Home » Liberty (Page 8)

Category Archives: Liberty

The two have been intertwined for decades.

Cover art, “Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research, Summary of a Workshop (2015)”

On October 17, 2014, spurred by incidents at U.S. government laboratories that raised serious biosafety concerns, the United States government launched a one-year deliberative process to address the continuing controversy surrounding so-called “gain-of-function” (GOF) research on respiratory pathogens with pandemic potential. The gain of function controversy began in late 2011 with the question of whether to publish the results of two experiments involving H5N1 avian influenza and continued to focus on certain research with highly pathogenic avian influenza over the next three years. The heart of the U.S. process was an evaluation of the potential risks and benefits of certain types of GOF experiments with influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses that would inform the development and adoption of a new U.S. Government policy governing the funding and conduct of GOF research.

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill

What is Gain of Function Research (GOF)?

There is no clear consensus regarding what constitutes GOF research. In the current political climate where the role of US Government (NIH/NIAID, DoD/DTRA, USAID and by implication CIA) in funding of what is clearly GOF research seeking to increase human infectivity of bat Coronaviruses has created an opportunity for stakeholders to sow confusion and ambiguity concerning what actually constitutes GOF research. Much of the resulting obfuscation has involved technical parsing of the definition of GOF in ways which conveniently support the interests of key stakeholders such as Dr. Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance organization, as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci and his famous denial and attack on the credibility of Senator Rand Paul during congressional testimony.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Slow-Motion Execution of Julian Assange Continues

May 22, 2024

The Slow-Motion Execution of Julian Assange Continues

The ruling by the High Court in London permitting Julian Assange to appeal his extradition order leaves him languishing in precarious health in a high-security prison. That is the point.

Dust to Dust – by Mr. Fish

The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he is a journalist whose only “crime” was providing evidence of war crimes and lies by the U.S. government to the public. It does not mean he will be released from the high-security HMS Belmarsh prison where, as Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Julian there, said he was undergoing a “slow-motion execution.”

It does not mean that journalism is any less imperiled. Editors and publishers of five international media outlets —– The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL —– which published stories based on documents released by WikiLeaks, have urged that the U.S. charges be dropped and Julian be released. None of these media executives were charged with espionage. It does not dismiss the ludicrous ploy by the U.S. government to extradite an Australian citizen whose publication is not based in the U.S. and charge him under the Espionage Act. It continues the long Dickensian farce that mocks the most basic concepts of due process.

This ruling is based on the grounds that the U.S. government did not offer sufficient assurances that Julian would be granted the same First Amendment protections afforded to a U.S. citizen, should he stand trial…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Rise of Pro-Palestine Encampments in Calgary, “The Police Went into Full War Mode in Riot Gear”. Robert Inlakesh

May 22, 2024

The Rise of Pro-Palestine Encampments in Calgary, “The Police Went into Full War Mode in Riot Gear”. Robert Inlakesh

Transcript from recent show.

This interview was recorded for the Global Research News Hour. Published May 18, 2024. Find a link here:

University Encampments and the Freedom Flotilla: Fighting Back Against Historical Racist Genocide – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, documentary film-maker, writer and political analyst, who has lived in and reported from the occupied Palestinian Territories. He has written for publications such as MintPress News, Mondoweiss, MEMO, TRT, and various other outlets. He currently works with The Last American Vagabond, Press TV and Quds News. Director of: ‘Steal of the Century‘ Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe

In this interview, RObert speaks of the uprisings of many university students against the Israeli actions in Gaza. He also talks about the decision by Israel to reject the ceasefire proposal they submitted to Hamas only to reject it when Hamas agreed!

Global Research: You’re currently based in Calgary. Were you part of the pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Calgary, which was recently torn down by police?

Robert Inlakesh: Yes, I arrived there. I probably spent a good six hours there covering it.

I was filming with a bunch of the protesters and observing what was going on and wanting to document how it all played out. Of course, it took a violent turn due to the fact that the university, according to the information that I received from the students, they wanted to negotiate with the university. The university refused.

It said that we won’t listen to you, called the police in. The police arrived. The private security shut down all of the buildings.

…click on the above link to read the rest fo the article…

Happiness is Just Chemistry, and Its Absence

May 21, 2024

Happiness is Just Chemistry, and Its Absence

(like everything on my blog, my graphics are covered by Creative Commons licence)

What is it about us that we never seem to be happy, at least for long? What does it even mean to be happy?

