>Israel sends IDF team to Florida to assist with tower collapse rescue efforts
interesting
>Joanna Mendelson, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/qanon-antisemitism-right-wing-authoritarianism-polling/
Not Every QAnon Believer’s an Antisemite. But There’s a Lot of Overlap Between Its Adherents and Belief in a Century-Old Antisemitic Hoax
Nearly 4 in 5 Americans who agree with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also believe in QAnon
Roughly half of respondents who agree with QAnon also agree that the rise of liberalism has enabled Jewish people to destroy institutions and take over the world.
QAnon and Protocols believers were slightly more likely than U.S. conservatives to say that Capitol rioters were seeking to protect the government.
Both conspiracy-embracing groups track closely with right-leaning adults when it comes to questions about voter fraud and the 2020 presidential election.
The Capitol riots were rife with symbols of humanity’s hate-filled past, but perhaps one of the most startling and enduring images was that of a man in a sweatshirt that said “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom” — a reference to the eponymous Nazi extermination camp and its infamous motto, “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
A new Morning Consult survey tracking right-wing authoritarian beliefs shows that while not all believers of the conspiracy theory that helped spur the insurrection are antisemites, a large majority of adherents to a century-old antisemitic hoax are also believers of QAnon. And though efforts to deplatform the conspiracy group have sent QAnon underground, data shows that believers’ views on the issues that led to the insurrection track closely with those of self-identified U.S. conservatives.
U.S. adults in the April 26-27 survey were asked questions regarding two notable conspiracy theories: QAnon — described as a belief that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles made up of left-wing politicians, religious figures and Hollywood elites — and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document first published in the early 1900s that alleges a Jewish plot to take over major institutions in an effort at world domination.
Seventy-eight percent of U.S. respondents who agreed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also agreed with QAnon, while 49 percent of QAnon adherents agreed with the century-old antisemitic slur, compared to 32 percent of right-leaning adults and just 11 percent of left-leaning adults.
“Although we wouldn’t say initially that QAnon had antisemitic tropes, very quickly it became apparent that there was a strain within QAnon belief that articulated some of these very clearly antisemitic tropes,” said Joanna Mendelson, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. More specifically, QAnon adherents “identify Jewish control of the media, the banks and the government as being behind the Deep State, helping to manipulate the levers of society and undermine trust.”
The group has undergone a sea change in recent months: Both Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. started cracking down on QAnon communities and content as early as last summer, and sought to strengthen their moderation efforts following the insurrection, effectively deplatforming the conspiracy group.
A spokesman for Twitter said the company has been clear that it will take strong action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and since Jan. 8 has suspended more than 150,000 accounts that “were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service.”
Following the failure of the “Stop the Steal” rallies and Capitol insurrection to prevent Biden’s presidency, the QAnon movement has been retooling and reorganizing.
“Q hasn’t posted since December,” said Aoife Gallagher, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Digital Analysis Unit, referring to the conspiracy theory’s eponymous leader who spurred the movement with his “Q drops.” “Really what a lot of the community is doing is that they’re latching on to different influencers that have built up audiences over the last few years.” And many of those influencers are now flourishing on less-moderated spaces such as Telegram, which Mendelson described as “lion’s dens for extremist ideology.”
Take GhostEzra, for instance, “essentially a marginal figure when it came to QAnon while on Twitter, who had roughly 18,000 followers prior to the mass ban, but who now has essentially amassed 338,000 subscribers,” said Mendelson.
The QAnon influencer, who was described by Vice News last month as the subject of a war within the community due to his openly antisemitic posts and Holocaust denialism, “in a very short space of time pivoted to very, very blatant antisemitism — borderline neo-Nazism,” Gallagher said.
“When you remove QAnon communities from Facebook and the like, like that, you’re pushing them into more extremist spaces,” she added. “Now, I do think that it stops them building their audience in the same way that they were able to use the algorithms of Facebook and YouTube to build their audience over the last number of years.”
Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
But that doesn’t mean QAnon has disappeared. Instead, ideas that originated in the QAnon space — such as allegations of widespread voter fraud — are now filtering into mainstream right-wing ideology, without the name attached.
In the survey, more than 3 in 5 right-leaning adults said they agreed that Joe Biden won the election due to widespread voter fraud, roughly on par with the share of QAnon and Protocols believers who said the same.
“You can’t overstate, really, how much QAnon had a role in what happened on Jan. 6,” Gallagher said. “QAnon had been pushing voter fraud claims well before last year.”
When it came to the Capitol riots, QAnon believers and those who agree with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were basically split on whether the insurrectionists were there to protect or undermine the government, though both groups were slightly more likely than right-leaning adults to say it was the former.
While the Capitol rioters did not succeed in overturning the election, QAnon circles are still focused on the fight.
“We’re seeing them talk about themes that either ask for auditing of the election or that make claims that Trump will be reinstated or identify or promote a similar belief,” Mendelson said. A Morning Consult survey conducted earlier this month found that 29 percent of GOP voters thought it likely the former president would return to office sometime this year. And a different survey showed that just over half of Republicans thought election reviews could change the outcome of the 2020 contest.
“I think the influence of QAnon in the wider Republican Party is huge,” Gallagher said. “But people wouldn’t recognize that it’s QAnon.”
Experts say QAnon beliefs have also filtered into the halls of Congress, with both Mendelson and Gallagher citing freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as an example of the group’s mainstream influence.
“She’s kind of nearly put herself in there as one of the de facto leaders of that movement now,” Gallagher said, “even though she’s disavowed it, but she still plays into their narratives all the time.”
Greene has come under fire over the past few months for her controversial statements, including a 2018 Facebook post blaming the Rothschilds — a Jewish banking family that has been the subject of many antisemitic conspiracy theories — for California wildfires and a tweet comparing vaccination identification to the gold stars Nazis forced Jewish people to wear during the Holocaust. (She has since apologized for the equivalence.)
Earlier this month, she also tweeted a conspiracy theory that the “Deep State” and Federal Bureau of Investigation operatives were “involved in organizing and carrying out the Jan 6th Capitol riot.”
Greene said in a statement emailed to Morning Consult that “I have never once promoted Q Anon as a candidate or a member of Congress, but do you know who has promoted it nonstop: the media, just like you are doing with this article. Nancy Pelosi and CNN believe in Q Anon far more than I ever did.”
Per a tweet from Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer earlier this year, Greene in December posted on Twitter praising an article by Gab Chief Executive Andrew Torba in which he promotes QAnon and calls the conspiracy group “a refreshing and objective flow of information.”
“In this current landscape, we are seeing mainstream figures, thought leaders and politicians push extremist narratives in the public sphere,” Mendelson said. “And increasingly, the line is becoming very blurred between these fringe beliefs and some of these more conservative ideals.”
Data indicates that not only are the lines becoming blurred, but that fringe belief groups and the U.S. right wing are largely on the same page when it comes to authoritarian tendencies. As part of its survey, Morning Consult polled adults in eight countries and ranked their responses based on a right-wing authoritarianism scale originally created by longtime authoritarian researcher Bob Altemeyer.
The findings show that not only does the United States’ right flank have the highest mean ranking among that group in all countries (109.3, 10 points higher than the next-highest ranking), but so do its QAnon believers, with both groups ranking above 100 on the scale, which starts at 20 and ends at 180. Canada’s adherents of the Protocols of Elders of Zion actually had a slightly higher mean score than their American counterparts, but both groups were above 100 and within a third of a point of each other.
Any solution to the proliferation of QAnon, both experts said, must involve the tech industry.
The Internet Association, a stakeholder group representing major internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, said in an emailed statement that “internet companies have taken and continue to take thoughtful actions to address the abuse of their services by extremist groups, including by banning accounts and removing threatening or harmful content. Policies and enforcement techniques are regularly reevaluated and updated to keep pace with changes in extremist behavior, and our industry welcomes opportunities to collaborate with other stakeholders to improve the safety of their services.”
