Puppet MastersS


Eye 2

Boris Johnson's cautious Covid plan is not a roadmap to freedom, but a never-ending path to permanent restrictions on our liberty

Joanna Williams
RT
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 13:23 UTC
Prime Minister Boris Johnson
© REUTERS / Leon Neal/PoolBritain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic media briefing at 10 Downing Street in London, Britain February 22, 2021
Covid's in retreat and millions of people have been vaccinated, so why not move out of lockdown more quickly? Worryingly, the damaging restrictions are fast becoming an end in themselves - and look like they're here to stay.

A 'one way road to freedom'. That is how Boris Johnson described his much-anticipated plan to lift lockdown. But yesterday's big reveal turned out not to be about freedom at all. The painfully slow pace of change proposed, as well as all the talk of masks and social distancing continuing into the autumn, suggests this is less a roadmap to freedom and more a never-ending path to permanent restrictions on our liberty.

We know that the rate of people testing positive for Covid-19, the numbers being admitted to hospital and the daily death toll are all, thankfully, plummeting. It's not much talked about, but coronavirus is on the decline all around the world. Globally, cases fell by 16 percent last week and have been in retreat for over a month. As a result, more and more countries are beginning to open up and let people get on with their lives. Italians can go out to restaurants. Germans can get a haircut next week. French children have been back at school since the start of the year. But here in the UK, we cannot do any of these things.
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Target

House Dems, targeting right-wing cable outlets, are assaulting core press freedoms

Glen Greenwald
greenwald.substack.com
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Pelosi and group
© Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesSpeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with other House Democrats • January 15, 2020
Democrats' justification for silencing their adversaries online and in media -- "they are spreading fake news and inciting extremism" -- is what despots everywhere say.

Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.
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Stop

Judge bans enforcement of Biden's 100-day deportation pause

Nomaan Merchant
Washington Times
Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Biden
© Evan Vucci/APUS President Joe Biden
A federal judge late Tuesday indefinitely banned President Joe Biden's administration from enforcing a 100-day moratorium on most deportations.

U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued a preliminary injunction sought by Texas, which argued the moratorium violated federal law and risked imposing additional costs on the state.

Biden proposed the 100-day pause on deportations during his campaign as part of a larger review of immigration enforcement and an attempt to reverse the priorities of former President Donald Trump. Biden has proposed a sweeping immigration bill that would allow the legalization of an estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally. He has also instituted other guidelines on whom immigration and border agents should target for enforcement.

Tipton, a Trump appointee, initially ruled on Jan. 26 that the moratorium violated federal law on administrative procedure and that the U.S. failed to show why a deportation pause was justified. A temporary restraining order the judge issued was set to expire Tuesday.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

Twitter's discrediting of leaked docs that show UK's covert activities against Russia is a shocking case of media manipulation

Tom Fowdy
RT
Wed, 24 Feb 2021 13:45 UTC
Map and entities
© Grayzone screenshot/Twitter
On some platforms, whistleblowing is only considered an acceptable form of journalism when it exposes enemies of the West. Twitter's labelling of a Grayzone story that reflected badly on Britain shows the double standards at play.

Earlier this week, journalist Max Blumenthal published a series of leaked documents from the British Foreign Office on his news website the Grayzone, revealing that the BBC and the Reuters Foundation had participated in a covert programme targeting Russia and its neighbours, seeking to push political change within the country.

Former Labour MP Chris Williamson commented on the findings, noting:
"These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using."
For those familiar with the BBC and its history as an extension for British foreign policy goals, the leaks are not a surprise. However, that does not mean the news was met with a warm welcome.

Shunned by the mainstream media, the Grayzone report was subsequently targeted by Twitter, with each link being tagged with a warning stating: "These materials may have been obtained through hacking."
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X

China did 'little' to hunt for Covid origins in early months, says WHO document

Stephanie Kirchgaessner
The Guardian
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 05:00 UTC
Huanan Market Wuhan
© Héctor Retamal/AFP/GettyA police officer outside Huanan market in Wuhan where the virus was first detected.
Chinese officials did "little" in terms of epidemiological investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in the first eight months after the outbreak, according to an internal World Health Organization document seen by the Guardian.

The internal WHO travel report summary, dated 10 August 2020, also said the team who met Chinese counterparts as part of a mission to help find the origins of the virus received scant new information at that time, and were not given any documents or written data during extensive discussions with Chinese officials.

The report from last summer, which was written as global infection rates reached 20m, offers new insights into how WHO scientists appear to have been stymied in their early efforts to study the outbreak in China.

The revelation comes after the Biden administration recently issued a pointed statement about its concerns over Chinese cooperation in studying the disease and the need for the WHO to be held to a high standard and protect its credibility.

Comment: The WHO received a 'cold' reception.

