Reader’s Links for January 26, 2022

Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.

This document was written around the time this site was created, for those who wish to understand what this site is about. And while our understanding of the world and events has grown since then, the basic ideas remain sound and true to the purpose.

So please post all links, thoughts and ideas that you feel will benefit the readers of this site to the comments under this post each day. And thank you all for your contributions.

This is the new Samizdat. We must use it while we can.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

78 Replies to “Reader’s Links for January 26, 2022”

  1. Hi all! Thank you for the kind words and enduring my supposed better half. Typing is quite exhausting still so I won’t be posting much but I can at least copy/paste if I keep trying. I have to play videogames to help the hand/eye bit and this amuses everyone.
    I don’t know if this is old news and my apologies if so. I posted the whole article as I could not precis it to my satisfaction:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/gamers-are-better-scientists-catching-fraud/619324/

    Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud?
    A pair of recent cheating scandals—one in the “speedrunning” community of gamers, and one in medical research—call attention to an alarming contrast.

    By Stuart Ritchie
    Animation of a pac-man gobbling up dots and bank-robbers
    Getty; The Atlantic
    JULY 2, 2021
    SHARE
    In the competitive pursuit of speedrunning, gamers vie to complete a given video game as quickly as humanly possible. It’s a sport for the nerdier among us, and it’s amazingly popular: Videos streaming and recording speedruns routinely rack up seven-figure view counts on Twitch and YouTube. So when one very prominent speedrunner—a U.S. YouTuber with more than 20 million subscribers who goes by the nom de game “Dream”—was accused in December 2020 of faking one of his world-record runs of the block-building game Minecraft, the online drama exploded like a batch of TNT.

    Specifically, Dream reported that he’d finished Minecraft in just over 19 minutes, faster than all but four players had ever managed it, because of an incredible stretch of good luck. Moderators at the website speedrun.com, who preside over such world-record attempts, begged to differ. According to their impressively detailed probability analysis, Dream’s luck was just too good. He was the equivalent of a roulette player who gets their color 50 times in a row: You don’t just marvel at the good fortune; you check underneath the table.

    Recriminations followed. Dream and the moderators fired tweets and videos back and forth, and the moderators received a tsunami of social-media abuse from the more outraged members of Dream’s fan base. Dream commissioned his own scientist to produce a rebuttal to the probability points. If you had more than a passing interest in video games, you couldn’t miss the story: It was covered on every major video-gaming site, in tech magazines, and all over YouTube.

    And then, on May 30 this year, Dream admitted it: The run wasn’t real. He had, he claimed, inadvertently set some software running that enhanced his luck in the game, thus breaking the rules and disqualifying his speedrun.

    Whether you believe the “inadvertently” part is up to you. The important thing is that the system worked: Dream’s ill-begotten time, which was rightly struck from the books, became the latest in a long line of scam achievements exposed by moderators using sophisticated tools to uphold the field’s standards. Whether they’re employing audio-spectrum analysis, picking through every keypress to make sure that the run is legit, or simply using their long experience to spot a questionable performance, members of this community of technical experts have put in strenuous work to make life harder for those who break the rules.

    Scientists should pay attention.

    Two weeks before Dream’s confession, and halfway around the world, another fraud scandal had just come to a conclusion. Following a long investigation, Japan’s Showa University released a report on one of its anesthesiology researchers, Hironobu Ueshima. Ueshima had turned out to be one of the most prolific scientific frauds in history, having partly or entirely fabricated records and data in at least 84 scientific papers, and altered data and misrepresented authorship on dozens more. Like Dream, Ueshima would eventually come clean and apologize—but only after a data sleuth had spotted strange anomalies in his publications. Many of his papers have already been expunged from the scientific literature.

    If you haven’t heard about this historic low point for scientific publishing, I don’t blame you. Aside from the specialist website Retraction Watch, which exists to document these kinds of events, not one English-language media outlet covered it. (There were a few stories in the Japanese press.) The case garnered little social-media interest; there was no debate over the lessons learned for science.

    Does it strike you as odd that so many people tuned in to hear about a doctored speedrun of a children’s video game, while barely a ripple was made—even among scientists—by the discovery of more than 80 fake scientific papers? These weren’t esoteric papers, either, slipped into obscure academic journals. They were prominent medical studies, the sort with immediate implications for real-life patients in the operating room. Consider two titles from Ueshima’s list of fraudulent or possibly fabricated findings: “Investigation of Force Received at the Upper Teeth by Video Laryngoscopy” and “Below-Knee Amputation Performed With Pericapsular Nerve Group and Sciatic Nerve Blocks.” You’d hope that the mechanisms for purging fake studies such as these from the literature—and thus, from your surgeon’s reading list—would be pretty strong.

    A Scientific Look at Bad Science
    BOURREE LAM
    Read: The myth of self-correcting science

    Alas, that’s not often the case. The scientific community has long looked the other way when fraud allegations fly. That Ueshima’s university made such an extensive investigation of his work and published it for all to see is unusual. Skeptics and whistleblowers who spot potential fraud in researchers’ work are routinely ignored, stonewalled, or sometimes attacked by universities or journal editors who don’t have the time or inclination to dig into potentially forged (and potentially dangerous) studies.

    For example, it took 12 years for any action to be taken against the world’s most prolific scientific fraudster, Yoshitaka Fujii (coincidentally, another Japanese anesthesiologist), even after very convincing analyses of his dodgy data were published. Like Dream’s speedrun, Fujii’s data were just too good to be true: The fraud-spotters wrote, with admirable literalness, that they were “incredibly nice!”

