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What Has Been Asserted Without Evidence May Be Dismissed Without Evidence

We’re being bashed in the face with western propaganda about the Ukraine situation with increasing forcefulness. Every day now we’re seeing things like “analysts” claiming Putin definitely wants a large-scale war, very familiar-looking puff pieces about Ukrainian guerrilla freedom fighters based on claims by anonymous intelligence sources, think pieces on why Americans should all care about Ukrainian freedom from Kremlin tyranny, and, of course, a lot of entirely unsubstantiated assertions about what Russia is doing.

Despite the British government’s evidence-free claim that Russia was planning to install a puppet regime in Ukraine being debunked within hours and then shown to be a US intelligence claim dishonestly packaged as a British one days later, mass media outlets still to this day repeat the allegation like it’s a real thing. Despite the entirely unevidenced US government claim that Russia was plotting to stage a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine failing to prove true in subsequent weeks, US Senator Bob Menendez went on CNN over the weekend and declared that this false flag which never actually, physically happened was grounds to sanction Russia effective immediately.

The US political/media class is just saying whatever it wants about what Russia is doing and planning to do with no regard for facts or evidence. Nothing is too cartoonishly hysterical; in fact the more clickbaity and attention-grabbing the better. They feel free to scattergun these outlandish claims willy nilly all over our information ecosystem because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they are proven wrong, and that they will in fact see their stars rise as a reward for advancing the interests of the US empire.

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‘Fringe Minority’? Crowd-Funding for ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers Outraises Canada’s Top Political Parties

The massed ‘Freedom Convoy 2022’ of Canadian truckers currently stationed around the capital Ottawa is close to raising $10m to support its cause of defeating Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “political overreach,” according to the protest GoFundMe page.

The GoFundMe page set up by protest supporters clearly shows Tuesday the money pouring in to the cause from across the nation, with backers happy to dismiss the sneering attack by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who labelled the anti-mandatory vaccination trucker convoy a ”fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.”

The Independent reports this amount is higher than the money raised by major federal political players of Canada during the closing months of 2021, public records with Elections Canada showed.

According to the record, Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada raised $3.7m during the last quarter of 2021, with the opposition Conservative Party of Canada ranking a close second with over $3m during the same period.

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U.S. Govt Spent Over $2.3 Million Injecting Puppies With Cocaine.

The National Institutes of Health spent over $2.3 million on studies that injected puppies with cocaine.

The experiment, revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the White Coat Waste Project, follows previously unearthed studies funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci that “debarked” beagle puppies.

Seven six-month-old Beagle puppies were forced to wear a drug-injecting jacket that allowed them to be dosed with cocaine again and again and again for months, along with an ‘experimental compound,’ to see how the two drugs interacted.

The year-long experiment, which began in September 2020, was filmed so research could evaluate the puppies’ adverse reactions” to the drugs. Prior to the drugs being administered, the puppies were forced to undergo surgery, where they were implanted with a “telemetry unit” to monitor their vital signs throughout the experiment.

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Black Lives Matter ‘transferred millions to Canadian charity run by the wife of co-founder Patrisse Cullors to buy Toronto mansion formerly owned by the Communist Party’

Black Lives Matter transferred millions of dollars to a Canadian charity run by the wife of co-founder Patrisse Cullors, according to a report, which was used to buy a $6.3 million Toronto mansion to house an arts center.

News of the transfer of money to the Canadian group has raised further questions about transparency and accountability within Black Lives Matter – coming days after auditors said an inquiry into the handling of BLM’s $60 million war chest was necessary, and less than a year after Cullors was forced to stand down amid questions about her own property empire. 

BLM Canada announced in July 2021 that they had recently purchased a three story Victorian mansion in the Baldwin Village area of Toronto, close to downtown. The imposing red brick house was previously the headquarters of the Communist Party.

On Saturday, The New York Post reported that the funds to purchase the property came from Black Lives Matter, and were transferred from the global network to M4BJ – a Toronto-based non-profit set up by Janaya Khan and other Canadian activists.

Khan is the spouse of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors.

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Gavin Newsom spotted maskless at 49ers-Rams game despite stadium mandates

California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted on Monday to going maskless “for a few moments” at the 49ers-Rams NFL game – in defiance of a local mask mandate and the LA stadium’s own requirements.

Newsom, who was previously forced to apologize for breaking his own COVID-19 rules early in the pandemic, posed for a photo with former LA Lakers star Magic Johnson on Sunday in what appeared to be one of SoFi Stadium’s suites.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and San Francisco Mayor London Breed were also spotted in the suite without masks.

LA County currently has a mask mandate in place for outdoor “mega events” that host more than 5,000 people, regardless of vaccination status. The rules will apply for the Super Bowl matchup that will be hosted at the stadium on Feb. 13, local health officials have said.

Under SoFi Stadium’s policies — which adhere to the local health order — masks are required to be worn at all times except when people are eating or drinking.

The governor and two mayors were not eating or drinking at the time the photos were taken.

