The Cradle

Israeli warplanes continued heavy attacks against civilians in southern and eastern Lebanon on 24 September.

Airstrikes pounded Kfar Kila, Khiam, and Qabrikha early evening on Monday, as well as several other towns in south Lebanon.

“Enemy aircraft launched a raid on the town of Mansouri in the western sector,” as well as the town of Taybeh in the south, the Lebanese National News Agency’s (NNA) correspondents in Marjayoun and Tyre reported.

Israeli artillery also pounded the Marjayoun plain, sparking fires in the area.

The Iqlim al-Tuffah heights and outskirts of the towns of Sajd, Ansar, and Jbaa were also hit, NNA reported.

A paramedic was killed when his ambulance team was targeted in an airstrike in south Lebanon’s Upper Nabatiyeh area.

Several people were also killed by Israeli airstrikes on eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa region.

“The death toll from the enemy raid on a residential building in the town of Nabi Aila in the Bekaa, until now, has reached five martyrs and six wounded,” the Lebanese Civil Defense said.

The fresh wave of attacks came shortly after an Israeli drone strike targeted a residential building in Beirut’s southern suburb, killing and injuring several people.

The Israeli military “has now begun an extensive wave of attacks on terrorist targets in Lebanon,” the army said in a statement at around 6:00 PM on 24 September.

Over 500 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 wounded by Israeli attacks across Lebanon in less than two days.

Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets at Israeli sites in the Haifa and Safad areas on Tuesday afternoon and early evening, also targeting several bases in the Galilee.

“In support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, in support of their valiant and honorable resistance, and in defense of Lebanon and its people, the Islamic Resistance fighters bombed the Dado base on Tuesday 09-24-2024 with 50 rockets,” Hezbollah said Tuesday evening, marking its 16th operation of the day.

Message for the people of Lebanon: pic.twitter.com/gNVNLUlvjm

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) September 23, 2024

Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese know that you are lying. Like the Palestininas, the Lebanese know that Israel’s leadership is as unscrupulous as eager to expand its genocidal violence to the region in order to maintain power and advance its settler-colonial agenda. Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese know that most of the Israeli society may simply be too hurt, traumatised or indoctrinated to see any alternatives beyond living in a perpetual state of war. Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese may be wondering why you are not in the #Hague yet.
https://t.co/0e8rDEIugg

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) September 23, 2024

The Israeli regime and its Western allies have lost the genocidal war against Gaza. They’re now trying to escape defeat and humiliation by launching another genocidal war against Lebanon. However, this defeat will be much more devastating, both for Zionists and for their allies. pic.twitter.com/mJNg6DPBJX

— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) September 23, 2024

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/09/24/will-israels-bloody-rampage-in-lebanon-deter-hezbollah/

By Michael Snyder

While everyone was distracted, the global elite got exactly what they wanted.  The UN adopted the “Pact for the Future” on September 22nd, and the mainstream media in the Western world almost entirely ignored what was happening.  Instead, the headlines urged us to just keep focusing on Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.  Sadly, the vast majority of the population has never ever heard about the “Pact for the Future”, and so there was very little public debate about whether or not we should be adopting a document which lays the foundation for a new “global order”.  The text of the “Pact for the Future” is available online, but hardly anyone will ever read it and many of the most important provisions are buried toward the end of the 56 page document.  Of course everyone should take the time to actually read this document, because our leaders just committed us to an extremely insidious global agenda that literally covers just about every conceivable area of human activity.

September 22nd, 2024 is a day that will go down in infamy.

Once the “Pact for the Future” was formally adopted, the following was posted on the official UN website…

World leaders today adopted a Pact for the Future that includes a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations. This Pact is the culmination of an inclusive, years-long process to adapt international cooperation to the realities of today and the challenges of tomorrow. The most wide-ranging international agreement in many years, covering entirely new areas as well as issues on which agreement has not been possible in decades, the Pact aims above all to ensure that international institutions can deliver in the face of a world that has changed dramatically since they were created. As the Secretary-General has said, “we cannot create a future fit for our grandchildren with a system built by our grandparents.”