    Ironically, scientists who study what they claim are the pernicious effects of video games have been particularly lax about policing allegations of misconduct within their community; at the very least, they may be less diligent than gamers themselves. One researcher who recently left the field (and academia altogether) wrote about his exasperating experience trying to alert multiple journals and a university to obvious “gibberish” data in several video-game-violence papers: It did not go well; most of the relevant scientific authority figures reacted with little more than a shrug. “The experience has led me to despair for the quality and integrity of our science,” he wrote. “If data this suspicious can’t get a swift retraction, it must be impossible to catch a fraud equipped with skills, funding, or social connections.”

    The methods used to produce fake speedruns and fake science have some surprising similarities, however different the institutional responses might be. The most basic way to put together a fraudulent speedrun is by manipulating the video that you need to submit to the moderators. This is usually done by “splicing”: If you mess up the start of a level, then nail the boss battle, but do the opposite on another attempt, you can stitch together the two good halves into one perfect—but bogus—video. Even when the joins are poorly done, as in a now-infamous botched attempt to claim a five-minute run of Super Mario Bros., only those paying proper attention will spot them.

    Scientists engage in similar shenanigans with the images in their papers. Spliced, duplicated, touched-up, recolored, and otherwise Photoshopped images from microscopes or blots are rife in scientific publications, and are overlooked by peer reviewers with worrying regularity. The eagle-eyed microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, considered the world expert in spotting “problematic” scientific images, routinely reports her concerns about images to the relevant universities or journals—and often goes completely unheard.

    The rigorous format in which the speedrunning community asks players to provide video proof of their runs is itself significant. For many games, you need to show not just a recording of your screen, but also a video of your hands on the controller or keyboard, so moderators can ensure that it really was a human—and not a script or a bot—that clinched the all-important record.

    Science has been much slower to adapt, even after countless scandals. Researchers provide images for their papers entirely at their own discretion, and with no official oversight; when they aren’t faked, they might still contain cherry-picked snapshots of experiments that don’t represent the full range of their results. The same applies to numerical data, which are often—consciously or unconsciously—chosen or reported to make the best case for a scientist’s hypothesis, rather than to show the full and messy details. Only a few journals require scientists to do the equivalent of posting the screen-and-hands recording: sharing all their data, and the code they used to analyze it, online for anyone to access.

    Speedrunning, like science, may be done in groups (say, one of the game’s levels per team member). In both contexts, the actions of one fraudulent member taint the achievements of their colleagues. In a 2006 group speedrun of the first-person-shooter Half-Life 2, one player illegitimately altered the game’s code to make his run faster, betraying the trust of his teammates. Similarly, in science fraud, a credible allegation can come as a huge shock to all the members of a research group—except, perhaps, for the guilty party.

    Meanwhile, gamers have developed clever tools to reassess and recertify older speedruns. Savvy moderators for the racing game Trackmania United Forever have, in the past few weeks, demonstrated a new kind of analysis that uses the number of times a player changes their car’s direction to show that many revered world-record times were in fact impossible for human hands to achieve—in other words, that they were the result of cheating. The faked Trackmania speedruns have now been wiped from the record. Science has its own advanced fraud-detection methods; in theory, these could be used to clean out the Augean stables of research publishing. For example, one such tool was used to show that the classic paper on the psychological phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance” contained numbers that were mathematically impossible. Yet that paper remains in the literature, garnering citations, without so much as a note from the journal’s editor.

    Another parallel between fraud in speedrunning and science concerns the fraudsters’ motivations. If you ask a speedrunner why they think people fake their runs, they might say it’s about clout. Getting your username at or near the top of the leaderboard, even for an old or obscure game, gains you respect from your peers. Some runners are willing to do an awful lot to that end. Scientists might think they’re above clout—and perhaps they should be—but the evidence points the other way. There are no literal leaderboards in science, but there are plenty of other signifiers of clout: the sheer number of publications on your CV; the number of times you’ve been cited; the reputation of the journals where you publish; the grant money you can aquire; the fame of being the discoverer of something important. All of these appear to be brain-breakingly powerful incentives for certain scientists, who flout the rules despite knowing better.

    Apart from a minority of professional gamers, speedrunning is a hobby, and the community is moderated by volunteers. Science is, well, science: a crucially important endeavor that we need to get right, a prestige industry employing hundreds of thousands of paid, dedicated, smart people, submitting their research to journals run by enormously profitable publishing companies.

    Perhaps the very status of science is what makes its practitioners reluctant to pursue fraudsters: Not only do scientists find it difficult to imagine that their peers or colleagues could be making up the data, but questioning a suspect data set could result in anything from extended frustration and social awkwardness to the destruction of someone’s career. You can see why so many scientists, who hope for a quiet life where they can pursue their own research, aren’t motivated to grasp the nettle.

    But the consequences of ignoring fraud can be drastic too, and whole evidence bases, sometimes for medical treatments, can be polluted by fraudulent studies. The entire purpose of the scientific endeavor is brought into question if its gatekeepers—the reviewers and editors and others who are supposed to be the custodians of scientific probity—are so often presented with evidence of fraud and so often fail to take action.

    If unpaid Minecraft mods can produce a 29-page mathematical analysis of Dream’s contested run, then scientists and editors can find the time to treat plausible fraud allegations with the seriousness they deserve. If the maintenance of integrity can become such a crucial interest for a community of gaming hobbyists, then it can be the same for a community of professional researchers. And if the speedrunning world can learn lessons from so many cases of cheating, there’s no excuse for scientists who fail to do the same.

    Stuart Ritchie is a psychologist and lecturer at King’s College London. His latest book is Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth.

    • You are back – – just brightened my day. Take good care of yourself and say Hi to Will, the other half. LOL

    • Michelle!!
      You’re back! I’m so grateful.

      You’re helping plow away some covid-sludge, building up for a long, long time.

      Wicked tangents, dead-honest opinions – just seeing your name makes me smile.

  2. “Boris Johnson celebrated his 56th birthday with a party in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street on June 19, 2020.

    It is alleged that as many as 30 people were in attendance.

