Society's ChildS


Briefcase

Texas legislature subpoenas BlackRock for documents linked to ESG effort

Jacob Bliss
Breitbart
Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:01 UTC
blackrock renewables
© Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images, Zhou Gukai/VCG via Getty Images
The Texas legislature subpoenaed BlackRock and any of its subsidiaries and affiliate entities last month for any documents related to the asset manager's effort to push Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies.

The subpoena, first reported by Fox Business, was from the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs and requested any documents related to "ESG Integration Practices" and "ESG Factor" that BlackRock has in its position.

The subpoena came after the committee wrote a letter to BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) in August for documents related to any ESG decision-making process. Fox Business reported that Vanguard, State Street, and ISS turned over the relevant information the Texas Senate committee requested, while BlackRock failed to do so, leading to the subpoena.

Comment: See also:

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Robot

NBC issues correction, changing story to match White House spin on Griner swap

Virginia Kruta
The Daily Wire
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:01 UTC
karine jean pierre
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
NBC published a bombshell story — alleging that Russian officials initially offered the Biden administration the choice between WNBA star Brittney Griner and Marine veteran Paul Whelan in Thursday's prisoner swap — but then issued a correction after the White House told a different story.


Comment: See: International spies swap: US, Russia discuss trading Paul Whelan for Viktor Bout and Konstantin Yaroshenko


Outkick's David Hookstead shared screenshots of both the original story and the edited version, explaining, "NBC had a bombshell report that Russia offered America Brittney Griner OR Paul Whelan, citing a senior government official. It would be Biden's choice which one to save. The report was later edited without explanation to mirror Biden's explanation that only Griner was offered."


Comment: See also:

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Folder

Twitter files reveal internal dialogues on why Trump was banned from platform

Diana Glebova
Daily Caller
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 21:26 UTC
donald trump
© Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Internal Twitter conversations released Friday by reporter Matt Taibbi showed the deliberations that Twitter executives had when deciding to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform in January of 2021.

Trump's account ban was ultimately justified by Twitter executives as looking at the "context surrounding" Trump and his supporters "over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years," one internal conversation shows, according to Taibbi's Twitter thread.


Comment: More from the Washington Examiner:
Journalist Matt Taibbi posted details from the company's internal communications on Friday about how the company's team of executives, which Taibbi dubbed a "high-speed Supreme Court of moderation," made decisions about election-related content during the 2020 election. The thread is part of a series of releases related to Twitter's permanent suspension of former President Donald Trump.

"We'll show you what hasn't been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6," Taibbi said. "Decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies."
...

Taibbi also said certain content moderation decisions were made by key Twitter executives, including former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, and former legal counsel Jim Baker. The group's approach was a "high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President," Taibbi claims.

Roth also met with officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to discuss election security on a weekly basis. He also posted details about a Slack channel in which Twitter employees debated details about whether to moderate certain tweets in relation to election misinformation. For example, Taibbi notes an exchange regarding a tweet in which former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) joked about mailing in ballots for his "deceased parents and grandparents."

"I agree it's a joke," a Twitter employee said, "but he's also literally admitting in a tweet a crime."

These decisions were made in an attempt to regulate Trump's efforts to affect the 2020 election. "Twitter, in 2020 at least, was deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump's engagement, long before J6. The ban will come after other avenues are exhausted," Taibbi concluded.
...

Twitter's team panicked on Jan. 6, according to Taibbi. The company's "executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes," the journalist said.
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Eye 1

Study finds prejudice against Covid-19 unvaccinated around the world

Bill Pan
The Epoch Times
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 07:56 UTC
vaccination requirement
© Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesA sign stating proof of a Covid-19 vaccination is required is displayed outside of Langer's Deli in Los Angeles, California on Aug. 7, 2021.
People who have received COVID-19 vaccines express discriminatory attitudes toward unvaccinated people, a new study of over 15,000 citizens of 21 countries across the world suggests.

"Individuals who comply with the advice of health authorities morally condemn the unvaccinated for violating a social contract in the midst of a crisis," two Denmark-based scientists wrote in their paper, published Thursday in Nature. "Those who refuse vaccines report that they feel discriminated and pressured against their will."

To measure COVID-19 vaccination status-based prejudice, researchers asked some 15,233 people how they feel if a close relatives of theirs are going to marry a vaccinated or unvaccinated person — a question that has long been used in surveys on discrimination along racial, ethnic, or partisan lines.

Specifically, participants were presented with brief descriptions of a series of fictitious individuals and asked to imagine that these are people whom one of their close relatives intends to marry. They were shown two profiles at a time, side by side, and asked to rate each profile by saying whether they agree or disagree with statements such as, "I would be unhappy if this person married one of my close relatives," and "I think this person is untrustworthy."
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Attention

Former French secret service head: Mass migration "threatens civil peace"

Paul Joseph Watson
Summit News
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 07:51 UTC
france migrants
© JULIE SEBADELHA via Getty Images
The former head of France's secret service has warned that uncontrolled mass migration is the only issue facing the country that "threatens civil peace."

Pierre Brochand, the former director of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) between 2002 and 2008, made the comments during a speech to the Gaullist Amicale of the Senate.

The intel chief said that mass migration had produced "a cross-cutting impact on all of our collective life, which I consider to be generally negative."

Although asserting that immigration in and of itself was not "evil," Brochand noted that the "very particular immigration that we have been subjected to for 50 years" has caused a "creeping third-worldization of French society," as well as "regression in key areas, such as education, productivity, public services, safety, and civility."

