European Court of Justice finds Ursula Von Der Leyen GUILTY of violating EU law by withholding terms she agreed on the vaccine contracts
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Thomas Crooks’ Parents Called Cops on Day of Trump Shooting
Screenshots / Social Media, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream
RTM
Shocking new information has come to light regarding the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman responsible for the attack, was reportedly on law enforcement’s radar hours before he opened fire.
The gunman’s father reportedly told CNN he believed his son had gone to practice at a local shooting range, expecting him to return by 1 pm.
Crooks had also informed his boss that he needed the day off on Saturday, telling colleagues he would see them on Sunday.
Fox News reported that Crooks’ parents had contacted local law enforcement in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, expressing concern about their son’s whereabouts on the day of the rally.
Crooks was spotted at the rally’s security screening area approximately three hours before the shooting, Daily Mail reported.
[…]
1,000-plus doctors, scientists sign Hope Accord calling for SUSPENSION of all mRNA jabs
Dr Eddy Betterman
The Hope Accord is moving forward after cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra tweeted a video of himself explaining that more than 1,000 doctors, scientists and concerned citizens have thus far signed the document, which calls for the immediate suspension of all mRNA jabs.
In order for health professionals to reclaim any semblance of medical ethics and set the record straight that mRNA technology is dangerous an unsuitable for use in medicine, Dr. Malhotra is urging everyone who cares, including our readers, to sign the Hope Accord.
“In 2015, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Richard Horton, wrote a chilling commentary in which he claimed that possibly half of all the medical literature may simply be untrue,” Dr. Malhotra says in the video below. “He wrote that science had taken a turn towards darkness. And now it’s a question of who is going to take the first step to clean up the system.”
“The COVID pandemic has revealed a microcosm of the corporate capture of medicine and public health by powerful vested interests in the form of Big Pharma in particular. This is an industry whose business model is one of fraud. And sadly, we have seen the greatest failings of the system with the rollout of an mRNA product that has likely contributed to deaths and serious harm to millions of people around the globe.”
Dr. Malhotra believes that now is the time to take the next step to clean up the medical system. And the best way for ordinary folks to do this, he says, is to sign the Hope Accord “which calls for the complete suspension of these products but also calls on reclaiming medical ethics.”
“It’s time to act,” he pleads. “Please sign this petition and this accord and we can take things further to really genuinely clean up the system.
A number of elected officials are also joining the call for the medical system to be cleaned up starting with the immediate removal of all Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “vaccines” to be pulled from the market for the safety of the public.
Americans for Health Freedom (AHF) says that as of June 25, 2024, 191 politicians, 96 candidates, one surgeon general, one entire state Republican party, one state congressional district, 17 Republican party county committees, and seven physician organizations have all pledged to call for all COVID injections to be banned immediately.
All of the above entities have also pledged not to take any more donations from the pharmaceutical industry. A complete list of all of them is available at AmericansForHealthFreedom.org.
“I am honoured to be standing alongside my respected colleague, Dr. Malhotra in calling for the restoration of medical ethics,” tweeted Dr. Ayiesha Malik, who describes herself on X as “a compassionate GP and integrative doctor.”
“We won’t let history repeat itself. We will stand together and bring hope to the future.”
One perhaps major setback is that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) just took control of the United Kingdom – and on Independence Day for the United States, no less – with the installment of Keir Starmer as England’s new prime minister.
The latest news about growing medical industry opposition to mRNA can be found at BadMedicine.news.
[…]
Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/07/18/doctors-scientists-sign-hope-accord-mrna-jabs/
The 100 Years’ War on Palestine
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance
By Rashid Khalidi
Profile Books Ltd (2024)
Book Review
Authored by the son of a negotiator in the 1990s Madrid and Oslo negotiations, Khaidi organizes his book as as a series of six wars against Palestinian Arabs, the first dating 1917-1939.* Although he’s is highly critical of British and (and later US) foreign policy for systematically denying Palestinians any right of self-determination, he’s also highly critical of other Arab states (who have a long history of denying self-government to their own subjects) and Yasser Arafat and other PLO leaders for denying Palestinian residents of input into the Madrid and Oslo peace negotiations.*
The book also contains an Afterword about Israel’s current war on Gaza, with has mobilized support for Palestine, throughout the Western and Arab world, as well as the global South. At present, Khalidi estimates that approximately 5 million Palestinians live in Israel and its occupied Palestinian territories and 5 million live in exile.
