PP NewsBrief: 2021-04-30

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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Amy Coney Barrett Receives $2 Million Advance for Book Deal: Report

"Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has reportedly signed a book deal securing an advance of $2 million.

According to Politico, which quoted three sources with knowledge of the deal, Barrett will write about how judges should not bring their personal feelings into their decision-making.

The deal is likely the highest for a supreme court justice and the biggest amount since book deals won by Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O’Connor, one industry source told Politico.

During her hearing to be confirmed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 2017, Barrett’s Catholic faith was a point of contention for Democrats who pressed her on how she would rule on certain cases having to do with Roe v. Wade, the Second Amendment, and the Affordable Care Act.

Barrett, like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said she would not offer “previews” on specific cases, according to The Hill."

I don't think it's too much to ask that if you're given a liftetime appointment to the highest court in the land you don't use your position to enrich yourself. It's just so sleazy.

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ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy: This Time Over BLM

"...On April 10, The New York Post published an exposé on what it called Cullors’ “million-dollar real estate buying binge.” The paper noted that as protests were unfolding around the country, the BLM official was “snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records,” including a California property valued at $1.4 million. The article also revealed that the self-described Marxist and her partner “were spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit at the Albany,” an “elite enclave laid out on 600 oceanside acres,” which “features a private marina and designer golf course.” The Post included photos of several of the properties obtained from public real estate listings.

In an interview about that Post story with Marc Lamont Hill, Cullors — except saying she has not visited the Bahamas since the age of 15 — did not deny the accuracy of the reporting, but instead justified her real estate acquisitions. She denied she had taken a salary from the BLM group, pointing to other income she earns as a professor, author, and a YouTube content creator as the source of this sudden outburst of real estate purchases. She denounced the Post reporting as "frankly racist, and sexist.”

So that seems like a perfectly healthy cycle for covering a controversy, obviously in the public interest. In the wake of concerns from activists about where this massive amount of BLM money has gone, The New York Post did its job of unearthing the splurge of real estate acquisitions by the person who controls and directs BLM's budget and who has been a target of accusations and suspicions from activists. Cullors then had the opportunity to publicly provide her side of the story concerning her aggressive and ample financial investments.

But then something quite unhealthy and unusual occurred. Five days after publication of that Post article, the Substack journalists Shant Mesrobian and Zaid Jilani reported that Facebook was banning the sharing of that article worldwide on its platform — similar to what Twitter and Facebook did in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election to The New York Post's reporting on the Biden family's business dealings in China and Ukraine. The Substack reporters noted that Facebook ultimately confirmed the worldwide ban of the Post's reporting to The New York Times’ media reporter Ben Smith, justifying it on the ground that the article “revealed personal details about [Cullors] and her residence in violation of Facebook’s community standards.”

...

Whatever one’s views are on this particular censorship controversy, there is no doubt that it is part of the highly consequential debate over online free speech and the ability of monopolies like Facebook to control the dissemination of news and the boundaries of political discourse and debate. That is why Smith devoted his weekly column to it. And yet, when Smith approached the standard free speech advocacy groups for comment on this story, virtually none was willing to speak up. “Facebook’s usual critics have been strikingly silent as the company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial calls,” he wrote.

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In lieu of the traditional, iconic and organization-defining willingness — eagerness — of the ACLU to defend free speech precisely when it has been most controversial and upsetting to liberals, what we now get instead are cowardly, P.R.-consultant-scripted excuses for staying as far away as possible: “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time.” That sounds like something Marco Rubio's office says when asked about a Trump tweet or that a corporate headquarters would say to avoid an inflammatory controversy, not the reaction of a stalwart civil liberties group to a publicly debated act of political censorship.

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The ACLU's we-know-nothing routine for abstaining from commenting on Facebook's censorship of the BLM article is, for so many reasons, preposterous. The group funds what it calls its Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and some of its best lawyers oversee it. Clearly they focus on these issues. And the ACLU in general has taken a firm and borderline-absolutist position against online censorship by Silicon Valley monopolies: principles whose application to this particular case would be easy and obvious. The ACLU has a section of its website devoted to “Internet Speech,” and its position on such matters is stated explicitly:

"The ACLU believes in an uncensored Internet, a vast free-speech zone deserving at least as much First Amendment protection as that afforded to traditional media such as books, newspapers, and magazines….The ACLU has been at the forefront of protecting online freedom of expression in its myriad forms. We brought the first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared speech on the Internet equally worthy of the First Amendment’s historical protections."

