When “Green Energy’ = No Energy (Unless You are In the Club)

Sweden Dumps Climate Agenda, Scraps Green Energy Targets

Sweden has just dealt a severe blow to the globalist climate agenda by scraping its green energy targets.

In a statement announcing the new policy in the Swedish Parliament, Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson warned that the Scandinavian nation needs “a stable energy system.”

Svantesson asserted that wind and solar power are too “unstable” to meet the nation’s energy requirements.

Instead, the Swedish Government is shifting back to nuclear power and has ditched its targets for a “100% renewable energy” supply.

The move is a major blow to unreliable and inefficient technology.

Countries are being pushed toward “renewable energy” to meet the goals of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) green agenda.

The WEF’s green agenda is being heavily pushed by the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), Paris Climate AgreementWorld Bank, and Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration.

Announcing Sweden’s new policy, Svantesson said: “This creates the conditions for nuclear power.

“We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”

Environmental campaign group Net Zero Watch has welcomed the move.

The group argues that the Swedish decision is “an important step in the right direction, implicitly acknowledging the low quality of unstable wind and solar, and is part of a general collapse of confidence in the renewable energy agenda pioneered in the Nordic countries and in Germany.”

Under its new direction, Sweden now views nuclear power as being critical to the nation’s “100% fossil-free” energy future.

Sweden can “afford to reject fossil fuels, relying on nuclear and hydro and biomass,” Net Zero Watch suggests.

Svantesson also sent a warning to other Western nations who are blindly pushing to meet the energy requirements of the WEF’s green agenda.

In “substantial industrialized economies… only a gas to the nuclear pathway is viable to remain industrialized and competitive,” Svantesson noted.

Experts have argued that lowering carbon dioxide emissions is not really a worthwhile goal for an individual country or globally.

The potential harms of the gas are uncertain and exaggerated while the benefits are overlooked.

Dr. John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s Energy Director, said that “living close to Russia focuses the mind.”

The Swedish people wish to “ground their economy in an energy source, nuclear, that is physically sound and secure, unlike renewables which are neither,” he explains.

Other world governments are continuing “to live in a fantasy” about meeting the green agenda goals, Constable added.

“But we are coming to the end of the green dream.’

from:    https://slaynews.com/news/sweden-dumps-climate-agenda-scraps-green-energy-targets/

Of Bats, Biolabs, and Fort Collins, CO

Is The Next Wuhan Biolab At Colorado State University In Fort Collins?

When I wrote The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism, some objected that the cover picture was too evil looking. Let me assure you that the evilness of true evil is just getting started, as evidenced by this shocking story about yet another gain-of-function biolab is being constructed in the West. There is much more to this story, to be revealed in coming days and weeks.  ⁃ TN Editor

In December 2022, Larimer County Planning Commission approved a new “bat lab” or bat vivarium at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado after giving one day notice to the public for opposition. In October 2021, NIH recently granted $6.7 million in funding for this facility, but this is negligible compared to the $288 million in NIH funding to CSU since 2014. This article will address the prior NIH bioweapons projects at CSU, the zealousness for profitable pandemic projects in Fort Collins, the grassroots opposition to gain-of-function research at CSU, the stonewalling of public stakeholder feedback, the need for public backlash in Colorado, and most importantly, the evidence that CSU labs are an extension of the CDC working in partnership with the DOD without accountability or transparency.

Prior Bioweapons Projects and Leaks at CSU

Michael Nevradakis with Children’s Health Defense has written a comprehensive 11-page overview of the biological research at CSU. In “Plan to Build NIH-Funded Bat Lab Research Lab in Colorado Sparks Fears of Lab Leak,” Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert shared his concerns with the CSU facility:

“It is well known that Colorado State University has a long and ongoing history of specialization in weaponizing insects with biowarfare agents for delivery to human beings. This new lab will magnitudinally increase CSU’s offensive biowarfare capabilities, in gross violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that provides for life in prison.”

A biological disaster at CSU occurred at the Prion Research Center, with prion proteins being the causative mechanism in incurable neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. CSU conducted long-term research on Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), similar to scrapie in sheep, mad cow in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans. CSU’s reported “breakthrough” research in 2019 replaced the gene that encodes the prion protein in mice with genetic code from deer. The collateral damage of this research is decades of leaking CWD in wildlife, which is 100% fatal to deer and elk. According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, “By 2018, CWD rates of infection were estimated to occur in about one-third of Colorado’s elk population and about half of the state’s deer population.” Governmental sources claim the origin of CWD in deer is unknown, while hundreds of non-governmental sources trace CWD to the CSU lab where deer shared pens with sheep from a scrapie project in 1967. In 2021, Issues in Information Systems journal reported that Fort Collins was a primary catalyst in the widespread distribution of the disease:

“Text mining of the internet for the first 40 years of the disease produced evidence supporting a common assertion in the press that all of the early cases can be traced back to Fort Collins. For 1967 into 1998, six clusters were identified that could all be traced back to Fort Collins. Limited information from game farms made tracking difficult for 1998 to 2007 with 10 more clusters traced back to areas linked to Fort Collins or with trace backs to Fort Collins explainable based on the evidence.”

Regarding human risks from lab leaks, The Coloradoan reported “Records reveal ‘biological hazards’ at Fort Collins CDC” in 2017:

“The Fort Collins office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was home to at least three lab mishaps since 2013 that risked exposing the public to dangerous pathogens, a USA TODAY investigation has found. …

In documents describing some of the Fort Collins mishaps and others, the CDC blacked out key information including the types of viruses and bacteria involved in the mishaps and often the entire descriptions of what happened.

The agency cited a 2002 bioterrorism law to justify its redactions. The law allows the agency to withhold from the public certain records filed with regulators or information containing specific ‘safeguard and security measures.’

Two of the Fort Collins incidents involved ‘select agents,’ pathogens included on a federal list of potential bioterror pathogens. The list includes pathogens such as those that cause anthrax, Ebola, plague or certain avian or reconstructed flu virus strains.”

Fort Collins Is an Eager City for Pandemic Pseudoscience, Experimental Drugs, and Vaccine Passports

Fort Collins was the most zealous city in Colorado during COVID-19 for mitigation strategies: developing new therapeutics, vaccine trials, wastewater testing, mask studies, and a proposed vaccine-verified facility program. Fort Collins was listed as one of the 10 best cities in the world for coronavirus contributions. CSU had over 100 investigators working on more than 25 projects related to COVID-19, including vaccines and therapeutics. But were these projects more profitable than productive?

CSU also had a vocal professor with an engineering background in the area of air pollution (not an infectious disease doctor) promoting the use of mask wearing to prevent coronavirus. John Volckens, Ph.D. has conducted prior research on children in Fort Collins wearing air quality monitoring devices, so he clearly views people as appropriate test subjects for environmental devices. Volckens made the following non-evidence based statements at a viral transmission workshop: “Individual behaviors like wearing masks are one factor in determining a person’s environmental risk” and “Behavior is a social science that needs to be woven into our research as we focus on prevention.” Is it likely that Volckens’ long-time National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grantee and planning committee member status prompted him to make medical device wearing recommendations?

Fort Collins Chamber of Commerce promoted UC Health’s AstraZeneca vaccine clinical trial of 1500 subjects to line up like cattle at the Ranch in Loveland for an experimental drug.

The Larimer County Board of Health was forced to “pause” the Vaccine-Verified Facility program due to overwhelming public backlash about this threat to medical privacy and Constitutional rights regarding commerce and movement.

In September 2020, CDC launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) and funded two Centers of Excellence in Houston and Colorado, to serve as leaders in wastewater surveillance implementation and coordination. Larimer County accepted grant awards to report data to this CDC program. CSU studied COVID-19 viral levels in wastewater coming from businesses and places of residence, in coordination with CDPHE and LCDHE. The CDC plans to track other emerging health threats and infectious disease threats in wastewater listed as antibiotic resistance and foodborne diseases, which are not communicable diseases. Allegedly this Colorado surveillance program can identify RNA from a person infected with SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater from a specific residence, however the program paradoxically claims it cannot detect RNA from a person vaccinated by Pfizer of Moderna in wastewater. The value in the wastewater surveillance program as an “early warning system” is yet to be demonstrated.

Is this over-zealous pandemic response due to the vast amounts of money allocated for these projects or the influence of the CDC office in Fort Collins?

The CSU Lab Is an Extension of the CDC Working in Partnership with the DOD

Operation Warp Speed was a Department of Defense campaign “Charged with developing and delivering a vaccine to 300 million Americans, Operation Warp Speed paired military planners with experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to work the details of a monumental plan.” Most people know that DOD partnered with the CDC for COVID-19. With the current widespread criticism of the “woke” military and the demonstrated incompetence at the CDC during the pandemic, Colorado should be concerned with the evidence that, in military terms, this new CSU facility is a forward operating base (FOB) for the main operating base at the CDC. The CDC calls this an Emergency Operating Center and Larimer County opened its EOC in August of 2021. The CDC Foundation also lists CSU as a partner, and the Gates Foundation funded over $1 million in research at CSU for Tuberculous in 2021.

The public will not see tactical military vehicles deployed at the DOD operation at CSU’s lab. Instead, General Perna in Operation Warp Speed utilized civilian companies to manage the logistics of a military campaign:

“It is only through the foundation established by the ‘incredible experts’ of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the capability and capacity of commercial industry — including Pfizer, McKesson [drug distribution services], FedEx, UPS, Walgreens, CVS and … most importantly, the governors’ public health officers and health-care communities — that this plan will be successful,” Perna said. “Because of the sheer energy and the whole-of-America approach, I am absolutely 100% confident that we are going to distribute safely this precious commodity … [which is] needed to defeat the enemy COVID.”

When General Perna praised the public health “officers” (with officers being high-ranking people in the military), he referred to yes-men and yes-women who sit in appointed positions on research boards and public health boards to stonewall the public’s opposition. Fort Collins has so many examples of these public health officials with conflicts of interests that it will require a follow-up article. However in one example, CSU benefitted from funding for millions of dollars for biopharma projects over ten years under the leadership of Linda Birnbaum who retired as Director of National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in 2019. Her thesis research focused on enrichment of RNA genes. Her son, Dr. Bernard Birnbaum was appointed by Larimer County Commissioners to the Board of Health in 2016 and is currently serving his second five-year term. Bernard Birnbaum violated the board bylaws to delay the vote on officers, then requested a second term as President of the Board of Health, and the board subsequently amended the bylaws months later to accommodate. These public health boards need to be challenged on every policy and procedural approval. When citizens testify to these public health “officers,” their valid objections are rebuffed for impeding millions of dollars of funding attached to bioresearch and public health projects. These “officers” are not required to provide evidence in support of public health policy, nor acknowledge evidence which shows their public policy is harmful to mental health or the economy.