Brochand sought to debunk the often cited argument, most recently voiced by President Emmanuel Macron, that mass migration has always been the norm.
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Arrow Up

"Incredibly high" excess deaths must be investigated, Says Australia's top actuary body

Will Jones
The Daily Sceptic
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 09:00 UTC
ambulance
The "incredibly high" excess death rate in 2022 should be urgently investigated by the Government, Australia's top actuarial body has said.

According to new analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data by the Actuaries Institute, there were 15,400 excess deaths during the first eight months of the year, with around one third having no link to Covid.

This is 13% higher than expected, which is an "incredibly high number for mortality" according to Karen Cutter, spokeswoman for the institute's COVID-19 Mortality Working Group. It is "not clear" what is driving the increase, she said. "Mortality doesn't normally vary by more than 1-2%, so 13% is way higher than normal level."

"I'm not aware [of anything comparable] in the recent past but I haven't gone back and looked [historically]. They talk about the flu season of 2017 being really bad, and the mortality there was 1% higher than normal. So it's well outside the range of normal."

According to the raw data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 128,797 deaths from January 1st to August 31st, which was 18,671 or 17% higher than the historical average. Of those, 7,727 or 41% were attributed to Covid, leaving 10,944 non-Covid excess deaths.

The reason for the difference between the raw ABS data and the actuary figures is that, unlike with ONS data in the U.K. which use a five-year average baseline, the actuaries use a modelled baseline for calculating excess deaths. This aims to take into account trends like an ageing and growing population and improving health outcomes. The actuaries acknowledge that, compared to using the 2015-19 baseline, this results in a higher baseline and thus fewer excess deaths.

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Light Saber

Musk: Twitter's child porn failures 'a crime'

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 18:49 UTC
Elon Musk
© The Sunday TimesTwitter CEO Elon Musk
On Thursday, three members of Twitter's Trusty & Safety Council quit the company in a huff, claiming in a tweeted screed that the "safety and wellbeing of Twitter's users are on the decline" since Elon Musk took over.

The individuals in question - Anne Collier, Eirliani Abdul Rahman, and Lesley Podesta (niece of John Podesta) - wrote about how they've worked tirelessly on 'digital safety' - with Rahman proudly serving on the Council's "Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) Prevention advisory group."

Except - these three beacons of virtue apparently didn't do much when it came to pedophiles running rampant on the platform - which led several major brands to pull campaigns with the company shortly before Musk's acquisition.

Comment: Did you catch the mention that the Podesta's brother's neice, Leslie, was a member of Twitter's Trust & Safety Council, i.e. the bunch that was supposed to be getting on top of child porn and trafficking? One wonders what sort of slimy worms might be found under THAT rock.

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Crusader

Ukraine ramps up crackdown on Orthodox Church, raids 14 churches


RT
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 15:20 UTC
church Ukraine
© Telegram / SBUkrThe nation's domestic security agency raided more than a dozen religious sites in the Kharkov Region
Ukraine's domestic security agency, the SBU, conducted a new series of raids on Orthodox Christian churches in northeastern Kharkov Region on Saturday. The operation, which targeted 14 religious institutions, comes amid Kiev's crackdown on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the largest denomination in the country, over its alleged links to Russia.

The SBU directorate in Kharkov Region claimed it had conducted "counterintelligence activities" as part of the agency's efforts to "counter the subversive activities of Russian special services in our state."

The raids are also meant "to prevent the use of religious communities as a cell of the 'Russian world'" the SBU noted in a post on Facebook, adding that it was searching for individuals who may be undermining Ukraine's sovereignty as well as for various prohibited acts.

Comment:



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Better Earth

Iran: To veil or not to veil

Sharmine Narwani
The Cradle
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:00 UTC
iran veil
© The CradleDuring a two-week visit to Iran in November, I witnessed women of all ages walking freely on the streets without the hijab. But, what we're not told, is that they have been doing so for years.
The explosion of protests in Iran that began in September were not about the Islamic Republic's "hijab law" specifically, but about the abuses and excesses of the so-called morality police - the Gasht-e-Ershad (also known simply as Ershad, or in English, the 'guidance patrol') - against regular Iranian women who were considered to be immodestly garbed.

Public disgruntlement was triggered by the widely-publicized death of Mahsa Amini, who was apprehended by the Ershad and died while in their custody.

Although subsequent video footage released by Iranian police authorities showed that Amini had collapsed herself - likely due to her personal health history, as her official autopsy indicates, and not from alleged "beatings" - Iranians argued that the stress of it all may have triggered that collapse.
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Syringe

Pfizer was judged to have misled the public over the Covid vaccine but faces a derisory fine. The system is broken

Dr Alan Black
The Daily Sceptic
Wed, 07 Dec 2022 04:34 UTC
Bourla
© screenshotDr. Albert Bourla Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pfizer Inc.
When Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, agreed to be interviewed by the BBC in December 2021, he probably saw it as an opportunity for a bit of free advertising and PR for his company and its Covid vaccine. And so it turned out, apparently. An undemanding set of questions from the docile Fergus Walsh gave Dr. Bourla the chance to opine unchallenged on all things Covid and Covid vaccination, and no doubt communicate a few of his company's key marketing messages.

However, UsforThem, an organisation which campaigns for the needs and rights of children, saw things differently. Its researchers noticed that during his interview Dr. Bourla had made statements about Covid and the use of Covid vaccines in children that were misleading, unbalanced and not capable of substantiation. They took these concerns to the U.K. regulatory body, the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (the PMCPA), and a recent article in the Telegraph reports that the PMCPA agreed with them.

Comment: "the industry lacks the discipline and quality control that it needs but cannot itself provide" - should read: "but will protect the global money-making sham and death machine it has intended and proven to be."

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