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Because the ACLU still employs a few old-school civil libertarians among its hundreds of lawyers and staff, those employees manage to do work and express views that are consistent with the ACLU's old-school civil liberties agenda even when contrary to the interests of liberal politics. But the tactics used by the ACLU in those cases to downplay or hide those aberrations are as transparent as they are craven.

When three Silicon Valley monopolies united to remove the social media app Parler from the internet in January, 2021 after influential Democratic lawmakers demanded it — one of the most brute acts of monopolistic censorship yet — an ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, was cited in The New York Times as labelling Parler's destruction “troubling,” telling the paper: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.” But on the ACLU's highly active and influential Twitter account — the group's primary platform for promoting its work, expressing its views, and soliciting donations, where it has two million followers and often tweets up to fifty times a day — the group said absolutely nothing about the removal of an entire social media app from the internet

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It goes without saying that the ACLU has every right to devote a huge bulk of its institutional resources and public advocacy to the cause of trans equality if it chooses to do so. But what that reveals is that the group is becoming exactly what its leaders always vowed it would never be: just another garden-variety liberal political advocacy group. After all, there is no shortage of extremely well-financed LGBT groups doing the same advocacy on trans issues. Those LGBT groups shifted their focus almost entirely to trans issues when they won the entire agenda of gay and lesbian equality with the Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in all fifty states, and supporting trans rights is the mainstream, standard view of Democratic Party leaders and liberal activists.

The ACLU's refusal to engage with growing online censorship is baffling even from the perspective of its liberal politics given that radical leftists are increasingly (and predictably) the targets of tech censorship alongside anti-establishment right-wing voices. Just yesterday, the highly popular trans YouTube host Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints complained that one of her past episodes had just been demonetized and urged: “Free speech should be reclaimed as an essential leftist issue. We should not surrender the most fundamental civil right to Google LLC in the name of deplatforming rightists and curtailing harassment.” Wynn's last video, rebutting the views of J.K. Rowling on trans issues, featured Wynn's list of the telltale signs of “indirect bigotry” toward trans people, and she included "free speech advocacy,” but — as happens to so many people — Wynn has apparently reconsidered that view and has discovered the centrality of free speech values now that her own speech is targeted. But agitating for more online political censorship still remains a cause deeply popular among establishment liberals, further explaining the ACLU's reluctance to involve itself in these controversies on the side of free expression.

What always distinguished the ACLU in the past — and what gave it credibility with judges in courtrooms — was its devotion to and focus on non-partisan free speech, free press and due process causes that were too unpopular or controversial for other groups to touch, particularly liberal groups who could not afford to offend the political sensibilities of Democrats. There are still some isolated occasions when the ACLU does such things — such as when it spoke up in defense of the NRA against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's efforts to target the group with destruction or when the ACLU recently denounced parts of the Democrats’ H.R.1 “reforms”— but the ACLU largely hides those exceptions on its most popular public platforms, and they are becoming increasingly rare."

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Another False Start in Africa Sold with Gates Foundation Green Revolution Myths

"Since the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was launched in 2006, yields have barely risen, while rural poverty remains endemic, and would have increased more if not for out-migration.

AGRA was started, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020.

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Hagiographic accounts of the Green Revolution cite ‘high‐yielding’ and ‘fast-growing’ dwarf wheat and rice spreading through Asia, particularly India, saving lives, modernising agriculture, and ‘freeing’ labour for better off-farm employment.

Many recent historical studies challenge key claims of this supposed success, including allegedly widespread yield improvements and even the number of lives actually saved by increased food production.

Environmental degradation and other public health threats due to the toxic chemicals used are now widely recognized. Meanwhile, water management has become increasingly challenging and unreliable due to global warming and other factors.

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...AGRA has ignored many crucial features of India’s Green Revolution. Importantly, the post-colonial Indian government had quickly developed capacities to promote economic development.

Few African countries have such ‘developmental’ capacities, let alone comparable capabilities. Their already modest government capacities were decimated from the 1980s by structural adjustment programmes demanded by international financial institutions and bilateral ‘donors’

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Instead, the technophile AGRA initiative has been enamoured with novel technical innovations while not sufficiently appreciating indigenous and other ‘old’ knowledge, science and technology, or even basic infrastructure.

