Peter Daszak Invited to Answer Questions in U.S. House of Representatives

The U.S. House has invited Peter Daszak to answer questions in the U.S. House of Representatives. What needs to be discussed? John Leake lays it out at Coureageous Discourse, in an article titled "Why Aren't Daszak and Baric Arrested?" Excerpt:

Especially interesting is Ms. Rocke’s statement: “Hi Ralph: I have a couple of questions about the SARS-CoV spike glycoproteins you are developing with respect to the DARPA grant we are collaborating on.”

Here it is critically important to understand that DARPA chose to pass on Daszak’s DEFUSE grant proposal—which proposed modifying SARS-CoV bat coronaviruses in order to make them infectious to humans—because, in the DARPA reviewer’s estimate, the work proposed was too dangerous.

And yet, as Ms. Rocke plainly states, Professor Baric was already “developing SARS-CoV spike glycoproteins with respect to the DARPA grant.”

This is just one of many glaringly obvious pieces of evidence that Baric, Daszak, and Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were already, in 2018, developing SARS-CoV-2—the infectious agent that began circulating in Wuhan, China less than two years later.

The 2018 DEFUSE proposal also expressly states the plan to insert a furin cleavage site into the "SARS-CoV spike glycoprotein” that Professor Baric was “developing” in 2018.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the U.S. Right to Know reporter, Emily Kopp, wrote an excellent report titled US scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan and published on January 18, 2024. As Ms. Kopp points out, SARS-CoV-2 has multiple features that are expressly proposed in the DEFUSE grant proposal.

See this invitation from the House of Representatives, which details the issues.

If you are looking for any discussion of this memo (or the critically important issues raised by this memo) in the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN or NPR, you will not find any discussion in any of these places. I checked today.

Continue ReadingPeter Daszak Invited to Answer Questions in U.S. House of Representatives

Fighting Against the Rip Tidal Pull of Digitized Conformity

Matt Taibbi, in his latest, "Maintain Your Brain," at Racket News:

I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.

I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing...

We’re entering a stage of history where, like the underground resistance in Bradbury’s book, we’ll have to build some consciousness as a movement to save the human mind. Because thinking for oneself has already been denounced as a forbidden or transgressive activity in so many different places (from campuses to newsrooms and beyond), it’s probably already true that membership in certain heterodox online communities is enough to put a person on lists of undesirables.

Twenty-five years ago, most of us thought it would be a great idea to digitize everything and connect it to everything else. It was a great idea. My most recent moment of demoralization: now that everything is digitized and connected, it gives too much power to anyone who can manage to control it all. To open the gates to some and close them to others. It wasn't so terrible when their were hundreds of media outlets, but that's not the case any more. Worse yet, a lot of the censoring is being don surreptitiously (e.g., shadow-banning, stealth editing and outright censoring). Increasing numbers of us are getting the sense that we are yelling into the void. I just don't know the extent of it. I don't know who is in charge. I don't know where this is leading, but if they can do this to Matt Taibbi, they can easily do it to small fish like me.

Matt urges: "We’ll eventually want to get to know each other a little more, be a little more interactive." I think that is the right approach, living and interacting significantly more locally, which will make it more difficult for power-hungry others, especially when well-intentioned (Mike Benz calls it "The Blob"; Brett Weinstein refers to this somewhat coordinated effort as "Goliath"), to intervene, to pit us against each other, to make us disappear, to generate yet another false consensus . . . .

Continue ReadingFighting Against the Rip Tidal Pull of Digitized Conformity

Apple Censors Jon Stewart and Lina Khan

And this is how the world goes around. Apple has been publicly exposed as a censor in a big way. Stewart, no longer working for Apple, is now free to talk about the problem. Matt Stoller reports:

During the interview with [FTC Chair Lina Khan], [Jon Stewart] said that Apple had blocked him from interviewing her while he was at Apple. "They literally said, please don't talk to her,” he offered.... It’s a wide-ranging interview, in which Khan and Stewart discuss everything from inhalers to antitrust to big tech. And it’s worth watching. But the key moment was when Stewart asked Khan why Apple would do something like that. And she responded, “I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.”

