Saturday, June 24, 2023

Day 3 of the CDC (Centers for Disinformation, Criminality and Prevarication) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting

I didn’t want to dive down into the CDC sewer for a second time today and recreate today’s ACIP meeting so I could write it up. But then I realized I really have to come to grips with the fact that our culture has spawned a bumper crop of Stepford wives/lemmings/robotic gibberish producers and we have to figure out how to bring them back to life or at least reprogram them so they are good for something. I hope to write more on that large topic later.

The mission of CDC and the ACIP members is to sign off on all possible vaccines as safe and effective, and to never turn over any stones that could reveal anything different. Then to roll all vaccines out to as broad a group of humans as humanly possible.

To that end, the ACIP members are presented with bits of partial information. They never ask for more. And everyone speaks in code, which is why I started watching the meetings, because they are hard for normal people to understand, and I felt they needed a translator.

Today’s meeting began with Monkeypox vaccines. There are two, because both were intended for smallpox. ACAM2000 was purchased starting 25 years ago and after the anthrax letters a dose was bought for every American—after the old smallpox vaccine that was stored frozen for decades was destroyed, allegedly to save money on electricity.

Let me remind you that monkeypox is essentially like shingles. CDC tried to make it seem serious with some gruesome photos today, then admitted they were of end-stage AIDS patients with monkeypox too. It is a mild disease and there is no need for a vaccine for 99.9% of people; and if you get it you will probably have real immunity afterwards.

ACAM2000 was assumed to be safer than the older (NYC Board of Health brand) vaccine, but it turned out it wasn’t. It caused myocarditis and it could spread from the inoculation site to other people, just like the old vaccine. Last year CDC said ACAM2000 caused myocarditis in 1 in every 175 recipients who were not previously vaccinated for smallpox. That is a very huge, disastrous side effect profile, but it didn’t stop the military giving the vaccine to most soldiers. Here is CDC’s own slide with my red pen:

So the USG went with Jynneos, guessing it was safer. And CDC is willing to give it along with COVID vaccines, even though that probably magnifies the risk of myocarditis.

Perhaps it is safer. However, the human trials that looked at cardiac enzyme levels found a lot of elevations (10% and 18% of subjects in two small trials) which the manufacturer, the US military (it was tested in soldiers) and the FDA chose to avoid investigating further.

The officials are blame averse. Irresponsible. They do not take care of the people whose safety they are charged with protecting. Working for the government, they have a pension to protect. The manufacturer has only one customer, the USG, and the customer wanted any problems ignored or hidden. After throwing $2 Billion at Jynneos over 20 years there simply could not be any problems. This is just one recent contract of several:

So what did we learn today? After I have beaten CDC up for a year over hiding its 2017 Congo Jynneos trial, today CDC admitted its existence. There were two Congo trials and a total of 1600 subjects.

But CDC’s Dr. Brett Petersen (the Principal Investigator) was nowhere to be found today. After Dr. Rao mentioned the trials, very little was said about their findings. No meaningful safety or efficacy information was presented. Ever heard of a limited hangout? CDC pretended to disclose but disclosed nothing at all about efficacy. We were told that giving a 3d (booster) dose 5 years after the initial 2 doses caused a lot more immediate side effects, so probably not a good idea.

The ACIP was also briefed on monkeypox vaccines exactly a year ago today. But to my knowledge they were never told about the monkey study of Jynneos. Jynneos had a completely different name at the time—funny how that happens— and when administered to monkeys it failed to prevent monkeypox in the monkeys.

I guess it is the depth and consistency of the frauds that get to me. Everything is either misrepresented , omitted, or an outright lie. As if it never occurred to CDC officials to tell the truth. What does that do to someone’s soul? Are the CDC criminals trying to achieve a certain volume of material injected into all of us, and doing it piecemeal? Why would they work so hard to push a vaccine that doesn’t work? Or several?

Not only that, they want to expand its use to pregnant women, breastfeeding women and kids. They tried this last year too.

They also had a similar proposed guidance for kids. But then one of the ACIP members piped up regarding the fact the vaccine is not licensed for kids. Uh oh. Then the members realized CDC was trying to inveigle them into pushing an unlicensed use of the vaccine. Not so fast, CDC. But these criminals have already given the vaccine to 700 children. They now think they got the pediatric dose wrong. Whatever that implies.