And Twitter said it is looking into ways to empower research into QAnon and other coordinated harmful activity on the platform, as well as focusing a significant part of its enforcement efforts on accounts engaged in ban evasion, though the company acknowledged that it has to work hard to stay ahead of bad actors in the online space.
“Obviously, there’s no magic wand, there’s no silver bullet for how to solve this,” Gallagher said. “But I do think that providing people with the tools that they need to be able to find accurate information or to be able to recognize the fact that certain types of information is not reliable — I think that that will go a big way, hopefully, to kind of figuring out how to get through this.”
Mendelson also suggested a “multipronged solution” involving not only the tech industry but law enforcement, the legislature, education and community groups.
In the meantime, she warned, the grievances that were expressed on Jan. 6 are still brewing — and could lead to more violence.
The retooling of QAnon in the wake of the insurrection “is combined with a sort of desperation, and that desperation is very dangerous,” she said. “When one doesn’t feel like the democratic process is working properly, when one feels their voice has been silenced, when one feels that their vote does not count — that can pave the way for potentially radical action.”
>Hunter Biden Invested In The Pandemic Firm Collaborating With EcoHealth and The Wuhan Lab.
https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/hunter-biden-invested-in-ecohealth-wuhan-partner/
Hunter Biden Invested In The Pandemic Firm Collaborating With EcoHealth and The Wuhan Lab
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
>Hunter Biden Invested In The Pandemic Firm Collaborating With EcoHealth and The Wuhan Lab
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was an offshoot of Rosemont Capital, an investment fund founded by Biden and John Kerry’s stepson in 2009, that counted Biden as a Managing Director.
Among the companies listed on archived versions of the firm’s portfolio is Metabiota, a San Francisco-based company that purports to detect, track, and analyze emerging infectious diseases, The National Pulse can reveal.
Financial reports reveal that RSTP led the company’s first round of funding, which amounted to $30 million. Former Managing Director and co-founder of RSTP Neil Callahan – a name that appears many times on Hunter Biden’s hard drive – also sits on Metabiota’s Board of Advisors.
Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”
As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China. “Sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,” the paper notes.
The proximity between Hunter Biden and COVID-19’s origins are almost too convenient.
Among the researchers listed on the aforementioned 2014 paper are “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Lab. The disgraced Peter Daszak – recently recused from the Lancet COVID-19 commission due to several conflicts of interest as a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – is also listed as an author.
Daszak is also a figure central to the potential origins of COVID-19. His EcoHealth Alliance funneled taxpayer dollars from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan.
Researchers from EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota have also collaborated on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies linking emerging infectious disease outbreaks to wildlife trade facilities including “wet markets.”
“Wildlife trade can facilitate zoonotic disease transmission and represents a threat to human health and economies in Asia, highlighted by the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak, where a Chinese wildlife market facilitated pathogen transmission,” the 2016 paper notes.
Researchers from Metabiota have also been listed alongside EcoHealth Alliance personnel on a 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, 2015 study focusing on herpes, and 2015 study on viral diversity.
Beyond the ties to EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota has also been embroiled in controversy for “bungling” America’s response to Ebola.
“An American company that bills itself as a pioneer in tracking emerging epidemics made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa — with employees feuding with fellow responders, contributing to misdiagnosed Ebola cases and repeatedly misreading the trajectory of the virus,” an Associated Press (AP) investigation into the company found.
The company reportedly made the “already chaotic situation worse,” prompting World Health Organization officials to criticize the company:
Emails obtained by AP and interviews with aid workers on the ground show that some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.
WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote to colleagues in a July 17, 2014, email about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the Sierra Leone government lab Metabiota shared with Tulane University in the city of Kenema. He said there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.”
“This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote.
In April 2021, Joe Biden’s USAID announced a new initiative spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance to track emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential. Also collaborating on the taxpayer-funded venture is Metabiota, whose researchers have been listed as authors on papers from June 2021 relating to coronavirus surveillance in Africa.
https://thenationalpulse.com/news/tiktok-insiders-reveal-chinese-parent-company-can-access-u-s-user-data/
TikTok Insiders Reveal Chinese Parent Company Can ‘Access U.S. User Data.’