The most interesting parts sections the book concern the Israeli invasion of Lebanon In 1982 (Khalidi and his young family lived in Beirut at the time) and the peace negotiations (in which his father served as an advisor to Palestinian negotiators) leading to the 1993 Oslo Accord.
1909: Khalidi starts his chronology in 1909, when Palestine was stil a colony of the Ottoman Empire. At the time the first Jewish immigrants (fleeing brutal repression in Eastern Europe) arrive (40,000 in 1909-1914), Jews represent 6% of the population and Jews, Arabs and Christians lived comfortably side by side.
1917: The Balfour Declaration, signaling British intent to establish a Jewish state in British- controlled Palestine, issued on November 2, 1917.
1936-38: Palestine remains a British colony until 1947, subject to brutal military repression when they protest eviction by Jewish immigrants from the farmland they work. Because European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution are denied entry to the to the UK and and US, many flee to Palestine, where the Jewish population increases to 18%. An armed rebellion in 1936 lasted two years it could only be quashed by massive military force.
1947-48: Ongoing terrorist attacks by Jewish paramilitary groups (Stern Gang, Haganah, Irgun) force the British to withdraw from Israel in 1947, leaving the newly created United Nations in charge of Palestine and the formal process of independence. The original UN resolution grants 56% of historic Palestine to the self-governing state of Israel (despite Jews representing a minority of Israel’s population) and 44% Palestinian Arab state tsubject to military occupation by the king of Jordan.
Jewish paramilitary groups begin ethnically cleansing many Arab-assigned sectors of Palestine prior to 1947, a process that evicts 300,000 Arabs from Palestine’s major cities prior to the UN-designated date for Israeli independence (May 15, 1948) and 400,000 shortly afterwards. They flee to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank (then under Jordanian control) and Gaza (then controlled by Egypt).
Palestinian refugees with means, skills or relatives in Arab countries (a large majority) come to live outside refugee camps.**
1959: Fatah (the party which currently runs the Palestinian Authority) formed in Kuwait 1959 by group of Palestinian engineers, teachers and professionals headed by Arafat.
1964: Because the Arab states fear retaliation by Israel, they oppose Palestinian attacks on Israeli border regions, and the Arab League forms the PLO (in Egypt) in the hope of reigning in Fatah. Meanwhile the Egyptian and Jordanian military harass, arrest and torture Gaza militants who stage attacks on Israel.
1967: Following Israel’s 1967 Six Day War war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Egypt and Jordan are forced to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank, which have been Israeli colonies every since.
1969: the Cairo Agreement puts the PLO in charge of security in the Lebanese refugee camps and by the start of the Lebanese Civil War (1973-1990), the PLO (with 15,000 15,000 armed members) represents the largest military force in many parts of Lebanon.
1982: Israel invades Lebanon and embarks on seven week siege of Beirut. They make withdrawal of all PLO troops a condition for ending the siege. They latter resettle in numerous Arab capitols, with the PLO leadership in Tunis.
1987: indirectly empowered by the PLO’s political decline, a secret Unified National leadership launches the First Intifada, consisting of mainly peaceful strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and subject to brutal Israeli military repression.
1993: first Oslo Accord signed, negotiated mainly by PLO leaders with no direct knowledge of actual conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. Creates the Palestinian Authority, which has limited political input into any aspects of governance other than security, and takes over from Israel the task persecuting, arresting and torturing Palestinian militants. Conditions become much worse for everyone but a few Palestinian authority leaders.
1994: Arafat returns to Palestine
2000: Worsening repression leads to Second Intifada, resulting in Arafat’s imprisonment in his compound until his death (most likely by polonium poisoning) in 2004.
2005: Abbas elected to 4 year term as president.
2006: After boycotting the 2005 election, Hamas win 74 seats to Fatah’s 45 seats in the Palestinian Authority legislature. Refusing to accept Hamas as part of the PA government, a US trained Fatah-controlled security force invades Gaza and makes an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Hamas.
*For most of his life, Arafat ran the PLO in exile from Lebanon or Tunis. He only resided in Palestine for 10 years (1994-2004).