The Asian Green Revolution relied crucially on improving cultivation conditions, including better water management. There has been little such investment by AGRA or others, even when the crop promoted requires such improvements.

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AGRA and other African Green Revolution proponents have had 14 years, plus billions of dollars, to show that input-intensive agriculture can raise productivity, net incomes and food security. They have clearly failed.

Africans — farmers, consumers and governments — have many good reasons to be wary, especially considering AGRA’s track record after a decade and a half. India’s experience and the ongoing farmer protests there should make them more so.

Selling Africa’s Green Revolution as innovation requiring unavoidable ‘creative destruction’ is grossly misleading. Alternatively, many agroecology initiatives, which technophiles decry as backward, are bringing cutting-edge science and technology to farmers, with impressive results."

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‘Know your customer’ indeed! Banks deploy AI systems to monitor customers & employees alike

"A number of US banks have unleashed AI-powered cameras capable of both facial recognition and general behavioral pattern analysis, hinting at a wider rollout in retail stores and elsewhere - and a big drop in customer trust.

Speaking to Reuters earlier this week, City National’s chief information security officer Bobby Dominguez tried to put a positive spin on the dystopian step forward when interviewed by Reuters about the phenomenon on Thursday. noting “we’re already leveraging facial recognition on mobile. Why not leverage it in the real world?”

This cheery approach clashes a bit with the secrecy of the banks that are already using such technology - Reuters explained City National Bank of Florida, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo were conducting trials of AI surveillance systems, but declined to say when, where, or on what basis the recording takes place. Are the recordings held for months? Deleted after a day unless something really juicy happens? And while City National specifically mentioned it would be trailing 31 sites using facial recognition software that potentially could “spot people on government watch lists” that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen."

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Canadian health officials report 1st death caused by blood clot in AstraZeneca Covid vaccine recipient

"A 54-year-old woman in Quebec has died from a blood clot after receiving AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine, the province's public health chief Horacio Arruda has said. It is the first such fatality in Canada.

"We just had our first patient who has died of a thrombosis, cerebral thrombosis, following vaccination from AstraZeneca," Arruda told a news briefing on Tuesday.

Speaking about the fatality, Quebec Premier Francois Legault said he was "very sad to know that a 54-year-old woman in good shape... died because she was vaccinated."

Arruda said tests at McMaster University laboratory in Hamilton had discovered antibodies which had caused a problem with platelets in her blood, which led to her death.

Some 400,000 people have received AstraZeneca's Vaxzevria vaccine in Quebec, Arruda said.

Three other cases of blood clotting are being investigated, including one person who is recovering and two cases that have not been confirmed as linked to the vaccine.

Earlier this month, Canada's first instance of a blood clot in someone injected with Vaxzevria was also confirmed in a woman in Quebec."

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The Chauvin Appeal: How The Comments Of The Court and The Prosecutors Could Raise Challenges Going Forward

"The final day of the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis seemed at times to be a remake of the 1981 neo-noir film, “True Confessions.” Call it “True Concessions.” Judge Peter Cahill acknowledged that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) may have given the defense a basis to overturn any conviction, while prosecutors seemed to drive a stake through the heart of their cases against three other officers charged in the death of George Floyd. And it all played out on live television.

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If Waters was undermining any conviction of Chauvin, the prosecutors themselves seemed to be undermining any prosecution of the other officers. In one of the trial’s most surprising moment, prosecutor Steve Schleicher seemed to exonerate the other three officers in order to further incuplate Chauvin.  In his closing argument, Schleicher declared that Chauvin “had the power, and the other officers, the bystanders, were powerless.”

Prosecuting the powerless is not usually part of the oath of district attorneys. What was striking about Schleicher’s statement is that the cases against the other officers depend on a conviction in this case. As discussed previously, prosecutors structured the cases against all four officers like an inverted pyramid; Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are charged as aiders and abettors to Chauvin’s alleged murder or manslaughter....

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Schleicher’s concession adds to an already difficult case because the other officers did take steps that can be cited by their defense attorneys as seeking to help Floyd. The officers repeatedly called for an ambulance, and Lane, a new officer on the force, attempted to deescalate the situation. When Floyd pleaded, “Please don’t shoot me, man,” Lane replied: “I’m not shooting you, man.” When Floyd struggled not to get into a police car and said he could not breathe, Lane offered to sit with him, roll down the windows and turn on the air conditioning. It also was Lane — who had only been on the force a couple of days — who urged Chauvin to move Floyd from the knee-restraint position.

