Society's ChildS


Cell Phone

Dozens of Al-Jazeera journalists allegedly hacked using Israeli firm's spyware


Middle East Eye
Sun, 20 Dec 2020 23:44 UTC
NSO group spyware
© AFPNSO Group spyware has been implicated in the gruesome killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia and UAE thought to be behind attacks which took place weeks before UAE-Israeli normalisation deal.

Dozens of journalists at Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera were targeted by advanced spyware in an attack likely linked to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, weeks before the Trump administration announced the normalisation of ties between Israel and the UAE.

Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said it traced malware that infected the personal phones of 36 journalists, producers, anchors and executives at Al-Jazeera back to the Israeli-based NSO Group, which has been widely condemned for selling spyware to repressive governments.

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Laptop

The Russian 'cyber Pearl Harbor' that wasn't

Sean Lawson and Brandon Valeriano
The American Conservative
Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:01 UTC
cyber attack hacked hacking
© Shutterstock/solarseven
The recent SolarWinds hack is no excuse for doomsday rhetoric, especially from those who have been leveling it for decades.

For almost three decades, we have awaited a mythical "cyber Pearl Harbor," the harbinger of digital doom that the U.S. cybersecurity community assumes to be inevitable. Strangely enough, some believe this cyber Pearl Harbor already happened twice within the last two months.

Though warnings of cyber Pearl Harbor emerged as early as 1991, former defense secretary Leon Panetta is perhaps best known for promoting the idea, warning in 2012 of an impending "cyber-Pearl Harbor that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation." Such a grand event would be tough to miss.

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Eye 1

Why they're denying you healthcare and financial support during a pandemic

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Sun, 20 Dec 2020 08:12 UTC
pelosi
An old adage known as Betteridge's law of headlines asserts that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

There's a Bloomberg story trending on Twitter right now about China having the ability to control the weather, with the headline reading "Has China Mastered Weather Modification? Should We Worry?"

According to Betteridge, no.


It just goes on and on and on. Every single day the western mass media are bashing us in the face with stories about horrifying scary things other countries are doing which we all need to be afraid of, and from which we must turn imploringly to our own kind and beneficent rulers for protection.
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Clipboard

Lockdowns do not control the coronavirus: The evidence


American Institute for Economic Research
Sat, 19 Dec 2020 07:38 UTC
lockdown advertisement notice
© Christopher Thomond/The GuardianAn Orwellian public information notice in Manchester on Thursday.
The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion.

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and "nonpharmaceutical interventions" account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

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Gift 2

Anonymous donor gives 123 tons of food to needy families in Kentucky

Amy Furr
Breitbart
Sun, 20 Dec 2020 04:43 UTC
Food donation in KY
© Kentucky State Police
Numerous Kentucky families will not have to worry about putting food on their tables for quite a while thanks to an anonymous person's generous gift.

"Santa Clause is known for delivering toys to children but in Daviess County he just dropped off 246,300 pounds (123 tons) of food for families struggling this holiday season," the Kentucky State Police wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday:

The anonymous benefactor reached out to Trooper Corey King, asking for help in finding somewhere to donate the non-perishable items.

"This is usually the time of year when our troopers are involved in a statewide food drive called 'Cram the Cruiser'," King explained. "Due to the pandemic, we were not able to host the program like we have in years past. So when our 'Secret Santa' reached out I was excited to help."

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TV

Big Media: Selling the narrative and crushing dissent for fun and profit

Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds.com
Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00 UTC
censored
The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn't just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it's also strangled democracy.

The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus. Indeed, the danger long preceded the pandemic, which has served to highlight how far down the road to ruin we have come.

The danger we are ill-prepared to deal with is the consolidation of the private-sector media and its unification of content into one Approved Narrative which is for sale to the highest bidders. This is the perfection of for-profit Totalitarianism in which dissent is crushed, dissenters punished and billions of dollars are reaped in managing the data and content flow of the one Approved Narrative.

So don't post content containing the words (censored), (censored) or (censored), or you'll be banned, shadow-banned, demonetized, demonized and marginalized. Your voice will be erased from public access via the Big Media platforms and you will effectively be disappeared but without any visible mess or evidence--or recourse in the courts.

