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Apple hobbled a crucial tool of dissent in China weeks before widespread protests broke out

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

That changed on Nov. 9, when Apple released a new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 16.1.1, to customers worldwide. Rather than listing new features, as it often does, the company simply said, “This update includes bug fixes and security updates and is recommended for all users.”

Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

AirDrop has been an effective communication tool for protestors in Hong Kong, as Quartz previously documented. It’s been used to communicate with other protestors, reach passersby, and spread messages to tourists from mainland China visiting Hong Kong. On the mainland, protestors have also AirDropped protest literature, particularly on college campuses where some of the current protests have broken out. China’s control of the internet has become so strong that dissidents must cling to any crack in the so-called Great Firewall.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-hobbled-crucial-tool-dissent-185100767.html

Apple hobbled a crucial tool of dissent in China weeks before widespread protests broke out

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

That changed on Nov. 9, when Apple released a new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 16.1.1, to customers worldwide. Rather than listing new features, as it often does, the company simply said, “This update includes bug fixes and security updates and is recommended fo...

Seafood mislabeling is “rampant” across New York, according to a study released by the state attorney general’s office on Friday (Dec. 14).

The attorney general’s office purchased fish from 155 stores across 29 supermarket brands throughout the state, and then sent them to a lab for testing. A remarkable number of the specimens—more than one in every four, or 27%—were not what the supermarkets said they were. Instead, they were often completely different, cheaper, and less sustainably raised species.

People who buy lemon sole, red snapper, and grouper in particular are more likely than not to receive an entirely different fish, according to the report.

28% of “wild” salmon was actually farmed salmon, despite costing one-third more on average
67% of “red snapper” was something else entirely—often lane snapper, a nutritionally similar but cheaper variety. The report notes the lane snapper also had higher mercury levels.
Nearly 88% of “lemon sole” was not, in fact, lemon sole. It was often swai, which is faster and cheaper to raise.
“It’s clear that seafood fraud isn’t just a fluke—it’s rampant across New York,” New York attorney general and apparent pun aficionado Barbara D. Underwood said in a statement.

Two-thirds of the supermarket chains the attorney general’s office purchased from had at least one instance of fish mislabeling. Five chains in particular—Food Bazaar, Foodtown, Stew Leonard’s, Uncle Giuseppe’s, and Western Beef—had mislabeling that “exceeded 50%.”

Within the state, New York City had the worst false-label problem; 43% of the fish sampled from NYC supermarkets was not what it was labeled as. (Runners up were Long Island, with a 41% fish mislabeling rate, and Westchester and Rockland counties, with a 32% mislabeling rate.)

For the time being, at a least for now. it was still fish. --- Give it a few more years.

Have Americans grokked that virtually all of the mis-and-dis-information bombarding them lo these many years actually comes from the government and the news media channels that serve it? What we’ve got now in this country is a Mind-Fuckery Industrial Complex waging a psy-ops war on the people of this land. Why is that?

Essentially, to cover-up crimes against the country by public officials that have already occurred. Twitter, pre-Musk, was a major accomplice and enabler of all that, and suddenly it’s not — to the horror of everyone in charge at our nation’s seat of government. The main crimes revolve around selling-out America’s future one way or another — “Joe Biden” and Company being only the most blatant perps in the big picture.

Before them was Hillary Clinton, with her purchase of the Democratic National Committee and previous lucrative ops during her turn as Secretary of State, like the Uranium One deal, the Skolkovo military tech transfer op, and then the Russia Collusion op to insure none of that would ever come to light. The whole Intel Community behemoth was neck deep in it, too, amping up the Russia prank into a four-year coup d’état. Remember, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that Hillary’s little hoax was for-real. It’s all just gotten more grotesque since Mr. Trump was ejected in the souped-up 2020 election, with sideshows such as the ongoing race-and-gender hustles, the climate con, and the Green New Deal bullshit.

Covid-19, surely released on-purpose, was, as Ed Dowd avers, a cover for global bankruptcy. Nothing else explains the astounding coordination of so many governments acting the same way against their own citizens: lockdowns, vaxx mandates, vaxx passports, and all. The icing on that poison cake, of course, is that everything the public health officialdom told you about Covid-19 was patently untrue, and dishonestly so, not via omission or plain incompetence. In fact, the virus was made in a Chinese lab with the help of Dr. Fauci and colleagues. Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine did work effectively against it. The “vaccines” were not tested properly and turned out to be harmful. And now the Covid-19 melodrama is ending in a discernable death-of-the-vaxxed and the reveal of all those aforesaid lies, while, anyway, the global bankruptcy approaches its nauseating climax.

