Corporate Overlords Steady Creeping To Throttle Last Vestiges Of Peasant Dissent

zerohedge  |  A Senate bill is raising fears among some for its potential to enable Big Tech and mainstream media outlets to collude against smaller and independent media outlets.

The bill, dubbed the Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), would supersede some existing antitrust laws and allow media companies to band together to negotiate with Big Tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Specifically, the JCPA says:

“A news content creator may not be held liable under the antitrust laws for engaging in negotiations with any other news content creator during the 4-year period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act to collectively withhold content from, or negotiate with, an online content distributor regarding the terms on which the news content of the news content creator may be distributed by the online content distributor.”

In brief, this means that online and print media outlets, including some of the largest and longest-established names in the industry, could band together in a kind of media union to demand concessions from tech companies in order for the coalition to continue to allow their content on the platform. Under existing antitrust laws, such cartels—which describe a collusion of firms in an industry to join together for a common financial or industry outcome—are decidedly illegal.

Proponents of the JCPA have presented it as a much-needed panacea to address dwindling numbers of dedicated local media companies who, proponents say, are often left behind in the umbrella of Big Tech algorithms and advertising capacity.

In a change.org petition that has garnered over 23,000 signatures, the News Media Alliance, one of the most outspoken supporters of the bill, explained this position, presenting it as a hardline position against the reach of big tech power and influence.

“Today, many local newspapers are struggling to stay in business. Big Tech platforms, such as Facebook and Google, control how we access trustworthy news online and how journalism is displayed, prioritized, and monetized. They capture the vast majority of all digital advertising dollars because of their outsized ability to collect consumer data.

“Local newspaper revenues have gone down and as a result, thousands of journalists have been laid off, ‘news deserts’ are emerging across the country, and dangerous misinformation that threatens the fabric of our democracy continues to flourish.”

But opponents of the bill have raised alarm bells, warning that in practice the policy will only serve to benefit established legacy and mainstream outlets, to the exclusion of anti-establishment, independent publications.

Specifically, opponents point to a section of an updated draft of the JCPA that could effectively permit legacy media cartels to demand that tech platforms censor or outright refuse to permit newer, less-established media outlets from publishing on the platform.

 

World's Largest Purveyor Of State Sponsored Terrorism And Political Assassination

warontherocks |  today’s growing wave of assassination attempts has crossed ideologies. Certain adherents of the far left have been responsible for attempts on the Republican baseball practice and more recently Justice Kavanaugh. But the far-right is also active in this space and was responsible for the most recent successful high-level political assassination in the country: the killing of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, state senator of South Carolina, at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015. Jihadists often place prominent figures in their crosshairs, as demonstrated by a recently disrupted plot against George W. Bush. Even the more nascent male supremacist movement has its targets: A so-called “men’s rights activist” attacked the home of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas in July 2020, killing her son.

The emerging trend is due in no small part to the reemergence of so-called “accelerationism” as a distinct violent extremist strategy. For extremists seeking to sow chaos and speed up some cataclysmic societal collapse, high-profile politicians provide an attractive target, as symbols of the mainstream liberal political order. “We need to kill the HVT’s,” one poster wrote on Telegram in August 2019, using a military acronym for high-value target. “When a popular HVT is gunned down, it inspires hope and dreams.” The COVID pandemic then added fuel to the fire as public officials were blamed and then threatened for the lockdowns and enforced quarantines. Targets ranged from prominent health officials like cerebral National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as many other lower-level state officials responsible for the imposition of these extraordinary public health measures. Fauci was forced into constant law enforcement protection because of threats against his life — which was only a prelude to the death threats and serial harassment that now routinely are directed against local and state election officials.

Political assassinations are uniquely suited to tear at the country’s social fabric. For starters, they force opposing politicians and voters into an apparently awkward dilemma between condemning hatred and violence and seeming to renege on their own political positions — a situation Democrats did not handle particularly well after the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life. As Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco stated in June in response to that attempted attack, “We can’t come together on this topic without acknowledging and condemning the appalling rise in violence that we have seen from a range of ideologies directed at public officials.” But they also risk dissuading good people, across the political spectrum, from running for public office and participating in a vibrant American democracy. Indeed, perhaps the most damning element of the January 6 commission hearings has been the broadcasting of the threats issued against everyday public servants, such as Georgia’s election workers. The Department of Justice recently announced it has opened around 110 federal criminal investigations into “contacts reported as hostile or harassing by the election community.” “A common refrain I hear from my members is that nobody is going to take this seriously until something bad happens, and we are all braced for the worst,” the National Association of State Election Directors executive director warned in recent written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Until recently, this was not a field you went into thinking it could cost you your life.”