Schleicher’s words can be cited in defense pretrial motions to dismiss the case. While it will be more difficult to introduce such concessions from the prosecution into the actual trial of the three remaining officers, it could make it more difficult for this prosecution team to appear in those other cases— particularly Schleicher, who would have to argue the exact opposite to another jury of what he argued before this jury. And that never sits particularly well with a trial court.

Neither Waters nor the prosecution seemed concerned over how their words would impact this or later cases in the killing of George Floyd. Whatever benefit these statements may have brought, their true costs could be prohibitive as Minnesota struggles with the resulting uncertainties and unrest."

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Coming “COVID Commission” Is a Gates-Led Cover-Up

"A corporate-funded COVID Commission Planning Group is being set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11. This is a classic illustration of the fox guarding the henhouse

The planning group is led by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel

Zelikow is also a strategy group member of the Aspen Institute, a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization

The COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing

These foundations include Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, Stand Together Foundation (Koch Network) and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which co-hosted Event 201, a pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” is also involved

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According to the Miller Center, the planning group will lay out the plans for nine separate task forces, each focused on one of the following topics, to lay “the foundation for a future commission to investigate”:

• The origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its prevention
• Threat assessment, including the creation of an international network for detection and warning, “biological intelligence” and other data collection
• National readiness and a review of the initial response
• At-risk communities and how to address gaps in public health capacities, worker safety and the responsibilities of private businesses
• State and local readiness, containment and mitigation, including when and how to use lockdowns, mandates and school closings
• Health care challenges surrounding patient care, including those with long-hauler syndrome
• Diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, including the regulatory environment that might benefit or stifle innovation and/or global supply chains
• Telling the stories of COVID-19 victims, frontline workers and public health officials (i.e., propaganda generation)
• Solving data issues

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The Rockefellers, like Gates, built an empire around health and medicine despite having no medical expertise whatsoever. Their influence is rooted in money, which is spent in self-serving ways. While Rockefeller and Gates are both known as philanthropists, their donations grow their wealth, as the money they spend on “charity” ultimately ends up benefiting their own investments and/or business interests.

In addition to the COVID-19 Action Plan document cited above — which doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it — the Rockefeller Foundation also published a 2010 report titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which they laid out their “Lockstep” scenario — a coordinated global response to a lethal pandemic.

The plan is to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people. It’s to use coordinated pandemic response as a justification for wealth redistribution and the resetting of the global financial system.

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What most fail to realize is that the wealth distribution they’re talking about is not distribution from the wealthy to the poor, even though that’s what they want you to believe. It’s to centralize wealth at the top and eliminate private property rights and private business ownership from the lower and middle classes. The “equitable” living standards they’re talking about is poverty for all but themselves. It’s really crucial to begin to grasp this reality now, before it’s too late.

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All of the pieces needed for the Great Reset are already in place; it’s just a matter of seeing how all the separate pieces fit together. For example, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.

Gates also funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video. As one would expect, AI — a Google specialty — is also a key component of this global surveillance plot.

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Technocratic rule, which is what the Great Reset will bring about, hinges on the use of technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry, banking and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).

Beyond pandemic preparedness and response, the justification for the implementation of the Great Reset agenda in its totality will be climate change. The Great Reset, sometimes referred to as the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations and “sustainable development goals” as part of the post-COVID recovery effort.

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While the New World Order was long derided as a “conspiracy theory” that you’d have to be crazy to believe, the Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the same old NWO plan that has been in circulation for well over a decade, is now public fact.

Many world leaders have spoken about it in an official capacity, and in June 2020, Zia Khan, senior vice president of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation penned the article “Rebuilding Toward the Great Reset: Crisis, COVID-19, and the Sustainable Development Goals,” reviewing the “social crisis” necessitating the world’s acceptance of a new world order.

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The Great Reset is not some wild conspiracy theory but a publicly released agenda that is moving forward, whether we like it or not. I believe the only way to stop it is through our collective responses to the various pieces and parts of the plan that are being rolled out. They want you to believe that none of the things being introduced have anything to do with each other but, in fact, they are all pieces of the same puzzle.

The final image is the inside of a prison cell. It may not be a physical prison. It may be largely digital in nature. It may look like the four walls of your own home. But it’s a prison nonetheless.