There is a small outbreak going on in Chicago now, and most of the cases have been fully vaxxed. And of all the monkeypox cases tracked since ? in the US, 23% had received 2 doses and 37% had received one dose of Jynneos. That does not sound like it works to me.

Nonetheless, CDC says the vaccine is highly effective, 89% in one study, but they will continue to study efficacy. And data-free, they are now pushing the story that vaccination reduces severity of illness, which wasn’t severe to begin with…

On to the proposed 5 valent (pentavalent) Meningococcal vaccine. This simply combines two vaccines into one. Was either needed? Not by the 11-14 year age group for whom the Men A vaccine is mandated in many states. They are at extremely low risk of the disease: about 1 in 30 million per year, according to CDC. The graph below is misleading, providing the cumulative incidence over a ten year period by age group. For this we vaccinate millions of seventh graders every year. An atrocity.

How long does the vaccine last? We don’t know, probably not long, maybe a couple of years.

I suspect it was initially recommended for their age group because age 12 was the date for a DTP vaccine booster, so meningococcal vaccine could be given at the same visit. Of course, 12 year olds did not need a tetanus or diphtheria booster at that age, since their 5 earlier doses would be more than adequate. The 12 year pertussis booster would only work for about two years, and might lead to negative efficacy after that. I base this on data published about 10 years ago by Nicola Klein after California instituted the 12 year booster, and then there was a pertussis outbreak, providing a natural experiment whose results she was able to catalogue.

Since this vaccine is not needed, CDC gave us modelling in lieu of real data to work with. Even that didn’t make the quadrivalent A, the B or the combined vaccine look very useful. The meningococcal disease incidence was dropping for unknown reasons for ten years before the vaccine was introduced in 2005. It kept dropping to less than one in a million Americans yearly, and the vaccines may or may not have something to do with that.

There was no discussion of safety of the Men A or B vaccines, despite the fact that 89% of adolescents get Men A vax and 31% get the first Men B vax. Only 12% of kids go back for the second Men B dose! The side effects are therefore probably severe for the Men B shot.

The ACIP members seemed inordinately concerned about vaccine reimbursements but ridiculously unconcerned about vaccine costs, or safety. This slide was meant to soothe them.

Studying the safety of the entire vaccine schedule

After this, the committee was presented with very limited studies from the VSD and medical records companies that alleged to investigate the entire vaccine schedule’s aluminum burden against the outcomes of diabetes, asthma and eczema. As expected, the vaccine schedule had nothing to do with diabetes, but there was a “small positive association” with asthma and eczema.

I thought this was an interesting slide that purported to show asthma rates are dropping despite more vaccines being added to the schedule. This shows when vaccines were added recently

One member picked up a good tidbit that I had missed. The EPIC study claimed to include 173 million subjects. Hello? Turns out that 173 million Americans have their medical records on software belonging to the EPIC medical records company. Did they know that EPIC was selling their data to the CDC? The same turned out to be true for other medical records companies.

The final act of this 4 ring circus was an attempt to show that the COVID bivalent booster is wonderfully effective and safe, even in pregnancy. And hybrid immunity is the best thing since sliced bread.

But the claims about hybrid immunity are almost certainly a lie, since very strong data from the Cleveland Clinic shows the reverse—vaccination actually detracts from natural immunity.

CDC went through a song and dance to convince us that Omicron is terribly dangerous for pregnancy and young babies, and rolled out some data to convince us that the vaccines were effective for both, despite CDC data showing waning almost immediately and limited effectiveness in babies whose moms were vaccinated during pregnancy. Fatuous Sara Oliver (the Melinda Wharton/Amanda Cohn-in-waiting, an ignorant MD whose job is to shepherd these meetings along) jumped in and said that while some of the numbers might not look good, you had to “look at all the data together” and then you would realize things were pretty good after all.

BTW, only 23% of pregnant moms took a covid shot per CDC—so they are wising up. But CDC has its eyes on the little kids. After claiming that hospitalizations were very high in the 6-24 month old group, it was revealed that CDC is planning a 2 shot initial series for kids and yearly boosters.

