René Magritte The menaced assassin 1927
McCullough
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487229999262412804
Merck’s COVID-19 pill encourages sexually actively men “to use a reliable method of contraception correctly and consistently during treatment and for at least 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir. The risk beyond 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir is unknown”
Peak deaths in reality on 21 Jan were 92% below the prediction of SAGE should Boris not introduce more restrictions before Xmas. Their peak was 2,890 around 21 Jan and reality is closer to 200 deaths.
German about UK research
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487363763774787588
“We’re done with the mandates, were done with the government telling us what to do, we will continue and we will follow just like the rest of the world on these trucker protests, and they will be 100 percent legal, they will abide by the law.”
• ‘Government Overreach Is Coming to an End’ (ET)
American truckers protesting against vaccine mandates and government overreach have been joining a record-breaking Canadian convoy of tens of thousands of vehicles headed to Ottawa. Brian Von D, the administrator at “Convoy to DC 2022” announced that they will “join forces” to ride from California to Washington, adding that “America is next.” “As [the Canadian convoy] moved from the west to the east, [the American truckers] have been filtering into this convoy, and it is absolutely massive. It is known worldwide, it is the largest thus far,” he said in a live video on Facebook. Tens of thousands of vehicles were reported to have departed from all parts of Canada. A large number from the United States have been joining along the way. Brian clarified that some numbers “running around” on social media about the trucks joining the convoy are not correct.
Support truckers
Support truckers!! pic.twitter.com/UzyCp73zbf
— Jack Posobiec ☦️ (@JackPosobiec) January 29, 2022
“A post says 100,000 to 5,000. Those aren’t correct. Somebody made those numbers up. There’s no way for us to put a number on exactly how many United States trucks have gone over there.” Speaking about the upcoming U.S. convoy, he said “it will start in California and it will end in DC and we’re gonna stay there, just like Canada is doing,” Brian said. “You’re gonna have your main artery … everybody will join in as they go down the interstate to DC.” He added that dates and planned routes would be released soon on a website and various social media platforms, and a GoFundMe page would only be released on their CONVOY TO DC 2022 Facebook page. “We’re done with the mandates, were done with the government telling us what to do, we will continue and we will follow just like the rest of the world on these trucker protests, and they will be 100 percent legal, they will abide by the law.”
Brian added that nobody has been kicked out of the convoy so far for failing to abide by agreed-upon terms. “It’s been a unity that I’ve never seen before, not anywhere in the north. Canada has definitely shown that—the most peaceful protest in the convoy I have seen to date,” Brian further stated. “America, it’s your turn, it’s your turn to step up and show what you’re made of. “We don’t care what side you’re on, we don’t care where you’re from, if you live in America, in Canada, or anywhere you may come from, we’re doing it for you,” he said. Businesses of different sizes, as well as families in the two countries, have helped the convoys with food, shelter, and gas.
CBC Russia
If chlamydia could talk…
— MAX (@maxkeiser) January 29, 2022
From the Toronto Sun. Must be the only Canadian paper that doesn’t cheerlead Trudeau.
• Media’s Handling Of Trucker Convoy One-sided, Inflammatory, Shameful (Lilley)
Run for your lives, the barbarians are at the gates! That pretty much sums up the reaction of most in the Canadian media to the trucker convoy that has been winding its way across the country for the last week before descending upon Ottawa on Saturday. If you haven’t heard, this protest is destined to become Canada’s January 6th, the storming of the American capital that took place just over a year ago. Where did the idea come from that people involved in the convoy wanted to attempt a violent overthrow of the Canadian government? It wasn’t from any of the organizers, it was an anonymous comment made online and referenced by Global News in one of their reports. It was enough to set the tone of the coverage for days to come — these are violent extremists. Beware!