Heightening the threat yet further is a growing tendency for assailants to use untraceable or even homemade weaponry as part of violent plots — as seen in the assassination of Abe, in which the assassin used a fully homemade shotgun to evade Japan’s stringent gun laws. The crude attack was reminiscent of failed drone attacks against political leaders in Venezuela and Iraq and may be indicative of an emerging era in which more widely accessible tools are weaponized in these strikes against individuals — again, regardless of the motivating ideology. Cruder technology lowers the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing even untrained or unprepared extremists — such as Zeldin’s assailant, who, despite being an Army veteran, used a personal protection device disguised as a cat-shaped keychain in his assault — to attempt serious plots. As Colin Clarke and Joseph Shelzi write, “The proliferation of emerging personal technologies like drones, 3-D-printed weapons, and other innovations will likely open the door for more attacks against high-profile figures in the future.”

We live in an age of heightened political tensions, when political decisions are often seen as existential crises, and where elections, therefore, carry perceived life-or-death stakes. With a midterm around the corner, a former president under investigation, and major upheavals occurring on hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control, extremists inclined to violence will be increasingly likely to lash out. The situation is only made more serious by the seeming consent a faction of the political right has offered to would-be assassins, including a Florida State House candidate who was recently expelled from Twitter for writing, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight! Let freedom ring!” The conceit that fuels these would-be assassins’ fanaticism and feeds their egos poses a considerable and growing danger to civil servants and political figures across the political spectrum — at a time when mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, cinemas, and other public venues have already become an increasingly frequent occurrence. “The system was blinking red,” Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet famously told the 9/11 Commission describing the months before September 2001 — a sentiment which feels pertinent again now.

Carol Crawford Is The CDC's Censorship And Disinformation Czar

stevekirsch  |  Carol Crawford is the person at the CDC responsible for censoring misinformation spreaders.

In this video, I make a call to her to propose a way to end misinformation.

At the end of the call, I remind her that she is engaging in illegal acts by telling social media companies what content to censor. See page 7 for her message to Twitter showing them what to censor.

Twitter follows orders, even though Carol is breaking the law. They aren’t going to turn her in. On the contrary, they are in on it. This is collusion to censor free speech.

If you’d like to tell her you support my suggestion, you can reach her at ccrawford@cdc.gov.

I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you.

You Tube censored my video within minutes of posting

I also uploaded the video on YouTube, but it was censored after just 6 views! YouTube will censor anything that makes the government look bad. So if you document government corruption, YouTube is not the place to post it.

Truth Is Treason In An Empire Of Lies

caitlinjohnstone |  The empire has had mixed feelings about the internet since its creation. On one hand it allows for unprecedented surveillance and information gathering and the rapid distribution of propaganda, which it likes, but on the other it allows for the unprecedented democratization of information, which it doesn’t like.

Its answer to this quandary has been to come up with “fact checking” services and Silicon Valley censorship protocols for restricting “misinformation” (with “facts” and “information” defined as “whatever advances imperial interests”). That’s all we’re seeing with continually expanding online censorship policies, and with government-tied oligarchic narrative management operations like NewsGuard.

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

 

 

Leadership Comparison: Russian vs. NATO Leadership In Ukraine

stratpol  |  Response to Mr. Myard, on the United States / Russia confrontation in Ukraine.

If a good part of your analysis on the risks of the Ukrainian conflict getting out of hand seems correct to me, I come back to the sentence: “The information provided by the Americans was decisive in countering the Russian advance, of which the army proved incapable. to adapt, due to outdated military concepts.”

Former "Situation-Intelligence-Electronic Warfare" Chief of the Joint Operational Planning Staff, I do not at all share this part of the analysis which is based on an inaccurate "situation assessment" which is, in fact, the conclusion from a biased Atlanticist position, aimed at making the Ukrainians believe that Russia is weak, in order to push Ukraine to resist until the end and let it envisage, with Western help, a victory. Here is my argument:

Until proven otherwise, Russia has not declared a partial and even less general mobilization of its forces to carry out this “special operation”. As part of Operation Z, it has so far used only 12% of its soldiers (professionals or volunteers), 10% of its fighter planes, 7% of its tanks, 5% of its missiles and 4% of its artillery. Everyone will observe that the behavior of the Western ruling elites is, until now, much more feverish and hysterical, than the behavior of the Russian governance, calmer, more placid, more determined, more sure and master of itself, of his action and his speech. These are facts.

Russia has therefore not made use of its immense reserves (reserves which hardly exist any more in the EU). She has more than a week's worth of ammunition as she demonstrates every day in the field. We are not so lucky in the West where the shortage of ammunition, the obsolescence of major equipment, their insufficient maintenance, their low DTO (Technical Operational Availability), the absence of reserves, the lack of training of personnel , the sample nature of modern equipment and many other elements do not allow us to seriously consider, today, a military victory for NATO against Russia. This is the reason why we are content with an “economic” war, hoping to weaken the Russian bear.