    Now the Met has launched a criminal probe into the incident, Number 10 staff face being charged with perjury if they knowingly make a false statement, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.

    These are the Covid rules which were in place at the time:

    – England was coming out of the first national lockdown, which had been imposed in March.

    – Groups of up to six people were able to meet outdoors in England from Monday June 1, including in gardens and other private outdoor spaces, provided strict social distancing guidelines were followed.

    – People from different households were told to stay two metres apart and not to spend time inside others’ homes other than to get to the garden or use the toilet.

    – Indoor gatherings remained against the law, but there were exemptions ‘if reasonably necessary’ for work purposes.

    The Government’s original Covid regulations which were put in place in March 2020 gave the police powers to hand out fixed penalty notices for breaches of the rules.

    Initially, these fines were worth £60 or £30 if paid within 14 days.

    However, the value of the fines increased in England from £60 to £100 on May 13, 2020, lowering to £50 if paid within two weeks.”
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10441535/Boris-PM-interviewed-police-caution.html

    Most Socialist institutions infantilize their staff and make work and home-life the same thing. They coerce staff to pay for each other’s birthdays as a heartwarming moral boost. So not going to Buba’s birthday bash (momma’s child), would be a breech of work ethics, and therefore ‘necessary.’.

    • “The FBI and state law enforcement officials searched four locations in Mesa and Garfield counties Tuesday in connection with a criminal investigation into employees of the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office.

      Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, a Republican, and others in her office have been under criminal investigation over a possible election-security breach in August, after voting equipment passwords were posted online by a leading figure in the QAnon conspiracy theory.”
      https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/17/tina-peters-mesa-county-criminal-investigation/

      “The case involving Peters’ counterclaims in response to Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s lawsuit is ongoing, with new filings due on Wednesday. The secretary of state’s lawsuit had resulted in a Mesa County District Court judge barring Peters and Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley from administering the Nov. 2 election. A joint federal and state investigation into possible criminal charges against Peters over an alleged election equipment security breach is continuing, according to the district attorney’s office on Friday. A Mesa County activist’s complaint against Peters with the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission is pending. And the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office is suing the clerk again, this time for alleged violations of campaign finance law”
      https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/13/tina-peters-mesa-county-clerk-election-conspiracy/

  3. Change. Grow. Live.

    This will never happen.

    With this assertion, Christians will always be products of sin in need of a Redeemer.
    Living as an Ex-Sinners, forever watchful lest they backslide, knowing a last-minute savior will come as they burn.

    Change.

    No, be true to yourself. Do not convert into warm membership to mimic a standard of good behavior and guilt. Just repent of wilfulness. To stop trying to fix a problem that neither you nor they can solve by overlaid behavior.

    Grow.

    Not on the unsteady foundation of a new identity. Find the truth of the thorn like a fishhook dragging you along. Your marriage between pleasure and escapism. Face death. For through willingness to die to find the truth of this attachment no matter what, will be a life that no one can threaten.

    Live.
    The difference between a plastic slave and a human.

    Or return to the Christianity of blocking the Way to the Truth and the Life
    https://www.changegrowlive.org/advice-info/alcohol-drugs

    • One day, even this Peer-Supported Behavioural Change of unwanted alcohol-attraction, will be deemed a Hate Crime.

      Placebo will have moved from disease, to nature. Reward will be prescribed daily.

      Heaven. Among many.

    • I was about to write to the trainer about their Christian Affirmation:

      1. “You were never created to live depressed, guilty, condemned, defeated, ashamed or unworthy.”

      2. “We were created to be victorious”

      3. “I would rather go through life sober excepting I am an alcoholic, then go through life drunk trying to convince myself I’m not.”

      And reply:

      1. The natural state of every mind: is not to be depressed, guilty, condemned, defeated, ashamed or unworthy.

      2. You can regain what you thought you’d lost.

      3. I would rather go through life cured, than being convinced temptation is around every corner.

      But Christianity is not about cure. Theirs is that happy feeling of being saved by Belief, of Humanity’s Sin, and it will be all taken care of in the end.

      How could I place broken children and open their vulnerable minds to such a abject default position of angels and demons?

      And if I wrote to these priests – all hell will break loose! Because they shouldn’t be there. And they will make damn sure you are not there.

        • Confessing sins, (not knowing why)
          Father-Please for Blessings, cry.
          Forgiveness tastes like crispy rye
          The thorn is fixed for Earth and Sky.

    • the gateway pundit – CDC Sends Out Letter Following Pennsylvania Crash Involving 100 Test Monkeys

      As reported earlier — A truck and trailer carrying about 100 monkeys collided with a dump truck Friday afternoon along Route 54 just off Interstate 80 near Danville, Pennsylvania.

      Three monkeys escaped the crash. The monkeys were later reportedly “humanely euthanized.”

      The CDC is now monitoring local residents for cold-like symptoms.
      That’s very comforting considering the lab leak from Wuhan that just destroyed the global economy.

      The monkeys are originally from Mauritius an island country off the African coast.

      Earlier this week a woman who came in contact with the monkeys said she is experiencing symptoms and has pink-eye and a cough.

      Earlier this week, following the much-publicized crash, the CDC sent out a letter on precautions when dealing with monkeys. The CDC tells the first responders to monitor themselves and contact their physician if they experience symptoms.

      “If you were within five feet of the NHP crates without respiratory and eye protection, monitor yourself for signs of illness including fever, fatigue, cough, diarrhea, and vomiting. If you become ill during the 31-day quarantine period (until February 21, 2022), you should immediately report to your physician that you had exposure to monkeys and notify the Pennsylvania State Department of Health at (717) 787-3350.”