You would think that the “most wide-ranging international agreement in many years” would make headlines all over the planet.

But that didn’t happen.

The UN press release also boldly declares that the “Pact for the Future” will “lay the foundations” for a new “global order”…

“The Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations open the door to new opportunities and untapped possibilities,” said the Secretary-General during his remarks at the opening of the Summit of the Future. The President of the General Assembly noted that the Pact would “lay the foundations for a sustainable, just, and peaceful global order – for all peoples and nations.”

The Pact covers a broad range of issues including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation, human rights, gender, youth and future generations, and the transformation of global governance.

I don’t want to live in a new “global order” that includes “all peoples and all nations”.

I am sure that most of you feel the exact same way.

Another page on the official UN website tells us that “UN 2.0” is all about creating a “modern UN family”…

Halfway through the 2030 Agenda, the world is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It is not too late to change course, if we all rethink, refocus, and recharge. “UN 2.0” encapsulates the Secretary-General’s vision of a modern UN family, rejuvenated by a forward-thinking culture and empowered by cutting-edge skills for the twenty-first century – to turbocharge our support to people and planet.

We will strive towards this vision with a powerful fusion of innovation, data, digital, foresight and behavioural science skills and culture – a dynamic combination that we call the “Quintet of Change”. It is about evolution towards more agile, diverse, responsive, and impactful UN organizations.

That sounds so cozy, doesn’t it?

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of a “family”, right?

But the truth is that the agenda that they intend to impose on all of us will not be pleasant at all.

Over the years, much has been written about how insidious the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” are.

Well, the UN is openly admitting that the “Pact for the Future” was specifically designed “to turbo-charge implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals”…

• The entire Pact is designed to turbo-charge implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
• The most detailed agreement ever at the United Nations on the need for reform of the international financial architecture so that it better represents and serves developing countries, including:
  • Giving developing countries a greater say in how decisions are taken at international financial institutions;
  • Mobilizing more financing from multilateral development banks to help developing countries meet their development needs;
  • Reviewing the sovereign debt architecture to ensure that developing countries can borrow sustainably to invest in their future, with the IMF, UN, G20 and other key players working together;
  • Strengthening the global financial safety net to protect the poorest in the event of financial and economic shocks, through concrete actions by the IMF and Member States;
  • and accelerating measures to address the challenge of climate change, including through delivering more finance to help countries adapt to climate change and invest in renewable energy.
• Improving how we measure human progress, going beyond GDP to capturing human and planetary wellbeing and sustainability.
• A commitment to consider ways to introduce a global minimum level of taxation on high-net-worth individuals.
• On climate change, confirmation of the need to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

In one way or another, all forms of human activity contribute to “climate change”.

And so they intend to strictly regulate all forms of human activity in order to meet their twisted goals.

The “Pact for the Future” also recognizes a “central role” for the UN and a “coordinated and multidimensional international response” whenever future “global shocks” arise…

We recognize the need for a more coherent, cooperative, coordinated and multidimensional international response to complex global shocks and the central role of the United Nations in this regard. Complex global shocks are events that have severely disruptive and adverse consequences for a significant proportion of countries and the global population, and that lead to impacts across multiple sectors, requiring a multidimensional and whole-of-government, whole-of-society response.

[…]

Via https://www.activistpost.com/2024/09/the-un-just-adopted-the-pact-for-the-future-which-lays-the-foundation-for-a-new-global-order.html

Jay Valentine

This week, a group of citizens, attorneys, investigators, writers, former elected officials, tech entrepreneurs unveiled a powerful technology platform to even up the fight with liberal NGOs stealing U.S. elections.

Their site, StopBogusBallots.com is an initiative of Common Sense Elections, a PAC applying quantum speed technology, innovative, successful legal strategies, top flight investigative talent – to exposing mail-ballots from nonsensical addresses BEFORE the votes get counted.

2024 will be decided by mail-in ballots, from 7 swing states, each of which is currently too close to call.

NGOs are active in each swing state, operating ballot mills registering illegal aliens and other migrants – capturing their ballots – and voting them.