Plan to Build NIH-Funded Bat Lab Research Lab in Colorado Sparks Fears of Lab Leak” details emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that CSU joined a collaboration in 2017 of DOD, CDC, NIH, with EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance has previously collaborated with Wuhan Institute of Virology in gain-of-function research with cornonaviruses and aims to develop genetically engineered self-spreading vaccines. EcoHealth Alliance also has sustainability goals to “balance and optimize” (or surveil and control) populations of people and animals. Emails from 2020 confirm communications between CSU Professor Tony Schounz, Ph.D. and Jonathan Epstein, Vice President at EcoHealth Alliance, about importing infected bats and rats. Emails from 2018 confirm communication between Schountz with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Schountz proposed a collaboration on projects involving bat-borne viruses and arboviruses (viruses spread by mosquitos, ticks, fleas). CSU also has a partnership with Zoetis, which was previously under the name Pfizer Animal Health until 2013.

Act Now the Need for Citizen Stakeholder Input and Public Backlash

CSU’s new facility will expand its capabilities to study viruses with high mortality in humans: Ebola virusMarburg virusNipah virus and Hendra virus.” Pharmaceutical companies have expressed interest in developing mRNA vaccines for these viruses. These are highly pathogenic Biosafety Level 4 agents, yet the new facility is designated for only Biosafety Level 2 agents.

Despite CSU’s current plan that it will not conduct controversial gain-of-function research, a written agreement between CSU and the citizens of Colorado does not exist. CSU’s biosafety director Rebecca Moritz stated in The Rocky Mountain Collegian, “…this will be the only facility like it in the United States.” It begs the question of the unique capabilities planned for this lab.

Christine Bowman leads a newly formed local opposition group called Covid Bat Research Moratorium of Colorado (CBRMC). She reports that US Sen. John Hickenlooper, US Sen. Michael Bennet, and Fort Collins mayor Jeni Arndt have not responded to citizen’s concerns about the CSU lab. CSU has failed to schedule the promised process public engagement process in the past six months to address the public’s safety concerns.

Unprecedented backlash is needed to overcome the intent to shut out the public from the research at this lab: public engagement with county commissioners and board of health in Larimer County, citizen demands for reports about transparency and safety reviews from the governing Institutional Research Board (IRB), CORA requests, student walkouts at CSU, and yard signs and billboards. The biolab opposition will need funding, scientific experts, and lawyers. The opposition must obstruct every step of the construction of the next Wuhan biolab in Colorado.

Read full story here…

from:    https://www.technocracy.news/is-the-next-wuhan-biolab-at-colorado-state-university-in-fort-collins/

Food Control

Get Your One Health Token From the World Health Organization

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • The World Health Organization and their “One Health” approach are coming for the world’s food systems, aiming to meld them with health and medical fields
  • The outcome will be food tokens, medically tailored meals and prescription food programs that dictate what you eat
  • Part of this is a new “food is medicine” agenda, which is being put in place to ultimately screen, track and control people through food, according to investigative journalist Corey Lynn
  • The Rockefeller Foundation, the American Heart Association and Kroger have already partnered to develop and launch the Food is Medicine Research Initiative, which includes programs like produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals
  • Expect that as the Food is Medicine initiative ramps up, you’ll hear more about the “necessity” of bioengineered food, lab-grown meat and insects for “good” human health and to protect the planet

The World Health Organization and their “One Health” approach are coming for the world’s food systems, aiming to meld them with the health insurance and medical fields. The outcome will be food tokens, medically tailored meals and prescription food programs that both dictate what you eat and have the power to impose penalties if you stray too far off course.

“How do you get people to break? Control their food and money,” investigative journalist Corey Lynn explains. “What is the weapon? Controlling your identity through digital means. The smart phone, QR codes, digital identities, biometrics, AI, and chips are all weapons being used against humanity.”1 You can listen to Corey discuss this on Spotify by going to her channel Dig It! Episode #189.2

Are Food Tokens in Your Future?

It was October 2022 when the WHO announced its One Health Joint Plan of Action, launched by the Quadripartite, which, in addition to WHO, consists of the:3

  • Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
  • United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
  • World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE)

“The Quadripartite will join forces to leverage the needed resources in support of the common approach to address critical health threats and promote the health of people, animals, plants and the environment,” according to a WHO press release.4

Echoing this statement, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “a transformation of the world’s food systems is needed urgently, based on a One Health approach that protects and promotes the health of humans, animals and the planet.”

Part of this is a new “food is medicine” agenda, including from the White House,5 which isn’t nearly as holistic as it sounds. Instead, “food is medicine” is the phrase “being used to campaign, launch programs, change policies and financing, aggregate data, tie the health care industry in with the food supply, and ultimately screen, track and control people through food,” Lynn says.6

It’s a smokescreen, under which more people will be ushered into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC), and similar initiatives so digital food tokens can be implemented. This allows for the tracking and control of people’s food purchases.

A number of big names have recently joined in the push to increase SNAP enrollment, including Google, which intends to make it easier to find out eligibility and apply for the program.

Other partners include Instacart, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food Industry Association. Benefits Data Trust is also working to help facilitate the enrollment of college students into SNAP, Medicaid and the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides help to obtain internet access.

Again, these seemingly altruistic plans have an ulterior motive — surveillance and control. “Food, health care and internet may seem like a wonderful free benefit, until a college student tries to get their first cheeseburger, doesn’t get the Covid jab, or puts out ‘misinformation’ on the internet,” Lynn says. “Watch how quickly it’s all taken away. It’s like making a deal with the Devil.”7

It’s All a Trap

Once you’re locked into receiving food tokens, you’ve fallen into their trap. Who’s “their”? Lynn has previously described key organizations pulling strings behind the scenes, allowing them to “operate as ghosts without transparency or accountability.”8 These powerful organizations enjoy unrestricted privileges and layers of immunity, allowing them to exert control over the globe.

“These aren’t just ordinary organizations,” Lynn explains. “They happen to be the prime organizations that run the new world order globalists’ agendas against humanity, and they have hundreds of NGOs working with and through them.”9 The roll-out of “healthy eating tokens” isn’t just a possibility.

They’ve already been woven into key propaganda pieces, like this 2018 image below from the Illinois Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Task Force:10,11 “Whereas this example may be reflective of a welfare applicant,” Lynn says, “make no mistake, this is the goal all states are trying to accomplish for all people, not just those on welfare.”12

social benefits distribution

Pitfalls of White House’s $8 Billion Commitment

In line with WHO’s One Health, the White House laid out a Fact Sheet detailing its “transformational vision for ending hunger and reducing diet-related disease by 2030 – all while closing disparities among the communities that are impacted most.”13

The initiative intends to invest in “new businesses and new ways of screening for and integrating nutrition into health care delivery,” along with devoting at least $2.5 billion to startup companies “pioneering solutions to hunger and food insecurity.” Another $4 billion is earmarked for “philanthropy that improves access to nutritious food, promotes healthy choices and increases physical activity.”

Here again we have the smoke-and-mirrors effect, which masks the integration of food and health as a means to enact broad policies of control. As Lynn reports:14

“A helping hand is always nice, until it has ulterior motives. Sure, physical activity for all and the reduction of sugar in food items are both welcome approaches, but the rest of this agenda is not in the best interest of human beings.

The problem is, when reviewing this Fact Sheet it may seem like a good idea, just as while reviewing a single white paper from the WEF [World Economic Forum] could even sound like it has the potential to be a good thing.

However, when one takes the Fact Sheet with countless white papers, websites, funding, and other internal documents and puts it all together — it paints quite a different story. They know full well that most people won’t gather all of the pieces of the puzzle so they won’t be able to see the reality of the situation and discern the true agenda. That’s why it is so critical to do just that.”

The White House intends to work with a long list of private organizations to reach its goals. The American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Joint Commission, National Grocers Association, Food Industry Association and the Rockefeller Foundation are among them.

Globalists Team Up to Tell You What to Eat

The Rockefeller Foundation, the American Heart Association and Kroger have already partnered to develop and launch the Food is Medicine Research Initiative.15 It includes programs like produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals,16 which sound good in theory. But entities like the Rockefeller Foundation aren’t looking to further the reach of small farmers producing real, healthy food.

Consider the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which was launched in 2006 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With strategies centered on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers, AGRA’s influence significantly worsened the situation in the 18 African nations targeted by this “philanthropic” endeavor. Hunger under AGRA’s direction increased by 30% and rural poverty rose dramatically.17

The Green Revolution is another Rockefeller Foundation-funded conversion of natural farming to a system dependent on chemicals, fossil fuels and industry. You can expect that under this Food is Medicine initiative, genetic engineering, lab-grown meat and, eventually, insects will take center stage. Plus, it’s another tool for integrating food under health care, so you can ultimately be tracked with one digital health passport. Lynn says:18

“Of course food is medicine, but that’s not the true intention of this initiative. By integrating food under medicine just imagine how this will change the landscape of the control mechanisms being put in place under the guise of health care.

This isn’t the only avenue the Rockefeller’s are using to orchestrate this shift in food control. They are also one of the major funders of the Center for Good Food Purchasing, along with W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the 11th Hour Project — the grant-making vehicle of the Schmidt Family Foundation — former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The stated goal of this “Center” is to manage the Good Food Purchasing Program, which is all about getting institutions to convert over to their “supply chain transparency from farm to fork and shift towards a values-based purchasing model.”

Converting schools, hospitals, and public administrations is a strong goal, for starters. They’ve established standards, certifications, and a point system as the first of its kind and are building local and national partners as quickly as they built the website.”

Meanwhile, they’re rolling out Food is Medicine courses at hospitals and universities in order to indoctrinate health care providers into this plan. Among the training will be “screening for nutrition” and instruction on how to refer patients to their community nutrition resources, likely along with education on the “benefits” of gene-edited foods and fake meat.19

What Happens if You Veer From Their Prescribed Diet?

Expect that as the Food is Medicine initiative ramps up, you’ll hear more about the necessity of bioengineered food, lab-grown meat and insects for “good” human health and to protect the planet. It’s important to share knowledge with your circle about the pitfalls of these foods and why traditional whole foods are truly what your body needs.