      ==============================

      the letter :

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/cdc-monkey-released-statement.jpg

      ==========================================

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/cdc-releases-statement-following-pennsylvania-crash-involving-100-test-monkeys/

    • global news – Ukraine’s national security chief wants Canada to provide “defensive weapons” amid Russia standoff

    • Canadian Press NewsAlert: Canada extends mission to train Ukraine soldiers by 3 years

      OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada is extending its mission to train Ukrainian soldiers by three years.

      He says Canada will also expand the mission, known as Operation UNIFIER.

      Trudeau says as part of the $340-million commitment, he has authorized the Canadian Armed Forces to deploy 60 personnel to join 200 troops already on the ground, with further capacity to increase that number up to 400.

      He says it also includes a provision of non-lethal equipment, intelligence-sharing and support to combat cyberattacks.

      He says this guarantees the Forces’ continued support of Ukrainian forces so the country can defend its sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.

      Trudeau adds Defence Minister Anita Anand will travel to Latvia and Ukraine to visit with Canada’s Forces in the coming days.

      Russia has positioned about 100,000 troops across Ukraine’s border along with tanks and other heavy artillery, raising fears across Europe and the NATO military alliance of an invasion, something Russia has denied.

      More Coming.

      This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 26, 2022.

      https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/canadian-press-newsalert-canada-extends-mission-to-train-ukraine-soldiers-by-3-years

      =================================
      Canada criticized for ‘soft, tentative language’ amid Ukraine-Russia crisis

      As the Trudeau government wraps its cabinet retreat Wednesday, its handling of the Ukraine-Russia crisis faces growing criticism for being soft and superficial while rendering Canada missing in action with its allies.

      The criticism comes from not only the Conservative Opposition but from a former Canadian analyst in Europe who was on the diplomatic front lines of the political tensions between Ukraine and Russia.

      Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government also faces pressure from Ukrainians of Canadian descent who are amplifying the requests by Ukrainian leadership in Kiev for several key asks that he and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly have repeatedly deflected.

      Those asks are to provide weapons to the Ukraine military, impose further sanctions on Russia and extend Canada’s military training mission of its forces beyond its expiry date at the end of March.

      The requests have domestic political implications because Canada’s Ukrainian diaspora of 1.4 million people is one the most influential constituencies in domestic political affairs.

      “For a country which professes to be one of Ukraine’s closest allies the soft, tentative language being used by Canadian officials such as Foreign Affairs Minister Joly is a real head-scratcher,” said Michael Bociurkiw, a Canadian who served as the spokesman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe during the height of tensions following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

      “Language such as ‘we are deeply concerned’ doesn’t reflect the outrage felt by most Ukrainian Canadians at what’s currently transpiring on Ukraine’s borders. This government’s modus operandi is repeat the right buzz words without actually saying anything substantial.”

      That is unfortunate because Canada is well-positioned to provide a concrete response – including providing weapons – due to the expertise it has built up by deploying Canadian Forces personnel, RCMP officers and various diplomatic and development experts to Ukraine, said Bociurkiw, now a senior fellow with the Washington-based Atlantic Council.

      Russia has positioned about 100,000 troops across Ukraine’s borders along with tanks and other heavy artillery, raising fears across Europe of an invasion, something Russia has denied.

      The Conservatives are questioning why Trudeau was left out of a meeting that U.S. President Joe Biden hosted on Monday from the White House situation room with several key European leaders.

      The White House readout of the meeting listed the participants: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Polish President Andrzej Duda and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

      “Justin Trudeau is not on this list. This is what happens when you fail to stand up for Ukraine,” tweeted Conservative MP James Bezan, who has been banned from travelling to Russia for his outspoken advocacy for Ukraine over the years.

      Trudeau’s office explained his absence from the Biden meeting by saying the government has been working closely with the Ukrainian government and its international partners, including recent discussions with Biden, Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. It also noted a weekend phone call between Joly and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a recent phone call between Defence Minister Anita Anand and her American counterparts.

      “We stand by our friends in Ukraine and will continue to be there for the Ukrainian people alongside our allies as we have with military training missions, as well as financial and economic supports,” said spokeswoman Cecely Roy in an email.

      Roy also noted that Canada gave Ukraine a $120-million loan aimed at bolstering the country’s economy in the face of the Russian threat.

      On Tuesday, Bezan, Conservative foreign-affairs critic Michael Chong and the party’s procurement critic Pierre Paul-Hus called on the government to redirect weapons to Ukraine that were originally intended for Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq.

      “With more and more signs of a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, the time for waffling by Prime Minister Trudeau must end,” the three Conservatives said a statement.

      Bociurkiw said Canada should have long ago sent weapons to Ukraine because “they can’t be integrated quickly into front-line operations. The Ukrainians have made clear the type of gear they need so there should be little doubt as to which gaps Canada can fill.”

      Ottawa followed its allies on another key move on Tuesday by ordering the children and family members of its embassy staff in Ukraine to leave the country.

      The decision came after Britain said it would pull some of its diplomats out of its Ukraine embassy, and after the U.S. State Department decided to order the families of its Ukraine embassy personnel to leave.

      “The safety and security of Canadians, our personnel and their families at our missions abroad is our top priority,” Global Affairs Canada said.