Watching the post-election political vaudeville during the lame-duck Christmas intermezzo, one can’t escape perceiving that just about everything in the USA is now heading south toward breakdown and ruin. The on-the-ground economy craters, inflation rages at the supermarket, supply lines break, the oil and gas industries get strangled, health care goes down smoking and burning, public education folds in disgrace and failure, Wall Street ends with a bang and a whimper, and John Fetterman prepares for his place in history.

Our government’s Ukraine op is ending in disaster for that sad-sack former Russian province and, surprise-surprise, for the European Union, NATO, and us, too. We finally played the Russia card like we’re the proverbial patsy at the poker table. Our hand turns out to be a pair of deuces with the five-of-diamonds high. Russia rakes in the chips with its massive natural resources and the world’s most stable currency, soon to be backed by gold. How’d that turn out, Victoria Nuland?

The EU was already functionally bankrupt. Now it has lost its entire industrial base for a lack of fuel to run it — self-Epsteined, shall we say, on the national scale — and faces not just a return to the medieval standard-of-living but also to the competitive savagery of many small nations soon to be fighting among themselves, making bad conditions worse. So sad. Euroland was a nice place to visit at the turn of the millennium and now the lights will blink out, like seeing a fond relative expire, eyes going vacant, on her deathbed.

Western Civ is, after all, a kind of family. And now the family is disintegrating — as old families will — in a malodorous fog of receivership, vice, and imbecility. Here in the USA, it’s hard to have faith in the supposed political opposition, the Republican Party. Not with Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy still riding herd. They preside over their own coterie of extravagant grift and disgusting privilege. Don’t be shocked… shocked… if they just stand by while America collapses at the hands of “Joe Biden.” If there is any saving of this nation these two must be defenestrated, and, anyway, saving the nation from penury, depravity, and senility looks increasingly improbable, at least in the form of our old federal republic.

The macro trend is quite clear, as laid out in The Long Emergency: what’s coming is the opposite of global government; rather, national governments become increasingly impotent and illegitimate, and smaller regions by necessity must retreat into autarky to keep anything going. For us that means Washington DC sinks into irrelevance while the states, or perhaps mere parts of the states, have to take charge of their own affairs.

That process might have been jump-started by the Elon Musk revolution at Twitter. It will be a lot harder for the Mind-Fuckery Industrial Complex to operate with this key player in revolt. Lies will be contested now on the grand scale in ways that were formerly subverted. Things blurry will come into focus. Fresh air will blow in on chill winter winds. New ops against the people, such as the threatened central bank digital dollar, will be laughed off the stage. Some lights go out, but others get turned on.

Public Inquiry into the approval process for covid-19 vaccines
Petition to the UK Government to investigate the MHRA.

We want the Government to launch a Public Inquiry to investigate the MHRA's process for approving covid-19 vaccines.

This should consider all aspects of the approval process, including how approval was expedited and the drivers for expedition, and any potential conflicts of interests.

The MHRA are primarily funded by fees from the pharmaceutical industry.

1. Censoring the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

2. Quietly Seizing Hunter’s Laptop from Repair Shop

3. Seizing and Returning Hunter’s Second Laptop

4. Downplaying or Ignoring Intelligence Threats to Provide Plausible Deniability

5. Running Sham Investigations and Burying Information

6. Stepping Up When Hunter’s Gun Goes Missing

7. Stepping In When Ashley Biden’s Diary Shows Up

8. Keeping the Ducks in a Row and Quiet

The daughter of Hugh Auchincloss – selected to be Anthony Fauci’s temporary successor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – works for a leading Food and Drug Administration consulting firm advising American pharmaceutical companies.

Adding to the conflict of interest, she has authored strategy papers for the company focused on COVID-19 regulations.

Hugh Auchincloss has been Fauci’s number two at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency since 2006, giving him considerable influence over the federal agency’s vaccine policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and push to collaborate more with the Chinese Communist Party on research.

He is also the aide Fauci sent panicked emails to about the gain of function research occurring in Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. In a recent deposition, Fauci also identified Auchincloss as responsible for reversing a ban on federal funds supporting gain of function research in the case of Ralph Baric – who shared his deadly research tactics with scientists in Wuhan.

The various university ranking systems (Times Higher Education, QS, U.S. News, etc.) are designed to measure an educational institution’s alignment to empire. Universities that receive the most government and corporate grants and whose professors dominate their field with the most publications, are rewarded with the best rankings.

But what if one lives in a society where the government and corporate sector (and even academic publishing) are obviously corrupt and need to be overthrown? Then either you play along or kiss your top university ranking goodbye.