If the powers-that-be take control of the food supply and dictate what people can and can’t eat, humanity is threatened. Envision a world in which your weekly groceries are only released if you’ve met certain requirements, and even then, those groceries are made up of what they ration for your use.

“Imagine if one refuses to eat bugs — they may not receive proper health care,” Lynn says. “Or what happens if one refuses to go on the food token program and only eat as instructed? Did they just lose their ability to receive health care? … What happens if edible vaccines hit the market and they try to make it mandatory as part of one’s diet?”20

To fight back, continue to source food from small, local sources instead of multinational corporations — and pay for your food with cash. As Lynn reports:21

“Just as with their other agendas that all tie into this one, the narrative control is being piped out by universities, medical associations, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, and many others to bring a whole new outlook on what a nutritional diet should look like to prevent disease.

It’s as though a complete overhaul is being done on what’s ‘good’ for human beings to ingest, and gene-edited produce, insects, and cultured cells seem to be the top priority.

This may seem like a slow burn, but they are clicking multiple pieces of the structure into place simultaneously, and when that burn finally reaches inside people’s homes, in their cabinets, fridge, and wallets, it will be too late to rollback all of the policies and regulations that have locked into place.”

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/06/27/who-one-health-approach.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230627&mid=DM1423741&rid=1840084123

“Who’s Yo’ Daddy?”

Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance

Exclusive: Breakthrough could aid research into genetic disorders but raises serious ethical and legal issues

Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm.

Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage.

However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries.

The structures do not have a beating heart or the beginnings of a brain, but include cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself.

Prof Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, of the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, described the work in a plenary address on Wednesday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s annual meeting in Boston.

“We can create human embryo-like models by the reprogramming of [embryonic stem] cells,” she told the meeting.

There is no near-term prospect of the synthetic embryos being used clinically. It would be illegal to implant them into a patient’s womb, and it is not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue maturing beyond the earliest stages of development.

The motivation for the work is for scientists to understand the “black box” period of development that is so called because scientists are only allowed to cultivate embryos in the lab up to a legal limit of 14 days. They then pick up the course of development much further along by looking at pregnancy scans and embryos donated for research.

Robin Lovell-Badge, the head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said: “The idea is that if you really model normal human embryonic development using stem cells, you can gain an awful lot of information about how we begin development, what can go wrong, without having to use early embryos for research.”

Previously, Żernicka-Goetz’s team and a rival group at the Weizmann Institute in Israel showed that stem cells from mice could be encouraged to self-assemble into early embryo-like structures with an intestinal tract, the beginnings of a brain and a beating heart. Since then, a race has been under way to translate this work into human models, and several teams have been able to replicate the very earliest stages of development.

The full details of the latest work, from the Cambridge-Caltech lab, are yet to be published in a journal paper. But, speaking at the conference, Żernicka-Goetz described cultivating the embryos to a stage just beyond the equivalent of 14 days of development for a natural embryo.

The model structures, each grown from a single embryonic stem cell, reached the beginning of a developmental milestone known as gastrulation, when the embryo transforms from being a continuous sheet of cells to forming distinct cell lines and setting up the basic axes of the body. At this stage, the embryo does not yet have a beating heart, gut or beginnings of a brain, but the model showed the presence of primordial cells that are the precursor cells of egg and sperm.

“Our human model is the first three-lineage human embryo model that specifies amnion and germ cells, precursor cells of egg and sperm,” Żernicka-Goetz told the Guardian before the talk. “It’s beautiful and created entirely from embryonic stem cells.”

The development highlights how rapidly the science in this field has outpaced the law, and scientists in the UK and elsewhere are already moving to draw up voluntary guidelines to govern work on synthetic embryos. “If the whole intention is that these models are very much like normal embryos, then in a way they should be treated the same,” Lovell-Badge said. “Currently in legislation they’re not. People are worried about this.”

There is also a significant unanswered question on whether these structures, in theory, have the potential to grow into a living creature. The synthetic embryos grown from mouse cells were reported to appear almost identical to natural embryos. But when they were implanted into the wombs of female mice, they did not develop into live animals. In April, researchers in China created synthetic embryos from monkey cells and implanted them into the wombs of adult monkeys, a few of which showed the initial signs of pregnancy but none of which continued to develop beyond a few days. Scientists say it is not clear whether the barrier to more advanced development is merely technical or has a more fundamental biological cause.

“That’s very difficult to answer. It’s going to be hard to tell whether there’s an intrinsic problem with them or whether it’s just technical,” Lovell-Badge said. This unknown potential made the need for stronger legislation pressing, he said.

from:    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/14/synthetic-human-embryos-created-in-groundbreaking-advance

These Guys Are Totally Insane

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

A top official with the World Economic Forum (WEF) has called for religious scripture to be “rewritten” by artificial intelligence (AI) to create a globalized “new Bible.”

Yuval Noah Harari, the senior advisor to the WEF and its chairman Klaus Schwab, argues that using AI to replace scriptures will create unified “religions that are actually correct.”

Harari, an influential author and professor, made the call while giving a talk on the “future of humanity.”

According to Harari, the power of AI can be harnessed and used to reshape spirituality into the WEF’s globalist vision of “equity” and inclusivism.

Speaking with journalist Pedro Pinto in Lisbon, Portugal, Harari told the elitist audience:

“It’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas.

“You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind.

“They cannot create a new idea.

“You know, [Johannes] Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century; the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it, but it did not create a single new page.

“It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?”

Harari then revealed that he and his allies at the WEF have a solution to the supposed problems he’d just highlighted.

“AI can create new ideas; [it] can even write a new Bible,” he declared.

“Throughout history, religions dreamt about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity,” he added.

“In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct … just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI.

“That could be a reality in a few years.”

WATCH:

Harari noted in another recent gathering that software like ChatGPT has mastered human languages and can harness that function to influence culture, the Times of Israel said.

“For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society,” he said, according to the paper.

“Now AI is likely to be able to do it.

“And once it can… it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us.

“It can get humans to pull the trigger.”

Harari also said that “contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them,” the paper noted.

He also warned that “we need to act quickly before AI gets out of our control” and that “governments must immediately ban the release into the public domain of any more revolutionary AI tools before they are made safe,” the paper added.

Harari frequently pushes ideas that involve humanity being replaced by machines.

As Slay News previously reported, Harari gloated last year that “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in today’s world.

According to Harari, most of the general public has now become “redundant” and will be of little use to the global elite in the future.

Harari argues that modern technologies like artificial intelligence “make it possible to replace the people.”

“If you go back to the middle of the 20th century — and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you’re in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin — and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers,” Harari said.

“You need them.

“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” he added.

“The future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering.

“Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

The Price of A Senator

Censored: BlackRock Employee Says “You Got 10K? You Can Buy a Senator”

Serge Varlay, OMG
O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) is behind the latest hidden camera sting that recorded Serge Varlay, a recruiter for Blackrock that has $9.5 trillion of assets under management, saying that banks and hedge funds like BlackRock, “run the world” and can buy politicians like senators and even the president of the United States. Varlay, on the topic of the Russia-Ukraine war, said that “we don’t want the conflict to end” because the war helps BlackRock, which is currently investing in Ukraine, make money. He gave an example of destroying grain silos in Ukraine that would cause shortages and a profit can be made by investing in other wheat suppliers. He said that “it’s exciting when shit goes wrong. Right?” Varlay admitted that the mainstream news is propaganda and that pundits like Jim Cramer give false information that should be ignored. He recommended a stock tracker that follows politicians and to follow their trades.The video, released on Twitter, has been seen nearly 10 million times and has received over 100,000 likes. But despite its popularity, search engines like Google appear to be suppressing its reach. According to Yahoo Finance, BlackRock is the second-largest institutional shareholder of Google (Alphabet Inc.), owning nearly 366,000,000 shares valued at $44.5 billion.

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Just the News:     https://justthenews.com/accountability/james-okeefe-responds-after-blackrock-bombshell-seemingly-suppressed-google

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2023/06/censored-blackrock-employee-says-you-got-10k-you-can-buy-a-senator/

How Much Is Your House Worth in the Netherlands???

After Taking Farms, the Dutch Government Is Now Dictating Who Can Buy Homes and the Price

The Dutch government was successful in taking about 3,000 farms, removing livelihoods and reducing the food supply, and now they want to take over private homes, too. The Housing Act will allow municipalities to force homeowners to sell their homes ONLY to people with a lower to middle income if the value of the home is less than €355,000 ($400,000 USD). People who own cheaper homes will not be able to benefit from market value as equity will be capped, while wealthy people can continue to benefit from appreciation. Research shows that preventing investors from buying rental homes will drive housing prices UP and the cost of rent, too. It is a shocking power grab in the year 2023. Last year, Blackstone bought up billions in homes in the Netherlands and own 117,000 houses in Europe, mostly in the Netherlands.

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from:    https://needtoknow.news/2023/06/after-taking-farms-the-dutch-government-is-dictating-who-can-buy-homes-and-the-price/

America Needs a Lifeline

RFK Jr. and Elon Musk Discuss ‘Reclaiming Democracy’

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked

STORY AT-A-GLANCEfree speech

  • June 5, 2023, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk co-hosted a live Twitter discussion about issues they believe ought to be at the forefront of the political debate going into the 2024 presidential election
  • Topics covered included free speech versus censorship, the destruction of democracy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, the humanitarian crisis at the border, COVID, the link between mass shootings and antidepressants, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and more
  • If elected president, Kennedy will issue an executive order forbidding federal agencies from participating in any efforts to censor speech by the American public
  • Kennedy is adamant about stopping the ever-growing influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border and is currently formulating policies to make the border “impervious,” while simultaneously opening up legal immigration pathways
  • Kennedy also wants to shut down gain-of-function research and bioweapons development

June 5, 2023, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk co-hosted a live Twitter discussion with Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, venture capitalist David Sacks, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger and securities attorney Omeed Malik, about issues they believe ought to be at the forefront of the political debate going into the 2024 presidential election.

Topics covered included free speech versus censorship, the destruction of democracy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, the humanitarian crisis at the border, COVID, the link between mass shootings and antidepressants, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and more.

Also you can mark your calendars as I and Dr. Pierre, Kory, Dr. Patrick Gentempo, Del Bigtree, Mikki Willis and others will be participating in a Health Policy Roundtable, where we will be able to grill Bobby about your concerns. It will be Tuesday, June 27 at 7:00 PM EDT.