There have been endless studies suggesting that, a year after winning a major lottery, people are no happier than they were before. And that a year after losing a limb, those who suffered that tragedy are just as happy, on average, as the lottery winners.

Robert Sapolsky has explained how our body chemistry drives us to always want more — to never really be happy with what we have. That’s probably part of it. But another part of it, I think, is that our human brains’ constant ruminations — second-guessing, worrying, regretting etc, leave us in a stage of constant low-level anxiety, never content with the present, and obsessed with the past and the future.

This is all, of course, just my theory, just my amateur opinion. But my conditioning is to try to make sense of everything, and to use this blog to help me do so, so here we go.

Based on years of living with, observing, and reading about, non-human creatures, my sense is that, unless they have been abused or constrained under situations of chronic stress, they live most of their lives in a state of what I call alert equanimity (box 1 in the chart above). These are, I am guessing, times when their feelings of natural contentment are not being disrupted by stressful situations and the chemical responses of their bodies to those situations…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The surveillance state will be a power hog

May 21, 2024

The surveillance state will be a power hog

The amount of power required for the data centers that underpin the control grid and AI is overwhelming.

From a recent Wall Street Journal article:

U.S. power usage is projected to expand by 4.7% over the next five years, according to a review of federal fillings by the consulting firm Grid Strategies. That is up from a previous estimate of 2.6%.

The projections come after efficiency gains kept electricity demand roughly flat over the past 15 years, allowing the power sector to limit emissions in large part through coal-plant closures.

“We haven’t seen this in a generation,” said Arne Olson, a senior partner at consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics. “As an industry, we’ve almost forgotten how to deal with load growth of this magnitude.”

Just over 60 percent of China’s power grid is fueled by coal, according to the International Energy Agency. How else could you transform a country as big and as vast from backwater to tech leader in about 30 years?

source: https://www.iea.org/countries/china

But, while China has used every available source of energy in its arsenal, the West has been hell bent on destroying traditional energy generation for use by our remnant industrial base by focusing on wind and solar, which is nowhere near stable enough to maintain baseload for the kinds of important manufacturing activities needed in a modern economy — whether making steel, or appliances, or cars. Instead, we basically handed over our industrial and economic infrastructure to China, seduced by the lax environmental rules, cheap labor and promise of vast profits for shareholders.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekend reads: The American press gets its groove back

May 20, 2024

Weekend reads: The American press gets its groove back

U.S. media is ‘dragging itself back from the brink.’ Will Canada follow?

A story broke last weekend that I’ve been waiting a long time to see. In an interview with Ben Smith at Semafor, Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times, effectively announced the return of journalism to its pre-Trump era standards, stating that the role of the news media “is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other.” Kahn pushed back on the activist ethos in newsrooms, blasted journalists that expect their work to be a reflection of personal politics, and acknowledged the Times went “too far” in 2020 and is now re-establishing norms in the wake of these “excesses.”

It was a stunning moment.

Speaking about the story on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ben Smith described the Grey Lady as being “focused on dragging itself back from the brink.” He said that “what’s happening inside the New York Times is a sense that, during particularly the summer of 2020, they aligned themselves too much with particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.” And that Khan considers it his job to pull the institution back.

The context for Kahn’s stance is ongoing tensions between the Times and the White House (in part because the President won’t grant the paper a sit-down interview), and comments from podcaster and former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer in particular. The Pod Save America co-host recently complained in a Substack post that the Times is “often too worried about seeming balanced to truly articulate the danger of Trump.” And that journalists “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This

May 19, 2024

I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This

Ideally, I would have written this on May 4th not 14th, but I am going to talk Star Wars.

I was a fan in 1977, kept the flame alive when only battered VHS cassettes of the original trilogy existed, and was delighted to get prequels. Until the opening crawl announced, “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” I recall thinking, “This is my job – boring!” But the prequels were better than the sequels and all the TV shows I don’t watch. Indeed, the prequels’ clunky theme of democracy crumbling into autocracy, dispute over trade routes, then war, seems even more prescient than my 2016 ‘Thin Ice’ report, which underlined how the 21st century could echo the 20th, and our more detailed fragmented ‘World in 2030’ report in 2020.