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The good news is, Americans now have a brand-new weapon in our fight for freedom. I recently interviewed Naomi Wolf about her new digital platform, Daily Clout, that will allow citizens to lobby bills to their legislators.

Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don’t have lawyers at their beck and call. Daily Clout has hired an attorney who is busy drafting turnkey bills that protect us against the continued erosion of freedom and reestablish rights and liberties. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that. As explained by Wolf:

“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we’ve been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’..."

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To get involved, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign. Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator."

The Daily Clout project seems quite interesting.

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Canadian Doctor Defies Gag Order and Tells the Public How the Moderna COVID Injections Killed and Permanently Disabled Indigenous People in His Community

"The first dose of the Moderna vaccine has now been administered to some of my patients in the community of Lytton, BC. This began with the First Nations members of our community in mid-January, 2021. 900 doses have now been administered.

I have been quite alarmed at the high rate of serious side-effects from this novel treatment.

From this relatively small number of people vaccinated so far, we have had:

1. Numerous allergic reactions, with two cases of anaphylaxis.

2. One (presumed) vaccine induced sudden death, (in a 72 year old patient with COPD. This patient complained of being more short of breath continually after receiving the vaccine, and died very suddenly and unexpectedly on day 24, after the vaccine. He had no history of cardiovascular disease).

3. Three people with ongoing and disabling neurological deficits, with associated chronic pain, persisting for more than 10 weeks after their first vaccine. These neurological deficits include: continual and disabling dizziness, generalised or localized neuromuscular weakness, with or without sensory loss. The chronic pain in these patients is either generalised or regional, with or without headaches.

So in short, in our small community of Lytton, BC, we have one person dead, and three people who look as though they will be permanently disabled, following their first dose of the Moderna vaccine. The age of those affected ranges from 38 to 82 years of age."

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Lawmaker questions financial ties between fact checker and Johnson and Johnson

"Representative Thomas Massie has raised questions about the financial relationship between a common online fact checker and Johnson and Johnson – a regular subject in its fact-checks, particularly where it relates to J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine.

A Factcheck.org project addressing “misconceptions” about COVID-19 and vaccines is funded by an organization that has more than 15% of its assets in Johnson & Johnson stock, Massie pointed out.

The significant amount of stock in a company that is producing a COVID-19 vaccine would make some question if the project is really an unbiased source of COVID-19 information.

The homepage of the project, called “SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project,” states:

“SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.”

...

In a tweet posted April 24, Kentucky’s 4th District Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, posted screenshots showing that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funds the project and has more than 15% of its assets in Johnson & Johnson stock.

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Additionally, the CEO and president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Richard Besser, previously served as the acting director for the US CDC and as chief health and medical editor at ABC News."

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Defensive bioweapon? DARPA wants insects to spread genetically modified viruses… to ‘save crops’

"A US military program dubbed ‘Insect Allies’ could be used as a biological weapon, a group of European scientists warns. The Pentagon’s research arm claims they are intended to defend crops, but doesn’t deny ‘dual-use’ potential.

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They argue that “the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance US agriculture or respond to national emergencies” and therefore the program “may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery,” which would mean a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention.

...

...Dr. Blake Bextine, program manager of Insect Allies, said that DARPA was “not producing biological weapons, and we reject the hypothetical scenario,” though they “accept and agree with concerns about potential dual use of technology.”

However, Bextine’s two-page response, released by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency later in the day, did not contain the forceful denial of bioweapons charges. Instead, Bextine argued the program was intended to “respond rapidly to threats to the food supply” and that it was subject to government regulation and transparency rules.

Nothing could possibly go wrong, Bextine firmly emphasized, simply because “every performer in the program is required to include at least three independent kill switches in their systems to shut down functionality of the technology.”

DARPA’s insect allies would work by injecting the affected crops with gene-editing viruses intended to target whatever ailment affects them, using CRISPR technology. The researchers point out this mechanism could also be used to introduce viruses into healthy organisms, however.

...

Despite worrisome scientific breakthroughs and controversial research programs, so far the notion of a genetically tailored virus being used as a bioweapon has been confined to science fiction. A story published in 2015, titled “Seven Kill Tiger,” posited the nightmare scenario of China using such a weapon to wipe out much of Africa."

From 2018...