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NPC

'Haven't thought about that': Biden's AG nominee Garland dodges question whether illegal immigration should remain a crime


RT
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 19:10 UTC
closed border facility
© REUTERS/Mike BlakeA bus leaves a closed border facility as migrants subject to a Trump-era asylum restriction program were expected to begin entry into the United States at the San Ysidro border crossing with Mexico, in San Diego, California, U.S., February 19, 2021.
Former judge Merrick Garland, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the Justice Department, seemed to say "I don't know" a lot at his Senate confirmation hearing, including when asked about illegal immigration.

Senators questioned Garland on Monday ahead of the floor vote on his nomination, which appears to be a foregone conclusion. Time and again, however, he would not commit to things such as safeguarding the investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the FBI and DOJ spying on former President Donald Trump, and enforcement of US immigration laws.

"Do you believe that illegal entry at America's borders should remain a crime?" Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) asked at one point, only for Garland to reply, "I just haven't thought about that question."

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Attention

Twitter removes hundreds of accounts it says are linked to Iran, Russia, Armenia - for "undermining NATO"

Foo Yun Chee
Reuters
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 18:44 UTC
twitter
© Sputnik / Natalia Seliverstova
Twitter said on Tuesday it had taken down 373 accounts which it said had ties to Russia, Armenia and Iran and had breached its platform manipulation policies.

The company said it had taken down 238 accounts operating from Iran for various violations of its policies.

Twitter said 100 accounts with Russian ties were removed for amplifying narratives that undermined faith in NATO and targeted the United States and the European Union.

Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow planned to look into the grounds for Twitter blocking the accounts, TASS news agency reported.

Twitter also said 35 accounts with ties to Armenia were taken down, adding that they had been created to target Azerbaijan.

"The 373 associated accounts across the four networks were permanently suspended from Twitter for violations of our platform manipulation policies," the company said in a blog post.

Comment:



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Eye 2

Former Clinton adviser: America becoming 'totalitarian state' under Biden

Steve Watson
Summit News
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Tucker Wolf
"Characteristic of totalism fascism in the '20's"

Author and former Clinton advisor Naomi Wolf warned Monday that the US is devolving into a police state under the Biden administration as endless lockdowns and restrictions show no sign of being lifted.

Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Wolf urged that the US is "moving into a coup situation," under Democrat rule, owing to medical mandates being extended under the "guise of a real medical pandemic."

Wolf emphasised that "lockdowns have never been done in society and really, we are turning into a of totalitarian state before everyone's eyes."

Far from being a conservative commentator, Wolf pointed out that it's "not a partisan thing," and told Carlson that what is happening "transcends everything that you and I might disagree or agree on. That should bring together left and right to protect our Constitution."


Comment: The high-speed descent into totalitarianism has been stunning. And some like Wolf (who are aware enough to perceive reality as it really is) and who voted for Biden - will one day wake up to the fact that they have been horribly wrong about what his presidency represents.

See also:

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Attention

Government the Machinery of Death

John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 17:26 UTC
"Police fail to grasp that they are public servants for peace. They should provide a civil service, to enforce the laws equally, without bias and with discretion. They must understand that they do not have immunity or special privileges and — most importantly — are just responsible for apprehending suspects, and should not act as judge, jury and executioner, which too many of them truly believe themselves to be." — Frank Serpico, former police detective who exposed corruption within the NYPD
US Police
© The Daily Bell
The government should not be in the business of killing its citizens.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.

That the death penalty was recently abolished in Virginia is just the tip of the iceberg.

While any effort to scale back the government's haphazard application of the death penalty — meted out as a punishment, a threat, and a chilling glimpse into the government's quest for ultimate dominion over its constituents — is a welcome one, capital punishment remains a very small part of the American police state's machinery of death.

Yet it's not enough to declare a moratorium on federal and state death penalty executions.

What we need is a moratorium on federal and state violence in all their varied forms (on police shootings of unarmed citizens, innocent civilians killed by the nation's endless wars abroad, unknowing victims of secret government experiments, politicians whose profit-over-principle priorities leave Americans vulnerable to predatory tactics, etc.), because as long as government-sanctioned murder and mayhem continue unabated, the right to life affirmed by the nation's founders in the Declaration of Independence remains unattainable.

The danger is real.

Everything about the way the government operates today (imperial, unaccountable and manifestly corrupt) flies in the face of what the founders sought to bring about: a representative government that exists to protect and preserve the life, liberty, property and happiness of its people.

Police violence is but one aspect of the government violence dispensed without restraint or respect for the rights of the people, but it is widespread.

The casualties are legion.
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Magic Hat

Reporter asks State Dept. spokesman if Biden is taking credit for Trump-era policy

Kenneth Garger
New York Post
Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:17 UTC
State Department spokesman Ned Price
© APState Department spokesman Ned Price speaks during daily press briefing.
State Department spokesman Ned Price clashed with a reporter during a press briefing at the White House on Monday.

The tense exchange erupted as Price was boasting about the administration's efforts to scale back the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany.

Price said 18 mostly Western companies have made "good-faith efforts to wind down" their involvement with Nord Stream 2.

Comment: See also:

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