In just the last week: the IMF warned the world risks splitting into walled-off FX/trade blocs; The Economist stated “The liberal international order is slowly coming apart,” with “a worrying number of triggers that could set off a descent into anarchy”; Germany flagged conscription for all 18-year olds and spending over 3% of GDP on defence; China introduced military training for all High School students; Biden raised tariffs on Chinese EVs to 102.5%, and Trump said he would make it 200%, with tariffs on used cooking oil likely next; Bloomberg warned “The US, China, Russia are in a spiral towards war”; the manager of the Hong Kong trade office in London was arrested for spying; and, as some underline Russia has shifted to a full war economy that incentivises the martial, my prediction that markets will serve national security going forwards came true in Putin firing his defence minister to appoint an economist to the role instead.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Watch: Pelosi Dismantled In Real Time In Masterclass On Populism

May 19, 2024

Watch: Pelosi Dismantled In Real Time In Masterclass On Populism

Two weeks ago, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was thoroughly savaged during a debate at Oxford University over the question of whether populism is a “threat to democracy.” In case you missed it, read on as it’s making the rounds. If you have 14 minutes to spare, jump right in:

Opening the case for the left was Rachel Haddad, Secretary of the Oxford Union. She argued that populist leaders like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage pose a threat to democracy, and are not a “new generation of geniuses” who can find simple solutions to longstanding, complex problems.

Pelosi closed the debate for the proposition, defining populism as an “ethno-nationalist populism, generated by an ethnic negativity to immigrants, people who are different from them and the rest” (so, ‘they’re racists!’).

Speaking against the motion were Union committee members Sultan Kokhar (Chair of Consultative Committee) and Oscar Whittle (Director of Research), as well as former Mumford & Sons lead guitarist, Winston Marshall – now a podcaster for The Spectator – who got into an exchange with Pelosi during parts of his speech.

Marshall started out by saying:

“Words have a tendency to change meaning when I was a boy, “woman” meant “someone who didn’t have a cock.”

Populism has become a word used synonymously with “racists.” We’ve heard “ethno-nationalist,” with “bigot,” with “hillbilly,” “redneck,” with “deplorables.”

Elites use it to show their contempt for ordinary people.”

He then noted that Barack Obama, while still president, tried to frame he and Bernie Sanders as actual populists vs. Donald Trump, who ‘doesn’t care about working people.’

But then, “If you watch Obama’s speeches after that point, more and more recently, he uses the word “populist” interchangeably with “strong man,” with “authoritarian.” The word changes meaning, it becomes a negative, a pejorative, a slur.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Jig Is Up: It’s Time for Accountability for the Origin of COVID-19

May 19, 2024

The Jig Is Up: It’s Time for Accountability for the Origin of COVID-19

Responsibility starts with EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and ends with agency officials who funded and defended his reckless virus research.

Today’s guest essay comes from David Robertson who looks at science officials’ pattern of misleading the public and passing the buck, including possible attempts to create a fall guy to blame for reckless, NIH-funded virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

When the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a recent hearing, viewers beheld an amazing spectacle. For the first time in the Subcommittee’s history, Democrats showed interest in getting to the bottom of the pandemic’s origin and began aggressively interrogating the lone witness: EcoHealth Alliance president, Peter Daszak.

Daszak is a prime candidate for blame in a possible laboratory accident in Wuhan, for an obvious reason: his NIH-funded nonprofit was performing reckless research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with inadequate safety, right before the Wuhan outbreak. This fact has long been known.

Before working to cover all this up, Anthony Fauci and other virologists stated as much in private emails back in February 2020. Daszak, however, has evaded questions about this for years.

Daszak’s responses to the Subcommittee’s questions did not exactly fill Democrats with confidence. “I remain seriously concerned that you, Dr Daszak, appear to be eluding questions from this Committee in an attempt to avoid consequences,” Democratic Ranking Member, Raul Ruiz, said in his closing statement. “It is important that you and your organization be held accountable.”

In one telling example Daszak claimed that, in a 2020 letter he orchestrated in The Lancet to dismiss claims of a possible Wuhan lab accident as “conspiracy theories”, he was exclusively referring to hairbrained ideas that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered from snake DNA or had HIV virus inserts…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Investigates Meta in Crackdown on Alleged “Rabbit Hole” Effects, Wants It To Push Digital ID

May 19, 2024

EU Investigates Meta in Crackdown on Alleged “Rabbit Hole” Effects, Wants It To Push Digital ID

There was a lot of talk about the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) while it was drafted and during the typical-of-the-bloc tortuous process of adoption, but now that it’s been here for a while, we’ve been getting a sense of how it is being put to use.