Just say no.

Thursday, June 22, 2023

My day in Clown World with the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. On the menu: RSV, dengue, chikunguna, pneumococcus.

 

This morning we heard about the 4th pneumococcal vaccine on the scene.

First there was the PPSV23 (aka Pneumovax)—used for many decades. Very inflammatory. Unclear how well/if it works.

Prevnar then surfaced about 20 years ago for kids, starting with 7 serotypes. What it did was shift the serotype ecology, causing a reduction in infections due to the 7 serotypes but causing an increase due to serotypes that had not been included. So then Pfizer went to a Prevnar 13 and retired Prevnar 7. This was extremely lucrative: the kids who got Prevnar 7 were told to go back and get the Prevnar 13. Retail price $226 per dose, 4 doses needed = $904. Never let it be said that Pfizer leaves money on the table.

Pfizer’s competitors saw dollar signs, and started mucking around with their own pneumococcal vaccines, adding more serotypes. Merck came up with a 15 valent for $216 per dose. And today the ACIP discussed a 20 valent pneumococcal vaccine, which has been discussed here previously. It was called PCV20, since it has no brand name yet.

But the CDC presented no good data on these new vaccines. Are they better than the old ones? Worse? Better for some populations? The last time this was discussed it totally confused everyone. So, instead of generating real data, the CDC today rolled out—ta da! —Models. Economic models. So, they lack data, but they don’t lack models. What they lack are reliable data to plug into the models.

We heard about two models and I attempted to snooze. Then the members made inane comments. Here are a few: “Uncertainties in the efficacy remain.” “Poorly efficacious vaccines should not be given.” “There is no efficacy data and no corrrelates of protection.” To which one wit responded, “Our CDC colleagues are masters at epidemiology surveillance that will give us the answer in future.”

In other words, “we won’t know if it works unless we give it to millions of children, so what are we waiting for?”

BREAK TIME. Chairlady Grace Lee had had enough comments of that nature; you never know what will get into the newspapers.

Next was dengue. The committee had it patiently explained again that dengue does kill (6 Puerto Ricans a year for the past 10 years) and while one vaccine (Dengvaxia) licensed in 2019 had already rolled out there, another was on the way. And so we had to hear about #2 for the third time. I wrote an Op-Ed that discussed Dengvaxia when it was licensed, because FDA (and the EMA) licensed it after the vaccine killed a bunch of kids in the Philippines. I really liked that Op-Ed, but it is behind a paywall.

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2019/03/28/opinion/why-americans-dont-trust-vaccine-makers/

CDC was conducting a war of attrition against its committee. Just like with the PCV20, they threw models at us. Except this time, they admitted the dengue vaccine can potentially kill—in fact, that is why the licensed vaccine requires a lab test before it can be used. They modelled the financial costs and benefits with and without lab tests, for different ages, etc. Mind-numbing work, because it is based on a bunch of guesses. Dr. Espana (the modeler) himself said that he did not put deaths from the disease or the vaccine into the model, because they were so rare. So—the outcome you are trying to prevent was not included in the model. This is great stuff, CDC.

Here you see that serotypes 3 and 4 are expected to cause half the dengue cases, but the data suggest the Takeda vaccine may well have negative efficacy for these serotypes. What a joke that this vaccine is even coming before this committee—and for the third time.

Notre Dame was hired by CDC to create a model, and Takeda (the mfr) created its own model. Unsurprisingly, their predictions were extremely different. But no one on the committee dared hint that the emperor had no clothes, and no one asked why CDC was wasting everyone’s time with this nonsense. Here are their models’ results, compared. Hope you get a belly laugh:

It’s a war of attrition. And the committee will be mezmerized by the details of the trees and forget the forest when this stupid vaccine finally comes up for a vote.

Today’s slides were very simplistic but they do convey the flavor of the materials presented.

So after being left hanging with these 2 vaccines it was time for lunch.

Now for chikungunya. We have also heard about this one previously—we have heard about all of them previously. The idea seems to be to present the bad news, but wait a few months for a vote until the members have forgotten it.