      On Monday, decision by Global Affairs updated its travel advisory warning against non-essential travel to Ukraine, which has been in effect since last week. The advisory now suggests Canadians who are in Ukraine consider leaving.

      https://globalnews.ca/news/8538699/ukraine-russia-crisis-canada-response/

  4. If you only watch one convoy vid today make it this one. It’s funny and informative. People standing in minus 30 degree temperatures to support the movement is truly inspiring. The scale of this seems massive. Just yesterday I was speaking with a fellow who said his mother was organizing support just outside Ottawa with food and shelter for weary travelers. This is real grassroots growth. If it is the silent majority awakening then look out, because this is not a manifestation of the synthetic, woke, feminized poison that is our affliction, but rather the masculine, righteous pulse of a people who are tough enough to thrive in country that deserves saving from communism.

    https://youtu.be/rwrhPmtmDzI

    And remember another historic moment when we were down but not out against communism:

    https://youtu.be/bFKvB3Wnzgk

  5. Algerian knife parties in the Netherlands:

    Mayor gets tough on knife crime at refugee centre in Brabant
    https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/01/mayor-gets-tough-on-knife-crime-at-refugee-centre-in-brabant/
    A string of violent incidents at a refugee centre in Budel, a small village in Noord-Brabant, has led to the local mayor invoking his emergency powers in an effort to stop the trouble. Ronald van Kessel, mayor of the local authority area of Cranendonck, which includes Budel, says the move is necessary to restore order. Declaring the refugee centre and its surroundings to be a risk to public safety gives police the right to stop and search passersby for weapons and to ban people from the locality. There have been at least six reports of violent incidents in or near the centre in the past three months. Last week, two men were injured in a knife attack and three teenage brothers, aged 15 to 18, were arrested. Van Kessel said he had taken the step after discussion with refugee settlement agency COA, which is responsibility for safety. ‘They have to create a safe living environment and come up with solutions,’ Van Kessel told the Eindhovens Dagblad. Next week, Van Kessel will discuss the issue with the king’s commissioner in Noord Brabant and junior justice minister Eric van der Burg, who is responsible for asylum seekers. A spokesman for the COA told the paper that most of those involved in the violence were young men claiming to come from Algeria, which until last June held safe third country status. Since then, however, the Netherlands has not regarded Algeria as a safe third country, which means asylum seekers cannot automatically be refused help.

    • “KNIFE crimes”; “injured in a KNIFE attack”

      Naughty, naughty knives!
      Marauding knives, keep these young men safe!

  6. zero hedge – Italy’s Presidential Election: Whatever It Takes II

    By Marnix Arendshorst, Rabobank Macro Strategist focusing on Italy

    […] The 2022 Italian presidential election

    The President of the Republic is elected by both chambers of Parliament, which gather in a joint session, as well as 58 representatives chosen by regional councils of each of Italy’s twenty regions. A total amount of 1,009 ‘grand electors’ will cast secret ballots. In the first three rounds, a majority of two thirds is required. From the fourth ballot onwards an absolute majority suffices.

    Only twice a candidate was chosen in the first round (Cossiga and Ciampi). It could take around ten rounds to choose a new president, with outliers to 23 rounds. The election process takes several days, potentially one or two weeks.

    […] Draghi has been appointed by Mattarella to form a technocratic cabinet to help Italy out of the health, political, and economic crisis. He was never elected by the Italian citizens. Now he has to be chosen by politicians.

    […] As Italians say: “When you have a name, that one will never reach the end.” The elections are not over until the last round. Recall that Mattarella only had four (!) votes in the penultimate round of the 2015 presidential election.

    + COMMENTS

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/italys-presidential-election-whatever-it-takes-ii

  7. Québec solidaire souhaite mettre sur pied des brigades pour faire du porte-à-porte pour convaincre la population non vaccinée de se protéger contre la COVID-19.

    « Les anti-vaccins font beaucoup de bruit, mais les non-vaccinés ne sont pas tous anti-vaccins », a lancé le chef parlementaire de Québec solidaire, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, en point de presse mercredi.

    L’idée n’est pas de trouver les adresses des gens qui ne sont pas vaccinés. « Les informations médicales des Québécois sont précieuses, on ne veut pas les diffuser à tout vent », a précisé le député. Ces brigades iraient « cogner aux portes » dans les quartiers où le taux de vaccination est jugé trop faible.

    Chez les non-vaccinés, a-t-il ajouté, il y a également des aînés isolés, des personnes qui ne parlent ni français ni anglais, des gens isolés ou des personnes ayant des problèmes de santé mentale. Elles auraient pour mission de « calmer les anxiétés » et « répondre aux questions » des gens dans leur langue maternelle.

    À son avis, la stratégie du gouvernement Legault – intensifier la campagne de vaccination – ne fonctionne pas. Au lieu « d’attendre que les non-vaccinés viennent au vaccin », il faut plutôt « amener le vaccin aux non-vaccinés ».

    Il souhaite que les CLSC et les GMF puissent vacciner. Les médecins ou les travailleurs sociaux qui ont déjà un « lien de confiance » peuvent davantage convaincre les personnes qui le craignent. « Qu’on leur offre sur place, et qu’ils puissent se faire vacciner quasiment sur-le-champ », dit M. Nadeau-Dubois. Il propose également de mettre 15 millions à la disposition des groupes communautaires pour faire la promotion de la vaccination.

    « Taxe vaccin »
    En entrevue avec La Presse, M. Nadeau-Dubois avait critiqué le gouvernement Legault, qui divise selon lui la population québécoise avec sa « taxe vaccin », une « punition » pour les non-vaccinés. Il estime que cette politique polarise la société québécoise et ne bénéficie en fin de compte qu’à Éric Duhaime, le chef du Parti conservateur du Québec.

    Il demande maintenant au directeur national de santé publique par intérim, le Dr Luc Boileau, de s’expliquer sur cette question. « Il est essentiel que la Santé publique nous dise si elle a un avis sur la question, et si oui, quel est-il », a-t-il dit. Il soupçonne que la contribution santé, dont le montant n’est toujours pas connu, est une mesure essentiellement politique.

    Dans les prochains mois, Québec solidaire dévoilera par ailleurs son plan pour réparer le système de santé. « Des choix politiques ont rendu malade le système de santé », a déploré Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. Il montre du doigt le virage ambulatoire du Parti québécois, et les réformes Couillard et Barrette, qui ont « centralisé » le système de santé.

    https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/2022-01-26/pour-convaincre-les-non-vaccines/qs-propose-des-brigades-vaccinales.php

    • CBC – What specialists know about Omicron subvariant BA.2

      A subvariant of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus — called BA.2 — is surging in certain countries.

