. I haven’t finished watching the Amazon version, but the BBC was originally about an elite cabal’s conspiracy to depopulate the planet by creating a false pandemic and then releasing a vaccine that would make people who took it, sterile. Pretty far out, huh?
Anyhoo, back to reality and the Canadian RFP for “The Interment Camps”. If you actually read the tender, you would see that the specification calls for bids to provide “Lodging for up to 1600 people spread across Canada”.
1600 people. Nationwide. And mostly in hotel rooms. You can argue whether or not the government has the right to detain people in the midst of a public health crisis. You can even debate if COVID-19 really would be a public health crisis if cooler heads prevailed (more on that below).
What you can’t argue, is that lodging for 1600 people, nationwide, are “internment camps”, because they’re not.
Apparently MPP Randy Hillier asked about this in Parliament “and was kicked out of the caucus for asking about them”. Nice try, Hillier did bring it up in provincial session. But he had already been kicked out of the PC’s in 2019 for mocking autistic children. He now sits as an independent (as a friend of mine far more plugged into Conservative politics once remarked to me “I often wonder myself where do we actually get these clowns from?” He was referring to career politicians in general).
#2) Liberal Party Whistleblower leaks “Great Reset” plan to end private property globally
I see this one more on social media, it purports to be a leak from a Liberal Party whistleblower which was posted to an indie website nobody had ever heard of before this, and a lot more people have heard of since. I won’t link to it here.
It outlines a plan from within the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) “Strategic Planning Committee” to begin introducing more lockdowns this fall, and then faced with the emergence of with a new strain of COVID in 2021 (“COVID-21”) engineer, in concert with national governments worldwide, a global economic collapse. The collapse would be followed by a debt jubilee and the implementation of UBI, with recipients of debt relief and UBI renouncing their claim on private property for the remainder of their lives.
All of this based on an anonymous email (purportedly) sent from a throw-away protonmail account. As I pointed out to the first few people who sent me this, it is so absent of corroboration or attribution that believing it is entirely, 100% faith based. It is totally devoid of evidence.
I can tell you that the only references to the PMOs “Strategic Planning Committee” seem to be in connection with this purported leak. It’s almost as if it doesn’t really exist and it’s not a thing. In Canada, committees are convened by the House of Commons, not the PMO (although it’s possible they informally call their groupings “committees”). The list of House of Commons Committees is here, and there is no Strategic Planning Committee in the list.
I can also tell you that wiping out everybody’s debt also wipes out a lot of other people’s assets, and most of those people whose assets are other people’s debts are: banks, pension funds, endowments and other forms of Big Money. And I don’t think they would sit still for a political drive to wipe out gigantic chunks of their assets. I’ve said it before, and plan to expand on it in the future: “Thank God for Big Money”. Because if you can count on at least one class of participants to act semi-rationally when faced with uncertain outcomes and trade-offs, it’s that.
Now it’s understandable that these kinds of rumours would run rampant, with the likes of the Davos crew in The World Economic Forum calling for using the COVID-19 pandemic as a type of “Great Reset”
…as I remarked on Facebook, it is hard not to imagine Herr Von Schwab delivering this speech wearing a monocle and a red armband.
Yet all this posturing is endemic to the type of catabolic collapse the existing power and institutional structures are facing today. As Jesse and Charles and myself frequently observe in our Axis Of Easy podcasts, we are transitioning from the Age of Nation States into an era of Network States and while it is too early to tell what this going to look like, today’s political class and plutocrats are trying hard to make sure they’re still the ones in charge after this huge tectonic phase shift.
Usually however, that doesn’t happen. When societies transition from one form of organizational structure to another, leadership changes as well. That could be why there is such a push to the hoop to keep a lid on things “as they are” over these past few years and the polarization and disarray is simply the old order turning into dust in the wind...
Enough conspiracy, let’s stick to data and science to end the lockdowns...
There is no shortage of science and data to challenge the flawed policies of the nation states whose basic playbook has been: lockdown, close economy, print money, ignore data, and double down.
This may be a good time to quickly outline my arc of how my views on the pandemic shifted over time.
My journey from Zombie Apocalypse to lockdown skeptic
I began monitoring the reports of a new virus emerging out of China in January. On January 23rd I emailed a friend advising him to go out tomorrow and pick up some N95 masks, and by the first week of February I was stocking up food, medical supplies, cash, and weapons. I was expecting a full breakdown of the global supply chain and a collapse of the global economy.
Based on early reported numbers of an R0 around 3.1 with an IFR of 5%, it looked like we’d see doubling times of 15 days. By March all three levels of government, city, province and national were reporting case rates and fatalities daily. I put together a spreadsheet and using those numbers as a model I forecasted Toronto to have 1.7M cases by the end of June. If the IFR really was 5%, or even 3%, it would mean between 51,000 and 136,000 fatalities.
This was terrifying, so as the world started locking down, it seemed to make sense. In fact I was wondering why we were still allowing inbound flights from hotspots like China? There were rumblings from The Clerisy like the New York Times that blocking flights from China would be racist. This was the early innings of the politicization that was to follow.