Media Bias

Not surprisingly, the liberal media chastised Kennedy for championing “right-wing ideas and misinformation” during the interview. In fact, that was The New York Times’ headline.1

The NYT went on to smear Kennedy as “a leading vaccine skeptic” who promotes “conspiracy theories” and “sounded like a candidate … in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.” Translation: He’s a rational realist who doesn’t shy away from difficult truths and inconvenient facts.

“He said he planned to travel to the Mexican border this week to ‘try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,’ called for the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians and said pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for the rise of mass shootings in America,” The NYT complained, adding:

“He claimed, without evidence, that ‘COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem.’ American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that is the case.”

Similarly, CNN wrote Kennedy off as a “marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims,” complaining he “attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance.”2

I suggest listening to the discussion for yourself, as most mainstream media reporting on it didn’t do it justice. Below, I’ll review some of the key issues discussed, with a focus on Kennedy’s stances and election promises, seeing how the establishment is doing everything in their power to prevent people from learning what he stands for.

Kennedy on Social Media Censorship

Proving the ties between the Biden administration and Big Tech are still alive and well in the post-COVID era, Instagram recently suspended Kennedy’s official presidential campaign page, after reinstating his personal page, which had been banned for the last couple of years. Kennedy commented:

“I was evicted from Instagram … in the spring of 2021. The day I was evicted, I had about 770,000 [followers], but I had been up to 900,000. Whenever I hit 900,000, they would cut them back to 800,000 or 700,000, so I was losing followers all the time.

They said it was because I was promoting misinformation. But the term is ‘information,’ and [has] nothing to do with … factual accuracy or inaccuracy. It was simply a euphemism for any statement that departed from the government orthodoxies and government proclamations …

Since I’ve declared the presidency [run], now we have about 50 people working for the campaign, and each of those people has an Instagram handle — for example, my daughter-in-law is Amaryllis@TeamKennedy.com — and when they attempted to register, Instagram would send them a flag saying ‘You’ve been suspended for 180 days.’

So, none of them were allowed on. And, of course, that’s illegal under Section 413 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which regulates speech. It protects speech during presidential and other federal election campaigns …

But I don’t want to be pointing the finger at Meta right now, because I think it’s time for healing in this country. I’m happy that I’ve been reinstated, and they gave me back all my old posts, and all my old followers …“

If elected president, Kennedy vows to call the heads of all social media companies into the Oval Office and “not walk out until we have figured out how to make this work and make it consistent with democracy.”

Like Sachs, Kennedy doesn’t believe that social media companies want to censor any of their users. Rather, they’re pressured to do so by advertisers and the government itself, which is using private companies to circumvent the U.S. Constitution. Were social media companies to continue censoring anyway, then turning them into common carriers could be one solution.

“I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist,” Kennedy said, “and I think the remedy for misinformation is more information, and the remedy for bad speech is more speech. It’s never censorship. Censorship is by far the worst solution. There are forms of speech that are not protected, [such as] inciting violence [and] pedophilia … and you can censor those.

But if it’s protected speech, I don’t think it should be censored. But I think in any case, we should understand the logic, the algorithms and the methodologies, and we should all have access to those. That’s key, because these institutions are now the public square. They are a place where speech takes place … and we have to figure out a way to integrate them into our democratic values system.”

Musk is also adamant about the need for free speech. “I think if we don’t protect free speech at all costs, we don’t have a functioning democracy. If we don’t have a functioning democracy, nothing else matters,” Musk said. Ironically, since his acquisition of Twitter, the Democratic Party and its press allies have routinely portrayed Musk as a “threat to democracy,” primarily based on his support of free speech.

How Do We Combat Government Capture of Corporations?

Malik also brought up an interesting point. Kennedy has frequently discussed the problems we have with regulatory capture — the fact that most of our regulatory agencies, including the FDA, CDC and EPA are controlled by the very industries they’re supposed to regulate.

As a result, there’s no one to make sure the public is not harmed by dangerous drugs, vaccines and chemicals. But a reverse kind of capture has also taken place, as elements within the federal government are pressuring private companies to violate the Bill of Rights on the government’s behalf, while pretending these companies are doing it of their own volition.

“How do we prevent our Bill of Rights from being violated by private actors when the government uses them to do their dirty work?” Malik asked Kennedy. “I’m not just talking about censorship here. I’m actually talking about the deprivation of economic liberty.”

Kennedy replied:

“In terms of the role of these agencies in compelling behavior from U.S. corporations, it is appalling, and as soon as I get into office, I’m going to issue an executive order forbidding the federal agencies — whether it’s NIH, the CIA, the FBI — from participating in any efforts to censor speech by the American public, or to compel other behavior from the American public that is not legally required.

That’s what we saw during the pandemic. We saw it in the vaccine mandates, and we saw it in the censorship of speech. I will forbid that, and make sure that it does not happen [again], at least not during my term in office. Immediately, the first week I’m in office, I will sign that executive order.”

Kennedy on the Border Crisis

Kennedy is also adamant about stopping the steady and ever-growing influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border.

“We need to seal our border,” Kennedy said. “A key existential function for every nation in the world is to be able to control immigration at its borders … Having millions of people … flowing across the border is not something any nation can or should put up with.

Worst of all, it’s created a humanitarian crisis … The notion that we have an open border is now a gospel around the world so that people are flying in from all over the world, from Europe, from China, from Asia … and being assisted by nonprofit groups and by government groups to actually make their way to the United States’ border within buses, and that needs to be shut down.

We have people in this country who are poverty-stricken and who don’t have access, because of the paucity of public assistance … to public assistance.

We need to be protecting the people in this country, in our urban populations, rural populations. Seventy percent of Americans could not put their hand on $1,000 if there’s an emergency. We don’t have the capacity to support …. this huge flood of new immigrants that’s coming into our cities and stressing the school systems, stressing the social service systems for … Americans who are already struggling. It needs to be turned off.

Over the next three days I’ll be meeting with people from the border patrol and elsewhere to try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently … That’s what I will do as President. I will make that border impervious … I will also open up legal immigration, so that the immigration that we do need, that’s going to be beneficial to our country and economy, will continue.”

Kennedy Wants to Shut Down Gain-of-Function Research

Kennedy is equally adamant about shutting down gain-of-function research, which is nothing more than a convenient cover for bioweapons development. According to Kennedy, the CIA continued developing bioweapons in secret after the Biological Weapons Convention went into force in 1975, and never stopped.

“We should shut the whole thing down,” Kennedy said. “COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem and you saw what that did to us. What if it was a real disease? A disease that had a 50% mortality like dengue fever or Ebola, or … one of these other real deadly viruses?

They got those in the labs too … Let’s shut it down around the world. Let’s have a real shutdown of all bioweapons development … and make sure that one country does not develop a weapon that is going to kill all the rest of us.”

Kennedy also stressed that, as we now face true existential threats such as bioweapons and AI, we must get off our war footing, as the constant threat of war “gives these institutions the excuse to be super secret and nontransparent and put us in a security state where they can develop all these crazy technologies in secret that are going to kill us all.” He believes in negotiation and working with other countries, including China and Russia, to ensure that everyone benefits and prospers.

Elon Musk on Neuralink and AI

Kennedy, in turn, wanted to know how Musk, who years ago warned we should all be terrified of AI because “first, it’s going to take our jobs, and then it’s going to kill us,” justifies being on the leading edge of that risky work.

Musk’s company Neuralink received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval at the end of May 2023 to test its implantable brain chips in human subjects.3 This is the first step in Musk’s stated vision to merge and augment the human mind with AI.

“It seems to me that [Neuralink] is a technology that could potentially be really … denigrating to democracy and human freedoms,” Kennedy said. “What are your thoughts about that?” Musk replied:

“Well, first of all … Neuralink … is about developing brain-to-computer interfaces to allow direct communication with the brain. The neural link will progress very slowly, because anytime you have a device implanted in a human, the FDA requirements are extremely difficult …

The first applications that we’re talking about are simply enabling someone who is a quadriplegic, or paraplegic, someone who has lost the connection from their brain to their body, to be able to communicate …

Long term, I think, it has some chance of mitigating [the] artificial intelligence existential risk by enabling a closer symbiosis of AI and humans. And I certainly agree that this is not without risk. Certainly we need to be very, very careful with how it’s done …

Looking at the advancement of artificial intelligence, I think we will probably have digital super intelligence before a neural link is sufficiently advanced to have high bandwidth communication between your cortex and the AI extension of yourself. But no question, we need to be extremely careful, and we will be extremely careful, and it will move slowly.

So, you’ll definitely see it coming up. People are going to have an opportunity to object and raise concerns and issues. With Neuralink, we’re also trying to be extremely ‘open book,’ so there’s nothing hidden and we are audited extensively by the FDA.

With respect to artificial intelligence or more digital super intelligence, there are levels of artificial intelligence that are not dangerous. Like, I don’t think self-driving cars are really dangerous, or having better autocorrect is dangerous. It’s when you have some deep intelligence that is far smarter than the smartest human — that’s where things could get dangerous.

I don’t want to go too far down a rabbit hole, because that’s a big one, but I think AI digital super intelligence or AGI [artificial general intelligence] is definitely a bad thing … and that there is certainly risk of it … acting in a manner contrary to the interests of humanity. We need to be cognizant of that risk, and we need to be very careful and thorough, and do our best to ensure that it is beneficial rather than harmful.”

Kennedy expressed mild disagreement with Musk on some of these points, noting that even self-driving cars pose a significant threat to society considering some 40% of American jobs involve driving. What kind of productive work can we replace all those lost jobs with?

Kennedy on the Ukraine War

Kennedy also didn’t mince words when asked to comment on the Ukraine war. He pointed out that the people of the West have been massively propagandized with “comic book depictions” of President Putin as the “bad guy” who attacked Ukraine unprovoked.

“The problem is, we’re being victimized by our own agencies, which are leaving out contextual information, leaving out the nuances, leaving out the entire history in this case, of U.S. provocations, which brought us and Ukraine into a war that is not helping Ukraine.

Ukraine has now lost probably 350,000 kids, and they are in much worse position than when they began … There’s credible information that there are seven [Ukrainian] deaths for every one Russian killed. And the Ukrainians are not going to win this war. They cannot afford to win this war. This war is existential for Russia …

We’ve turned this country [Ukraine] into a slaughterhouse of the flower of Ukrainian youth to benefit the geopolitical ambitions of the U.S. neocons who want to exhaust the Russian army and exercise regime change over Vladimir Putin. Ukraine is a victim in this war. It’s a proxy war. It’s a victim of Russia, yes … but they’re almost equally a victim of U.S. policies and ambitions and aspirations of neocons who wanted to get into this war no matter what.”