Let's come to the quality of the military leadership of the Russian side and compare it to that of the “Western coalition”.

On February 24, the Russians urgently embarked on a pre-emptive “special operation”, preceding by a few days an assault by kyiv forces against the Donbass.

This operation was special because most of the ground operations were going to take place in a sister country and in areas where a large part of the population was not hostile to Russia (Donbass). It was therefore not a classic high-intensity operation against an irreducible enemy, it was an operation in which the technique of the Russian steamroller, crushing the opposing forces, infrastructures and populations by the artillery (as in Germany during the ^2nd World War) was impossible to envisage. This operation was special because it was more, in the Donbass, an operation to liberate a friendly population, hostage of the Ukro-Nazi reprisal battalions, and martyred for 8 years ., an operation in which civilian populations and infrastructure were to be spared as much as possible.

This operation was therefore truly special and particularly difficult to conduct, always bearing in mind the contradictory requirements of obtaining victory by advancing and occupying the ground, while sparing the population and the civilian infrastructure and the lives of its own soldiers.

In addition, this operation has been carried out, so far, in numerical inferiority (nearly one against two), while the ratio of forces on the ground required in offensive is 3 against 1, and even 5 against 1 in zone urbanized. The Kievan forces have also perfectly understood the interest of entrenching themselves in the cities and of using the Russian-speaking and Russophile civilian populations as a human shield...

I observe that, on the ground, the Russian forces continue to advance, day after day, slowly but surely against a Ukrainian army which has achieved its general mobilization, which is aided by the West, and which is supposed to fight for his land...

Question the quality of Russian leadership, engaged in a very complex military operation, conducted in numerical inferiority, in which everything must be done to avoid excessive collateral damage. seems to me to be a huge error of assessment. We also all too often lend to the Russians, in the West, war intentions or aims that they never had, just to be able to say that these objectives have not been achieved.

It is true that NATO has never bothered with scruples to crush under the bombs the civilian populations of the countries it attacked (often under false pretexts), to force these countries to ask for mercy. (Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.). More than a million NATO bombs have been dropped since 1990 on the planet, causing the direct or indirect death of several million individuals in the most total indifference of Western public opinion.

Before coming to the examination of the Western leadership, for comparison with the Russian leadership, let us note that NATO took 78 days of bombardment and 38,000 aerial sorties to force little Serbia to ask for an armistice. Remember that Serbia is 8 times smaller than Ukraine and 6 times less populated, and that it was attacked by NATO, without a UN mandate, in a balance of power of more than ten to one. Has anyone in the West wondered then about the quality of NATO's leadership, which took 78 days to defeat its Serbian adversary with such a balance of power? Has anyone questioned the legality of this action launched under a false pretext (false Racak massacre) and without a UN mandate?

Ukrainian Azovstal Human Shield Spills The Tea On Azov Nazi Captors...,

reuters  |   Cowering in the labyrinth of Soviet-era bunkers far beneath the vast Azovstal steel works, Natalia Usmanova felt her heart would stop she was so terrified as Russian bombs rained down on Mariupol, sprinkling her with concrete dust.

Usmanova, 37, spoke to Reuters on Sunday after being evacuated from the plant, a sprawling complex founded under Josef Stalin and designed with a subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels to withstand attack. read more

"I feared that the bunker would not withstand it - I had terrible fear," Usmanova said, describing the time sheltering underground.

"When the bunker started to shake, I was hysterical, my husband can vouch for that: I was so worried the bunker would cave in."

"We didn't see the sun for so long," she said, speaking in the village of Bezimenne in an area of Donetsk under the control of Russia-backed separatists around 30 km (20 miles) east of Mariupol.

She recalled the lack of oxygen in the shelters and the fear that had gripped the lives of people hunkered down there.

Usmanova was among dozens of civilians evacuated from the plant in Mariupol, a southern port city that has been besieged by Russian forces for weeks and left a wasteland.

Usmanova said she joked with her husband on the bus ride out, in a convoy agreed by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that they would no longer have to go to the lavatory with a torch.

"You just can't imagine what we have been through - the terror," Usmanova said. "I lived there, worked there all my life, but what we saw there was just terrible."

 

Unintended Irony Of The Bezos Post Pantshitting About Musk's Bid To Own Twitter

WaPo  |  “What we need is a First Amendment-respecting process in which the government doesn’t dictate content but does cause there to be an acceptable behavioral code,” Wheeler said.

Even professionals who think that social media is a net good say that Twitter as Musk envisions it would be terrible for users and investors. The past few years have spawned any number of Twitter knockoffs catering to those who feel muzzled by the original, including Gab and Parler, but none has taken off in the mainstream.