    • UK – Sajid Javid: ‘It is the professional duty of every NHS worker to get vaccinated’

      ‘Regardless of the mandate for NHS workers, it is the professional duty of every NHS worker to get vaccinated’

    • FDA Asks the Court to Delay First 55,000 Page Production Until May and Pfizer Moves to Intervene in the Lawsuit

      Somewhere on the other side of the growing heap of government and pharma lawyers is transparency.

      As explained in prior posts, in a lawsuit seeking all of the documents the FDA relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, a federal judge shot down the FDA’s requested rate of 500 pages per month and instead ordered the FDA to produce at the rate of 55,000 pages per month starting on March 1.

      Since the government has trillions of dollars of our money, it is putting it to good use by fighting to assure that the public has the least amount of transparency possible. To that end, it has now asked the Court to make the public wait until May for it to start producing 55,000 pages per month and, even then, claims it may not be able to meet this rate.

      The FDA’s excuse? As explained in the brief opposing the FDA’s request, the FDA’s defense effectively amounts to claiming that the 11 document reviewers it has already assigned and the 17 additional reviewers being onboarded are only capable of reading at the speed of preschoolers.

      Meanwhile…

      As the FDA tries to obtain months of delay, guess who just showed upon in the lawsuit? Yep, Pfizer. And it is represented by a global chair and team from a law firm with thousands of lawyers. Pfizer’s legal bill will likely be multiple times what it would cost the FDA to simply hire a private document review company to review, redact, and produce the documents at issue. Within weeks, if not days.

      Pfizer is coming in as a third party. But Pfizer assures the Court it is here to help expedite production of the documents. Sure it is! Where was Pfizer before the Court ordered the 55,000 pages per month? Right, doing what it normally does: letting the government work on its behalf – like the way the government mandates, promotes, and defends Pfizer’s product.

      But the government did not please Pfizer this time and so here it comes, likely looking for a second bite at the apple. Of course the FDA consented to Pfizer appearing. You can read the response my firm filed to Pfizer’s motion , as well as all of the other relevant recent filings in the link provided below.

      Let me end by noting that all of this insanity is simply in response to an attempt to obtain some basic transparency. This should again bring into sharp focus why the government should never coerce or mandate anyone to get an unwanted medical product or procedure. Just look at this circus – the government mandates Pfizer’s product, gives it immunity for any safety or efficacy issues, promotes its product using taxpayer money, gives Pfizer over $17 billion and then uses taxpayers’ money to fight to avoid providing even the most basic level of transparency to the public.

      The introduction from the brief opposing the FDA’s request is below and you can find copies of all the relevant court filings (FDA Motion to Modify Scheduling Order, January 18, 2022 / Plaintiff Opposition to Motion to Modify, January 24, 2022 / Pfizer Motion to Intervene, January 21, 2022 / FDA Response to Pfizer Motion, January 25, 2022 / Plaintiff Response to Pfizer Motion, January 25, 2022) here:

      INTRODUCTION TO OPPOSITION TO FDA’S MOTION

      It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues.[1] However, the FDA’s potential embarrassment over its decision to license this product must take a back seat to the transparency demanded by FOIA and the urgent need and interests of the American people to review that licensure data. The Court already recognized this unprecedented urgent need in its January 6th order directing the FDA to produce 55,000 pages per month.

      The FDA now insists it must delay its first 55,000-page production until May 1, 2022 – four months after the Court entered its order. However, the FDA’s own papers seeking this delay make plain it can produce at a rate of 55,000 pages per month in February and March. The FDA affirms it has already “allocated the equivalent of nearly 11 full-time staff to this project” and that “a review speed of 50 documents per hour was within the normal range for document review in a complex matter” in private practice; and here the 50 document per hour rate would be faster since there is only a need to review for personally identifying information (“PII”) for most pages. Hence, if the FDA’s 11 full-time reviewers work only 7.5 hours per day and review 50 pages (not documents) per hour, the FDA could review over 88,000 pages per month in February and March. That is more than sufficient to produce the 55,000 pages per month currently ordered for these two months.

      Instead of complying with this Court’s reasoned order, the FDA claims these 11 reviewers can only review a total of 10,000 pages per month. What the FDA does not say, and what basic math shows, is that a rate of 10,000 pages a month for 11 full-time reviewers amounts to only 5 pages per hour! This rate is made even more absurd because most of the pages the FDA will be reviewing during this period are repetitive data files that only require second level review to redact minimal amounts of PII that Pfizer may have left in the documents. FDA’s reality defying claim and contemptuous approach to its production obligations should not be countenanced. (Infra § I.)

      It is also apparent that the instant demand is just the start of a campaign to delay the production ordered by the Court. In this first salvo, the FDA is not really asking the Court. It is instead expressly telling the Court it does not intend to produce more than 10,000 pages per month for February and March, and despite claiming it is making “unprecedented” efforts, the FDA repeatedly tells the Court: “It is not possible to guarantee that FDA will be able to fully comply” with the 55,000-page production rate thereafter. (Dkt. No. 38 at APPX004, APPX008.) Americans must follow the law and the FDA, a multi-billion-dollar agency, should similarly be given no safe harbor from complying with the orders of this Court. (Infra § II.)

      The FDA should also be held to what it attests. The FDA, with over 18,000 employees and an over $3 billion discretionary budget, repeatedly assures the Court that it is taking steps to “marshal every possible resource available to it,” “acting with maximal urgency to assemble every possible resource available to it” and “putting every available resource at its disposal into its efforts to achieve compliance.” (Dkt. No. 37 at 10, 3, 10.) The FDA also attests that over the coming weeks, it will have 28.5 full-time people reviewing the documents. Working 7.5 hours per day for 20 business days per month, 28.5 people reviewing 50 pages per hour can review a total of approximately 213,750 pages per month. Putting aside that most of this production can be reviewed far faster than the rate of 50 pages per hour, Plaintiff asks that the FDA be held to its representations and be directed to produce at the rate of 180,000 pages per month starting in April. (Infra § III.)