But then, a curious thing happened. The rate of change in infections and fatalities started coming down, drastically.
By June it was clear to anybody following the data that this was, at least for now, largely in the rearview mirror. I had been in touch with an old friend who now ran IT for several hospitals. In January he was trying to get administrators to take COVID seriously. By May, they had built 4 additional ICUs across the hospitals and they were sitting empty. Worse, resources were being denied to other medical uses. He was beginning to wonder if maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as we both originally thought.
Then, over the summer despite the clear slowdown in the severity of the pandemic, the policy response to it intensified. And then it all became political. Questioning the efficacy of continuing the lockdowns became associated with being alt-right. Pro-Trump. Or worse. A Narrative War ensued. If you questioned official policy, you got deplatformed. I documented numerous instances of this over on AxisOfEasy.
Now we’re in the fall and the case counts are back up and Second Wave Hysteria is in full effect. The only problem is, the fatality rate is on the floor. Another problem is this shouldn’tbe a problem. It should be good news!
The fatalities are up slightly with the season, but nowhere close to tracking the case counts as they did in wave 1. This could be for a number of reasons (more testing, the most vulnerable were hit in wave 1, etc) but no matter how you slice it, the graphs pretty well everywhere look like this:
That spike on the deaths chart in early October was from a data adjustment from the previous 75 days. Source here.
In this case, we’re talking about the Province of Ontario, which has to date nearly 70,000 cases total and slightly over 3,000 deaths. Nothing like the 1.7M cases and 50K to 136K fatalities my original model predicted.
What does that mean?
It means my model was wrong!
Which is ok, and fortunate, in fact. Now I’m not an epidemiologist, so I’m allowed to get my models wrong. But what I did do, that policy makers and experts are not doing, is re-examining the premises in the face of new data.
The Imperial College / Neal Ferguson model that inspired much of the global lockdowns is an extreme example of this. It turned out to be total shitcode, but it hasn’t impacted the policy response. Not one bit.
There is no justification for more lockdowns
Which brings us to the Triggernometry podcast I mentioned above, which I never did get around to adequately explaining. It’s a great conversation with those merry comics Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster and their guest this episode: biological engineer Ivor Cummins.
When you challenge the prevailing orthodoxy around anything COVID, it’s not uncommon for people to hysterically shriek at you that have to follow science and look at the data! Well, that’s what Cumins has done and here’s the upshot of what he (and many others) have found:
We should not have locked down over the summer. With cases and fatalities down it was the ideal time to let the virus spread amongst the low risk population to get further toward herd immunity.
Forcing mask wearing at the nadir of the pandemic (the summer) was a flawed policy that leaves no exit strategy. We’re basically in masks forever now.
40 years of published science indicates that masks (especially surgical and cloth masks, as opposed to N95) don’t make much of a difference when it comes to these types of pathogens, but four or five hastily rushed papers from over the summer of this year say otherwise.
The argument against pursuing a herd immunity strategy because of the so-called “long timers”, people who get COVID, and experience ongoing, long term and possibly life long effects is not a compelling argument. Statistically these cases are low, but more importantly they are not unique to COVID-19. We always have these edge cases with long term effects in seasonal flus and other diseases.
The fatality curve is playing out along established patterns regardless of whether their were lockdowns or not.
The first lockdown was understandable. A second one is completely unjustified.
Unfortunately what has happened is this has become about politics and ideology instead of public health. The real world, long term health effects of lockdowns and a crashed economy, the mental health issues, suicide, domestic violence and substance abuse are very real, and have now surpassed the damage being caused by the virus itself. I seem to remember two doctors in California who warned this would happen who were deplatformed and vilified for saying it.
The science and the data are out there, but those who push it forward are frequently accused of “reading what they want to see in the data”. If you revisit the two charts I posted above, that clearly show how case counts have diverged from fatalities, which are flat, I was told exactly that by people when I posted those charts a month ago.
Them: You’re just seeing what you want in that data.
Me: Aren’t these two curves clearly diverging, and one is flat?
Them: Just wait two weeks.
Me: Aren’t you literally extrapolating what you want to see in the data by saying that?
Them: These alt-right denialists are too much.
Well the two weeks, four weeks, six weeks everybody keeps telling me to wait for their extrapolation to kick in have come and gone and we can clearly see that the worst of the COVID-19 induced destruction is in the rear-view mirror. If the numbers change and new data emerges that changes things, I will modify my opinion accordingly. That’s the way it’s supposed work.
But we live in an age where policy makers working off of hypothetical models and career politicians with zero real world experience no economic skin in the game are egged on by billionaire monopolists philanthropists and their pet projects in narcissism re-imagining society. They don’t know how to do anything other than double-down on failure while everybody else bears the consequences.
We need to reopen the economy and start picking up the pieces from all the other collateral damage we’ve caused.
Here is the entire Triggernometry video, I highly recommend watching it and circulating it among your colleagues.