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What Could Go Wrong? Millions of US Kids to Be Taught in School Which News is “Fake”

NewsGuard, a controversial service that ranks news sources read by clients online based on how trustworthy it considers them to be, will soon be available for free to millions of schoolchildren in the US.

The New York-based company signed a licensing agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, making the service available to members and their students, the two said this week.

AFT President Randi Weingarten called the deal a game-changer when it comes to helping kids, “particularly our middle, high school and postsecondary students, separate fact from fiction.”

She called NewsGuard “a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”

The service was launched in 2018, when the position that Big Tech should openly censor information that it deemed undesirable was not as pervasive in the US as it is today. NewsGuard ranks thousands of news sources with a “street light” color code, and puts a nutrition label-like explanation on each one to explain the score.

The service comes in the form of a browser plug-in and costs $2.95/month, except for users of Microsoft Edge, since Microsoft licensed it to be a built-in feature of its browser in 2019.

NewsGuard claims to be apolitical and to apply a rigorous process when assessing the integrity of news outlets. After its launch, skeptics, however, questioned the abundance of people linked to the US government among its advisory board.

One of them, Richard Stengel, who served under Barack Obama as the Department of State’s public affairs chief, said on the record that state propaganda was fine and that all nations subjected their citizens to it.

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1944–1956: Radioactive nutrition experiments on retarded children by Harvard and MIT

In December of 1993, Scott Allen, a journalist at the Boston Globe, uncovered documents showing years of ethically dubious experiments conducted on Fernald Center youth. The day after Christmas, he published an article, “Radiation Used on Retarded,” noting that “Records at the Fernald State School list them as “morons,” but the researchers from MIT and Harvard University called the retarded teen-age boys who took part in their radiation experiments ‘the Fernald Science Club.’”

Developmentally disabled children at the Fernald State School and a state School in Waltham, Massachusetts were subjected to radioactive nutrition experiments sponsored by the AEC conducted by Harvard University and MIT researchers. The children were fed Quaker Oats breakfast cereal containing radioactive tracers to test absorption of plant minerals and calcium. Parents were never informed that radioactive elements were involved in the tests.

“In the name of science, members of the club would eat cereal mixed with radioactive milk for breakfast or digest a series of iron supplements that gave them the radiation-equivalent of at least 50 chest X-rays. From 1946 to 1956, scores of retarded teen-agers consumed radioactive food to help the researchers better understand the human digestive process.”

“There is absolutely no ground for caution regarding the quantities of radioactive substances which we would use in our experiments,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology biochemist Robert S. Harris assured Fernald’s superintendent in a letter proposing the research in December 1945. At least some consent forms sent home to parents or guardians do not mention radiation.”

“Based on figures in an unpublished report on the project, the children’s spleens were exposed to between 544 and 1,024 millirems of radiation over the course of seven meals. By comparison, the typical American receives about 300 millirems of radiation from natural sources each year.”

“The experiments at the Fernald School, which almost certainly would not be permitted today, are one of the darker corners of Massachusetts’ atomic legacy. Along with pioneering the field of nuclear medicine, some of the state’s leading academic institutions and hospitals also subjected the terminally ill, the elderly and others to radiation doses that are considered unsafe today, often with no possible benefit to the test subjects.”

Though never secret — researchers published the results of the Fernald studies in scholarly journals — details of the research effort, funded partly by Quaker Oats Co. and the US Atomic Energy Commission, have sat in a jumble of boxes in the Fernald School library until now.

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Let’s Back Up A Sec And Ask Why Free Speech Actually Matters

The Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy is still going on and has only gotten more vitriolic and intense. Claims that Spotify must walk away from its $200 million contract with the world’s most popular podcaster for promoting vaccine misinformation have sparked a lot of debates about freedom of speech, online censorship, what exactly those terms mean, and whether they can be correctly applied to the practice of Silicon Valley deplatforming.

When confronted with accusations of quashing free speech and promoting censorship, those who support online deplatforming in this or that situation will often respond with lines like “It’s not censorship, it’s just a private company enforcing its terms of service,” or “Nobody is obligated to give you a platform,” or “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach,” or by posting the famous XKCD comic which says “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.”

And of course it’s true that nobody is legally guaranteed the right to speak on an independent online platform. But even if we ignore the fact that this censorship behavior is not being driven solely by the wishes of independent corporations and is in fact happening in increasingly close coordination with the US government whose officials openly threaten Silicon Valley platforms with repercussions if they don’t regulate speech, the fact that it is technically legal for those companies to silence voices they don’t like is not a sound argument. It doesn’t prove that censorship isn’t happening or that the deplatforming is okay, it just proves that it is technically legal for those giant monopolistic platforms to do those things. A casual glance at history shows that plenty of terrible things have been done which were perfectly legal at the time.

To really answer the question of whether the increasingly widespread practice of Silicon Valley censorship via algorithm and deplatforming is a major problem and whether an increase in speech restriction is desirable, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves why free speech even matters in the first place. Why is it something that’s written into constitutions and upheld as sacrosanct in so many nations? Why is it a value we’re told has supreme importance all our lives?

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