Sacks agreed, saying:

“I think the war was easily avoidable if you had been willing to use diplomacy and basically give a written guarantee to the Russians that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. That is what they were demanding in December of 2021, in a written ultimatum to the White House.

Those negotiations ended when we said we wouldn’t close NATO’s door. The other thing we didn’t do was give support to the Minsk agreements, which would have provided some limited autonomy to the ethnic Russians in the Donbass … If we had just done those two things, I think there’s a really good chance that this war never would have occurred.”

‘Put Yourself in Your Adversary’s Shoes’

Kennedy continued by elaborating on the importance of the Minsk agreement when it comes to reestablishing and maintaining peace with Russia:

“France agreed, Germany agreed on the Minsk accords, which was a reasonable settlement. Keep NATO out of Ukraine. My uncle, President Kennedy, used to say, ‘The only way to have peace is if you put your yourself into the shoes of your adversary.’

In that speech … he was explaining, for the first time, to the American people the role and the suffering that Russia had endured during World War II. I grew up in a generation where we were told that America had won the war against the Nazis … Without America, the world would have been lost.

My uncle was telling the American people, that’s not true. [We] beat Hitler with the Russians, and they made a sacrifice that is unimaginable to anybody else in the world. Hitler invaded Russia, through Ukraine, and killed one out of every seven Russians and leveled one-third of the nation.

He said, ‘Imagine if all of the American continent, the continental United States, was reduced to rubble between the East Coast and Chicago. That’s what happened to Russia. You’ve got to understand that if we’re going to have peace with [Russia]. And we need to understand that today. We need to put ourselves in their shoes.

Either way, it’s not just Putin. The Russian leadership back in 1992 made an agreement [with us]. They said, ‘We will pull our 400,000 troops out of East Germany, and we will turn East Germany over to a hostile army, the NATO army. The concession that we want from you for that is that you will not move NATO to the east,’ and President Bush famously told them, ‘We will not move NATO one inch to the east.’”

In short, everyone knew that inching NATO eastward would be viewed as a direct confrontation and a formula for war. Yet that’s what NATO and the U.S. did. NATO kept expanding eastward, until only Ukraine was left. And that was Russia’s “red line” that could not be crossed. “It’s just dumbfounding,” Kennedy said. “We’re picking a fight with a country that has 1,000 more nuclear weapons than we do. It’s just insane.”

Kennedy on Gun Violence and the Second Amendment

To learn more about Kennedy’s views and political stances, listen to the 2.5-hour discussion in its entirety. Epoch News’ Roman Balmakov also recently interviewed Kennedy, and that interview is embedded above.

In closing, the foundational principle that guides Kennedy, no matter what the issue, is the U.S. Constitution. He views himself as a “Constitutional absolutist,” so while he has grave concerns about the rise in gun violence, for example, he opposes placing restrictions on the Second Amendment.

“I want to stop the school shootings,” he says, “and it comes down to protecting the schools the way that we protect airlines … I also look very closely at the role of psychiatric drugs in these events. There are no good studies right now. That should have been done years ago on this issue, because there’s tremendous circumstantial evidence that SSRIs, benzos and other drugs are doing this …

You have to look at almost all of these drugs. If you look at our manufacturers’ inserts, they include a side effect of homicidal and suicidal behavior, and prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country … I will do those studies immediately when I get into office …

The only way we’re ultimately going to get gun control in this country is through consensus, and that consensus cannot happen when we’re all at each other’s throats. We need to assure the people who feel insecure about the Constitution that our Constitution is no longer under threat, and nobody wants to come and take away their guns.

That will bring people to the table and say, ‘OK, how do we protect our children?’ And that’s what I’m going to try to do as president.”

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/06/17/reclaiming-democracy-with-rfk-jr-and-elon-musk.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20230617_HL2&mid=DM1418261&rid=1831260799

Watching what You Say

  • The internet was likely not intended to remain free forever. The intention for it to be used as a totalitarian tool was baked in from the start
  • Google started as a DARPA grant and was part of the CIA’s and NSA’s digital data program, the purpose of which was to conduct “birds of a feather” mapping online so that certain groups could be neutralized
  • All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ‘90s were funded by the Pentagon and the State Department. They were developed by the intelligence community as an insurgency tool — a means to help dissident groups in foreign countries to develop a pro-U.S. stance and evade state-controlled media. Now, these same technologies have been turned against the American public, and are used to control public discourse
  • In the past, censorship was a laborious task that could only be done after the fact. Artificial intelligence has radically altered the censorship industry. AI programs can now censor information en masse, based on the language used, and prevent it from being seen at all
  • One of the most effective strategies that would have immediate effect would be to strip the censorship industry of its government funding. The House controls the purse strings of the federal government, so the House Appropriations Committee has the power to end the funding of government-sponsored censorship

In this video, I interview Mike Benz, executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online. Benz started off as a corporate lawyer representing tech and media companies before joining the Trump administration, where he worked as a speech writer for Dr. Ben Carson, the former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and President Trump.

He also advised on economic development policy. He then joined the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology. There, he ran the cyber desks at state, meaning all things having to do with the internet and foreign policy.

“This is toward the end of 2020, which was a really fascinating time to witness the merger, in many respects, of big government and big tech companies themselves,” he says. “I had grown up, I think, like many Americans, with a belief that the First Amendment protected you against government censorship.

The terms of engagement that we had enjoyed from 1991, when the worldwide web rolled out, until 2016, the election in the U.S. and Brexit in the U.K., which is, really, the first political event where the election was determined, in many respects, by momentum on the internet.

There was that 25-year golden period where the idea of being censored by a private sector company, let alone the government, was considered something, to me, very deeply anathema to the American experience.

What I witnessed at the State Department — because I was at the desk, basically, that Google and Facebook would call when they wanted favors abroad, when they wanted American protection or American policies to preserve their dominance in Europe, or in Asia or in Latin America.

And the U.S. government was doing favors for these tech companies while the tech companies were censoring the people who voted for the government. It was a complete betrayal of whatever social contract typically underlies the public-private partnership.”

The Internet Was Founded by the National Security State

Ostensibly, the rapid expansion of censorship started post-2016, but you can make a strong argument that the internet was never intended to remain free forever. Rather, the intention for it to be used as a totalitarian tool was likely baked in from the start when the national security state founded it in 1968.

The worldwide web, which is the user interface, was launched in 1991, and my suspicion is that the public internet was seeded and allowed to grow in order to capture and make the most of the population dependent upon it, knowing that it would be the most effective social engineering tool ever conceived. Benz comments:

“I totally agree … A lot of people, in trying to understand what’s happening with the net censorship, say ‘We had this free internet, and then suddenly there was this age of censorship and the national security state got involved at the censorship side.’

But when you retrace the history, internet freedom itself was actually a national security state imperative. The internet itself is a product of a counterinsurgency necessity by the Pentagon to manage information during the 1960s, particularly to aggregate social science data. And then, it was privatized.

Opening it up to all comers in the private sector, it was handed off from DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to the National Science Foundation, and then went through a series of universities on the infrastructure side.

And then, right out of the gate in 1991, you had the Cold War coming to an end, and then simultaneously, you had this profusion of Pentagon-funded internet freedom technologies. You had things like VPNs, encrypted chat, TOR.

All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ‘90s were funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, and developed by the intelligence community, primarily, as a way of using internet freedom as a means to help dissident groups in foreign countries be able to develop a pro-U.S. beachhead, because it was a way to evade state-controlled media.

This was, basically, an insurgency tool for the U.S. government, in the same way that Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty, and Radio Free Europe were tools of the CIA in the Cold War, to beam in, basically, pro-U.S. content to populations in foreign countries in order to sway them towards U.S. interests. It was a way of managing the world empire.

The internet served the same purpose, and it couldn’t be done if it was called a Pentagon operation, a State Department or CIA operation. But all of the tech companies themselves are products of that. Google started as a DARPA grant that was obtained at Stanford by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

In 1995, they were part of the CIA and NSA’s [National Security Agency’s] massive digital data program. They had their monthly meetings with their CIA and NSA advisers for that program, where the express stated purpose was for the CIA and NSA to be able to map so-called ‘Birds of a feather’ online … so that they could be neutralized.”

How It All Began

As noted by Benz, the idea of having the intelligence community map political “Birds of a Feather” communities in order to either mobilize or neutralize them was (and still is) justified in the name of counterterrorism. Nowadays, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, it’s used to control public discourse, suppress truth, and promote propaganda angles.

The technology used to control public discourse is an artificial intelligence (AI) technique called natural language processing (NLP). It’s a way of aggregating everyone who believes a certain thing online into community databases based on the words they use, the hashtags, the slogans and images.

“Emerging narratives, all manner of metadata affiliations, all that can be aggregated to create a topographical network map of what you believe in and who you’re associated with, so that it can all be turned down in a fast, precise and comprehensive manner by content moderation teams, because they’re all birds of the same feather,” Benz explains.

“The fact that this grew out of the U.S. National Security state, which is running the show, essentially, today, to me says that there’s a continuation between the internet freedom and internet censorship. They simply switched from one side of the chess board to the other.”

What Is the National Security State?

For clarity, when Benz talks about the “National Security State,” what he’s referring to are the institutions that uphold the rules-based international order. Domestically, that includes the Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), certain aspects of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the 17 intelligence agencies.

Of those, the Pentagon, State Department and the intelligence community (IC) are the three central ones that have managed the American world empire since the 1940s. None of them are supposed to be able to operate domestically, but in a sense their power has expanded so much that they essentially control domestic affairs.

As explained by Benz, the Pentagon, State Department and IC are not supposed to be able to operate domestically. “But in a sense, they really control domestic affairs, because their power has expanded so much that they’ve developed an extraordinary laundering apparatus to be able to fund international institutions that then boomerang back home and effectively control much of domestic political affairs, including discourse on the internet.”

As for the CIA, it was created in 1947 under the National Security Act. It was created as a cloak-and-dagger mechanism, to do things the State Department wanted done but couldn’t get caught doing due to the diplomatic repercussions — things like election rigging, assassinations, media control, bribery and other subversion tactics.