The Common Sense Elections Dark Money Tracking System tracks every NGO influencing U.S. elections – dollars they spend, dollars they receive.

There is no organization in America, who can, with 3 clicks from a phone, expose every connection between the Chinese Progressive Association, Tides Advocacy, down to Leftist street-level GET-OUT-THE-VOTE organizations impacting the 2024 election.

Now there is – and the Common Sense Elections team is publishing the roadmap of influence, from foreign and domestic actors secretly impacting the 2024 election – using Fractal quantum technology.

The first Fractal analysis of Dark Money groups is available today at StopBogusBallots.com.

Common Sense Elections identified over 500,000 ineligible addresses – each – in Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin, over 1.4 million in Pennsylvania.

These addresses may receive a mail-in ballot which could be intercepted by a Leftist NGO to vote for their candidate.

StopBogusBallots.com does not simply find an anomaly; they cross-search it with property tax records, real-time U.S. postal change of address records, and other databases to challenge a mail-in ballot before it is counted rather than litigate afterward.

The product is a ballot challenge – with full documentation – from an official government document – like a property tax entry – and a street level photo – delivered weeks or days BEFORE the ballots are counted.

Let’s say Phineas votes from 135 Elmont Street.

The voter roll reveals nothing about the address.

Common Sense Elections cross-searches property tax rolls, which informs us that the address is a vacant lot in an abandoned mall with no bedrooms.

Phineas may well vote in person.

Common Sense Elections is not about stopping anyone from voting – they just don’t think it is OK to send a mail-in ballot to a vacant lot – because an NGO may intercept it and vote it.

Phineas is NOT going to receive a mail-in ballot because mail, particularly a ballot, is not delivered to a vacant lot.

Should a ballot come from that address, Common Sense Elections, or affiliated groups can challenge it, consistent with Wisconsin procedure, before it is counted.

How could Phineas get a mail-in ballot where a mail-in ballot cannot be delivered?

But he did get that ballot!  He cannot get it in the mail!  The ballot is then cast!

Multiply such examples by the thousands, with different details, yielding the same result.

The Common Sense Elections team worked with Fractal quantum speed technology for the last 3 years perfecting how to successfully apply such a strategy.

In 2022, that strategy impacted enough bogus ballots – saving the U.S. Senate seat for Senator Ron Johnson.

Before Common Sense Elections built its site, citizens across America, reading a Substack article mulling this action – pledged over $350,000.  More is flowing in every day.

Citizens can now donate to a group of legal street fighters, using advanced technology, who rang the bell in Wisconsin impacting a U.S. Senate race – and bring the fight to those who are undermining U.S. elections – IN PLAIN SIGHT.

The StopBogusBallots.com SCOREBOARD shows how many ballots in Wisconsin – to start – followed by Michigan and Pennsylvania as funding continues – come from ineligible addresses.

Here’s how the 2024 game may change:

It’s November 1.

Wisconsin polling shows a close race.

The Wisconsin StopBogusBallots.com scoreboard shows 75,000 ballots flagged from ineligible addresses.  These are cast, not yet counted.

Wisconsin will likely be won by 25,000 ballots – and before the first vote is counted, citizens know who won – nobody – because the ineligible ballots outnumber the winner’s margin – by a lot.

For the first time, documented evidence is in place before the steal.

Every flagged ballot has a property tax record showing it is a coffee shop or a U.S.P.S. entry showing it to be undeliverable.

Records from Marriott and Days Inn websites show ballots from hotels—by the thousands—and time series quantum speed analysis shows 30 people sending in ballots from one hotel for 15 years.

Colleges and university dorms are outed for the first time.

Students sending in ballots from a frat house, some 105 years old, voting from the same frat house for 20 years – may determine the next President and Congress.

Americans will not be OK with this!

The preposterousness of the voter rolls is being outed – and in some states, like Arizona, its citizens may well see hundreds to thousands of ballots coming from LEGALLY UNDELIVERABLE ADDRESSES LIKE A STREET CORNER which is legal in that ridiculous state.

Every American can see – in plain sight – the scoreboard – and 75,000 ballots, perhaps more, came in from laughable places – like a Walmart or gas station – in a state decided by 25,000!.