Utilizing the European digital ID wallet to carry out age verification is just one of the fever pitch ideas here. And EU bureaucrats are trying to make sure that these controversial policies are presented as perfectly in line with how DSA was originally pitched.

The regulation was slammed by opponents as in reality a sweeping online censorship law hiding behind focused, and noble, declarations that its goal was to protect children’s well-being, fight disinformation, etc.

The cold hard reality is that trying to (further) turn the screw – any which way they can – on platforms with the most reach and most influence ahead of an election is simply something that those in power, whether it’s the US or the EU, don’t seem to be able to resist.

Here’s the European Commission (who’s current president is actively campaigning to get reappointed in the wake of next month’s European Parliament elections) opening an investigation into Meta on suspicion its flagship platforms, Facebook and Instagram, create “addictive behavior among children and damage mental health.”

After all, exerting a bit more pressure on social media just before an election never hurt anybody. /s

Thierry Breton, an EU commissioner who made a name for himself as a proponent of all sorts of online speech restrictions during the current, soon to expire European Commission mandate, reared his head again here:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekend reads: Slowing down the news

May 19, 2024

Weekend reads: Slowing down the news

A Q&A with Jeremy Klaszus, founder of the Calgary outlet The Sprawl

At Lean Out, we often write about what’s not working in Canadian media — but we also want to highlight what is working, particularly when it comes to local news. As such, we have an ongoing series on independent outlets, featuring discussions with entrepreneurs that are dreaming up innovative solutions to our industry’s most pressing problems. We have profiled Village Media and kawarthaNOW, and interviewed the authors of What Works in Community News? on the podcast.

Today, we bring you a conversation with the founder of an online outlet in Calgary, The Sprawl. This hyperlocal site focuses on slowing down the news cycle, publishing one in-depth, reported podcast a month, along with a weekly newsletter. It’s a refreshing formula, and The Sprawl produces the kind of calm, thoughtful journalism that we most admire.

In this edited and condensed interview, editor-in-chief Jeremy Klaszus shares his thoughts on the current crises in media — from the fragmented information ecosphere and news fatigue, to lost trust and failing business models — and why thinking small might just be the solution.

TH: Jeremy, you and I met at a recent news forum in Ottawa. Since then, I’ve enjoyed exploring your work. You have been a journalist for close to 20 years. In 2017, you launched The Sprawl, a hyperlocal journalism site in Calgary, and then the Sprawlcast, a monthly podcast that does a deep-dive into civic affairs topics, such as housing. What made you decide to found an independent outlet?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Medical Elites’ Disgrace Over Ivermectin

May 19, 2024

Medical Elites’ Disgrace Over Ivermectin

“We know there is an important (but untransparent) list of who is responsible for misrepresenting published data, but will anyone be held accountable?”

In the wake of the FDA settling a lawsuit brought against it for wantonly and aggressively smearing ivermectin, the agency has deleted its postings. That’s good, but we shouldn’t forget how egregiously it mischaracterized the drug, ignored copious evidence in its favor, and portrayed its proponents as dangerous crackpots.

About 30 months ago, America’s FDA was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Should I take ivermectin to treat COVID?” Answer: No. The agency also told Americans not to use ivermectin to prevent Covid. Then, in what became known as its infamous “horse tweet,” the FDA even patronizingly told Americans: “Seriously, y’all. stop it.”

Prescribers who advocated for alternate treatments like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine were mocked online by America’s “trusted journalists” as being part of a “right-wing conspiracy” and labeled “hucksters.” Those who didn’t demure to the Covid mRNA or other Big Pharma treatment narratives were banned, fired, and spoken harshly about around the world and into the reaches of the stratosphere in what seemed like coordinated messaging.

Many clinicians lost their jobs – at best. At worst, their reputations, practices, finances, and careers were shattered. If that was not bad enough, after losing their jobs, state medical and pharmacy boards initiated legal proceedings against their licensure, singling out their “off-label” Covid treatments, despite other off-label treatments being a near-ubiquitous component of pharmacy and medical practice.