One case of chikungunya is reported in lab workers in the US every 2 years, but Paraguay is just getting over a massive outbreak with over 160,000 reported cases. Also cases in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. This is a mosquito-borne virus, like dengue. It has been studied in military labs, at a BSL-3 level. The vaccine is being regulated under the “Animal Rule”—pretty bizarre when Paraguay provided the perfect laboratory to study the vaccine—which means no efficacy testing needed, just show us a few antibodies and give it to a few folks, watch em for a bit, and call that safety testing.

Or maybe FDA did require a study in Paraguay, but if the results were not to someone’s liking so they are being hidden—like CDC did with its monkeypox trial in the Congo. Tomorrow we hear more about monkeypox vaccine, can’t wait.

Why in heaven’s name are we doing this? Licensing a vaccine without data for a disease that does not exist in the US. Don’t know but it is creepy. And the animal rule depends on there being very few cases, but 160,000 cases should have mooted its application. Evidence of more FDA malfeasance:

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/nda-and-bla-approvals/animal-rule-approvals

The regulations commonly known as the Animal Rule (21 CFR 314.600-650 for drugs; 21 CFR 601.90-95 for biologics; effective July 1, 2002) allow for the approval of drugs and licensure of biological products when human efficacy studies are not ethical and field trials to study the effectiveness of drugs or biological products are not feasible.

Now for RSV: the pregnancy vaccine and the monoclonal. This sickens me. We heard about each, and we heard a lot about modelling the economics if one or both were used together. The models are admittedly worthless, except now we are playing with the lives of pregnant women and newborns. GSK admitted their vax caused premature births, but Pfizer just got its nearly identical vax licensed. GSK was on the line, along with Pfizer, to give its rival a black eye if it got the chance.

Here the modeller admits his model aint worth much.

Instead of being horrified at the potential costs, and the fact that GSK wouldn’t have given up its vax at the end of the race unless it was convinced it caused premature labor, the committee tried its best to make light of the prematurity issue. SURELY CDC could find some way to help them justify its approval? Surely CDC’s modellers and its spin doctors could make that nagging premature labor go away, so our ACIP members would not get caught with their pants down later for having okayed it?

Then they got onto another track: who was going to pay for the vaccine and the monoclonal? OMG, if we can’t hang the costs on Uncle Sam, what then? Do you expect us to give this out in our offices and not get reimbursed? Patients don’t pay cash for vaccines. Members attempted to direct CDC to put the vaccine and monoclonal onto the childhood schedule or the Vaccines for Children program. They attempted to tell CDC that nirsevimab, a therapy, should be billed like a vaccine. The appropriate CDC offical had to explain very politely that they have no jurisdiction to tell Uncle what program to put his vaccines or monoclonals into.

Of course they should have had no worries—someone else will take care of those details. But it was striking to me how involved they were in the financing of the products, which together cost $700. And why the high cost didn’t seem to bother them at all.

And then I remembered. Pediatricians sink or swim on the vaccines they administer. $400 bonuses for each fully vaccinated child in the practice. Higher bonuses if a higher percentage of the patients are fully vaccinated. Low reimbursements for other billable activities. If a pediatric practice does not give out loads of vaccines, it will simply go under, unless it has a unique specialty practice and does not bill insurance.

Therefore, how can you expect a pediatrician to look closely at vaccines? It would be like asking him/her to dig his own grave.

And then they voted YES for the 4th pneumococcal vaccine, and I said a prayer that it was finally over.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Latest Cleveland Clinic preprint on vaccination vs. infection, June 9. Hybrid immunity isn't looking so good. Actually it is yet another lie


https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.09.23290893v1.full.pdf

ABSTRACT

Background. The CDC recently defined being “up-to-date” on COVID-19 vaccination as having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 bivalent vaccine. The purpose of this study was to compare therisk of COVID-19 among those “up-to-date” and “not up-to-date” on COVID-19 vaccination.