**Breakdown by country:
- In Jordan, of 2.2 million originally registered with UNRWA, only 370,000 remain in camp today (The king of Jordan granted Jordanian citizenship to all Palestinian and they now represent the majority of Jordan’s population.)
- In the West Bank only 1/4 of the 830,000 registered with UNRWA remain in camps.
- In Syria, only 1/4 of the 550,000 refugees remain in camps
- In Lebanon, fewer than half the 470,000 refugees remain in camps.
Trump Selected as 2024 Republican Nominee
Five unanswered questions over Trump assassination attempt
Questions surrounding how would-be political assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to get into a position just 100 feet from Donald Trump was speaking, take aim with a rifle and fire off at least eight shots, remain.
Crooks, 20, was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper moments after he opened fire at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. The presumptive Republican nominee was wounded in the ear while supporter Corey Comperatore tragically lost his life.
In the aftermath of a seismic day in US politics, it now appears that it was sheer luck that Trump was not killed by Crooks’ gunfire which the ex-president’s ear and did not cause major injury.
The Secret Service is coming in for the most scrutiny of their handling of the event. The building that Crooks’ fired from was identified as a security risk but the shooter was still able to establish a position and fire off multiple shots.
New videos appear to confirm witnesses accounts that attendees at the rally notified law enforcement about Crooks’ presence after seeing him bear crawling and armed atop the building.
After witnesses alerted cops when they saw Crooks bear crawling, an officer was hoisted by another officer on to the rooftop.
Once there, Crooks trained his gun on the officer, forcing him to duck for cover. Moments later, shots rang out, terrifying the crowd.
Trump was said to be in ‘great spirits’ on Sunday while telling the Washington Examiner that he has rewritten the speech he will deliver at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden spoke for about five minutes from the Oval Office and noted that the Republican National Convention was opening in Milwaukee on Monday, while he himself would be traveling the country to campaign for reelection.
He said passions would run high on both sides and that the stakes of the election were enormous.
But the president added, ‘it’s time to cool it down’ and noted not just the weekend attack on Trump but also the possibility of election-year violence on multiple fronts.
Here, the MailOnline looks at five of the key unanswered questions surrounding the first assassination attempt in 43 years and the security lapses around it.
How did Thomas Crooks get on to the roof?
Officials have confirmed that Crooks used a ladder to climb up to the roof of the American Glass Research building in Butler, along Evans Road.
How he managed to get the building with a large rifle and a ladder undetected remains to be established.
It’s not clear for how long he was in the vicinity. Trump took the stage at 6:03pm, attendees began entering the grounds of the event around 1:00pm.
The crowd were forced to go through metal detectors before gaining entry. CNN reports that Crooks was reportedly acting suspicious around security. It’s not clear at what time that was reported.
A message was relayed to the Secret Service about Crooks, warning them to keep an eye on him.
According to the Associated Press, Trump supporters notified local cops who were patrolling the area about Crooks’ presence at 6:10pm.
The building was identified as a security risk. So why wasn’t it secured?
The building rooftop where Thomas Crooks was perched is shown here. It was to the right of where Donald Trump was facing when he was shot
The building that Crooks shot from was identified as a security risk so it’s not clear as to why it wasn’t properly secured, according to a report from NBC News.
‘Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,’ a former Secret Service agent told the network. The rooftop was well-within the range of someone with AR-15 style gun.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that the agency worked with local law enforcement to secure the area and that securing the perimeter was the responsibility of the Butler Township Police Department and the Butler County Sheriff’s Office.
Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldlinger disputed this somewhat when speaking to NBC News.
‘They had meetings in the week prior. The Secret Service ran the show. They were the ones who designated who did what. In the command hierarchy, they were top, they were No. 1,’ he said.
‘To me, the whole thing is under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service. And they will delineate from there.’
The officer who confronted Crooks on the roof was a member of the Butler Township Police Department.
Why did it take so long for snipers to take him out?
Butler Township snipers provided support to the Secret Service snipers who were monitoring the event
The Secret Service is still investigating the response to the gunshots.
It took ‘seconds’ for the sniper to kill Crooks, a law enforcement source told CBS.
The video reveals that it was 43 seconds between the first series of pops heard and a Secret Service agent saying: ‘The shooter is down.’
Initial reports indicate that Crooks managed to fire eight bullets into the crowd before being shot dead at 6:11 pm.