A screenshot of a social media post

Description automatically generated

Within days of FDA’s initial postings above, the American Pharmacist’s Association (APhA) the American Society of Health System Pharmacists (ASHP), and the American Medical Association (AMA) all collaborated to release a joint press release condemning doctors who prescribed ivermectin to treat Covid, but it appears that these organizations…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Belgium and Hungary Launch Controversial Digital IDs, Vaccine Passport, Ahead of EU Regulations

May 18, 2024

Belgium and Hungary Launch Controversial Digital IDs, Vaccine Passport, Ahead of EU Regulations

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

Belgium and Hungary are leading the way in launching digital ID wallets ahead of EU’s eIDAS (“electronic identification and trust services”) 2.0 regulation and EUDI Wallet coming into force later this month.

In Belgium, the MyGov.be app, covering all of the country’s federal public services, was launched on Tuesday, with the government promoting the digital identity as “simplifying” the use of its services, and “making life easier.”

In other words, the authorities there are playing the convenience card – while downplaying the risks that come with this type of centralization of people’s identities.

The wallet, via “eBox” mailbox, gives access to government-issued documents, as well as 683 services, identity data, Covid vaccination records, and more.

However, the success of the scheme is by no means guaranteed – on the one hand it is not mandatory, so people are free to decide not to use it.

Judging by an opinion poll Deloitte carried out last year, “71 percent of Belgians do not want a digital ID on their phone,” reports say, adding that the same survey showed that 79 percent “do not want a mobile driver’s license, while half refuse to fully digitize their IDs.”

“Ease of use” is also how digital ID is pushed in Hungary, where the appropriate app will be made available for download as soon as this week, while the service will be fully operational from September.

Enthusiastic reports about this development describe the digital ID program as “innovative,” “handy” and “saving costs.”

At the same time, putting all of a person’s data in one place and storing it in the cloud is advertised as something positive, instead of what opponents consider as scary – from the security standpoint alone.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey on the Relentless Rise of Taxes, Regulations, and Inflation

May 18, 2024

Doug Casey on the Relentless Rise of Taxes, Regulations, and Inflation

International Man: Almost every government worldwide is moving to increase taxes and regulations on its citizens while at the same time engaging in ever-increasing currency debasement.

What do you think of this trend, and where is it going?

Doug Casey: Higher taxes, more money printing, and more regulations are long-standing trends. The cat first got out of the bag with the French Revolution and the triumph of the Jacobins, who wanted to collectivize French society. They almost succeeded. Not many years later, Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital, letting another feral meme loose into society. The idea that the State was a good thing and should grow is now everywhere.

With the turn of the 20th century, roughly 120 years ago, governments all over the world created central banks and the income tax. They started small but have become behemoths, funding welfare and warfare. Both things are highly destructive. In the 19th century there was no welfare and very few wars, because wars are expensive. Governments were hard-pressed to extract adequate revenue from their populations for fighting.

Like all living creatures, the prime directive of the State is to survive and grow. But the State is unique. The State, as Mao said, comes out of the barrel of a gun. Since it’s based on coercion, it’s only natural that some form of socialism would be its preferred way to organize society. Currency inflation, income taxes, and debt have enabled governments to get completely out of control. The prognosis is not good.

International Man: There seems to be a coordinated effort to increase capital gains taxes.

For example, Canada just announced an increase in the capital gains tax from 50% to 67%. President Biden has proposed increasing the US capital gains tax to 44.6% and adding a tax on unrealized capital gains.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Birth Dearth or Baby Boom?

May 18, 2024

Birth Dearth or Baby Boom?

A new debate on where global population may be headed

Writing in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week Greg Ip and Janet Adamy explored the possibility that the world’s population may peak and begin to fall far sooner than demographers have previously projected:

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.

The United Nations, in its World Population Prospects 2022, projected in its medium variant scenario that global population would peak in the 2080s at about 10.4 billion people. The WSJ reports that figure represents a substantial drop from U.N. projections just five years earlier: “In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100.”

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in 2020 projected a global population in 2100 of about 1.5 billion less than the United Nations:

In the reference scenario, the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion (8.84–10.9) people and decline to 8.79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100.

Both the U.N. and IHME foresee projected 2100 population to be less than demographers had previously projected. The trend in population projections for these organizations is down.

In contrast, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in a recent update to its Shared Socioeconomic Pathways scenarios increased its 2100 population projection by more than 1 billion people in its “middle of the road” scenario:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Category Archives: Liberty

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

What is Gain of Function Research (GOF)?

Post navigation

Latest Posts