That is the right analysis. It’s well-known that Apple bars TV producers on its streaming service from commenting on China. When I was in Hollywood last year, censorship on behalf of China by all the streamers, especially Apple, was a constant complaint. There are obvious reasons, as Apple is de facto controlled by the Chinese government.

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A Review of Some of the Amicus Briefs Filed in the U.S. Supreme Court Case of Murthy v Missouri

Murthy v Missouri will be argued on March 18. This is one of the most important First Amendment cases in this history of the U.S. Supreme Court, yet A) the NYT and most other big corporate news outlets will not discuss it and B) the ACLU refuses to get involved.

On his Substack, Aaron Kheriaty, M.D., discussed some of the amicus briefs filed in a nationally important in which he is a plaintiff, Murthy v Missouri (called Missouri v Biden in lower courts).

How important is this case?  Here is an excerpt from the opinion of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals:

We find that the White House, acting in concert with the Surgeon General’s office, likely (1) coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences, and (2) significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment...

Generally speaking, officials from the White House and the Surgeon General’s office had extensive, organized communications with platforms. They met regularly, traded information and reports, and worked together on a wide range of efforts. That working relationship was, at times, sweeping. Still, those facts alone likely are not problematic from a First-Amendment perspective. But, the relationship between the officials and the platforms went beyond that. In their communications with the platforms, the officials went beyond advocating for policies ... or making no-strings-attached requests to moderate content ...Their interaction was “something more.”

We start with coercion. On multiple occasions, the officials coerced the platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to moderate content. Privately, the officials were not shy in their requests they asked the platforms to remove posts “ASAP” and accounts “immediately,” and to “slow[]down” or “demote[]” content. In doing so, the officials were persistent and angry. Cf. Bantam Books, 372 U.S. at 62–63. When the platforms did not comply, officials followed up by asking why posts were “still up,” stating (1) “how does something like [this] happen,” (2) “what good is” flagging if it did not result in content moderation, (3) “I don’t know why you guys can’t figure this out,” and (4) “you are hiding the ball,” while demanding “assurances” that posts were being taken down. And, more importantly, the officials threatened—both expressly and implicitly—to retaliate against inaction. Officials threw out the prospect of legal reforms and enforcement actions while subtly insinuating it would be in the platforms’ best interests to comply. As one official put it, “removing bad information” is “one of the easy, low-bar things you guys [can] do to make people like me”—that is, White House officials—“think you’re taking action.”

That alone may be enough for us to find coercion. Like in Bantam Books, the officials here set about to force the platforms to remove metaphorical books from their shelves. It is uncontested that, between the White House and the Surgeon General’s office, government officials asked the platforms to remove undesirable posts and users from their platforms, sent follow-up messages of condemnation when they did not, and publicly called on the platforms to act. When the officials’ demands were not met, the platforms received promises of legal regime changes, enforcement actions, and other unspoken threats. That was likely coercive...

We also find that the FBI likely significantly encouraged the platforms to moderate content by entangling themselves in the platforms’ decision making processes.... Beyond taking down posts, the platforms also changed their terms of service in concert with recommendations from the FBI. For example, several platforms “adjusted” their moderation policies to capture “hack-and-leak” content after the FBI asked them to do so (and followed up on that request). Consequently, when the platforms subsequently moderated content that violated their newly modified terms of service (e.g., the results of hack-and-leaks), they did not do so via independent standards.... Instead, those decisions were made subject to commandeered moderation policies. In short, when the platforms acted, they did so in response to the FBI’s inherent authority and based on internal policies influenced by FBI officials. Taking those facts together, we find the platforms’ decisions were significantly encouraged and coerced by the FBI...

[T]he Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life. Therefore, the district court was correct in its assessment—“unrelenting pressure” from certain government officials likely “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”

State v. Biden, 80 F.4th 641, 653 (5th Cir.), opinion withdrawn and superseded on reh'g, 83 F.4th 350 (5th Cir. 2023), cert. granted sub nom. Murthy v. Missouri, 144 S. Ct. 7 (2023).