That is not an accident, said Alicia Wanless, director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington. People want basic rules in the same way they would avoid a nightclub that turns a blind eye to casual violence.

“Musk can buy Twitter and try to take it back to some nostalgic lost Eden of the early days of the Internet, but platforms with the least community standards, like Gab, hardly rank because it isn’t a good business,” Wanless said.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has helped protect global rights activists from government hacking and ordinary people from domestic stalking, said she “would be concerned about the human rights and personal safety impacts of any single person having complete control over Twitter’s policies.”

She added, “I am particularly concerned about the impact of complete ownership by a person who has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not understand the realities of content moderation at scale.”

Citing Musk supporting the idea for allowing anything legal, Galperin said: “Twitter’s content moderation practices leave a lot to be desired, but they tried the policies that Musk seems to favor more than a decade ago, and it did not work.”

A pullback in moderation would disproportionately harm women, minorities and anyone out of favor with the establishment, civil rights advocates said. “Without rules of the road, we are going to be put in harm’s way,” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “Our protections cannot be up to the whims of billionaires.”

Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who called out Russian disinformation on that platform during the 2016 election, said Musk has a notion of Twitter as a public square for free expression that is divorced from the reality of many individuals and failed to acknowledge that it would give more power to the most powerful.

Without moderation, Stamos said, “anybody who expresses an opinion ends up with every form of casual insult ranging to death and rape threats. That is the baseline of the Internet. If you want people to be able to interact, you need to have basic rules.”

Criticize Powerful Elites And Their Minions With Gusto And Verve!!!

greenwald  |  When Hillary Clinton's divine entitlement to the U.S. presidency began to look imperiled in 2016 — first due to the irreverent and unkempt (but surprisingly formidable) Democratic Party primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Senator from Vermont — her campaign and its media allies invented and unveiled a deeply moving morality tale. A faceless horde of unnamed, uncredentialed, unmannered, violent, abusive and deeply misogynistic online Sanders supporters — dubbed with the gender-emphasizing name "Bernie Bros” even though many were women — were berating, insulting and brutalizing Hillary, her top campaign surrogates (U.S. Senators, former cabinet members, corporate executives), and especially pro-Hillary corporate journalists with a vast artillery of traumatizing words and violent tweets.

This storyline — and especially the way it cleverly inverted the David v. Goliath framework of the 2016 campaign so that it was now Hillary and her band of monied and Ivy-League-educated political and media elites who were the real victims — was irresistible to Harvard-and-Yale-trained journalists at NBC, CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages who really believe they are the truly marginalized peoples. This narrative scheme enabled them — the most powerful and influential media and political elites in the world, with access to the most potent platforms and megaphones — to somehow credibly lay claim to that most valued of all currencies in American political life: victimhood.

With this power matrix in place, what mattered was no longer the pain and anger of people whose towns had their industries stripped by the Clintons’ NAFTA robbery, or who worked at low-wage jobs with no benefits due to the 2008 financial crisis caused by Clintonite finance geniuses, or who were drowning in student debt with no job prospects after that crisis, or who suffered from PTSD, drug and alcohol addiction and shabby to no health care after fighting in the Clintons’ wars. Now, such ordinary people were not the victims but the perpetrators. Their anger toward elites was not valid or righteous but dangerous, abusive and toxic. The real victims were multi-millionaire hosts of MSNBC programs and U.S. Senators and New York Times columnists who were abused and brutalized by those people's angry tweets for the crime of supporting a pioneer and avatar for marginalized people: the Wellesley-and-Yale-Law-graduate, former First Lady, Senator from New York, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The genius of the Bernie Bro rhetorical scheme was two-fold. First, it prioritized and centered elite discomfort over the far more important and real anger and deprivation of ordinary people. Secondly, and even better from the perspective of elite interests, it implicitly imposed a ban on any meaningful critiques of powerful political and media elites by insisting that the online abuse and resultant trauma they endured was the fault of those who criticized them. According to this elite-protecting script, this crisis of online abuse and trauma did not materialize out of nowhere. It was triggered by, and was the fault of, anyone who voiced criticism of those elites. By speaking ill of these media and political figures, such critics were "targeting” them and signaling that they should be attacked. 

Gonzalo Lira For The Win Because The Hit Dog Has Yelped Rather Loudly...,

dailybeast |  As soon as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Gonzalo Lira started sharing his thoughts and observations on the conflict in a run of YouTube videos and posts on Telegram and Twitter. “The commentary and analysis I post is without picking sides,” Lira, an American who’s lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv for years and was in Kyiv at the start of the offensive, wrote in a recent post, “trying to be as balanced and factually accurate as I can be.”