I’ve covered all kinds of political protests from the Summit of the Americas riots in Quebec City to riots in Montreal, violent protests in Ottawa and the Idle No More campaign that took hold near Parliament Hill for weeks. Never have I seen our national media, led by those on Parliament Hill, spend so much time digging into the comments and views of a group of people trying to find those they can demonize. Yes, some supporters have been using terms like fascist and Nazi to describe the government. That’s far from accurate, regardless of your political views, but do you take that extreme rhetoric and pin it on the organizers of the convoy? Those terms are thrown at me by supporters of the Trudeau government on a daily basis and I don’t pin that on the PM and his cabinet.
People have lost all sense of decorum online and immediately jump to extreme rhetoric. It happens on all sides. Normally though, journalists will say that organizers of a protest want a peaceful protest even as extreme elements threaten violence. That isn’t happening with this protest because it’s not one most in the media like or understand — it’s a group of people they look down upon. The media in this country is not acting as a neutral observer and conduit for news on this matter, most have decided the trucker convoy is the enemy and are treating it as such. Watch any of the news networks or, more importantly, read the Twitter accounts of supposedly objective journalists, or listen to the contempt in their voices as they ask questions to see that they have clearly taken sides.
When Trudeau referred to the convoy as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” the journalists covering him didn’t push back and ask him why he would use such language. They just moved along. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has faced more difficult questions on this front at every step than Trudeau has. Apparently, the journalists on Parliament Hill these days think their job is to hold the opposition and not the government to account. It also appears their job to support some protest movements and attack others based on the personal preferences of the journalists. The line between columnists and commentators, like myself, and supposedly neutral, objective reporters gets blurrier by the day. The behaviour of Canada’s media from reporters to news anchors, show hosts to editors, has been shameful over the past few weeks. Can we really be shocked that public trust in the media continues to fall?
Ottawa live cams
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487514289791545346
Very instructive.
Those paying attention will already know that we have been deceived over covid numbers thanks to PCR false positives, “died of” vs. “died with” confusion and a “case” definition that, in the UK, has included literally millions of perfectly healthy people. Grossly inflated counts have been used to mess with people’s minds and direct opinion. Now we have vaccines. Did you think the authorities would suddenly start playing it straight? This 10 minute video aims to identify three specific ways in which the performance of the covid vaccines has been misrepresented. Tricks have been played.
“permanent ‘state of exception.’”
• Truth or Covid? -or, “Why We Know Everything They’re Telling Us Is A Lie”- (OffG)
In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all. That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.
The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended.
That’s why the COVID coup began, in my own country, with declarations of an “emergency” in four-fifths of the states – and why, with very rare exceptions, those “states of emergency” remain in effect to this day, nearly two years later. Again, this cannot be explained away as a response to a respiratory virus. When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm – and this is even more emphatically true when virtually no one in the political opposition, the civil rights bar or the mainstream media so much as mentions this fundamental fact.
My point is that those of us who recognize what is happening are going to have to shift our tactics. We can no longer attack COVID19 propaganda in piecemeal fashion, challenging one medical falsehood at a time. That approach, I’m afraid, is likely to be self-defeating. As long as we focus on disproving each particular COVID “narrative,” the Infallible Ones can continue to manage the debate in mass media as a conflict between the interpretations of “experts” and those of “conspiracy theorists.” And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must be resisted accordingly.
Always wondered why Redfield was replaced by Wolensky. Or rather, why he didn’t cry foul a lot louder.
• Fauci-Shaped Paper on Origins of COVID-19 ‘Antithetical to Science’ (ET)
The claim that the virus that causes COVID-19 definitely was not from a laboratory, put forth in a paper quietly shaped by Dr. Anthony Fauci that was cited by other scientists who called the lab idea a “conspiracy theory,” was “antithetical to science,” a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director says. “The purpose of science is to have rigorous debate about different hypotheses. I’ve never really experienced in my life where there was private telephone calls among scientists that had a decision on what position they would take collectively, and to see that position then published in a scientific journal like Lancet, to say that individuals that thought like myself, had a different scientific hypothesis, somehow had to be put down and viewed as conspirators, this is really antithetical to science,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the agency’s head until Jan. 20, 2021, said during a Jan. 26 appearance on Fox News.