      The Court is, other than Congress, the only check on the FDA. In a free country, transparency is paramount, and the FDA has chosen to thwart transparency and the requirements of FOIA by anemically understaffing the office it maintains to respond to FOIA requests. It is akin to the boy that kills his parents and asks for sympathy for being an orphan. Decrying that this Court is now making it comply with the law – by actually producing documents in a timely manner – is ridiculous. It is also incredible for the FDA to claim that compliance here would harm its health policy objectives. Even if the FDA really does need to spend $4 to $5 million which, as shown below, is an absurd overestimate, that is an inconsequential amount of its overall $3.41 billion discretionary budget. Moreover, the issues with the Pfizer vaccine – including waning immunity, variants evading immunity, the failure to prevent transmission, myocarditis, and pericarditis – show that the FDA’s priority should be to address this product before rushing off to engage in other activities. (Infra § IV.)

      For these reasons, as explained below, the Court should refuse to reduce the rate of production in February and March and should increase the rate of production for April and thereafter to 180,000 pages per month consistent with the FDA employing 28.5 full-time reviewers in the coming weeks to conduct the review and the fact that most of the pages need only be reviewed for PII.

      …you can read the rest of the brief here:

      https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/044-PL-PHPMTS-MOL-IN-OPPOSITION-TO-DEFENDANTS-MOTION-TO-MODIFY-THE-SCHEDULING-ORDER-OF-THE-COURT.pdf

      [1] Reflecting the issues with this product, the FDA failed to send a representative to a federal court hearing in this matter on December 14th because of the “FDA’s protocols” regarding COVID-19. Meaning, despite the FDA’s claim the vaccine is “effective,” the FDA is apparently still scared to send a representative to the hearing. Its actions speak volumes and cast serious doubt on its words.

      https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/fda-asks-the-court-to-delay-first

      • He is a bad actor in so many ways. Racist, misogynist, divider, a promoter of hate speech – M-103, and a distorter of the truth.

  8. DAILY MAIL – German lawmakers debate making vaccines mandatory for ALL adults after politicians U-turned on earlier pledge not to force Covid jabs on anyone

    Lawmakers debate in parliament whether to make Covid vaccines mandatory

    German politicians have long insisted there would be no vaccine mandate

    But the tide turned last year amid frustration that a large number of holdouts were hampering the fight against Covid-19

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10442783/German-lawmakers-debate-making-vaccines-mandatory-adults-politicians-U-turned.html

  9. CBC – Reclaiming public space: Being a Black Muslim woman in Edmonton

    After a string of attacks against Black Muslim women in Edmonton, photographer Faisa Omer gathered six Somali-Canadian women and girls to reflect on the fear and joy of existing in public space.

  10. The Globe and Mail Newspaper that is subsidized by the Trudeau government runs a tally everyday:
    Total
    Cases 2,955,134. Jan. 25 11,118

    Deaths 32,955. Jan.25 179

    Hospitalized Jan. 25 10, 849

    Where do they get these numbers and is there anything positive about listing these numbers every day? Fear, fear and more fear.

    Where are their statistics on the number of people in Canada who have died from the injections and the number of vaccine injured?

    I know it is very hard to find ANY information about the dead and injured from these injections, but surely an investigative paper like the once decent Globe could show the real numbers and try to balance out their absolutely disgraceful reporting on this assault on Canadian people.

    How much money does Justine Trudeau give to the Globe and Mail per week?

    We know that Klaus Schwab and the globalists want to reduce the world population from 7 billion plus, down to under 500 million.

    Justine Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, Carney all young global leaders / Schwab puppets need to be removed from office. They are the threat to all our freedom. Canadians should demand the media, ALL media in Canada be defunded immediately, they are the promoters of these global clowns.

    The CDC Vaccine Adverse Reaction Events up to January 14, 2020 show :

    Adverse Reactions 1,053,830
    Deaths 22,793
    Serious injuries like Myocarditis, pericarditis, strokes, heart attacks, paralyzed, blood clots, brain bleeds, miscarriages, rashes that last for who knows how long, pots disease, …………..174,864

    If these numbers represent less than 1 %, surely there must be some numbers available in Canada that this rag of a paper could run or are we to believe
    Canadians are exempt from any vaccine deaths or injuries.

    Many newspaper collaborators were hung during the Nuremberg trials and now we know why. Never again has turned into just once more.

    • No, wake up, they will never ever admit to more than 1 % of people they killed or maimed for life, because they are ruthless murderers, full blown mafioso killers without any pity nor conscience and the Nuremberg II trial will indigt them one day, in the far future, as sure as Hitlers executioners were hanged.
      There are already now very efficient sleuth working hard to prepare those indigtments.
      Especially one stands out because he published a book in German.
      Lets hope Vlad Eyore will find someone to translate the following Video-interview from German into English. (Maybe Miss Piggy could do it. ??)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlLPJYwX8c
      At least download it soon for safe-keeping because it contains explosive proof and many names and details about the 20 year long preparations for this whole murderous pandemic-charade.
      The Author, German Dr.med. Heiko Schöning presents his book, which is called “it’s GAME OVER”, and which is the result of many years of extremely dangerous detective-work uncovering all the ruthless players involved in the series of fake pandemics starting with the post sept. 11, 2001 Anthrax threats nand their interconnections.
      The criminal who made billions already then with his patent of an anti-anthrax vaccin was suicided but his handler is still today the grey eminence and Godfather behind the whole vaccinsbonanza. His name is Edwin Meese, = the chief of staff for (naive) Donald Trump.