He began showing up on niche but notable podcasts and livestreams, where hosts introduced him as an unmediated font of on-the-ground insights, as someone willing to share truths about the complex conflict that the mainstream media either can’t or won’t. He’s also gained a slew of new followers—his Telegram has about 45,000 followers, up from 20,000 on March 1, and seems to be gaining hundreds more every day. Many people seem to view him as a valuable source, and have taken to signal-boosting his content.

But his “fair-and-balanced” accounts often involve wild claims about the supposedly obvious “evil” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The comedian-turned-politician is a known “cokehead,” Lira has claimed—a man who uses his people as shields, has provided arms to criminals who have terrorized the streets of Kyiv, and has possibly “deliberately tried to have a nuclear accident” to pin it on Russia and possibly drag America into his war. Meanwhile, Lira has portrayed the Russian assault as provoked—and as “one of the most brilliant invasions in military history.” He has insisted that the invaders don’t want to harm civilians or civilian infrastructure and are in fact taking pains not to, that the Russian advance has not stalled but is in fact right on course, and that Russian domination will likely be good for Ukraine in the end.

He has also shared widely debunked conspiracy theories to support or build out his narratives, many of them revolving around Russian claims that they’ve found evidence of American bioweapons labs and research in Ukraine. He has decried stories about Ukrainian resistance as obvious Western propaganda. And he has accused people who contradict his assessments of being idiots or paid shills.

Independent experts who follow the conflict closely, of course, vigorously disagree.

“His claims are nonsense,” Alexander Motyl, an expert on Ukrainian affairs at Rutgers University who’s been monitoring the conflict, told The Daily Beast.

Not only do Lira's narratives fly in the face of a vast amount of credible on-the-ground reporting, they “fit perfectly with what Putin and his associates have been claiming for months,” as Motyl put it. In fact, Lira has been in such striking lockstep with Russian narratives on the conflict—sometimes even posting official government statements as definitive truths about it—that Russian propaganda outlets have used clips of him as a supposed source of external, on-the-ground support for its stories.

More telling: When Alexandra Hrycak, a Ukrainian affairs expert who works at Reed College and has been monitoring the conflict, first reviewed Lira’s claims, she assumed he was likely a fictional persona created by the Kremlin to spread its message. These sorts of covert mouthpieces often claim to be fair and balanced outside experts, she noted, “and [tend to argue] that their opponents are irrational, emotional, and need to consider the facts.”

Lira is not fake. Nor is there any evidence that he’s a paid Russian agent. In fact, he’s actually attempted to publicly distance himself from propaganda content that uses his clips.

 

 

NYTimes Finally Admits "Russian Disinfo" Hunter Biden Laptop Is Authentic....,

greenwald  |  One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

 

These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”

 

Thought And Speech Unsanctioned By The Ruling Class Is Misinformation

foxnews  |  It's still amazing that someone like Joe Rogan has become the subject of such hatred and venom from the leftists media and their allies in academic and public medicine. Rogan has drawn such strong levels of invective for simply going against the ruling class on issues such as COVID-19 and, more broadly, the classically liberal principles of free, open, and rigorous debate with diversity in thought," NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck told Fox News. 

"Despite having had a long career in Hollywood and supported politicians like Bernie Sanders, none of his past behaviors are enough in the eyes of today's left. It's conform or be silenced. It's twisted and, quite frankly, lame brained for them to voice support for free speech and the First Amendment but insist Rogan shouldn't be allowed to have a prominent platform," Houck continued. "It's not only important to point out how he's not to be confused with a conservative, but it's almost an imperative to illustrate just how authoritarian and close-minded too many on the left have become."

CNN has particularly feuded with Rogan; the two sides feuded when Rogan took ivermectin to tread COVID-19 and the liberal outlet ran the narrative that he had taken "horse dewormer" and a "livestock drug." Rogan fired back in an interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta that his network was "lying" and Gupta conceded some of CNN's people had misspoken.

During a headline-making appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Gupta pointed to the "snarky" statement released by the FDA saying, "You are not a horse. You are not a cow," in order to encourage people to not take ivermectin, but Rogan remained persistent on calling out CNN's coverage of a drug that's been "given out to billions and billions of people" and resulted in a Nobel Prize.

Rogan first told Gupta that his ivermectin was "prescribed to me by a doctor," forcing the CNN correspondent to say the drug "shouldn't be called" horse dewormer.

The fight continued when CNN fumed in a statement to the Washington Post that Rogan had undermined faith in effective vaccines, adding "the only thing CNN did wrong here was bruise the ego of a popular podcaster who pushed dangerous conspiracy theories." The Post's Erik Wemple wrote at the time that the statement from CNN "sounds more like the work of an advocacy group than a journalism outfit."