Methods. Employees of Cleveland Clinic in employment when the COVID-19 bivalent vaccine first became available, and still employed when the XBB lineages became dominant, were included. Cumulative incidence of COVID-19 since the XBB lineages became dominant was compared across the ”up-to-date” and “not up-to-date” states, by treating COVID-19 bivalent vaccination as a time-dependent covariate whose value changed on receipt of the vaccine. Risk of COVID-19 by vaccination status was also compared using multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression adjusting for propensity to get tested for COVID-19, age, sex, and phase of most recent prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Results. COVID-19 occurred in 1475 (3%) of 48 344 employees during the 100-day study period. The cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was lower in the “not up-to-date” than in the “up-to-date” state. On multivariable analysis, not being “up-to-date” with COVID-19 vaccination was associated with lower risk of COVID-19 (HR, 0.77; 95% C.I., 0.69-0.86; P-value, <0.001). Results were very similar when those 65 years and older were only considered “up-to-date” after receiving 2 doses of the bivalent vaccine.

Conclusions. Since the XBB lineages became dominant, adults “not up-to-date” by the CDC definition have a lower risk of COVID-19 than those “up-to-date” on COVID-19 vaccination, bringing into question the value of this risk classification definition

You have to read between the lines to get it—or look at the graphs. The value of the risk definition is admittedly zero, but that is because the benefit of the vaccine is negative.

Cleveland Clinic has 50,000 employees and virtually all were vaccinated and masked for years. Only some are boosted. Only half have had symptomatic, diagnosed COVID. Articles like this have come out from time to time looking at this population of healthcare workers (probably the majority are nurses) to compare vaccine status with likelihood of infection.

The graphs are very important because the trends are consistent over time and between groups. You can also assume that epidemiologists have been all over these data, trying to make the findings go away, yet they are solid. So blame the virus we must.

The graphs reveal that

  1. You are only 77% as likely to get COVID if you are not “up to date” with a bivalent booster than if you got a bivalent booster.

  2. No matter whether you get tested a lot or a little, the increased risk in the bivalently boosted holds firm

  3. In those previously infected, the longer the period of time since you were infected, the more likely you are to be reinfected—except in those never infected, the risk of infection falls between those who were last infected before omicron and those who were infected with an early omicron variant.

  4. When the distance since the last infection was coupled with whether employees were up to date on a bivalent booster, those who recently had an infection did better and those without a bivalent vaccine did better, consistently.

What this means is that hybrid immunity is yet another phony concept: that it takes an infection plus vaccination to give you stronger immunity is a tall tale.

The 4th graph below reveals that those who were previously infected without receiving a bivalent booster were infected at a lower rate than those previously infected who were also boosted.

“Hybrid immunity” was coined as being something relevant for COVID protection when the bivalent boosters were authorized at the end of August 2022. But it was just another lie. Our federal public health agencies (and those of Canada, the EU, the UK and Switzerland) have morphed into federal public spin agencies—all rolling out bivalent boosters at the same time, all without reliable evidence of anything.

Best to assume the opposite of whatever they claim these days. Please review the long list of lies and obfuscations issued by CDC and FDA which I discussed in early September last year here and then here and here. Please stay away from all their vaccines. They have worked hard and consistently to convince us they deserve our mistrust.

Discussion

In conclusion, this study found that not being “up-to-date” on COVID-19 vaccination by the CDC definition was associated with a lower risk of COVID-19 than being “up-to-date”. This study highlights the challenges of counting on protection from a vaccine when the effectiveness of the vaccine decreases over time as new variants emerge that are antigenically very different from those used to develop the vaccine. It also demonstrates the folly of risk classification based solely on receipt of a vaccine of questionable effectiveness while ignoring protection provided by prior infection.


Saturday, June 17, 2023

Federal Agencies Routinely Spy on Phone Calls, Texts, Emails of American Citizens, Experts Say


Congress debates renewing FISA Section 702 amid reports of 'persistent' abuse

The headquarters of the FBI is seen in Washington, D.C. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

By Kevin Stocklin

Despite the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits warrantless government searches, U.S. agencies are proving to be ever more intrusive in their routine surveillance of Americans’ speech and activities.

Often working in collaboration with private companies and banks, agencies like the FBI have been misusing laws against foreign terrorism to vacuum up and sift through the private data of millions of Americans without a warrant or any evidence of a crime.

As Congress now debates reauthorizing relevant sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that are set to expire this year, the libertarian Cato Institute held a four-day conference last week, which featured calls for major legal reforms by conservative and liberal speakers alike.