Emails recently made public show that Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), played a key role in shaping a paper published by Nature in early 2020. The authors, most of whom messaged repeatedly with Fauci, joined him on a teleconference shortly before the paper was published, and have since received millions from Fauci’s agency, claimed that their analyses “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The Nature article was one of those cited by EcoHealth Alliance founder Peter Daszak and a separate group of scientists in an article later published in The Lancet. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” wrote Daszak, whose group funneled money from Fauci’s agency to scientists in Wuhan, China, and the other authors.
Many experts later acknowledged there’s no clear evidence that the CCP virus has a natural origin, and some have said the bulk of the evidence points to it coming from the set of laboratories in Wuhan. Redfield is one of them. “I don’t think it’s biologically plausible that this virus emerged from a bat to some intermediate species into humans and became one of the most transmissible viruses that we know in human disease. This virus clearly had a detour and that detour was being educated how to infect human tissue in the laboratory. I think that’s the most plausible explanation,” he told Fox.
“..vaccinated people do not appear to form antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein, the envelope of the virus, which is an important part of the response in unvaccinated people.”
• The Story of N-Antibodies And Why They Are So Important (Kirsch)
UCSF Professor Aditi Bhargava brought up the issue with N-antibodies in November of 2021. People have been too quick to dismiss her concern. In its Week 42 “COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report” (published 21 October 2021), the UK Department of Health admits on page 23 that “recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination.” What does this mean? It means that the vaccine interferes with the body’s ability to make antibodies after infection against other parts of the virus.
In particular, vaccinated people do not appear to form antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein, the envelope of the virus, which is an important part of the response in unvaccinated people. The observation may explain why the vaccines actually produce negative efficacy as was shown in the Denmark study, for example. Reuters did a “fact check” on this concerning observation and, as expected, found nothing wrong. Who’d have guessed? They said that since the S-protein response was so robust, your body had no need to mount a robust N-antibody response. Not so fast… this is hardly a “known effect.” This seems more like a hand-waving argument to me. In checking with the experts I knew, nobody was aware of this being something to simply ignore.
This is why Professor Bhargava voiced her concerns in her blog on November 3, 2021: New studies from the British Health Ministry suggests that COVID vaccines might interfere with the ability of our immune system to produce antibodies against other parts of the virus, crucial aspect for developing cross protection The data agrees with her: it is showing the vaccines are producing negative efficacy and making our bodies more susceptible to being infected with other diseases including cancers and shingles (see Incriminating Evidence for references). She also said in that same article, “Ideally, no one should be tested unless they have symptoms.” I couldn’t agree more with that statement.
Fired for being unvaxxed, she set up her own clinic.
• How a Sarasota Nurse Practitioner Saved Covid Lives Without Vaccines (Walsh)
What happened next, over the next twelve months, was a dizzying and exhilarating— sometimes harrowing—24/7 whirlwind, with Hamalian deep in the treacherous trenches and on the frontlines of covid-19. With her and husband’s savings, they took an all-or-nothing risk and opened her own family practice in Sarasota. From July 2021 to mid-January 2022, Hamalian and her Latitude Clinic have treated 1,092 covid patients. For most of them, she prescribed the much-disparaged drug, ivermectin, and to all of them the treatment protocols of the much-disparaged doctors of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Her results would shame mainstream medicine: Only one of Hamalian’s patients died.
None was intubated. None was put on a ventilator. Only ten were hospitalized. The one who died was a man of advanced age with multiple end-stage cormorbities. Hamalian says, except for the one deceased patient, “all are better and have returned to their normal lives. Some of the long-haul patients we are still working with and do not know if they will recover to 100 percent of the pre-covid health. Most of our long-haul patients say they have recovered completely. Most that are not fully recovered say they are 70 percent to 90 percent improved so far.”
More hospitals willing to let people die. Even children. What about Hippocrates? FIRST, do no harm!