Mainstream Media's Ludicrous Joe Rogan Fear Factor Continues....,

mediaite |  Two hundred and seventy “scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators” are requesting Spotify add a misinformation policy for its platform due to Joe Rogan’s massively popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE).

The “Open Letter to Spotify” calling for action against Rogan came as a result of Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone. The Malone episode has been called out for promoting conspiracy theories regarding the Covid-19 pandemic.

The letter states, “By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.”

The letter continues to slam Rogan for his stance on Covid-19 treatments. “Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Joe Rogan has repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine. He has discouraged vaccination in young people and children, incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines are ‘gene therapy,’ promoted off-label use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 (contrary to FDA warnings), and spread a number of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”

“Notably, Dr. Malone is one of two recent JRE guests who has compared pandemic policies to the Holocaust,” the letter charged.

YouTube has removed Rogan’s interview with Malone, and Twitter suspended Malone’s account earlier this month for breaking the platform’s guidelines around the posting Covid-19 misinformation.

You can read the full Open Letter to Spotify here.

The Atlantic Scapegoats The Internet For Elite Overproduction And Popular Immiseration

theatlantic  |  The internet gives groups the ability not just to express and bond over misery but to inflict it on others—in effect, to transfer their own misery onto those they resent. The most extreme examples come in the form of racist or misogynist harassment campaigns—many led by young white men—such as Gamergate or the hashtag campaigns against Black feminists.

Misery trickles down in subtler ways too. Though the field is still young, studies on social media suggest that emotions are highly contagious on the web. In a review of the science, Harvard’s Amit Goldenberg and Stanford’s James J. Gross note that people “share their personal emotions online in a way that affects not only their own well-being, but also the well-being of others who are connected to them.” Some studies found that positive posts could drive engagement as much as, if not more than, negative ones, but of all the emotions expressed, anger seems to spread furthest and fastest. It tends to “cascade to more users by shares and retweets, enabling quicker distribution to a larger audience.”

Tech executives thought that connecting the world would be an unmitigated good. Widespread internet access and social media have made it far easier for the average person to hear and be heard by many more of his fellow citizens.

But it also means that miserable people, who were previously alienated and isolated, can find one another, says Kevin Munger, an assistant professor at Penn State who studies how platforms shape political and cultural opinions. This may offer them some short-term succor, but it’s not at all clear that weak online connections provide much meaningful emotional support. At the same time, those miserable people can reach the rest of us too. As a result, the average internet user, Munger told me in a recent interview, has more exposure than previous generations to people who, for any number of reasons, are hurting. Are they bringing all of us down?

In an essay titled “Facebook Is Other People,” Munger uses one of his relatives as an example. The relative is in his 60s and has a cognitive disability. Munger describes him as “an embittered, lonely man, the perfect target for information fraudsters who will claim to explain that the source of his pain is some despised group (immigrants, the deep state).” The relative has expressed an interest in getting online, and Munger sees only downsides: “His presence as a consumer of online news will have negative consequences, both for himself and for the wider information environment.”

It may sound obvious to say that our digital spaces are not okay because people are not okay. But too many conversations about the problems in online communities elide this fact. They frame the information crisis as solely a technological issue. When Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow tech CEOs come before Congress for their bipartisan grillings, the subtext is that if the companies could only implement the proper moderation policies, remove a few of the most toxic personalities, and change the way content is recommended (according to their desired politics), the problem would go away.

Where Merit And Integrity Fail - Violence And Treachery Will Prevail

 “They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

NationalReview |  Dr. Aaron Kheriaty has been fired from the University of California Irvine, where he has worked as a professor at UCI School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health for almost 15 years. Back in the spring of 2020, he could have been a poster boy for the medical professionals we were cheering on every night. That was then. It seems that he has not only been dismissed because he is unvaccinated, but because he has dared to make the medical argument that natural immunity puts people in a similar — or better — place than a vaccine against Covid-19. I’m not a doctor, and I’d like to think doctors are free to raise questions based on their scientific judgment.

Kheriaty is not the only doctor I know who has found himself in situations where it is understood that you are to go along and not raise questions when it comes to Covid-19 protocols. I know that’s happened in other places in medicine — the scandal of women’s health is how they use the contraceptive pill for a whole host of problems, cover up symptoms, treat fertility as itself a problem, and sometimes leave women infertile when they actually want to have a child later on down the line. So it happens. And it’s not good.

An added injustice would be to not shed light on what’s happening. At one point this fall, when Dr. Kheriaty was still on forced leave, I tried to post a video commentary to YouTube about his situation and it was rejected as vaccine misinformation — to simply talk about what was happening. I myself do not know anything about Covid-19 except my own experiences and what doctors tell me, because I am not a doctor. It’s amazing how many of us think we are. And it’s terrifying when doctors suppress scientific debate.