“The violations that we’ve seen have not just been epic in scale, but they’ve also been persistent, over and over again,” Jake Laperruque, a deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told attendees.

“To put a human scale on this, what we’re talking about is not just random typos or wrong clicks; we’re looking at things like pulling up batches of thousands of political donors in one go, without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” Laperruque said. “We’ve had reports of journalists, political commentators, a domestic political party; these compliance violations are the most worrisome type of politically focused surveillance.”

In 2001, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act as a means to combat foreign terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2008, Congress added an amendment to FISA, Section 702, which authorized warrantless surveillance of non-U.S. persons located outside the country. This amendment, which critics say is the source of much of the abuse, is scheduled to “sunset” on Dec. 31.

Evidence of Abuse

Congressional debates about whether to renew Section 702 are coming amid numerous reports that the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies have abused the surveillance authority granted to them by this law. Critics say there is mounting evidence that federal agencies have been using laws, which were intended to target foreign terrorists, to conduct extensive, long-term domestic spying campaigns on U.S. citizens.

“To prevent Section 702 from being used as an end run around [Fourth Amendment] protections, Congress did two things: It required the government to minimize the collection, sharing and retention of Americans’ personal information … and it required the government to certify to the FISA court on an annual basis that it is not using Section 702 to try to access the communications of particular known Americans,” Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told conference attendees.

“What has become abundantly clear over the last 15 years is that these protections are not working,” Goitein said. “All agencies that receive Section 702 data have procedures in place, approved by the FISA court, that allow them to run electronic searches … for the purpose of finding and retrieving the phone calls, text messages and emails of Americans.”

A report by the Brennan Center for Justice states that “since 2006, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans from some of the largest telecommunications providers in the United States, via a series of regularly renewed requests by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).”

In addition, the report states that “over the past six years, the NSA has obtained unprecedented access to the data processed by nine leading U.S. internet companies. This was facilitated by a computer network named PRISM. The companies involved include Google, Facebook, Skype, and Apple.”

Rise of Data Brokers

Speaking to attendees of the Cato Institute conference, Nathan Wessler, a director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), detailed “the rise of data brokers” that assemble enormous databases of photo IDs that they then sell to law enforcement for profit.

“Many companies are selling face recognition algorithms to government and private industry buyers,” Wessler said. “That might be state driver’s license photos, arrest photos, federal passport photos.

“And then there’s another company, ClearView AI, which has been scouring the internet for billions of photos,” he said. “The last I heard, they had a database of 30 billion photos of people from social media, from employer websites, from local newspapers, and anywhere else on the internet where there’s a photo that might be attached to a name, building giant databases of face prints extracted from those photos, and selling that to police departments and other law enforcement around the country.”

This, Wessler said, “presents a truly unprecedented ability for the government to instantaneously identify anyone in any situation and then take action without usually any kind of court oversight, and often in tremendous secrecy.”

“We have legacy photo data sets of almost all of us,” said Clare Garvie, counsel at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “As a practical matter, most of us are in numerous of these, and they’ve been almost instantaneously turned into biometric data sets.”

According to Garvie, the collection of these biometric data sets by law enforcement started around 2001, and has been expanding ever since.

“That really happened without any notice to the public, any sort of negotiation or discussion about enrollment,” she said. “Its adoption has predated by almost 20 years any sort of public discussion about regulation, control, etc.”

This data collection comes at a time when the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is expanding the use of facial recognition software at airports. It is also coming at a time when, in the wake of numerous scandals, an increasing number of Americans are losing trust in the FBI and the Department of Justice. According to polls in 2021 and 2022, about half of all Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the FBI.

On May 12, Special Counsel John Durham released his report regarding the FBI investigation of alleged Russian collusion, which ultimately proved to be a hoax, in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Durham found that throughout an investigation that was “predicated on unvetted hearsay information,” senior leaders at the FBI violated their own rules and applied a double standard in how they treated Trump compared with his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“What Durham found is that apparently no one in the FBI or the National Security Division at DOJ thought it would be a good idea to go to NSA and CIA and ask them, ‘Hey, do you have anything that would corroborate this?'” said Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “And when you’re talking about an investigation that targeted the campaign of a presidential candidate, if they were that sloppy there, then how much more sloppy are they being with folks that don’t have the kind of power and influence that Donald Trump does, or that Hillary Clinton does?”