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USA

Fighting Joe Biden and the fight for the future

William L. Gensert
American Thinker
Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00 UTC
United we win

Comment: Sott recently published this article: The populist American powder keg is primed but will it be lit? - to which the following article would seem to affirm that it is already being lit...


Joe Biden is a lie wrapped in a sham hiding inside a moron -- he is an epigone of a president at best. Yet, once he takes that oath, we should do everything in our power to make certain he serves out his term while opposing him every day and, in every way, including continuous mostly peaceful protest. Why should "mostly peaceful" be the sole dominion of Antifa?

You see, Kamala Harris is much more complicated than Joe but also much more dangerous. She is a political creation who believes at any given moment whatever is the passion of that moment. She was once the "law and order" district attorney of San Francisco jailing young black men for smoking pot. Now she is a radical leftist, critical theory adherent, and hopeful dictator.

­­­­In addition, "mostly peaceful" for us will not be defined as wholesale destruction, arson, and assaulting innocents, as it is for the left. I mean in exercising our rights to protest and self-defense, we fight Antifa and its ilk every time they raise a hand to us, never walking away, and never relying on the police.

Democrats always overplay their hand. They will try to steal the Georgia runoffs just as they did the presidency -- they are printing the ballots as we speak. They are going for the kill-shot.
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2 + 2 = 4

Second wave of school closures is killing our children

Molly Rutherford
Washington Examiner
Fri, 18 Dec 2020 12:00 UTC
empty classroom
We know how many people have died from the coronavirus. We know how many people have tested positive for it. We know which states have the most cases. We even know how many people are in hospitals because of it. The numbers are shoved down our throats by the media daily and are being used to justify a new wave of lockdowns and school closures as 2020 winds down.

There's no question the coronavirus is harmful to some people — chiefly elderly people and those with preexisting conditions. But the lockdowns have been deadly, too — a portion of the narrative that has conveniently been left out of the conversation. Children are especially prone to the unintended consequences.

Unfortunately, I have seen the negative effects of the lockdowns firsthand. I've had preteen patients fall into despair and attempt suicide, in part, because of loneliness and lack of resources that are typically offered by schools when open. I'm not alone in witnessing the horrific trend in child suicides.

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Bulb

Poland threatens hefty fines for social media companies that censor legal speech, users everywhere celebrate


RT
Tue, 22 Dec 2020 01:01 UTC
Protest in Krakow
© Global Look Press / Omar MarquesProtest in Krakow against EU internet regulations
Social media companies that remove posts whose content is legal can be fined up to €1.8 million under a new Polish bill. Users have welcomed its introduction as an antidote to other countries' growing censorship demands.

Any social media company that removes content or blocks accounts that do not violate Polish law can be fined under the new legislation, announced in a press conference on Thursday by Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro. The bill also creates a special Court for the Protection of Freedom of Speech within one of the district courts.

Individuals whose posts have been censored will have the right to complain to the platform in question, which has 24 hours to respond. The user then has 48 hours to petition the new court to have their content reinstated, and the court then has seven days to consider the petition.

If the court finds in favor of the user and the social media platform does not restore the content or unblock the account, they will be fined up to €1.8 million by the Office of Electronic Communications. The whole process will happen online, according to Ziobro.
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People

'Let us in!' Students swarm Charlie Kirk-headlined Turning Point USA conference for 2nd day after HUNDREDS locked out on 1st night


RT
Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:52 UTC
charlie kirk
© REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Turning Point USA's Student Action Conference is underway in Palm Beach, Florida. Footage shows hundreds attending the event, despite last minute capacity changes that led to chaotic first night.

"Students once again attempt to get into @TPUSA Student Action Summit after many of them were blocked by police from entering the venue last night due to questionable last minute capacity changes by county officials," Blaze reporter Elijah Shaffer tweeted on Sunday, along with footage of the massive crowd gathered in Florida to hear conservative speakers such as Vice President Mike Pence, My Pillow founder Mike Lindell, and Donald Trump Jr.

The "questionable last minute capacity changes" led to a chaotic first night for the summit where some speakers brought the show outside to attendees who were blocked from entering the building due to Covid-19 restrictions.
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