Trump was in the middle of describing a displayed chart at the time. ‘And if you want to really see something this sad… take a look at what happened…’
The next sound heard was a series of pops, as many as six can be heard.
The next sound is a male voice saying: ‘Get down! Get down! Get down!’ Five Secret Agents then swarm the stage and provide coverage for Trump. Another series of pop like sounds are heard.
It’s 12 seconds later that we hear a final volley of shots, less than 30 seconds after that a voice can be heard saying: ‘Shooter is down.’
The weapon used was an AR-15 style rifle chambered in 5.56mm. At least three attendees, including Comperatore, were hit. Donald Trump was wounded in the ear.
The others were described as being ‘critically injured.’
Why was the glass making building out of the security perimeter?
It’s not clear why the glass manufacturer’s building remained outside of the secure perimeter.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC News Monday: ‘A direct line of sight like that to the former president should not occur. That’s why president Biden directed an independent review of the incident.’
A former Secret Service agent told NBC News that the mere presence of the building should have been enough to pique the interest of those charged with securing the event.
‘Just because it is outside of the perimeter, it doesn’t take it out of play for a vulnerability, and you’ve got to mitigate it in some fashion,’ the agent said.
Another former Secret Service agent, Anthony Cangelosi, told NBC that one of two scenarios is likely to be revealed. There was either no plan to deal with a potential sniper on the roof or there was an it was not executed.
‘I don’t like making any assumptions, but it does look like some mistakes were made, that this was preventable,’ Cangelosi added.
‘There will be an intensive review’ of the incident and ‘there’s going to be a massive realignment,’ said Joseph LaSorsa, a former Secret Service agent who served on the presidential detail. ‘This cannot happen.’
DA Goldlinger told CBS News that local law enforcement provided snipers to aid the Secret Service which means there was extra coverage.
Those local snipers were placed to the left of the Secret Service sniper who took out Crooks, disrupting their line of sight to Crooks.
During most of Trump’s campaign stops, local police aid the Secret Service in securing the venue. Agents from other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, such as the Transportation Security Administration, occasionally help.
Many Trump rallies feature thousands of audience members, take place in the open air and last for hours.
Before the event, agents scan the venue for bombs or other threats, and Trump invariably arrives in a fortified motorcade.
Law enforcement officials typically put up barriers as a perimeter, and require all attendees to go through a metal detector to enter the venue. Armed protective agents search all attendees’ bags and even wallets.
Many rallygoers are patted down by hand.
Why did the cops not do anything?
A member of the public is seen talking with a police officer before the shots rang out, the building where Crooks was perched is to the right
Following the shooting, Trump put out a statement thanking the Secret Service for their ‘rapid response’ and offering his condolences to Comperatore
Video from the scene just before the gunfire began shows a man speaking with a local cop and appearing to point to the roof of the building where Crooks was lying in wait.
Other bystanders can be heard directing the officer to that roof top.
A witness told KDKA that the shooting began moments after he told a cop that he’d seen Crooks.
‘When I turned around to go back to where I was, it was when the gunshots started, and then it was just chaos, and we all came running away, and that was that,’ Ben Macer said.
Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe told CBS News that when the cops were told about the sightings of Crooks, they began ‘searching’ for him.
Slupe said an officer with the Butler County Township was hoisted on to the roof where he encountered Crooks.
‘All I know is the officer had both hands on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned towards the officer, and rightfully and smartly, the officer let go,’ Slupe said.
‘I would have done the same thing, absolutely. I mean, people think the officers are supermen like you hold on the roof with one hand while you are hanging on for dear life and pull a gun out. It doesn’t work that way.’
[…]
Police Snipers INSIDE Building Used By Failed Trump Assassin; Reported Him Using Range Finder, Took Pictures, And Command Did Nothing
Zero Hedge
Three Beaver County police snipers were reportedly stationed inside the building used by the shooter in Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a local law enforcement officer with ‘direct knowledge’ of the incident tells CBS News‘ Anna Schecter, and as first reported by the Beaver Countian.
It gets worse…
A sniper, stationed on the second floor providing overwatch, saw the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, outside the building and looking up at the roof. He then walked away, returned, whipped out his phone, when one of the snipers took the first of two pictures of him.
Crooks then took out a rangefinder – at which point the sniper radioed to a command post. Crooks then disappeared again and came back a third time with a backpack. The snipers called in once again with information that he had a backpack and that he (Crooks) was walking toward the back of the building.