Parents DID get vaxxed in the end, but then had to wait 6 weeks, big risk to their child. Offered to let friends accompany the kid, but “all children undergoing such procedures must be accompanied by their guardians”.
• Child With Unvaccinated Parents to Receive Transplant in Greece (GR)
A child from Cyprus who was refused a heart transplant in Germany because his parents are unvaccinated will have the procedure in Greece. Due to be transported by air ambulance to Germany for the procedure, the three year old was taken off the transplantation list for a new heart because of the unvaccinated status of his parents. He was then hospitalized in Nicosia’s Makarios Hospital with serious heart disease, after he was denied treatment in Germany because his parents were not vaccinated against the coronavirus. Although they later agreed to become inoculated, six weeks would need to go by before they could be considered completely vaccinated. The three-year old was flown to Greece Saturday afternoon in order to have the procedure at the pediatric clinic of the Mitera Hospital in Athens. Dr. Giorgos Sarris will conduct the operation.
According to Dr. Avraam Elia, the head of the Makarios hospital’s pediatrics clinic where the child was hospitalized, both of his parents have since received the first shot of a two-dose vaccine. The boy was supposed to have been placed upon an air transport bound for a hospital in Germany that specializes in cardiology on Thursday morning. But the family received late word that the child’s organ transplant will not take place on Thursday, with the German institution canceling the lifesaving procedure. Hospital officials insist that they cannot accept the patient if his parents are unvaccinated — even if he is accompanied on the trip by other people who are vaccinated. According to reports in the Cyprus Mail, the German institution held firm to its policy that all children undergoing such procedures must be accompanied by their guardians in these cases.
“..Lavrov said on Friday that NATO’s written response to Moscow’s security proposals, in which the bloc is said to have dismissed Russia’s key concerns, was “embarrassing.”
• NATO Knows Truth About Russia ‘Invasion’ Plans – Source (RT)
Despite weeks of escalating tensions and claims that Russian troops and tanks could begin streaming over the border into Ukraine at a moment’s notice, Moscow doesn’t actually appear to be masterminding an invasion of its neighbor, a top NATO official has reportedly admitted. The senior figure, who represents an EU member state in the bloc’s Brussels HQ has told pan-European news outlet Euractiv that they believe Russia is not on the verge of starting a military incursion into Ukraine. “To invade such a large country with such military forces [like Ukraine], you need military capabilities other than those that have been currently deployed,” the source said.
The unnamed source also added that the US-led bloc is neither legally bound to militarily intervene in Ukraine, nor does it have “the right” to do so, because Ukraine is not a member of NATO. The country is still the bloc’s “partner of increased opportunities,” the source said, which means NATO has “some moral obligations” to sanction Russia in case of an aggression against Kiev. At the same time, the official argued that it may be a good idea if the West “pulled Ukraine’s ear a bit,” as there are some in Kiev adding fuel to the fire and risking provocations. “There are also problems in Ukraine; who is in power, who has the upper hand in the army…” the source went on.
Western countries have accused Russia of massing troops and military hardware along the frontier with the intention of attacking its neighbor, claims which Russia has consistently denied. Moscow, in turn, sees Western military infrastructure close to its borders as a threat and wants legal assurances that the NATO will not expand further eastward, effectively barring Kiev from membership. The bloc has rejected this demand, pointing to its stated ‘open-door policy’ and maintaining Kiev should have the right to aspire to membership. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday that NATO’s written response to Moscow’s security proposals, in which the bloc is said to have dismissed Russia’s key concerns, was “embarrassing.”
“..how will the platform react if a barrage of artists starts to make similar threats?”
• Spotify Has Become The Battleground For Big Tech’s Censorship Civil War (QTR)
This week, the decrepit clutches of cancel culture continued their “war” against Rogan (read: open minded discussion) in the form of 76 year old aging rock star Neil Young, who threatened to pull his catalog of music – which he doesn’t even fully own the rights to – from Spotify as a result of what he calls “misinformation” being presented on Rogan’s show. Now that we’ve redefined “controversial” as “open minded discussion”, it’s also crucial we redefine “misinformation”. Nowadays, “misinformation” means any utterance of thoughts that weren’t handed down directly from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the mainstream media or global elites and central planners. In response to Young’s temper tantrum this week, Spotify did precisely nothing and, at Young’s request, deftly pulled the artist’s music from their platform.