Company insiders have revealed that the Chinese parent company of the app TikTok can covertly access user data, alleging the boundaries between the two companies were “so blurry as to be almost non-existent,” in a CNBC report.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/tiktok-insiders-say-chinese-parent-bytedance-in-control.html
Anyone got a live-stream for soccer?
>unfortunately you have to pay the price of wading through the retards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Order_(Indonesia)
How does it feel?
The New Order (Indonesian: Orde Baru, abbreviated Orba) is the term coined by the second Indonesian President Suharto to characterise his regime as he came to power in 1966. Suharto used this term to contrast his rule with that of his predecessor, Sukarno (retroactively dubbed the "Old Order," or Orde Lama). The term "New Order" in more recent times has become synonymous with the Suharto era (1966–1998).
Immediately following the attempted coup in 1965, the political situation was uncertain, but the Suharto's New Order found much popular support from groups wanting a separation from Indonesia's problems since its independence. The 'generation of 66' (Angkatan 66) epitomised talk of a new group of young leaders and new intellectual thought. Following Indonesia's communal and political conflicts, and its economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s through to the mid-1960s, the "New Order" was committed to achieving and maintaining political order, economic development, and the removal of mass participation in the political process. The features of the "New Order" established from the late 1960s were thus a strong political role for the military, the bureaucratisation and corporatisation of political and societal organisations, and selective but effective repression of opponents. Strident anti-communist doctrine remained a hallmark of the regime for its subsequent 32 years, with Islamism becoming prevalent in the early 1990s.
Within a few years, however, many of its original allies had become indifferent or averse to the New Order, which comprised a military faction supported by a narrow civilian group. Among much of the pro-democracy movement which forced Suharto to resign in the 1998 Indonesian Revolution and then gained power, the term "New Order" has come to be used pejoratively. It is frequently employed to describe figures who were either tied to the Suharto period, or who upheld the practises of his authoritarian regime, such as corruption, collusion and nepotism (widely known by the acronym KKN: korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme).
>1998 Indonesian Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Suharto
In the second half of 1997, Indonesia became the country hardest hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The economy suffered a flight of foreign capital leading to the Indonesian rupiah falling from Rp 2,600 per dollar in August 1997 to over Rp 14,800 per dollar by January 1998. The Indonesian companies with US dollar-denominated borrowings struggled to service these debts with their rupiah earnings, and many went bankrupt. Efforts by Bank Indonesia to defend its managed float regime by selling US dollars had little effect on the currency's decline, but instead drained Indonesia's foreign exchange reserves. Weaknesses in the Indonesian economy, including high levels of debt, inadequate financial management systems and crony capitalism, were identified as underlying causes. Volatility in the global financial system and over-liberalisation of international capital markets were also cited. The government responded by floating the currency, requesting International Monetary Fund assistance, closing some banks and postponing major capital projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis#IMF_role
The scope and the severity of the collapses led to an urgent need for outside intervention. Since the countries melting down were among the richest in their region, and in the world, and since hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake, any response to the crisis was likely to be cooperative and international. The International Monetary Fund created a series of bailouts ("rescue packages") for the most-affected economies to enable them to avoid default, tying the packages to currency, banking and financial system reforms. Due to IMF's involvement in the financial crisis, the term IMF became synonymous with the Asian Financial Crisis itself.
>When it comes to looking after thousands of orphaned children from impoverished countries, nobody has more experience than Nike.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/military-violated-rules-by-collecting-information-on-canadians-conducting-propaganda-during-pandemic-report
Military violated rules by collecting information on Canadians, conducting propaganda during pandemic
Investigations into the activities have concluded not only were rules not followed, but senior leaders also had no authority to conduct such initiatives.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-pandemic-is-far-from-over-for-children-in-canada-vaccines-unlikely-until-fall
'The pandemic is far from over for children in Canada': Vaccines unlikely until fall
There will be no two-dose or even one-dose summer for close to five million Canadians — children under the age of 12 who do not yet qualify for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Advocates, who have long complained that children have been afterthoughts during the pandemic, say it is crucial they not be forgotten now, especially with so many unable to be vaccinated and the highly contagious Delta variant on the rise.