By the time other officers came for backup, he had climbed on top of the building and was positioned above and behind the snipers inside the building, the officer said.
Two other officers who heard the sniper’s call tried to get onto the roof. State police started rushing to the scene, but by that time, a Secret Service sniper had already killed Crooks, the officer said. –CBS News
So – law enforcement had eyes-on the shooter the entire time, took pictures of him, notified their command post – and nothing was done until Crooks shot Trump, at which point Secret Service snipers returned fire and killed him.
According to local TV station WPXI, officers on the ground spotted Crooks nearly 30 minutes before he fired at Trump.
Channel 11′s Nicole Ford confirmed that Beaver County’s ESU team had eight members at the rally, including snipers and spotters. According to Ford’s sources, one of them noticed a suspicious man on a roof near the rally at 5:45 p.m., called it in and took a picture of the person. We have learned from our sources the person in that picture is Thomas Crooks. We’re told it’s not clear if Crooks had a gun with him at that point.
According to multiple sources, a law enforcement officer had also previously seen Crooks on the ground and called him in as a suspicious person with a picture prior to 5:45 p.m. Our sources tell us an officer checked the grounds for Crooks at that point, but did not see him where the first picture was taken.
26 minutes after the second picture of Crooks was taken by law enforcement and the information called in, shots were fired from the roof of the American Glass Research building. Seconds later, a Secret Service sniper returned fire and killed Crooks.
So the local police command had roughly 30 minutes to coordinate with the US Secret Service on the suspicious guy with a rangefinder, who they then let climb the roof and attempt to assassinate Donald Trump.
Blame Game
The assassination attempt has pitted the USSC against local law enforcement – with agency director Kimberly Cheatle telling ABC News on Monday that it was the local police’s responsibility to secure the building that was outside the USSC perimeter.
“There was local police in that building – there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building,” said Cheatle.
One former Secret Service agent, however, took issue with Cheatle placing so much blame on local law enforcement – telling CNN: “The Service is responsible for everything, not just the inner perimeter. They should make sure all of this is covered.”
“Officers inside a building – that’s not mitigating a high-ground vulnerability,” the former agent continued.
According to Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, this isn’t the snipers’ fault.
“Whatever happened in Butler, this was not a failure of the local, state or federal officers on the ground who responded to the shots fired at former President Trump. They acted heroically and put their lives on the line to protect everyone at the event and we must recognize that,” he said. “This is a failure at the management or command level who failed to secure an obvious weakness in the security of this event.”
[…]
Scientists discover ‘exciting’ link between autism in children and gut bacteria”
By John Leake
The UK’s Daily Mail is just out with a report headlined “Scientists discover ‘exciting’ link between autism in children and gut bacteria.” The report cites a recent study published by a research team in Hong Kong titled Multikingdom and functional gut microbiota markers for autism spectrum disorder.
The authors confirm the seminal observation made by former UK gastroenterologist, Andrew Wakefield, in his 1998 paper “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.” As Wakefield observed back then, something was impairing the gut biome of children. He further observed that—in remarkable case studies—both GI tract trouble and neurological symptoms of autism emerged shortly after children received an MMR vaccine. Finally, Wakefield observed that correcting the child’s gut biome with dietary changes could also reduce the severity of the child’s symptoms of autism.
Instead of taking Dr. Wakefield’s observations as a starting point for further research that could have helped millions of children over the last quarter of a century, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex performed the most vicious vilification campaign against him since Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was persecuted in the mid-19th century for correctly recommending that anatomy students wash their hands after dissecting cadavers and before examining pregnant women in the maternity ward.
Neither the Hong Kong study nor the Daily Mail report offer any theory about what is altering the gut biome of autistic children. Dr Elizabeth Lund, “an independent consultant in nutrition and gastrointestinal health,” is quoted:
The researchers quite rightly point out that this data cannot say whether the different microbiome causes ASD or whether differences in the diet, or other environmental factors, associated with children with ASD lead to the observed differences.
Hmmm. I wonder what “other environmental factors” might be causing this widespread catastrophe in children?
Dr. Lund seems to be suffering from what I call the Nile River-God Syndrome, after Bernini’s depiction of the Nile River in his 1651 Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome. The source of the Nile was unknown in Europe until the British explorer John Hanning Speke “discovered” the giant lake he called Lake Victoria in 1858.