What happens next is anyone’s guess – but it’s sure better than getting screwed with no evidence and nothing to show a court.

Common Sense Elections is just getting started – the Red states are next.

In January, CSE is raising the funding to do two dozen states—building parallel systems with their current official government voter system, running them constantly, cross-searching with other databases, and showing the wildly inaccurate voter rolls in Texas, Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, Missouri, Florida, Mississippi, and several more.

[…]

Via https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/09/citizen-platform-take-ngos-big-steal/

Dmitry Orlov

Last week thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon, maiming hundreds and killing dozens of people. This was a large-scale terrorist strike targeting members of Hezbollah — the Party of God, a Lebanese Shia Islamist party — while sparing doctors working at Lebanese hospitals, who had been alerted to turn in their pagers beforehand by parties yet unknown. The exploding pagers contained batteries that included a small amount of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, a high explosive, which was incorporated as part of the battery manufacturing process. PETN is a nonvolatile powder and is very difficult to detect in small quantities, especially if it is encapsulated inside the plastic body of a battery.

However, just installing an explosive-charged battery in a standard production-line pager does not automatically a pager bomb make. There is also the crucial step of modifying the hardware and the firmware of the pager itself to provide the triggering mechanism. The simplest mechanism imaginable is a pattern matcher that waits for a certain text string to arrive as part of a page. Once the pattern matcher fires, it activates an electronic switch that short-circuits the battery, causing it to heat up and burst into flames (lithium-ion batteries heat up and can burst into flames or even explode when short-circuited).

This is what appears to have happened: the pagers started beeping all at once when they received the broadcast trigger message and then exploded a short time later. Since standard production-line pagers do not contain the hardware for short-circuiting the battery, these pagers must have been outfitted with custom electronics as well as an exploding battery.

Is that all? No, of course not! Broadcasting the trigger message to all the pagers required control of a base station located in Lebanon and somebody had to either be present to broadcast the page or to rig up electronics to do so remotely — more complexity and more hardware. And, of course, the entire technology suite had to be tested in some secret laboratory somewhere, to make sure that it would work right the first time.

Is that all? Not quite: there were also the exploding radios. They started exploding a day later. Apparently, the operation was not limited to just the pagers: similar tricks were performed with other types of battery-operated communications equipment, such as walkie-talkies. There weren’t as many of these, probably because, unlike the pagers, they hadn’t been purchased as a single large shipment. There were also many fewer of them. They were, however, an interesting proof of concept: now we know that your Android or iPhone or Tesla could be rigged to blow upon receiving a remote command just as easily as those pagers.

The entire operation, including setting up production for exploding batteries and for custom pager electronics able to short-circuit these batteries, assembling the pagers, programming the base station, delivering the pagers to Hezbollah buyers and setting up a local base station, all in a way that would not raise any suspicions, must have taken a great deal of time, effort and organizational acumen.

American propaganda sources (some people still use the phrase “media sources” to describe them) immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was the Israelis who were responsible for the exploding pagers. Anonymous American official sources (who but them, of course!) anonymously informed their pocket propaganda journos that the Israelis had warned them of the exploding pagers minutes before they started going off. Meanwhile, the Israelis themselves denied all responsibility.

However, my trusted anonymous sources (yeah, I can play this stupid game too, you know!) told me that it is unlikely that Israel could have pulled off the whole operation and that American intelligence operatives must have been involved. It would be interesting to find out who made the pagers, who sold the pagers to Hezbollah and who told the Lebanese doctors to turn in their pagers ahead of time. But it is highly unlikely that an investigation will ever be carried out to unearth such facts because one very important rule of conducting investigations is to avoid unearthing evidence that would incriminate the investigators.

Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that it was the Israelis who engineered and orchestrated the whole thing. Two reasonable questions immediately leap to mind: What were they trying to achieve? and Were they ready to take advantage of that achievement?

Perhaps the Israelis simply wanted to demoralize Hezbollah leadership or to behead the entire organization. But this is a bad guess; the Israelis are smart enough to know that Hezbollah fighters are natural-born martyrs, that their leadership structure is rather diffuse and self-repairing, and that such an attack would only encourage them to lob more missiles at Israel (which is what it did).