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Florida set to release swarms of GMO mosquitoes as residents decry ‘criminal experiment’ by Bill Gates-backed biotech

"Spearheaded by the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD) and Oxitec, a British biotech firm that’s received backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the project aims to turn the first swarms of gene-edited bugs loose into the Keys starting sometime this week, the two bodies announced in a joint statement.

For the first leg of the plan, set to be expanded later, mosquito boxes will be placed at six locations, which over 12 weeks will release around 144,000 Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, a species most closely linked with transmitting illnesses such as dengue, Zika and yellow fever. If all goes according to plan, the male, non-biting bugs will mate with local biting females, whose female offspring are programmed to die off, helping to control the Aedes aegypti population and reduce the spread of disease.

...

Oxitec is no stranger to genetically modified blood-suckers, having already released more than a billion bugs across South America and the Caribbean, such as a 27-month-long experiment in Brazil in 2013 that sought to cut the local mosquito population by 90%. Like the initiative in the Keys, offspring from the GM mosquitoes were meant to die off in Brazil, however Oxitec came under fire in 2019 after researchers published a study alleging that the bugs were reproducing, finding that up to 60% of mosquitoes analyzed contained traces of modified genes.

While the company later disputed those findings, insisting the experiment went as planned, other Oxitec efforts have also been subject to criticism. A like project in the Cayman Islands was terminated in 2018 after local officials concluded it had failed, with Health Minister Dwayne Seymour saying the plan “wasn’t getting the results that we thought we could get.”

Months before its Cayman Islands contract fell through, the company announced a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to produce similar “friendly” and “self-limiting” mosquitoes, this time for the Anopheles species, which spread malaria. Since then, Oxitec has raked in just shy of $8.5 million from Gates, according to the foundation’s financial records, receiving more than $1.2 million so far in 2021 alone. It is unclear whether any of those funds were devoted to the Florida Keys plan."

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US Court Says 'Ghost Gun' Plans Can Be Posted Online

"Plans for 3D-printed, self-assembled "ghost guns" can be posted online without U.S. State Department approval, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

A divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a Trump administration order that permitted removal of the guns from the State Department's Munitions List.

...

In overturning the injunction, the appellate panel found 2-1 that a 1989 federal law prohibits courts from overruling the State Department's decision to add or remove a weapon from the Munitions List, the Chronicle reported.

Judge Robert Whaley, who cast the dissenting vote, argued the potential increase in accessibility of ghost guns presents "a serious threat to public safety" and noted the weapons have been linked to several mass shootings.

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Federal figures showed nearly a third of guns seized in California in 2019 were ghost guns.

Such weapons generally lack serial numbers, which are used to trace them. California has a law requiring anyone building a homemade gun to get a serial number or identification mark from the state Department of Justice, but there are concerns the law is not being widely followed."

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Missouri school district official urges HIDING materials from parents after complaints about ‘equity’ lessons

"A school district west of St. Louis, Missouri has issued an apology to parents after an email from one of its officials urged teachers to hide lesson materials from parents and keep teaching the social justice agenda.

“Keep teaching! Just don’t make everything visible on Canvas,” Natalie Fallert, the 6-12 Literacy Speech Coordinator at the Rockwood School District, wrote last week in an email to English teachers. Canvas is the remote-learning platform currently used by the district.

“This is not being deceitful. This is just doing what you have done for years. Prior to the pandemic you didn’t send everything home or have it available. You taught in your classroom and things were peachy keen. We are going old-school,” Fallert added, according to the email, quoted on Wednesday by the Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak.

Fallert’s email actually urged teachers to publish a “lean” version of the curriculum for everyone to see, while using the “original” to teach and assign to individual students, and using this approach to anything that could be “picked apart.”

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Fallert’s email was written in response to complaints from parents about a “culture and identity” lesson in English classes, which featured a book called ‘Dear Martin,’ a 2017 young adult novel dealing with racism and police violence. Lesson plans on the book include “discussions on racial profiling, civil disobedience and affirmative action,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which framed the story as a “culture struggle over equity and race.”

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District spokesperson Mary LaPak told the paper that Rockwood is moving forward with a curriculum in line with the “educational equity resolution” approved last year, which aims to identify “conscious and unconscious biases” and eliminate “barriers to educational achievement.”"

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Montana Becomes First State to Pass Resolution Against Unconstitutional Wars

"The Montana state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan and unprecedented resolution Tuesday calling on the federal government to end endless wars. The resolution passed 95-3 in the House and 47-2 in the Senate.