“The pandemic is far from over for children and youth in Canada,” said Emily Gruenwoldt, president and CEO of Children’s Healthcare Canada.
Health Canada approved the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children and youth 12 and over early in June. But approval for younger children is unlikely to come until at least mid to late fall.
Gruenwoldt and others, including CHEO infectious disease specialist Dr. Anne Pham-Huy, say they were disappointed Ontario schools didn’t reopen in June and it is critical that they open to in-person learning in September. But public health measures — including proper ventilation, cohorting, small class sizes and rapid tests — must be in place. Work is underway in Ottawa and elsewhere to improve air quality in some schools, but more should be done, say health experts and others.
“My fear is that all these tools are not put into place by the September academic year,” said Pham-Huy, noting that Ontario children were out of school longer than others across the country.
Vaccinations may be the most important tool in the fight against COVID-19, said Pham-Huy, but they are far from the only one. The fact that younger children aren’t eligible to be vaccinated yet, makes it even more important that people around them are, say experts. That includes parents, teachers and school staff.
Dr. Peter Juni, who is the scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, said there will likely continue to be outbreaks in pockets of the population that are under-vaccinated, even as overall vaccination levels rise.
A recent outbreak in the northern First Nations community of Kashechewan, where a high percentage of adults are vaccinated, illustrated that. Israel, which has among the highest vaccination rates in the world, has also seen outbreaks in recent weeks among school children.
While children are not generally at as high risk from the virus as older adults, up to five per cent who become infected can go on to develop long COVID, with debilitating symptoms. Between one in 1,000 and one in 3,000 can also suffer from a rare inflammatory syndrome that, in severe cases, can cause heart and other organ damage. And children with complex health issues are more vulnerable.
Juni said more must be done to prevent transmission in the community as more restrictions are loosened.
He would like to see vaccine passports in Ontario, something the science advisory table is currently discussing. That, he said, will help society return to a kind of normal, albeit with some restrictions remaining in place, as well as helping to protect children.
Outside space, he said, should be able to look “near completely normal” if case counts continue to drop. But passports proving that people are fully vaccinated are needed to safely reopen the economy, including allowing people indoors in bars.
Juni said the science advisory table is working on several briefs related to children, including an opening framework for schools.
Gruenwoldt said the gradual reopening of society is leaving parents of children across Canada with plenty of questions. As of July 11, for example, Saskatchewan is eliminating all public health restrictions related to COVID-19.
“What does that do to children who are not vaccinated and immunocompromised? Are they left sheltering in place in a community that is no longer safe for them?”
Gruenwoldt said there has not been enough focus on the impact on children during the pandemic.
“Kids have consistently been an afterthought in policy and practice.”
Her organization has been pushing for children’s impact assessments when decisions are made — something that might have resulted in children returning to school in June as many parents, health officials and others wanted.
Making sure schools are safe environments should be top of mind now.
uOttawa epidemiologist Raywat Deonandan said it is important for the province and other governments to think about how to control spread among children.
Since children and youth 12 and older are now eligible to be vaccinated, that means attention can be focused on ensuring high vaccination rates among older school children and resources can be directed to elementary schools to do needed work to improve safety, he said.
And when vaccines are fully tested on children, there could be other issues Canada has to wrestle with, including the question of whether it is ethical to vaccinate children when 80 year olds are not vaccinated in most of the world, said Earl Brown, a virologist from uOttawa.
But, even for those Canadians who are lucky enough to experience a two-dose summer, the pandemic will not be over.
“I think there is this misconception that once you have two doses everything is 100 per cent,” said CHEO’s Pham-Huy. “There are so many factors that could come into play. It is, unfortunately, not over yet.”
>Cynthia Nixon says the poor should be allowed to steal from stores