When it comes to examining the possible role of childhood vaccines in causing the dramatic rise of the incidence of autism, the mainstream medical community remains steadfastly and willfully blind. They ought to know by now that—in the words of SNL’s Stuart Smalley—”denial is not a river in Africa.”
[…]
Via https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/daily-mail-scientists-discover-exciting
Drum Beat for Bird Flu Vaccines Has Begun
Colorized transmission electron micrograph of avian influenza A H5N1 virus particles (yellow/red)
By Dr Meryl Nass
This is from Kaiser Health News and ABC News.
Here are the nuggets that makes sense in this article:
- “There’s no evidence that this year’s bird flu virus spreads between people or causes serious disease in humans.
- And it’s unclear how well the available vaccine would prevent either scenario.”
Ignore everything else.
Actually, there are many “available vaccines” and none of the stockpiled vaccines are matches for the current H5N1. There are several vaccines in development but you can’t test them against a virus that does not exist. There is no bird flu virus that transmits human to human, so there is no way to tell if a vaccine would work against some future virus. Remember, for this virus to become a problem, it has to gain the ability to transmit human to human efficiently. But it also has to become more pathogenic. The chance of all this happening outside a lab is miniscule.
No rapidly produced vaccine has ever been safe and effective. Never. Do YOU want to be first up to try out the next one?
Finland is offering farmworkers bird flu shots. Some experts say the US should, too
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/finland-offering-farmworkers-bird-flu-shots-experts-us/story
As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S., veterinarians and researchers have taken note of Finland’s move to vaccinate farmworkers at risk of infection. They wonder why their government doesn’t do the same.
“Farmworkers, veterinarians, and producers are handling large volumes of milk that can contain high levels of bird flu virus,” said Kay Russo, a livestock and poultry veterinarian in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If a vaccine seems to provide some immunity, I think it should be offered to them.”
[…]
But the wait-and-see approach “is a gamble,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “By the time we see severe outcomes, it means a lot of people have been infected.”
“Now is the time to offer the vaccines to farmworkers in the United States,” said Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. Even more urgent measures are lagging in the U.S., she added. Testing of farmworkers and cows is sorely needed to detect the H5N1 bird flu virus, study it, and extinguish it before it becomes a fixture on farms — posing an ever-present pandemic threat.sability to infect human airways. It also spread between two laboratory ferrets through the air.
[…]
In considering vaccines, the agency takes a cue from a 1976 outbreak of the swine flu. Officials initially feared a repeat of the 1918 swine flu pandemic that killed roughly half a million people in the United States. So they rapidly vaccinated nearly 43 million people in the country within a year.
But swine flu cases turned out to be mild that year. [This is a lie and these authors know it. There were no cases of the flu for which the vaccine had been made—and the vaccine was rolled out anyway for a disease the experts knew did not exist.—Nass]. This made the vaccine seem unnecessarily risky as several reports of a potentially deadly disorder, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, emerged. Roughly one of every million people who get influenza vaccines may acquire the disorder, according to the CDC. [Another lie. One in a million was reported to have died from GBS, but ten times that many got GBS—Nass] That risk is outweighed by the benefits of prevention. Since Oct. 1, as many as 830,000 people have been hospitalized for the seasonal flu and 25,000 to 75,000 people have died.
For these reasons, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and about a dozen other countries are stockpiling millions of doses. Finland expects to offer them to people who work on fur farms this month as a precaution because its mink and fox farms were hit by the bird flu last year. “
[…]
Free Speech Worked Brilliantly After Trump Shooting
By Jeffrey A Tucker
There is only one major social media platform that is relatively free of censorship. That is X, once known as Twitter, and owned by Elon Musk, who has preached free speech for years and sacrificed billions in advertising dollars in order to protect it. If we don’t have that, he says, we lose freedom itself. He also maintains that it is the best path to finding the truth.
The crisis that broke out after the attempt on Donald Trump’s life put the principle in motion. I was posting regular updates and never censored. I’m not aware of anyone who was. We were getting second-by-second updates in real time. The videos were flying along with every conceivable rumor, many false and then corrected, alongside free speech “spaces” in which everyone was sharing their views.
During this time, Facebook and its suite of services fell silent, consistent with the new ethos of all these platforms. The idea is to censor all speech until it is absolutely confirmed by officials and then permit only that which is consistent with the press releases.