Or perhaps the Israelis intended the pager explosions to serve as a sort of artillery preparation for a ground invasion? In that case, what could possibly explain the absolutely dismal level of preparation for it? Days after the attack IDF was still moving equipment to the north, hastily pulling a tank brigade out of Gaza, and causing traffic jams all over Israel with haphazard troop and equipment movements. Even today IDF is nowhere near being able to take advantage of the element of surprise provided by the pager incident, which has been completely lost by now.

Or perhaps Israel is just a mad dog that is so mad that it bit itself? Overlapping with the genocidal disaster unfolding in Gaza, the pager incident, if cemented in the eyes of the world as being an Israeli operation, would further convince everyone that Israel is a terrorist state and withhold all cooperation and support from it. Perhaps the Israeli leadership no longer cares about such things, their one job being to keep Bibi Netanyahoo out of jail. But perhaps somebody else is very much interested in finding a good excuse for withholding all cooperation and support from Israel. And who might that be? Satan?

Satan (or “The Great Satan,” as the Iranians like to call it) is in sad shape. Its president is non compos mentis and his wife has taken over the chairmanship of White House cabinet meetings. It’s good that Biden has been sidelined; now he won’t be able to order any more huge terrorist acts like the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline. The Ukrainian operation is going nowhere and pretty soon Zelensky will be ready to walk on his knees to the gates of the Kremlin, dragging the fetid corpse of NATO behind him, and to commit seppuku once he gets there. The effort to get the Houthis in Yemen to unblock the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, codenamed Operation Poseidon Archer, is a dud: The Red Sea and the Suez remain blocked (except for Russian and Chinese vessels) and the Israeli port of Eilat on the Red Sea is bankrupt. There is a presidential election coming up soon, featuring a cackling idiotress from hell (who is hiding from even the most fawning American propagandists) and a tempestuous geriatric who wants to make America great again (which is a lot like sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun)

Is this a good time for Great Satan to escalate a military conflict, either with Russia or on behalf of Israel in the Middle East? Perhaps not! A forthcoming international conference of BRICS+ and friends in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation is likely to decide the fate of the US dollar as a reserve currency. Lots of people from around the world are coming to that conference, bringing nails to pound into the US dollar’s coffin. The Ukrainian fiasco can be terminated with just one simple headline: “Zelensky missing!” Ukrainian rats would then abandon the sinking ship, which would then, you guessed it, sink. But a bit of finesse is required to flush Israel down the pipes because of the power of the Israeli lobby which owns half the members of the US congress

Thanks to the emotive force of the exploding pager disaster, it will now be possible for US officials to interrupt the plaintive cries of Israeli lobbyists with urgent shouts of “What’s that horrible smell?” The Israelis already smelled quite bad because of the genocide in Gaza but, let’s face it, lots of people don’t really care about thousands of dead Palestinian women and children. The exploding pagers bring the bad smell factor to an entirely new level because that’s as clear a case of terrorism as anyone can imagine.

Not only that, but it’s indiscriminate terrorism because nobody can predict where it will strike next: Pandora’s Box has been opened. As you read this, you too may be looking askance at your portable computing device: could it have been tampered with by… Americans? You already knew that it eavesdrops on you and tracks your every movement. And now you know that it can also kill you or maim you when the time comes. Not a comforting thought, that…

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/76b35b82-908f-41fb-9bab-4d47e7dbe182

Episode 8 Medieval Growth and Prosperity

The Middle Ages Around the World

Dr Joyce E Salisbury

Film Review

Favorable climate (due to Medieval warm period) and new agricultural technologies led to an explosion of population, wealth and territorial expansion in the 11th and 12th century (known as the the High Middle Ages).