The Birth of Hybrid Warfare

Benz continues his explanation of how and why internet censorship emerged when it did:

“So, there’s the U.S. National Security State, and then there’s the transatlantic one involving NATO. The story of Western government involvement in internet censorship really started after the 2014 Crimea annexation, which was the biggest foreign policy humiliation of the Obama era.

Atlanta’s School of Foreign Policy was deeply inflamed by this event and blamed the fact that there were these breakaway Russia-supporting entities in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea on a failure to penetrate their media, and this idea that hearts and minds were being swung towards the Russian side because of pro-Russian content online.

NATO then declared this doctrine of so-called hybrid warfare — this idea that Russia had won Crimea not by a military annexation, but by winning, illicitly in a sense, the hearts and minds of Crimeans through the use of their propaganda. And the doctrine of hybrid warfare, born in 2014, was this idea that war was no longer a kinetic thing.

There hadn’t been a kinetic war in Europe since World War II. Instead, it had moved sub-kinetic into the hearts and minds of the people. In fact, NATO announced a doctrine after 2014 called ‘From tanks to tweets,’ where it shifted its focus, explicitly, from kinetic warfare to social media opinions online.

Brexit, which happened in June 2016 … was blamed on Russian influence as well. And so all of these institutions that argued for control over the internet in Eastern Europe said, ‘Well, it needs to come now. Now it’s an all-of-Europe thing.’

When Trump was then elected five months later, explicitly contemplating the breakup of NATO, all hell broke loose. This idea that we need to censor the internet went from being something that was touchy and novel, in the view of Pentagon brass and State Department folks, to something that was totally essential to saving the entire rules-based international order that came out of World War II.

At the time, the reasoning was, Brexit, in the U.K., was going to give rise to Frexit, in France, with Marine Le Pen and her movement there. Matteo Salvini was going to cause Italexit In Italy, there’d be Grexit in Greece, Spexit in Spain, and the entire European Union would come undone, just because these right-wing populist parties would naturally vote their way into political power.

They would vote for working-class, cheap energy policies that would make them more closely aligned with Russia naturally, because of the cheaper oil prices, or cheaper gas prices. Then, suddenly, you’ve got no EU, you’ve got no NATO, and then, you’ve got no Western military alliance.

So, from that moment, after Trump’s election, immediately, there was this diplomatic roadshow by U.S. State Department officials, who all thought they were getting promotions in November 2016. They thought they were going to get promoted from the State Department to the National Security Council. Turns out, they all got fired, because someone with a 5% chance of winning ended up winning that day.

So, they took their international connections, their international networks around the Atlanta Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the entire think tank, quasi-intelligence, quasi-military, government-funded NGO soup, and they did this international roadshow, starting in January 2017, to convince European countries to start censoring their internet …

Out of that came NetzDG [Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, the Network Enforcement Act] in Germany, which introduced a necessity of artificial intelligence-powered social media censorship.

All of that was, essentially, spearheaded by this network of State Department and Pentagon folks who then used their own internal folks in the government to procure government grants and contracts to these same entities. Eventually, they all rotated into those tech companies to set the policies as well.”

Threat From Within

So, to summarize, the infrastructure for worldwide internet censorship was largely established by IC veterans who were forced out by the Trump administration, and that infrastructure was then used to catalyze the international censorship response during COVID in late 2019, early 2020. Benz continues:

“Right. And those veterans were not alone. The full story is not just the shadow security state and exile. The fact is this. The Trump administration never had control of its own defense department, State Department or intelligence community.

It was the intelligence community that, essentially, drove his first impeachment, that drove a two-and-a-half year special prosecutor investigation that rolled up 12 to 20 of Trump’s closest associates. You had a chief of staff there who was hiding the military figures from the government. The careers at state threatened the political appointees from the inside. I experienced that myself.

This permanent aspect of Washington, with unfireable careers in high places, combined with a turf war in the GOP [Republican Party] between the populist right and the neo-conservative right, with the neo-conservative right having many well-placed Republicans in the Defense Department, State Department, in IC, to thwart the previous president’s agenda there, allowed this political network and exile, on the censorship side, to work with their allies within the government to create these censorship beach heads.

So, for example, that’s how they created the Department of Homeland Security’s … first permanent government censorship bureau in the form of this entity called CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, founded in November 2018], which is supposed to just be a cybersecurity entity.

It was done because of media and intelligence community laundering of a never-substantiated claim that Russia had potentially hacked the 2016 election, hacked the election machines or voting software, or might be able to do so in the future, and so we need a robust armed-to-the-teeth DHS unit to protect our cybersecurity from the Russians.

It’s the mission creep of the century. After the Mueller probe ended in June 2019, this unit, CISA, within DHS [Department of Homeland Security] — which had set up all of this, and which is only supposed to do cybersecurity — said ‘Well, if you squint and look at it, discourse online is a cybersecurity threat because if it undermines public faith or confidence in our elections, and it’s done using a cyber nexus, i.e., social media post, then that’s a form of cybersecurity threat, because democracy is essential to our security.’

And so you went from this cybersecurity mission to a cyber censorship bureau, because if you tweeted something about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, that was deemed to be a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, i.e., elections.

When they got away with that in 2020, DHS then said, ‘Well, if you squint and look at it, public health is also critical infrastructure.’ So, now, DHS gets to direct social media companies to censor opinions about COVID-19.

Then they worked their way into saying the same thing about financial systems, financial services, about the Ukraine war, about immigration. It got to the point where, by late 2022, the head of CISA declared that cognitive infrastructure is critical infrastructure.”

Cracks only appeared after Republicans got a majority in the House of Representatives in November 2022 and Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Public support for government also dwindled as Musk’s release of the Twitter Files revealed the extent of government’s involvement in the censoring of Americans.

So far, though, public awareness hasn’t changed anything. The very entities that once stood for internet freedom, like the National Science Foundation, are still actively funding and furthering government censorship activities.

AI Gives Censors God-Like Powers

Benz first became “gripped by the stakes of what was happening on the internet” in August 2016, after reading a series of papers discussing the use of NLP to monitor, surveil and regulate the distribution of information on social media based on the words used.

“DARPA provided tens of millions of dollars of funding for this language processing, this language chunking capacity of AI in order, ostensibly, to stop ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter,” Benz says.

“As part of the predicate for putting military boots on the ground in Syria, there was a lot of talk about ISIS coming to the U.S., and they were recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. And so the Pentagon, DARPA and the IC developed this language spyware capacity to map the dialectic of how ISIS sympathizers talk online, the words they use, the images they share, the prefixes, the suffixes, all the different community connections.

And then, I saw that this was being done for purposes of domestic political control instead of foreign counterterrorism, and the power that it has. It is what totally changed the internet forever. Before 2016, there was not the technological capacity to do mass social media censorship. That was the age of what censorship insiders like to call the whack-a-mole era. Censorship was reactive.

It was done by forum, by moderators, essentially. Everything had to be flagged manually before it could be taken down, which meant millions of people had already seen it, or it had already gone viral, it had already done its damage, so to speak, and you were just cutting off the backend with an act of censorship.

You could never have a permanent control apparatus in that setting, because there would always be a first mover advantage to whoever posted it. What AI censorship technology breakthroughs enabled after 2016 was a kind of nuclear weapon, if you will, on the censorship side, to be able to end the war immediately.

You don’t need a standing army of 100,000 people to censor COVID. You need one good developer, working with one manic social scientist who spends her entire life mapping what Dr. Mercola says online, and what he’s talking about this week, what his followers are saying, what they’re saying about this drug, or what they’re saying about this vaccine, or what they’re saying about this institution.

All of that can be cataloged into a lexicon of how you talk. And then, all of that talk can just be turned down to zero. At the same time, they can super amplify the language that they themselves are doing. So it gives a God-like control to a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people who can then use that to control the discourse of the entire population.

What’s also so terrifying about the National Security State’s involvement in this is, when they discovered the power of this by mid-2018, they began to roll it out to every other country in the world for purposes of political control there — to the Ghana desk, to the Ecuador desk, to Southeast Asia, all over Europe.”

Can We Get Out of the Grip of Censorship?

At the time of this writing, we’re in a lull. The COVID pandemic has been declared over and aside from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there are no major political crises going on that warrant heavy censorship. The networks and technologies for radical suppression are already in place, however, and can be turned up at a moment’s notice.

We’ve also recently seen just how easy it is for alternative media to be infiltrated and upended, so the fact that there are alternative platforms doesn’t guarantee that future censorship efforts will fail.

“There are so many threat vectors,” Benz says. “There are a lot of questions about what’s going on, for example, at Project Veritas, with how quickly it ousted James O’Keefe after releasing the most viral video ever, on Pfizer. It was about one week later — after their biggest accomplishment, perhaps, ever — that it was totally overthrown.

A similar thing has happened with Fox News with [the firing of] Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable TV host in the country — the guy who gets three times more concurrent viewership than CNN, in the opposing spot. Institutions can absolutely be penetrated and co-opted when enough pressure is applied.”

Transatlantic Flank Attack 2.0 Underway

As mentioned earlier, the U.S. censorship really began with NATO. Benz refers to this as the transatlantic flank attack. Basically, when U.S. intelligence want to impact the internet domestically, they first work with their European partners to enact regulatory changes in Europe first. This then ends up spilling into the U.S. market, and the IC appears to have had nothing to do with it.

The first transatlantic flank attack took place in early 2017 with the NetzDG. We’re now under transatlantic attack again, through the Digital Markets Act. This law, Benz says, will make it very difficult for Rumble and other free speech platforms to maintain that posture during the next pandemic. Once these platforms are forced to comply with the Digital Markets Act on the European side, the changes will be felt everywhere.

Cause for Cautious Optimism

While Benz remains hopeful that solutions to global censorship will present themselves, he still recognizes that the forces at play are enormous and the risks are high.

“It’s one of these things where the more you see what we’re up against, the more sobering it becomes. I think you need to maintain hope in order to maintain energy, to maintain momentum. With momentum, weird things can happen, even if you’re not supposed to win. Strange things break, or take a life of their own, or resurface.

All the little weaknesses of the system get tested, simply by a momentum here and there. For example, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is probably the reason that the GOP got over the hump in doing all of these congressional investigations into the government’s role in censorship.

They felt like they had an ally at Twitter, that they had billionaire backing. There was a waterfall, cascade impact. So, I am hopeful. DHS is on the run right now. They purged their website of all their domestic censorship operations that they listed and were loud and proud about for two whole years after the catastrophe of the disinformation governance board in April 2022.