This is the habit born of the Covid years, and it stuck. Now all the platforms avoid any news that is fast in motion, except to broadcast precisely what they are supposed to broadcast. Maybe that works in most times when people are not paying attention. Readers do not know what they are missing. The trouble was that during these post-shooting hours when nearly everyone on the planet wanted updates, there were no press releases forthcoming.
By habit, I reached for what was once called television. The networks had plenty of talking heads and newscasters with their usual eloquence. What was missing from all the broadcasts that I saw in these hours were any factual updates. They too were waiting for confirmation of this or that before putting out any information at all beyond the basics. They let their “experts” speak as long as possible just to waste time before rolling out new advertisements.
Over time, I realized something. X was driving the whole of the news, while the newscasters had to wait for permission before reading scripted lines.
Meanwhile, on X, the situation was utterly wild. Posts were flying fast and furious. New rumors would circulate (the shooter’s name and affiliations, stories about a second shooting, claims that Trump was hit in the chest, and so on). But shortly after the rumor circulated, so did the debunking. The feature called “Community Notes” kept the faulty news in check, while the truth gradually circulated to the top. This happened on topic after topic.
The wildest theories ever were permitted to appear, while others would debunk them with reasoned arguments. The readers could decide for themselves. You could see how the seeming chaos gradually organized itself into communities seeking verification. Posters grew ever more careful about posting claims that could not be verified, or at least explaining what they were.
X was single-handedly holding the whole of the corporate media to account, and reporters and editors very obviously came to depend on their X feeds to figure out what to say next. It was the same with newspapers. When NYT, CNN, WaPo, and so on would make major missteps, posters on X would call them out, the word would reach the editors, and the headline or story would change.
In the end, X became the one place where you could find the fullness of truth. All the while, the old-world media was dishing out the most ridiculous headlines one could imagine. For many hours, the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, and other such venues refused to say it was an assassination attempt on Trump. The headline led people to believe that this was a MAGA rally with some random shooters that got carried away and so Trump had to be ushered out. This really did happen, and readers were outraged.
CNN was probably the worst offender, with the following headline: “Secret Service Rushes Trump Offstage As He Falls at Rally.”
It took many hours and repeated attempts but eventually the mainstream media finally said that the incident was “being investigated” as an assassination attempt, even though it was very obvious that it was an attempt on his life that he barely survived with the slight turn of his head.
It was the kind of flurry of nonsense that further discredited the old corporate media right there in front of an entire planet that was no longer believing anything they said.
It’s hard to know why the corporate press did this. Were they just cautious and worried about misinformation? If so, how come so many of their headlines were of the same sort, that which refused to say that someone just tried to kill Trump? Were they just in the habit of waiting for officials to tell them what to say? Was it raw TDS that was driving this? It’s hard to know but the failure was conspicuous and obvious to all.
What stood out above all else was the way free speech on X worked to ferret out the real story, while actually driving forward the mainstream press to correct its errors and get the story right. One shudders to think how it would have all taken place in absence of this one platform, which became the go-to place for everyone. The most important lesson: free speech worked. And beautifully.
All Western societies are currently struggling with the question of just how much speech to allow on the Internet. The trajectory for years now has not been a good one. Once-free platforms have become more frozen, more propagandistic, more staid, and duller, even as this one platform has created a culture of freedom combined with community-driven accountability.
This freedom accomplished exactly what it was supposed to accomplish, while the censored platforms held onto misinformation much longer than they should have been.
Which makes the point. Too often, the battle over free speech is framed as misinformation/freedom vs. facts/truth/restriction. The very opposite has proven to be the case. The free platform proved itself capable of quick course correction alongside maximum agility in processing the floods of constant new information. Meanwhile, the venues in which “misformation” has been anathematized ended up being the major source of exactly that.
Freedom works. As messy as it is, it works better than any other system. Meanwhile, governments of the world have targeted X for destruction. Advertisers continue to boycott and regulators continue to threaten.
So far, it has not worked and thank goodness. But for X, the last 24 hours would have looked very different: nothing but propaganda, apart from a few marginal places here and there. Therein lies another irony: the way X is managed is increasing trust rather than reducing it.
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Via https://brownstone.org/articles/during-the-crisis-free-speech-worked-brilliantly/