House Joint Resolution 9, sponsored by Rep. Ron Marshall (R-Hamilton), is the first of its kind to be introduced by any state and is currently being used as a model for other states across the country.

The resolution specifically urges President Joe Biden and the United States Congress to “end the endless war in Afghanistan,” repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, resist sending U.S. troops into combat without a declaration of war from Congress or specific authorization to do so, and to “execute a prudent foreign policy.”

Concerned Veterans for America, a veteran-run organization, endorsed the resolution and plans on utilizing it at the national level. The organization’s Deputy Director Russ Duerstine said in a statement that “the passing of the Endless War resolution is a firm statement—a strong message on behalf of Montanans that there is a better way than continuing to fight endless wars.”

According to USA Today, Montana has the third-highest percentage of veterans of all states in the United States. A recent YouGov and Concerned Veterans for America poll also determined that two-thirds of all US veterans support the complete withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."

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Campaign to recall California Gov. Newsom racks up 1.6mn+ signatures, meeting threshold to appear on ballot

"A petition to remove California Governor Gavin Newsom from office has gained enough signatures to trigger a recall election, state officials said, noting that more than 1.6 million residents had endorsed the effort.

With 1,626,042 signatures submitted and verified since the recall campaign kicked off last year, Californians could soon head to the polls to elect a new governor, according to a tally released by California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Monday. The initiative required just shy of 1.5 million signatures to qualify.

“This now triggers the next phase of the recall process, a 30-business-day period in which voters may submit written requests to county Registrars of Voters to remove their names from the recall petition,” Weber’s office said in a statement, adding that “a recall election will be held unless a sufficient number of signatures are withdrawn.”

...

With 1.6 million signatures and counting, the special recall race is likely to proceed, but some of Newsom’s backers are holding out for a win over the effort, with former Democratic state senator Don Perata leading a campaign dubbed “Stop the Steal” to kill the recall in its tracks. A mocking reference to ex-president Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 race, Perata hopes to convince enough signatories to rescind their endorsement for the project and rob it of the signatures needed to move forward.

Should Perata fail to do so, state lawmakers will have a 30-day period to come up with a cost estimate for a special election – which Newsom’s office has already appraised at $81 million – after which Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis will select a date. That means Californians could vote sometime in the summer or fall."

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“Reimagining” Mice and Men. “Synthetic Embryos”

"While everyone is preoccupied with mask-shaming and vaccine-cheerleading, scientists are engaged in critical research with a more lasting effect on our lives. For 100 years scientists have dreamed of creating and developing life outside of a womb. In March 2021 that dream came true. Scientists grew naturally conceived mouse embryos in tiny beakers for six days—the equivalent of the full first trimester of gestation. At this point the embryos had an identifiable body shape and organs. This miracle of modern science, posted in a YouTube video, garnered a mere 9,400 views.

...

Two separate research groups have now created their versions of synthetic embryos, called “human blastoids” from embryonic stem cells and “iblastoids” using reprogrammed adult skin stem cells. A real blastocyst is a human embryo around five or six days after fertilization that is growing. Normally, a blastocyst would implant in the wall of the uterus at around 7 or 8 days and the placenta would start to form. These advances prompted the ISSCR to rewrite its own yet to be revealed new guidelines allowing synthetic embryos to develop beyond the current 14-day limit.

As Dr. Frankensteinian as this sounds, researchers explain that the stem cell-produced embryos can be used to study congenital conditions, and the effects of drugs, toxins, and viruses on early development without using human embryos and perhaps create organs for transplants. Kind of like the good that would come from Dr. Fauci’s unethical “gain of function” research on coronaviruses (making them more deadly and transmissible). Look where that got us."

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Tennessee latest state to end mask mandates & Covid restrictions as gov announces he is ‘removing authority from local officials’

"Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee is facing blowback after announcing an end to restrictions on businesses in his state and says local health departments will not have the authority to mandate masks.

In Tuesday tweets, Lee said Covid-19 is “no longer a health emergency” in Tennessee thanks to widely available vaccines against the virus.

“We have never had a statewide mask mandate and I am removing authority from local officials to issue mask requirements,” he tweeted, adding that remaining mask mandates and business restrictions should be lifted completely by Memorial Day weekend.