Perhaps feeling defeated by Spotify’s common sense decision, or perhaps motivated by the perverse amount of press Young received for his “declaration against misinformation”, a second septuagenarian former rocker, 78 year old Joni Mitchell, also joined the fray and threatened to pull her music from Spotify, as well. As her reasoning for the ultimatum, Mitchell claimed that “irresponsible people are spreading lies”. At first, I thought maybe she had looked back on the “official” declarations that cloth masks would work against the virus, vaccinations would end Covid altogether and that ivermectin was nothing more than veterinary horse paste. Instead, it turns out she, too, was referring to Rogan’s podcast.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people threatening to pull their music from Spotify are extremely wealthy. Mitchell has an estimated net worth of $100 million and Young has an estimated net worth of $200 million. [..] Young and Mitchell were immense successes because they tapped into the same vein of American culture that Rogan now resides in: the incessant need to hear “the other side of the story” from what “the man” was preaching. Whether the dialogue is about protesting the Vietnam war or Covid lockdowns is moot: these are the issues of our respective generations. The irony is uncanny, if you can zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Joe Rogan is now what these artists used to be: an iconoclast.
My guess is that more aging rockers may also follow suit and that, even if they don’t, the fever pitch to censor Joe Rogan is going to be dialed up even further for Spotify. Many people may be thinking we have seen what Spotify is made of in its decision to tell Neil Young to go pound sand; but how will the platform react if a barrage of artists starts to make similar threats?
Brief history of cancel culture.
• The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan (Greenwald)
When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont’s heating system and Putin’s sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being “Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is “disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID’s origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die.
Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely. This “disinformation” term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of “disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.
The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.
[..] The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline. “Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” warned the Post. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be.
James C. Goodale is the former general counsel and vice chairman of the New York Times and the author of “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.”
• UK Court Should Slap Down US Justice Department In The Assange Case (Goodale)
As the lead attorney for the New York Times in the “Pentagon Papers” case in 1971, I’ve been doing a slow burn ever since over the government’s behavior in that instance: lies, disregard of court rules, arrogance, destruction of documents. All of this was brought to mind earlier this week when a British court hinted in the Julian Assange case that the U.S. government has acted in the same way once again. It asked Britain’s supreme court to determine the appropriateness of a late filing by the government that completely undercut a ruling that Assange could NOT be extradited to the U.S. This followed British trial court Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who was hearing Assange’s extradition case, ruling that Assange might commit suicide if held in a U.S. prison in solitary confinement under what is called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) and, so, he could not be extradited.
As soon as she announced her decision, the U.S. government filed assurances that Assange would not be held in that kind of detention, although it reserved the right to revoke the assurance if circumstances changed. The judge was unmoved by this assurance, but she was reversed on appeal. The U.K.’s supreme court has now asked to consider the timeliness of this filing. I do not believe the U.S. government’s assurances are worth the paper on which they have been written. Its behavior in this case has been rampant. Most outrageously, the CIA discussed a plot to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was holed up, and to kill him. The CIA also tapped into conversations in the Ecuadorian Embassy, including those with Assange’s lawyers.
There is not much question whether all of this is true. There was testimony about it in open court, and Mike Pompeo, the CIA director at the time and later secretary of State during the Trump administration, has conceded that there is “some truth” in the foregoing. I do not pretend to be particularly familiar with the extradition laws of the U.K. But common sense tells me that you deliver highly important documents about a case — such as government assurances — before the case begins, not after it has been decided. U.K. counsel representing the U.S. disagrees, saying he can deliver documents when he wants and if he loses the appeal, he will start the extradition proceedings all over again.
Bad morning
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487439987889086467
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