China

This upsurge of wealth began in China in 960 AD, when the Song dynasty moved it capitol to southern China to escape repeated nomadic invasions. The new coastal capitol Lin’an (now Hangzhou) was ideally suited for China’s thriving maritime trade from India – facilitated by the Chinese invention of the magnetic compass.*

New strains of rice from South Vietnam enabled Chinese farmers to grow two crops a years. This, in turn, opened up new arable land both to landless peasants tea and cotton production for export. Iron production also increased substantially as coal replaced charcoal in the smelting process. Likewise with Lin’an’s heavy emphasis on arts and the sciences, artisans grew almost as rich as merchants.

Currency was introduced as small copper coins punched with square holes that enabled them to be threaded onto strings. To further facilitate trade, in 1024 the Song dynasty introduced paper currency and a central bank system to regulate it.

Europe

With most of the continent organized into centralized kingdoms by 1100 AD, Europe also florished. With the introduction of a padded horse collar that rested on the horse’s shoulders (rather than his neck), it became possible to use horses (who worked faster and longer than oxen) to pull plows. This also enabled the use of heavier plow with a colter** attachment enabling the cultivation of heavy clay.

It also enabled the change from a two-field(one in production, one fallow) to a three-field system (one spring, one fall an one fallow) system and the introduction of legumes, both to replace soil nitrogen and to add protein to peasant’s diets (after they were forbidden to hunt the landlord’s rabbits and other game). It also enabled the diversion of surplus land for sheep production and wool for export, especially after luxuriantly-coated Marino sheep were introduced from Africa via Spain.

After 1000 AD, European harnessed water and wind power (mainly to mill grain), based on Roman technology using gear to convert rotary to vertical motion.***

Between the 11th and 13th century, the European population doubled from 37 to 74 million. Owing to increased iron intake (leaching from iron cooking implements), maternal and infant mortality plummeted and women began outnumbering men.

Peasants were encouraged to move eastward (enabling landlords to expand their lands for sheep), leading to huge swaths of clear cut land in northern Germany to accommodate 3,000 new settlements.

Seljuk Turks

Beginning in the 11th century, Seljuk Turks from the Asian steppes migrated westward and came to dominate the Muslim world. In 1055 they conquered Baghdad, initiating the new title of “sultan” for Muslim leaders.

In 1071, they attacked the Byzantine empire, forcing Constantinople into a negotiated settlement in which they surrendered most of Asia Minor and the Anatolian peninsula (now modern day Turkey).

*The Chinese had been using magnets for divination for centuries.

**A colter (Latin ‘culter’ = ‘knife’) is a vertically mounted component of many plow that cuts an edge about 7 inches (18 cm) deep ahead of a ploughshare

***Windmills first developed in Persia (where the first medieval translation of Greek and Roman classics occurred).

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/13172786/13172803

Dr Robert Malone

True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.

Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?

To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information, iphone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.

iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.

What could possibly go wrong?

Although iPhone has historically been known to keep user data “safe,” this is not a given, and there have been hacks and data breaches over the years.

Crowd Strike happened – from just a simple coding error. In 2015, all of my confidential data given to the DoD and the FBI in order to get a security clearance was harvested by the Chinese government, when they hacked into the government’s “super-secret”, and “super-secure” government data storage site. In response, the government offered me a credit report and monitoring of my credit score for a year. Yeah – thanks.

Bottom line- no data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or mores might come to pass years from now. This type of information should not be harvested and stored.

Furthermore, trusting that iPhone will never sell that data or pass it off to research groups is very naive. In fact, mental health data is already being mined.

Apple has partnered with various health organizations and academic institutions to conduct health-related studies, such as Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Michigan on various health studies. Apple also collaborates with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a Digital Mental Health Study. This study likely utilizes data collected through Apple devices to investigate mental health patterns and outcomes. Trusting that the user identifiers have been completely stripped before that data is passed on is a risk that one takes when entering such information into an iPhone.

“Connect with resources.”

So how does Apple benefit? At this time, it appears that Apple is selling advertising of various mental health services by “connecting” services to people’s phones. Apple writes that “These assessments can help users determine their risk level, connect to resources available in their region, and create a PDF to share with their doctor.”

That might mean that one presses the depressed button in the mental health assessment, apple will place ads the search engine for anti-depressants or physicians that prescribe them.