House Works to Extend Section 702

On March 22, the House Intelligence Committee established a bipartisan working group to assess under what conditions Section 702 should be extended. Simultaneously, pressure to kill the provision is coming from people on both the left and the right who are concerned with a pattern of civil rights violations by federal agencies.

“Many Americans have rightfully lost faith in the FBI and the FISA process,” Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) stated at the time. Citing abuses in the Durham report, he said, “this incident, along with other outlined abuses, must be a wake-up call.”

While Section 702 was designed to combat foreign terrorism, the FBI has been accused of using it for purely domestic reasons, including to track down Americans who participated in the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021. And this effort is alleged to be part of a pattern of FBI surveillance of American citizens, including most recently charges that the FBI has targeted parents who protest school curricula and Catholics who oppose abortion rights.

In a March 24, 2022, letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) cited a report by the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that “from December 2020 through November 2021, the FBI conducted 3.3 million U.S. person inquiries against its Section 702 holdings. This was a substantial increase from the number of U.S. person queries the FBI conducted from December 2019 to November 2020, which was approximately 1.3 million.”

“These are long, ongoing programs that do not involve war in the traditional sense of the word,” said Bob Goodlatte, a former U.S. Representative and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “They are done in such a way that Americans’ rights under the Fourth Amendment are violated constantly, all day, every day.”

“The FBI routinely conducts these queries at the ‘assessment’ stage of its investigations, which is before the Bureau has a reasonable factual basis to suspect criminal activity, let alone probable cause and a warrant,” Goitein said. “The FBI conducted around 200,000 backdoor searches in 2022 alone, so that’s more than 500 warrantless search of Americans’ communications every day.

“The NSA and CIA also conduct thousands of backdoor searches every year,” she continued. “When you look at these numbers, it becomes clear that what was supposed to be a solely foreign focused authority has in fact become a very powerful domestic spying tool.”

The ODNI report also cited an FBI bulk inquiry of 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. In addition to the FBI’s alleged collaborating with tech and telecom companies to collect data on Americans, there have been allegations of collaboration with banks, as well.

Following an FBI “whistleblower” report that “Bank of America (BoA) provided the FBI—voluntarily and without any legal process—with a list of individuals who had made transactions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area with a BoA credit or debit card between January 5 and January 7, 2021,” Jordan and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) wrote on June 12 to JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Truist Financial Corp., Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank, demanding information regarding whether they had acted in similar fashion.

‘In the Government’s Crosshairs’

“If you go back and you actually look at the historical record, an awful lot of groups, either ethnically, religiously, politically, have wound up in the government’s crosshairs, and it’s a completely consistent pattern,” Eddington said. “That’s what, to me, speaks to the larger problem that we’re dealing with here.”

“What was fascinating and terrifying was to go through records from the World War I era and to see just exactly how victimized German Americans were, and I’m talking about lynchings, I’m talking about murders,” Eddington said. “The focus on Arab and Muslim Americans easily goes back to the Palestinian rights era.”

“Some of the worst surveillance abuses in recent history have all been done under this idea of defensive surveillance” against foreign enemies, Laperruque said, citing cases like Martin Luther King being monitored because the civil rights and anti-war movements allegedly represented security threats during the Vietnam War. “It’s proven to be some of the most vulnerable types of surveillance to abuse.”

Brett Holmgren, assistant secretary of state, said on May 30 that, while he found the abuses of Section 702 “disturbing,” the program should continue. Holmgren, who oversees the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), said the national security and diplomatic uses of 702 were essential and downplayed the abuses.

“Today, INR and the State Department that we serve, is at risk of losing access to one of the most important streams of intelligence on which we rely … Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Holmgren said.

Goodlatte said that Section 702 can be reformed in a bipartisan way to prevent many of the current violations from recurring.

“This is a tremendous opportunity because of the heightened awareness on both sides of the aisle in Congress of these abuses,” Goodlatte said. “Congress can act in a very bipartisan way, and I think is disposed to act in a very bipartisan way.”