They already had a Ministry of Truth at DHS. They just gave one hypothetical board the wrong name. They didn’t call it the CISA. They made the mistake of calling it by the right name, and that’s what ended the entire political support for the underlying apparatus.

So, the importance of an Orwellian name is essential for maintaining the political support. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m hopeful, and I’m honored to be a part of this rebel fleet of folks trying to take on the empire behind the censorship situation.

But having seen, in so many iterations the toolkit they use, it is a medieval torture toolkit that can do strange things. Pressure can do strange things, even to great people. And so I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Essential Internet Backbone Is Not Politically Neutral

In my view, internet decentralization is one key innovation that could break the grip of censorship. That said, other aspects, such as cybersecurity, must also be reinvented.

CloudFlare, for example, a content delivery and cloud cybersecurity service, basically controls the internet because they protect online businesses and platforms from hackers using Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Without it, you cannot survive online if you’re a big business. Even with a decentralized internet, CloudFlare might still be able to exert control by leaving sites open to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

Disturbingly, CloudFlare got political for the first time after 2016, when it decided to remove protection from a site called Kiwi Farms, which expressed anti-transgender views. As a result, the site had to move over to a Russian server to get back online.

Basically, U.S. citizens had to look for internet freedom in Russia because their architecture could not be supported in the U.S. — all because a government-integrated backbone of the internet made a political decision, likely at the behest of the IC.

“If there is another pandemic, for example, and there’s a push for certain medical interventions or countermeasures that certain sites don’t go along with, the CloudFlare, absolutely, could be a weapon in that respect,” Benz says.

“One of the things I found so troubling is that CISA, this DHS censorship agency, after the 2020 election set up a private sector liaison subcommittee for mis- and disinformation policies in the private sector. It was a seven-person subcommittee, with all of the top censorship experts at the University of Washington and Stanford.

Vijaya Gadde, the former head of censorship at Twitter, was a part of this board. I thought it was very troubling that the CEO of CloudFlare was also one of the seven people on the DHS censorship board.”

Major Challenges to a Decentralized Internet

Benz continues:

“To proceed to the various challenges to a decentralized internet, when you move up the stack of censorship … they can move up to cloud servers, to payment processors, and even to things like CloudFlare and your infrastructure protection.

In the early era of censorship, there was a rebuttal by censorship advocates that if you don’t like what private sector companies are doing, start your own social media companies. Build your own Google, build your own YouTube, build your own Facebook, build your own Twitter.

And then, what started to happen as censorship got completely insane, when it went from being troubling to disturbing, to saturating … you started to see these alternative social media platforms like Gab and Parler … that tried to escape the content moderation policies with Big Tech. But what started to happen is, those social media companies, like Parler, were completely destroyed.

Parler was de-platformed from, basically, the entire internet, when the president had just moved there, after being kicked off Twitter. That was a very instructive moment, and one that censorship insiders have reflected on, I should say, many, times as a moment of, ‘Should we have done that? We did it, but it costs us a lot of political capital.’

Parler was kicked off of Amazon Web Services. They were kicked off of all of the banks. They were banned from email providers. They could not hook to the internet, essentially, to even maintain the ability to post anything there. So, it went from build your own social media company to build your own bank.

Now you need to build your own bank and get a banking license for the payment processors. You need to build your own email distribution. You need to build your own cloud servers.

You need to build your own software service providers. And, eventually, are you going to need to lay your own subsea cables across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans? The social media companies didn’t invent the internet. They are superimposed on Pentagon infrastructure.”

The House Needs to Defund the Censorship Industry

Without doubt, there will be another crisis, whether it be another pandemic or war or something else, that will send the censorship machine into full gear yet again. Right now we’re in a lull, so this is the time to think ahead and get prepared. The question is, what can we do? How do we prepare and fight back?

According to Benz, one of the most effective strategies that would have immediate effect, and could be done right now, would be to strip the censorship industry of its government funding. He explains:

“Right now, there’s a Republican controlled House. The advantage of the House is that it controls appropriations, the purse strings of the federal government. If the House Appropriations Committee took seriously the government subsidization of censorship networks in the private sector, you could defund the speech police, even though, on the AI side, it only takes one good coder to be able to take out an entire political philosophy.

The fact is, they can only do that job because of an army of social science folks across 45 different U.S. colleges and universities who get paid. There are tens of thousands of them who are paid through the National Science Foundation, through DARPA grants and State Department grants, to map communities online as a matter of social science, and then provide that to the computer scientist to censor it.

My foundation, the Foundation for Freedom Online, has detailed $100 million, just in the past 18 months, that have gone from the federal government institutions directly into social media censorship insiders. Censorship is not an act anymore, it’s an industry, and you can cripple their capacity building.

When you pump it full of money, you go from having a couple of people do it, to tens of thousands of people doing it. The censorship capacity is built on an infrastructure of an industry that relies on government to pay for it, and it relies on government to spearhead their penetration into the institutions.

Right now, there are about eight different congressional committees trying to solve this problem from different aspects. I’ve personally briefed eight different congressional committees … But only a few of those committees are taking it seriously enough to pursue the issue deeply, and where that will shake out remains uncertain.

CISA worked with dozens of social media companies and private sector cutouts to launder censorship from the government into the private sector, but the institution I worked with more than anyone was the University of Stanford, the Stanford Internet Observatory in particular.

Jim Jordan’s Weaponization Subcommittee just subpoenaed Stanford for what I call the perfectly preserved First Amendment crime scene. Stanford meticulously kept logs of all of its censorship activities with government officials for the COVID-19 pandemic, and for two election cycles.

They detailed 66 narratives that they censored online, having to do with everything about vaccines, efficacy of masks, opposition to lockdown mandates. And then, they had a fourth category for conspiracy theories, basically anything that someone said about the World Economic Forum, or Bill Gates.

They’re now refusing to comply with that subpoena. But the stakes keep getting escalated, because who’s going to enforce that subpoena? Steve Bannon, regardless of your opinion of him, just got indicted for not complying with a subpoena, but is this Justice Department going to pursue criminal penalties against Stanford, for withholding congressional subpoena for their government?

This is for their government, because they were the formal partners. They had a formal partnership with the DHS. That stuff should be FOIA-able, first of all. You shouldn’t even need a subpoena for it. The only reason you can’t FOIA it is because they laundered it through Stanford. Standord holds the records rather than DHS.

I tried to FOIA that from DHS, and DHS says, ‘We don’t have it, even though they were our communications.’ So this is the way the CIA structures in an operation, through a web of cutouts and offshore banks, so you can never really get transparency. They’re now doing that for the censorship industry at home …

Whether they will continue to raise the stakes is now a terrifying open issue. And the fact that it’s the inside guys who are running the censorship situation means there may be other tactics that need to be pursued here, which is why I talked about, simply, going to the appropriations committee and zeroing it out, so you don’t even need to enforce subpoenas, necessarily.”

Building a Whole-of-Society Solution

As explained by Benz, the censorship industry was built as a so-called whole-of-society effort. According to the DHS, misinformation online is a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society solution. By that, they meant that four types of institutions had to fuse together as a seamless whole. Those four categories and key functions are:

  1. Government institutions, which provide funding and coordination
  2. Private sector institutions that do the censorship and dedicate funds to censorship through corporate-social responsibility programs
  3. Civil society institutions (universities, NGOs, academia, foundations, nonprofits and activists) that do the research, the spying and collecting of data that are then given to the private sector to censor
  4. News media/fact checking institutions, which put pressure on institutions, platforms and businesses to comply with the censorship demands

What the Foundation for Freedom Online is doing is educating people about this structure, and the ways in which legislatures and the government can be restructured, how civil society institutions can be established, and how news media can be created to support and promote freedom rather than censorship.

To learn more, be sure to check out foundationforfreedomonline.com. You can also follow his very active Twitter account Benz on Twitter.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/06/11/mike-benz-internet-censorship.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230611_HL2&cid=DM1414838&bid=1825712811

A Question of Bellief

Lies, Sweet Lies: What Stories Do We Believe?

Analysis by Tessa Lena

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • In the words of the WEF, “story-based media can shift social norms, values and beliefs more effectively than traditional, fact-based messaging”
  • When a story is based on a lie, it takes a significant effort to maintain that lie, and the tyrants work day and night to keep their lies “alive”
  • The definition of “normal” came from math, and its contemporary meaning was shaped by the father of eugenics and Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton
  • Today, there is an effort on the part of the “human parasites” to induce the condition of “arrested development” on as many people as they can
  • No matter the circumstance, it’s on us to stand tall

I would like to start with a stunning example of the World Economic Forum telling the truth. Here is factual quote by them from 2018:

“There is now a compelling body of evidence to support the idea that, with the right research and theoretical grounding, story-based media can shift social norms, values and beliefs more effectively than traditional, fact-based messaging [emphasis mine]. What is even more exciting is how digital technology is bringing compelling stories to millions of people at increasingly lower costs.”

Are they telling the truth? Yes, they are — and the past three years offer immediate proof. The story-based media, sponsored by their masters from BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, has shifted the social norms alright! Here is a scary SNL skit that — I think — was supposed to make somebody laugh. I don’t usually watch the SNL, and I didn’t laugh:

“Social Norms”

Why do the social norms exist? We are social creatures, and our communities have customs. We are wired from birth to look at what others are doing and compare notes. We are also wired to “adjust” our behavior depending on the reactions we get. In the traditional wilderness, most adults can’t survive without being mature and living by natural and spiritual laws. And even here and how, in the urban jungle, our basic survival may depend on how well and how quickly we “read the room.”

As it goes with most things in life though, human qualities that exist in us with the purpose of helping us survive and thrive, can be turned on their heads and abused. It is kind of like what the parasites in nature do when they take advantage of the instincts and various natural biological functions in their target host — and make those features work for themselves, to the detriment of the host.

Our love of being in harmony with our community can be abused, too — and it has been abused throughout centuries and in the past three years — by committing acts of mob-like terror to create the initial shock and lasting collective fear, and thus corrupting the “base line” — and then by enforcing “arrested development” and preventing children from emotionally growing up until they are ready to be consumed by the Machine.

Here is a fine bit of inverted storytelling for the child-like adults that is intended to make them feel “smart.”

See, a mature and soul-oriented adult can “read the room” and then intelligently choose what to, based on what’s spiritually sound to do under a circumstance. On the other hand, an individual who is not particularly mature or soul-oriented tends to react in a mechanical way. Such a person is usually easy to consume by the not-so-benevolent masters at the top.