    • No, wake up, they will never ever admit to more than 1 % of people they killed or maimed for life, because they are ruthless murderers, full blown mafioso killers without any pity nor conscience and the Nuremberg II trial will indigt them one day, in the far future, as sure as Hitlers executioners were hanged.
      There are already now very efficient sleuth working hard to prepare those indigtments.
      Especially one stands out because he published a book in German.
      Lets hope Vlad Eyore will find someone to translate the following Video-interview from German into English. (Maybe Miss Piggy could do it. ??)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlLPJYwX8c
      At least download it soon for safe-keeping because it contains explosive proof and many names and details about the 20 year long preparations for this whole murderous pandemic-charade.
      The Author, German Dr.med. Heiko Schöning presents his book, which is called “it’s GAME OVER”, and which is the result of many years of extremely dangerous detective-work uncovering all the ruthless players involved in the series of fake pandemics starting with the post sept. 11, 2001 Anthrax threats nand their interconnections.
      The criminal who made billions already then with his patent of an anti-anthrax vaccin was suicided but his handler is still today the grey eminence and Godfather behind the whole vaccinsbonanza. His name is Edwin Meese, = the chief of staff for (naive) Donald Trump.

  11. THE DEMISE OF THE EASTMED PIPELINE | OPINION

    The EastMed Pipeline was designed to bring natural gas from the offshore fields of Israel and Cyprus across Greece to Italy and Bulgaria. In 2013, the European Commission designated the pipeline a “Project of Common Interest” and invested tens of millions of dollars in technical, economic and environmental studies. It was estimated that the pipeline could send as much as 20 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe annually. In 2019, the energy ministers of Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority created the East Mediterranean Gas Forum. Notice that Turkey, a NATO member, was not included.

    At the end of 2020, Congress passed legislation that included support for constructing pipelines and liquified natural gas terminals, and created a United States-Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center run by the U.S. Department of Energy.…

    merica’s friends and allies banded together to increase and diversify energy supplies in Europe. So, why—in 2022—would the Biden administration privately and unofficially tell a Greek official that the U.S. no longer supports the project?

    After the cancellation of Keystone XL, as prices inevitably rose with the lessened supply, the Biden administration was forced to ask OPEC and Russia to increase their production to fill the gaps. OPEC’s initial response was “no.” But as the price rose—to over $86 bbl. in December—OPEC and Russia approved an increase in production.

    As a foreign policy matter, Turkey and Russia heavily disapproved of the entire EastMed project, which did not include either of them… Ankara has adamantly declined because it claims part of the energy resources of Cyprus as its own. Russia, for its part, would be happy to scuttle the pipeline to ensure its monopoly in Europe.…

    The final foreign policy element in the EastMed story is the Russia-U.S.-NATO standoff over Russian threats to Ukraine. The West has very few good options—threatening Russia with a war in Europe over Ukraine is not a winning strategy.

    The Biden administration may be trying other ideas, such as enticing Vladimir Putin into a more conciliatory position by removing a thorn in Russia’s side – even as the Russian president makes it clear to Europe that as cold as they are, he can make them colder.

    Or, more ominously, the administration may be encouraging Turkey to support the Ukrainians with weapons the U.S. cannot supply – Turkey has supplied drones and other equipment, angering Russia….
    https://www.newsweek.com/demise-eastmed-pipeline-opinion-1670851

  12. Site security is blocking posts, even stripped of all formatting. Maybe the previous one from Newsweek made it. Others haven’t.

    test test test

  13. MEMRI: Parents of Casualties of Ukrainian Flight 752 Shot Down by IRGC: They Downed the Plane Intentionally

    Mohsen Asadi-Lari and Zahra Majd, the parents of two passengers who were killed when the IRGC shot down Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 on January 8, 2020, said in an interview that was posted on Ensafnews.com on January 8, 2022 that the IRGC had intentionally shot down Flight 752, killing all 176 passengers and crew members on board.

    The couple said that they are gathering evidence to prove that the “accident” was intentional, and they claimed that the plane was used as a “human shield” to prevent war with the U.S. after Iran targeted American military bases in Iraq in response to the U.S. assassination of IRGC Qods Force Commander General Qasem Soleimani a few days prior.

    They said that the IRGC explicitly said that had the plane not been downed, there would have been a war with America that would endanger 10 million Iranian lives, and they added that IRGC Commander-In-Chief Salami had insisted on paying them a condolence visi…

    They described how none of their children’s possessions from the wreckage were returned to them, including electronics, and they speculated that this may be because the electronics contained information about what happened on the flight. They also said that bulldozers cleared the crash site very quickly after the disaster.

  14. Wiki is rehabilitating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

    Abu Yahuda writes:
    “Do human stupidity and wickedness have any bounds?
    After reading the comprehensive Wikipedia article about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I have to answer a resounding no.
    https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-protocols-of-elders-of-zion-is-back.html

    Thing is, The Protocols is magnificent. A compilation of millennia-old conspiracy theories in a single text, it’s the gold standard. Every “i” dotted, every “t” crossed. It’s timeless. It’s universal. The ultimate ah, hah! to incite scapegoating and displacement of anger.

    With that legacy from the Tsar’s Okhrana, the Soviet Union became the undisputed master of information warfare. Before Bernays, before Goebbels.

    Now it’s got Wiki’s blessing.

  15. A common question… Why all the injuries?
    DrNathanThompson – Published January 25, 2022
    @ 5:29 – Freedom MeetUp – Saturday, January 29, 2022 | 10AM – 5PM
    Fox River Lutheran Church
    Senior Pastor Kevin Garner, Pastor Steve Cassel,
    Dr Nathan Thompson, Dr. Peter McCullough & Attorney Thomas DeVore
    https://rumble.com/vta0qc-a-common-question…-why-all-the-injuries.html

    Freedom MeetUp for January 29, 2022
    Live Stream Link can be found here:
    https://rumble.com/c/FoxRiverLutheranChurch