“Section 702, on one level, is an incredibly technical and complicated bill, and I think the government uses that to its advantage,” Goitein said. “But if we get lost in a conversation about technical details, we’re missing the big picture.

“What Section 702 is being used for right now is not complicated at all; it’s being used for warrantless access to Americans’ communications,” she continued. “That is the principle we need to hold on to, that surveillance in this country, surveillance of Americans, should be pursuant to a warrant, and there should be robust mechanisms in place to ensure accountability and oversight.

“I think as long as we keep our eye on those big principles and don’t get lost in the legal weeds, we’re going to end up with a pretty good outcome,” she said.

“We cannot have a regime where the people doing the watching are also watching themselves for abuse and misconduct,” Laperruque said. “I do think that 702 can be reformed, but we need to remove it from this realm of self-policing … and actually have items like a warrant rule, where if the FBI or NSA or CIA wants to conduct a query to pull up Americans’ communications, it has to get a court order first.”

The Official Censor's Dictionary, from the Foundation for Freedom Online

 

Print and save the 2023 version of 'Newspeak' that would make 1984's Big Brother proud

https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Censorspeak-Decoded_v4.pdf

More UN financial BS


The UN Secretary General issued a report on restructuring the financial architecture of the world in May 2023. Clearly they did not want people to understand it. In this case, the UN suggests that even though countries cannot pay back their loans, they should be given larger loans with longer terms to pay them back.

One way to make the ideas unintelligible is to create extraordinarily long sentences, so by the time you get to the end yo have forgotten the beginning and the meaning is lost. Here is one example that spit out 81 words before a period appeared:

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/our-common-agenda-policy-brief-international-finance-architecture-en.pdf

“As noted in Our Common Agenda, a coordinating

body through the Biennial Summit, building on

the spirit of earlier proposals for an “Economic

Security Council”, would be a natural venue to

address immediate issues, including the promo-

tion of ultra-long-term financing for sustainable

development and a Sustainable Development

Goal stimulus for all countries in need, and longer-

term issues, such as making the international

financial architecture fit for purpose and resil-

ient to global crises, including food, energy and

financial crises.“

And they call this a solution?

“Lower the cost of sovereign

borrowing and create a lasting

solution for countries facing

debt distress”

Here are the Conclusions on page 31

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/our-common-agenda-policy-brief-international-finance-architecture-en.pdf

OUR COMMON AGENDA POLICY BRIEF 6: REFORMS TO THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE31

Conclusion

The reforms outlined in the present policy brief

are motived by the failure of the current inter-

national architecture to fulfil its core tasks and

to support long-term stable financing for the

Sustainable Development Goals, including invest-

ments in the rights to education, health and

social protection. The Sustainable Development

Goal and Paris Agreement targets will clearly not

be met if the international financial architecture

does not channel resources at scale and speed

to the world’s most vulnerable economies. This

failure poses a growing and systemic threat to the

multilateral system itself, driving deepening diver-

gence, geoeconomic fragmentation and geopolit-

ical fractures across the world.

[In other words, lend lots more money or the financial system will collapse—though wasn’t the financial system’s problem too much unsustainable debt that got us here to the brink of financial collapse? I suspect the PTB want a lot more borrowing to stabilize things for a little while, making things more unstable over the medium term—allowing them to crash the whole thing when they have reached the right time for themselves to justify the rest of the Great Reset.—Nass]

To avert such outcomes, we must pursue ambi-

tious reforms and advance on all the proposals

in the present brief. They should be regarded as

a paradigmatic shift in the structuring of interna-

tional economic and financial relationships that,

as a package, support the convergence of coun-

tries towards sustainable development. We need

to enable more sustainable and inclusive develop-

ment pathways for all countries, aligned with the

Sustainable Development Goals and anchored

in “beyond GDP” metrics. This will require new

forms of international cooperation, underpinned

by an architecture fit for purpose in the twen-

ty-first century, across the financial and monetary

system, tax, trade, environmental stability and cli-

mate action, and other development issues. Our

current multilateral system does not fit this bill,

but it can, with the reforms that I propose in the

present policy brief.

[WTH does “beyond GDP” mean? Beyond arithmetic? Are you reading this as gobbledygook the way I am?]