Thus, the “mechanically reactive” mode of living is typical for those who are yet to find themselves: children and child-like adults. And the effort to induce the condition of “arrested development” on as many “worker ants” as possible is the ambition of the human parasites.

What Is “Normal,” Anyway?

Enter the notion of “normal.” Before we proceed, let us look at the history of the term.

“The word normal entered the English language in the mid-1840s, followed by normality in 1849, and normalcy in 1857 … When normal was first used it had nothing to do with people, or society, or human behavior. Norm and normal were Latin words used by mathematicians. Normal comes from the Latin word norma which refers to a carpenter’s square, or T-square. Building off the Latin, normal first meant “perpendicular” or “at right angles.”

Normal was first used outside a mathematical context in the mid-1800s by a group of men … in the academic disciplines of comparative anatomy and physiology. These two fields, by the 19th century, had professional dominion over the human body … They used the term “normal state” to describe functioning organs and other systems inside the body.

The anatomists and physiologists, however, never did find or define the normal state. Instead they studied and defined its opposite — the pathological state. They defined normal as what is not abnormal …

The idea of the average as normal goes way back to 1713 to a Swiss mathematician named Jakob Bernoulli, who many consider to be the founder of modern day calculus and statistics …

Bernoulli created an equation known as the calculus of probabilities, which became the foundation of all statistics … The calculus of probabilities specifically, and statistics generally, made many seemly random events more predictable …”

Then Adolphe Quetelet took the calculus of probabilities and “applied not to gambling but to human beings … Quetelet was a true believer that statistics should be applied to all aspects of society … In 1835, he put forth the concept of the ‘average man.’

His plan was to gather massive amounts of statistical data about any given population and calculate the mean, or most commonly occurring, of various sets of features — height, weight, eye color — and later, qualities such as intelligence and morality, and use this “average man” as a model for society …”

Anyone can smell eugenics in the air at this point? Quetelet “used regular, average, and normal interchangeably. In 1870, in a series of essays on ‘deformities’ in children, he juxtaposed children with disabilities to the normal proportions of other human bodies, which he calculated using averages. The normal and the average had merged.”

The formal “father” of normality (and eugenics), however, was Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin. Galton was an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics known for his “pioneering” (per Encyclopedia Britannica) studies of human intelligence. He started out as a doctor and then left medicine for the budding field of statistics. He was knighted in 1909.

Pet LitHub, “as Lennard Davis described in his book Enforcing Normalcy, Galton made significant changes in statistical theory that created the concept of the norm, as we know it. Galton was into the idea of improving the human race and believed that statistics could help. He loved Quetelet’s whole ‘average man’ thing but had one minor problem.

In the center of Quetelet’s bell curve were the most commonly occurring traits, not the ideal bodies and minds Galton believed everyone should have.”

“To solve this problem, Galton, through a complicated … mathematical process … took the bell curve idea, where the most common traits clustered in the middle and the extremes, and created what he called an ‘ogive’ … which, as Davis explains ‘is arranged in quartiles with an ascending curve that features the desired trait as “higher” than the undesirable “deviation.”

According to Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, authors of Normality: a Critical Genealogy, “Galton was not only the first person to develop a properly statistical theory of the normal … but also the first to suggest that it be applied as a practice of social and biological normalization.”

By the early twentieth century, the concept of a normal man took hold. The emerging field of public health loved it. Schools, with rows of desks and a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, were designed for the mythical middle.

The industrial economy needed standardization, which was brought about by the application of averages, standards, and norms to industrial production. Eugenics, an offshoot of genetics created by Galton, was committed to ridding the world of “defectives” … and was founded on the concept of the normal distribution curve.”

Eugenics
Gene Editing

Is “Gene Editing” the New Spelling of “Eugenics”?

Speaking of eugenics — I mean, gene editing — here is a TED talk by Paul Knoepfler, a mainstream researcher at UC Davis School of Medicine, from a few years ago. It is fascinating to watch. I say “fascinating” because I like to observe other people’s train of thought. And in some cases, people’s thinking is a wild mix of possible good intention, actual science, fantasy, and hubris (remember DDT?).

In his case, in 2018, he called for a temporary moratorium on “designer babies,” and then in 2020, at a time when nearly every mainstream scientist was compliant or trusty or both, he published a piece supporting mRNA vaccines. What is his opinion on the mRNA vaccines today? I don’t know. But since he still seemingly has a job, whatever his opinion is, he is probably keeping it to himself.

Even more fascinating is this bit of storytelling. In real life, the scientists — even the well-intended ones — who hope to “improve humanity” by genetic modification are more like a very ambitious elephant in the china shop than anything else. Perhaps they are an elephant who identifies as a very graceful ballerina — but they are an elephant, and no amount of fantasizing about genetic modification can change that.

But it is fascinating to watch propaganda videos. Words are cheap, anything can be said with great conviction, including blatant lies. There is even a flying car briefly making an appearance in this propaganda video! Perhaps, a hint?

When something is based on a lie, it takes a significant effort to maintain that lie. Because of that, for centuries, there have been very powerful lie-maintaining institutions in place. The people employed at the lie-maintaining institutions have been very skilled at the art of deceit, at the art of confusion, at the art of seduction, and at the art of fear.

The middle managers could be just foot soldiers, the apprentices of the Machine. They often have no idea what they are really doing, and they typically prefer not even think about ways to find an accurate mirror because they are not looking to shatter their own worldview.

The ones at the top though know exactly what they are doing, and they put a lot of work in maintaining their lies. They are in perpetual search of new victims and new ways to sell their lies. They are in perpetual search of new abuse markets, so to speak. And so they swap stories and marketing brochures without even blinking, as often as they need, to replenish their victim supply.

Cycle of Abuse and the Story of Superiority

It dawned on me: the way institutional abusers play “divide and conquer” and treat different groups of people differently is as if they were delivering the experiences of different phases of abuse to those groups at the same time.

The “temporarily elevated,” i.e. the demographic targeted to be temporary supporters and loyal soldiers of the dark ones, are shown the “honey moon” phase — while the ones who are targeted for immediate destruction, receive the unmasked boot, the phase of abuse when the gloves of the abuser are off.

Of course, both groups are targeted to be eaten, just at different times — and during Phase One, Group One is supposed to not know that they are enthusiastically digging not just the graves for Group Two, but also their own graves.

That makes perfect sense as far as the art of warfare goes. Seduction, including sugar-covered storytelling and some practical perks, is required to pull the victim in. It’s very important for the abuser to first pull some wool over the victim’s eyes and ears and some cotton candy over the victim’s mouth.

The ones who are targeted to be supporters, are told that they better, smarter, more handsome, and more spiritually righteous than the ones targeted to be food. What’s hidden from the “next phase” victims though is the fact that the abuse is on its way. Inevitably, on its way.

The Not-so-Great Reset

What’s really happening in regards to the not-so-great reset role swapping, a reshuffling in the game of the musical chairs. We in the West have gotten used to the role of “honey moon” people, the ones who are shown the “honey moon” phase. And who could blame us? It is easy to get used to good things. Hey, this Soviet expat is very grateful for those good things and got used to them right away!

And it is also true that for all practical purposes, while Phase One lasts, it is much better to belong to our “western” group. Big houses, big TVs, material abundance, freedom of expression — or at least relative freedom of expression — all those things have been sweet, and having them makes a dramatic difference in our quality of life. As someone who grew up at the tail end of the USSR, I passionately attest to that.

However, it is important to be honest. And for the sake of being honest, it is better to separate the underlying reality from “storytelling.” For example, we decry — rightfully so — the forced closure of places of worship during the COVID lockdowns. But how many people know that, for example, the original people of this land could not legally practice the spiritual traditions of their ancestors until 1978, when American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed?

This reminds of a Soviet-era joke. A Russian and an American are having a conversation, and the American says: “We in America have freedom. For example, I can go up to the White House and say loudly, ‘Reagan sucks!” The Russian laughs and says, “Big deal. I, too, can go to Red Square and say loudly, ‘Reagan sucks!’”

Modus Propagandi

When the poorer and less socially elevated people are used as pawn in a coup, they are propagandized in a particular way — which is something that I observed in the Soviet Union, and something that I am observing, to my chagrin, in America today.

The dejected ones are handed a fake new “respect” and the satisfaction of “righteously” humiliating the ones who annoy them, in this case, the “privileged” folks. It is that game of musical chairs, the redistribution of the crumbles of respect, again.

From the standpoint of the dark individuals on top, it’s just another reiteration of “divide and conquer,” reshuffling of Phase One and Phase Two people and values, a matter of different groups of ants swapping roles. But it feels very serious to the dignified people on the ground for good reasons as we can feel our dignity just slipping away, the sound of propaganda of the day.

They Do It Again and Again

This topic is close to my heart. When the generation of my grandparents in the USSR found themselves on the receiving end of the not-so-great reset of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the “foot soldiers of the Machine” were the poor ones, the compliant ones, and the village drunks.

They were told story of new respect, and they were recruited to bring down (with seemingly some help form the colony-seeking Western bankers) the dignified.

This is not how I learned history at school, however. When I was a kid, I was told a story of horrible pre-1917 life and the Bolsheviks riding in on a white horse (like a Robin Hood, although I am not sure if Robin Hood had a white horse). It was later, gradually, that I figured out that it was just a story, and that it was a vicious lie.

Then when the Soviet Union fell apart, I was still a kid, and I remember how exciting and prestigious it was for anyone to be in any way involved with anything “from the West.” Glamorous things were: joint enterprises, foreigners, Western music, Western values, and this song.

What a sweet fairy tale it was. And despite the sweetness of that story, and the tremendously fond memories I have of those times, that, too, was just “storytelling.” In reality, it was a loveless market grab by the key investors in multinational companies. It was a social restructuring that for us, at that time, felt awesome because we, the people of the Soviet Union, were temporarily made to believe that were the benefiting group.

The “Russian Doll” of Lies: Letting Go

I have spent many years pondering this dynamic, and came to the conclusion that until we reject all fake stories — even the ones we imbibed with mother’s milk, even the ones that allow people like us to continue our comfortable slumber — we are not “safe” from being on the receiving end of the not-so-great reset.

That is a very tall order and a very tough spiritual and intellectual challenge even for the best of us, and it’s hard work. But our sweet freedom is worth all the hard work in the world, isn’t it? I think so.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/06/09/lies-sweet-lies.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art2HL&cid=20230609_HL2&cid=DM1413838&bid=1823970643