Why would that example be relevant, and which pharmaceutical companies might benefit?

Iphone has developed their mental health assessment with an “educational grant” from Pfizer!

Pfizer manufactures and sells Zoloft, Effexor, Pristiq, and Sinequan formulations. Together the sales revenue for these drugs is in the billions each year:

From 2015 to 2018, 13.2% of American adults reported taking antidepressant medication within the past 30 days, with sertraline (Zoloft) being one of the most common. Even off-patent, there were 39.2 million prescriptions filled with an annual sales revenue of 470 million.

Effexor XR is an antidepressant medication that was originally developed by Wyeth (now part of Pfizer). In 2010, when the first generic version of Effexor XR was introduced in the United States, the brand name product had annual sales of approximately $2.75 billion. By 2013, due to generic competition, Pfizer’s sales of Effexor XR dropped to $440 million.

According to IMS Health data, in 2016, Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) had annual sales of approximately $883 million in the United States, although sales appear to have fluctuated over the years.

The bottom line is that Pfizer is not supplying educational grants to develop mental health assessment software for Apple out of the “goodness of their heart.” Mental health inventions via medication are a big business, and these companies are looking to profit.

This is just one way that Apple is using surveillance capitalism by data mining mental health status and then selling access to that data to big pharma, big-tech, physician and insurance companies, etc.

How this information, which once released or leaked, can never be returned with privacies intact, will be used in the future is unknown.

If the setting for sharing research on health conditions has not been deactivated, this information will go into a database somewhere. It is only Apple’s assurance that your identification has been stripped from the data. Further, your mental health information will be uploaded to the cloud and will be used as a behavioral future. To be shared, packaged, sold, used to influence your decision-making, etc.

I am wary of the highly profitable industry that has been built up around “mental disorders.” Over the years, the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have hurt individuals and families by both classifying diseases and disorders incorrectly and by developing treatments and therapies that were and are dangerous. Many are still in use. Here are a few examples:

• There are estimates that 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, with most occurring between 1949 and 1952. In 1949, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to António Egas Moniz for his development of the lobotomy procedure.
• Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in 1952 with the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It was listed under “sociopathic personality disturbance”. This classification remained in place until 1973.
• Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are a widely prescribed class of antidepressant medications. There is a link between SSRIs and increased risk of violent crime convictions, and other research has shown an increase in self-harm and aggression in children and adolescents taking SSRIs.
• The APA supports access to affirming and supportive treatment for “transgendered” children, including mental health services, puberty suppression and medical transition support.
• The APA believes that gender identity develops in early childhood, and some children may not identify with their assigned sex at birth.
• Asperger’s syndrome was merged into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 in 2013. Since then, a large number of people face discrimination and barriers to entry into higher-paying positions. Children handed such a diagnosis also can suffer a lack of confidence in their ability to manage relationships effectively, which can easily carry on to adulthood.

These are just a few of the many, many ways the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have gotten things very wrong.

• A survey of more than 500 social and personality psychologists published in 2012 found that only 6 percent identified as conservative overall, implying that 94% were liberal or moderate.
• At a 2011 Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, when attendees were asked to identify their political views, only three hands out of about a thousand went up for “conservative or on the right

The liberal bias in psychology influences findings on conservative behaviors.

To bring this back to the use of software applications and the iphone mental health app in particular, be aware that these software programs are being developed by people with a liberal bias and who will view the beliefs of conservatives negatively. What this means for future use of this data is unknown, but it can’t be good.

If you do chose to use the mental health applications, which main stream media has nothing but praise for, be aware – there are alligators in those waters.

But sure that the data sharing mode, particularly giving data access to researchers is turned off. But even then, don’t be surprised in your phone begins planting messages about the benefits, or SSRIs or other anti-depressant drugs into your everyday searches. Or maybe your alcohol use or tobacco use data will be used to supply you with advertisements on the latest ways to reduce intake or how to find a good mental health facility. These messages may very well include neuro-lingustic programming methods and nudging, to push you into treatment modalities. But honestly, it is all for your “own good and for the benefit of your family.”

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Via https://www.malone.news/p/iphone-mental-health-assessments