More here. You don’t have to have a strong position on vaccines to be disturbed by what’s happened to Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.

Exposing What Elites Wish To Conceal Is An Unpardonable Offense...,

BAR  |  As you know, the U.S. incarcerates its share of political prisoners , with many having been affiliated with the Black Liberation Army and targeted by COINTELPRO . Why won’t the mainstream media cover the trials, appeals, demands, and resistance efforts of these political prisoners? Since they have been deemed “enemies of the state,” are they, as a result, enemies of the U.S. corporate media as well?

I’m not sure if most Americans have heard of COINTELPRO, but it was a very frightening, elaborate effort by the United States government to suppress, fracture and destroy Black liberation groups, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, Marxist, and feminist movements in the U.S.

This includes groups like the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA). The FBI used covert means to attack these groups e.g. create infighting, sew discord among its members, attack them in the media, label them as terrorists, and give them lengthy jail sentences of decades behind bars. Divide and conquer, like they do overseas.

Just a few days ago on December 4th, was the anniversary of Fred Hampton’s assassination in 1969. The FBI infiltrated his security detail and spied on him, before one night he was drugged and then murdered in his bed by government agents – all for the crime of combatting poverty, racism and uniting people under one banner irrespective of race and class.

Hampton is just one example, but others come to mind, such as Mutulu Shakur from the BLA, which you mentioned. The government either killed these activists and revolutionaries or gave them sentences such as 60 years imprisonment— essentially a life sentence— in order to decapitate these movements. There was a concerted effort to take out people in positions of leadership and incapacitate Black liberation groups.

The United States and its European allies love pretending they are civilized, “true democracies,” and that everyone else is barbaric. But if any of these things happened in another country, you’d hear the U.S. media howling about “repression by a brutal dictatorship”— but when the Americans or Europeans do it, it’s fine, apparently. This is why they portray activists and revolutionaries as violent, disturbers of the peace who must be penalized. That’s their excuse for repressing change in America.

These are political prisoners in the true sense of the word: imprisoned because their ideas and actions challenge the power structures of the United States. And once they are deemed enemies of the state, who is going to stand up for them? Certainly not the media. The media is an arm of the same corporations that control the government. The media is not interested in standing up for true revolutionaries. They would rather herald someone like the Facebook whistleblower for helping liberals advocate more censorship through Big Tech.

It’s not fashionable in America to be a real revolutionary, to really challenge racism and capitalism. The most “solidarity” you’ll see from the media and corporations is changing their logos to black and white, or adopting some marketing gimmicks— things that don’t require them to actually support anti-racism movements, but just give the appearance that they do.

The fact that the state invested so much energy and resources into destroying these groups shows you how effective they are, and how afraid they make the power structures of the white, capitalist, Western elites that rule America.

America claims to stand for justice, equality; it claims to fight for the underdog and prides itself in being a nation born out of revolution – but this is what happens to real revolutionaries in the United States: they are jailed or murdered by the state.

Kyrie Irving Hands The NBA Its Karen-Ass - Stephen A's Cooning Will Be Priceless...,

WSJ  |   “Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual right to choose,” Nets general manager Sean Marks said in October. “Currently the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate with part-time availability.” 

The Nets changed their mind about Irving’s availability with Covid ripping through their locker room in a spike that coincides with a sharp increase in cases across the league and the Omicron variant’s arrival in New York. Brooklyn executives cited a roster that has been depleted by the coronavirus to explain the unexpected backtracking by a team sitting in first place in the Eastern Conference even without Irving. As coach Steve Nash expressed misgivings about pushing the workload of Durant, who nearly leads the league in minutes after rupturing his Achilles’ tendon in 2019, the Nets softened their position. 

“We believe that the addition of Kyrie will not only make us a better team, but allow us to more optimally balance the physical demand on the entire roster,” Marks said. “We look forward to Kyrie’s return to the lineup.” 

They are likely to be waiting even longer now. The Nets have 53 games left in the regular season. Irving is currently eligible to play in 24 of them outside of New York and Canada, but that number will shrink to 21 after the new year. 

The whiplash of Irving’s availability wasn’t the only Covid-related turn of events for the Nets on Saturday. They had managed to win two straight games while extremely shorthanded this week—they fielded eight players in one win, the minimum required by the league—in large part because Durant was sublime. Then he, too, was sidelined. Durant has said that he is vaccinated and was one of the first public figures to share that he had Covid in March 2020. 

Irving, who has declined to comment on his vaccination status, remained mostly silent during his absence with the exception of cryptic messages on social media, including an Instagram video this week that showed him lacing up his sneakers. He was also spotted at high-school and college games in New Jersey and Los Angeles while his NBA team was playing in Brooklyn. 