Based on Kheriaty's summaries of the amicus briefs, it's surreal to see how many formerly admirable institutions have become throughly corrupted by money (often government money) and power to represent the joint position of the U.S. Government and mega-corporations. This is what you might expect with so many entities receiving government largess to do the government's dirty work. This includes the ACLU, as Kheriaty comments:

Not long ago, the ACLU would have championed the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. The organization was founded in 1920 in response to the Wilson administration criminalization of dissent regarding World War I. After the jailings of journalists, pamphleteers, and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, the ACLU immediately began defending anti-war activists’ First Amendment freedoms.

The ACLU famously defended neo-Nazis’ right to march through a Jewish suburb, but the organization later became an arm of the Democratic Party, shedding its former principles in the process.

The group has no shortage of amici briefs and opinions on their website; they’ve petitioned courts to support gun control, abortion, Covid vaccine mandates, and race-based university admissions and to oppose bans on men in women’s sports and efforts to curb illegal immigration. Despite this flurry of opinions and news releases, the ACLU has not made a single mention of Murthy v. Missouri (or Missouri v. Biden) on its website.

While the politicization of the ACLU has been well-documented over the last decade, it remains remarkable that the country’s most prominent civil liberties organization has decided not to support plaintiffs in what may amount to the most consequential First Amendment case of the last half-century.

This case is coming up for oral argument on March 18.

You wouldn't know much about this based on the silence of corporate media. Kheriaty mentions this:

While news outlets like the New York Times have largely ignored the case and others like CNN have insisted that “it is far from clear that the administration’s conduct amounted to censorship,” the Wall Street Journal has dutifully covered the legal proceedings and taken an editorial stand against the White House’s attacks on free expression.

For a detailed and principled view of Murthy and the First Amendment, consider this amicus brief filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Continue ReadingA Review of Some of the Amicus Briefs Filed in the U.S. Supreme Court Case of Murthy v Missouri

The Inconvenient Recent COVID Data of the VAERS System

Now that signals are pouring in on the VAERS system (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) that the COVID vaccinations are temporally associated with deaths and injuries, the Gates Foundation shows up right on schedule to attack the integrity of VAERS, warning of "Misinformation and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System."

Dr. Peter McCullough explains his concerns:

Every week in clinic I make entries into the US CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as I catch up on years of injuries, disabilities, and deaths that have occurred after vaccination. Because federal fines and penalties are severe for false reporting, I only enter cases in which I have the vaccine card, the full clinical vignette, and my clinical impression that the vaccine either directly caused the problem or significantly contributed in the causal pathway to the new disease or injury suffered by the patient. I did a PUBMED search today and there are > 500 papers that have relied on VAERS for epidemiologic studies of vaccine side effects including death in 126 manuscripts.

As the data mount, it should come at no surprise that the Gates Foundation, a major player in the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex has come out with an attack on the integrity of VAERS. It came through a JAMA editorial from Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PhD, that implied VAERS is “misinformation” in the title uses the adjective “unverified.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Jamieson, whose Annenberg Center is funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, goes on to propose a name change to VAERS to further diminish its importance. . . I expect at some moment, the data on vaccine safety will be so overwhelming in VAERS that the CDC will simply shut down access the system for queries and research. As sponsors of the program, the agency will refuse to tell America or the world anything on the safety of the novel, genetic biological products.

For the record, U.S. public health officials have used and trusted the VAERS system for decades. From the current VAERS About Page:

About VAERS

Background and Public Health Importance

Medical professionals working with vaccines Established in 1990, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines. VAERS is co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). VAERS accepts and analyzes reports of adverse events (possible side effects) after a person has received a vaccination. Anyone can report an adverse event to VAERS. Healthcare professionals are required to report certain adverse events and vaccine manufacturers are required to report all adverse events that come to their attention.

VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning it relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences to CDC and FDA. VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem, but is especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety problem with a vaccine. This way, VAERS can provide CDC and FDA with valuable information that additional work and evaluation is necessary to further assess a possible safety concern.

Let's see whether this self-description of VAERS, or even fundamental aspects of the VAERS system, changes in response to new suspicious pressures . . .

Continue ReadingThe Inconvenient Recent COVID Data of the VAERS System