Lee also announced an end to ‘The Tennessee Pledge,’ a set of guidelines released for businesses to take precautions during the pandemic. The ‘Pledge’ was removed from the state government website on Tuesday. While the recommendations were never mandatory, the governor said retiring the “government playbook” helps send a “clear message” about Covid restrictions ending in the state.

Tennessee joins multiple other states such as Texas that have rolled back their Covid-19 restrictions. Some have criticized the reopenings as premature, and Lee’s announcement was no different as many on social media blasted the governor as “unfit” for office and accused him of “pretending” Covid-19 is no longer an emergency."

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Privacy Champions Urge Passage of ‘Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale’ Act

"Federal agencies have taken advantage of legal loopholes to collect massive amounts of personal information from cell phone and internet users without congressional or judicial authorization for years, but that practice is being challenged by a bipartisan and bicameral group of lawmakers who introduced legislation on Wednesday that would prevent the U.S. government from buying individuals’ information from data brokers without a court order.

...

Led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a group of 20 senators introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (pdf) in the upper chamber of Congress. Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) also unveiled an equivalent bill in the House.

...

Media reports in the past year “revealed that a data broker named Venntel is selling location data collected from Americans’ smartphones to government agencies,” the lawmakers continued. “While it would be unlawful for app developers to sell data directly to the government, a legal loophole permits app developers to sell data to a data broker, which can then sell that data to the government.”

“Another controversial data broker, Clearview.AI, has compiled a massive database of billions of photos, which it downloaded in bulk from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, in violation of their terms of service,” the lawmakers added. “Clearview.AI uses these illicitly obtained photos to power a facial recognition service it sells to government agencies, which they can search without a court order.”

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a court order before accessing data about people through third-party brokers that “aggregate and sell information like detailed user location data, surreptitiously gathered from smartphone apps or other sources,” The Verge reported Wednesday.

...

In addition, the bill would close loopholes that enable the national security state to buy metadata about U.S. residents’ international calls, texts, and emails, and to collect records about their web browsing of foreign websites. While this is information that would typically require a warrant to access, the intelligence community has found ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, routinely violating individuals’ constitutional rights in the process."

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Senator Scott blasts Dems for divisive political race-baiting, Liberal Twitter brands him ‘Uncle Tim’ in response

"On Wednesday, the Republican lawmaker delivered his party’s response to the first congressional speech made by Joe Biden as president. He reiterated the GOP’s recurring criticism of Biden, that he is not seeking national unity and the nation is “sliding off its shared foundation.” Scott, the only black Republican senator, said race issues in particular are used by the Democrats as a “political weapon to settle every issue the way” they want.

...

“A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic – and if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them – and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor,” he said.

He declared that “America is not a racist country” – responding to a popular left-wing claim that institutionalized racism is all-pervasive in the US. He acknowledged that “our healing is not finished” and people of color face unfairness and discrimination all the time – including from purported liberals – but said Democrats appeared to “want the issue more than they wanted a solution.”"

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Bill Gates says ‘NO’ to opening vaccine patents – adds it probably won’t take a DECADE for poor nations to get the jab

"Vaccines developed by pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Moderna enjoy global protection under the World Trade Organization (WTO). Considering the scarcity of the medicines, there have been increasing calls from countries like India and South Africa, international relief organizations and public figures to waive those protections so that poorer countries can get better access to the medicines.

However, one of the most publicized figures in the global vaccination campaign, Bill Gates, apparently believes it’s a bad idea. When asked by Sky News’ Sophy Ridge if stripping intellectual property protections from vaccine recipes would be helpful, the founder of Microsoft responded with an emphatic “No.”

“The thing that’s holding things back in this case is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trial on these things. Every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way,” he explained.

...

Both Gates and his foundation are long-time defenders of intellectual property protections, and now critics are accusing Gates of deliberately wasting an opportunity to help reshape how intellectual property works for matters of greater public good. The Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator mechanism, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has a stated goal of providing “equitable access” to anti-Covid tools – but it also respects the exclusive intellectual property rights. At the same time, Gates has apparently been snubbing the alternative solution, known as Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP, which would pool open-source technologies on how to deal with the pandemic."

I've said it before: The lack of vaccine access for poorer countries is the nicest thing "the West" and its corporations have done in a long time. If I were writing an action thriller I might even make that the goal of the leftist villains: depopulate the "privileged" West and leave the "abused & exploited" developing world untouched...