The league’s Covid rules were significantly more onerous for the tiny minority of unvaccinated players even before the NBA issued a stricter round of guidance this week in response to the uptick of cases: There are nearly 60 players out now, including more than a dozen on the Nets and Knicks alone.

Making Up Shit: When mRNA Gets Broken Through - They Now Call It "Super Immunity"

Forbes |  A breakthrough Covid-19 coronavirus infection may not be “super” to have. But can it actually give you what’s being called “super immunity” on social media? In other words, can a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection after being fully vaccinated against Covid-19 bring you even greater protection? Well, a research letter just published in JAMA offered a small window into this “super” possibility.

If you search for “super immunity” on social media you will find plenty of posts such as the following:

My husband and I were boosted almost a month ago. We (unfortunately) did not gain any superpowers but we DO have super immunity against Omicron which does sound like a supervillain name so I feel like it counts. Get boosted if you are able to prevent major illness <3 https://t.co/HbzYWL2z1M

— Surena Marie 🍓 (@SurenaXMarie) December 17, 2021

You’ll also find mention of the study described by the JAMA research letter. For example, Monica Gandhi MD, MPH, a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and HIV researcher, used the terms “hybrid immunity” and “super immunity” when tweeting about the study:

This study shows this too in delta breakthrough infections from Provincetown. Of note, this study also looks at T cells; JAMA study specifically showed increase in IgA levels which are the mucosal antibodyhttps://t.co/StZ5neUFVc

— Monica Gandhi MD, MPH (@MonicaGandhi9) December 16, 2021

She called it “hybrid immunity,” because the potentially boosted immune protection may come from a combination of vaccination and then subsequent infection. Gandhi also referenced another study described in a pre-print uploaded to MedRxiv that drew blood from 35 vaccinated individuals in Provincetown, Massachusetts, 14 of whom had had subsequent breakthrough infections. This pre-print described how the blood of the breakthrough infection group had 28-fold higher levels of binding antibodies and 34-fold higher levels of neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant than the blood of the rest. This study also looked at another measure of immune protection, how the individual’s T cells responded to the virus, a measure that I described previously for Forbes. Those with breakthrough infections had a 4.4-fold higher Spike protein-specific CD8+ T cell responses against the Delta variant than the rest of the study participants. Take all the results from this pre-print with a Ugg boot full of salt though. Anyone with a laptop, an Internet connection, and opposable thumbs can upload a pre-print. It is not the same as a peer-reviewed study published in a reputable scientific journal.

Aerosol Scientist Discovers Failure Of Political Economy And Elite Narrative Strategy All The Way Down

Omicron is spreading at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant. I need to be very clear: vaccines alone will not get any country out of this crisis.
It’s not vaccines instead of masks, distancing, ventilation or hand hygiene.
Do it all. Do it consistently. Do it well. pic.twitter.com/YAVfJXsviQ

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) December 14, 2021

twitter | 1/ Why is there such EXTREME RESISTANCE by @WHO, @CDCgov and IPC(*) to clearly state that COVID-19 is a dominantly AIRBORNE disease?

TLDR: see slide

*: IPC: Infection Prevention and Control scientists and professionals 

2/ This is extremely puzzling, as it is now extremely obvious that airborne transmission is DOMINANT for COVID-19.

There are mountains of evidence, e.g. as summarized in our @TheLancet publication.

And NO evidence whatsoever for droplets or surfaces!

Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1383566908797059078

3/ I've pondered this question a lot. I've been involved in discussions with @WHO, many IPC and public health researchers and practitioners, politicians in multiple countries etc.

This thread summarizes my understanding of the causes of this situation. I look forward to comments

4/ Early in pandemic, a major historical error in the understanding of the IPC field played a major role

"Droplet transmission" was an important concept in that field... and it is an error that dates from 1910!!

This thread has long version (here short):

Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708

5/ The concept of "sprayborne droplet transmission" was used by Charles Chapin (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V…), a prominent US Public Health researcher (later pres. of APHA), to explain the EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION that transmission increases in close proximity and decreases with distance

Charles V. Chapin - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V._Chapin

6/ As of the start of the pandemic, @WHO and @CDCgov were completely stuck on the concepts from Chapin (e.g. his seminal 1910 book: ), as exemplified by this @WHO video showing the sprayborne droplets as explanation why distance reduces transmission:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1244258441880797184

7/ The problem is that Chapin had made an error. He was pushing "contact infection" that he had conceptualized, and encountered a lot of resistance (his book: archive.org/details/source…).

The sources and modes of infection : Chapin, Charles V. (Charles Value), 1856-1941 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/sourcesmodesofin00ch

8/ Chapin was very intelligent, and was well aware that short-range airborne transmission could also explain why distance reduced transmission: we breathe less exhaled air from someone else as we increased distance