Universities need to be careful what they wish for. Being a top-ranked German University in 1935 looks a whole lot different by 1945. That’s the dilemma that universities throughout the developed world face right now. They want to be top-ranked, but alignment with empire makes them complicit in the iatrogenocide. As Naomi Wolf discovered recently, Yale currently takes more money from the genocidal U.S. Department of Health and Human Services than it takes from student tuition.

If the developed world survives the current self-inflicted calamity, then the vast majority of these elite universities are going to owe reparations for their role in the iatrogenocide — and their leadership may be prosecuted at Nuremberg II.

So when we overthrow the government, we will need to undo all of this. We need a wall to separate universities from the state in the same way that we separate church and state...

But the problem is bigger than rankings — the problem is the values we hold as a society. Young people and parents were led to believe that universities that aligned themselves with empire were “good”. Yet nearly everything that mainstream society believes about merit and worth is really about proximity to power. Now that power itself is dedicated to iatrogenocide, these values are revealed as rotten and putrid.

What would it take to house every single homeless person in San Francisco? That question has long vexed politicians, advocates for the unhoused and ordinary citizens.

But new analysis paints a gloomy picture of the costs.

Ending unsheltered homelessness would require vast increases in housing, shelter and prevention services, according to the report from the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and homelessness consultancy firm Focus Strategies.

That would cost the city another $1.45 billion over three years. And it would take over $410 million each year after that to keep the programs running.

Death of 28-year-old physical therapist after Moderna shot disappears from VAERS
Haley Link Brinkmeyer got the Moderna vaccine in January of 2021 and died less than 48 hours later; The report of her death has been removed from VAERS

https://crossroadsreport.substack.com/p/death-of-28-year-old-physical-therapist

Death of 28-year-old physical therapist after Moderna shot disappears from VAERS
Haley Link Brinkmeyer got the Moderna vaccine in January of 2021 and died less than 48 hours later; The report of her death has been removed from VAERS

The criminals murdering millions are trying to hide their crime, but their crime is spectacularly obvious to everyone who has been paying attention.

NIH-Funded "Food Pyramid" Rates Lucky Charms Healthier Than Steak
40% of Americans are obese, 71.6% of adults over 20 are overweight, and for the first time in decades, life expectancy is falling due to chronic illness. wtf is going on?

The Montrose funeral home owner who pleaded guilty to a charge related to selling body parts was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a judge today. Megan Hess received the maximum sentence. Her mother, Shirley Koch, was sentenced to 15 years for her role.

COVID Data: Here today, gone tomorrow

T Coddington
22 hr ago

I happened to catch someone on Twitter today who highlighted the fact that in the most recent report from New South Wales Australia, all of the recent hospitalizations, ICU patients, and deaths had been vaccinated:




Source: https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/covid-19/Documents/weekly-covid-overview-20221231.pdf

While NSW is a very heavily vaccinated area, and by now it would be of no surprise that the majority of COVID patients and deaths to be among the vaccinated, it is a bit crazy that we have a row of 0’s for the “No Dose” row (Ooops- correction, not a row of 0’s. Zero hospitalizations. zero ICU patients, 6 deaths. Curious, to say the least, but forgive my oversight in original sentence). Not to worry, the NSW health authorities have a solution, namely (from the same document):

Did the TOGETHER Trial Lie to Reuters About FTX Funding?

Alexandros Marinos
22 hr ago

Just as the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX scandal was blowing up, I realized that FTX had funded the TOGETHER Trial, which I’ve been covering here for almost a year. What are the odds?

As far as I know, this tweet is the first anyone mentioned the connection:



... Long Story Short
It is incredible when timelines collide: somehow, the TOGETHER Trial story we’ve been focusing on in this Substack intersects with a global financial fraud such as FTX.

In short, yes, FTX did fund TOGETHER, and the TOGETHER team falsely claimed that they received no funds from FTX before May 2022. The principal investigators, with their statement to Reuters, are obscuring a $3.25m grant by FTX that must have been provided to them before May 2022, given that FTX was listed as a funder on the TOGETHER website since March 3, 2022 at the latest. We can speculate why they did that, but the bottom line is that TOGETHER is once more obscuring the public record.

On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb - a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers - saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.

The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.

It came not from an “anti-vaxxer” like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who had briefly followed Gottlieb as the head of the Food & Drug Administration. Further, the tweet actually encouraged people who did not have natural immunity to “Get vaccinated!”

No matter.

By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year. ...

Through Jira, an internal system Twitter used for managing complaints, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to the Twitter “Strategic Response” team. That group was responsible for handling concerns from the company’s most important employees and users.

“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote - failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots.

A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules.

Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it. It remains tagged even though several large studies have confirmed the truth of Giroir’s words.

Penn Biden Center Funded With $54.6 Million From Anonymous Chinese Donors
by Jen SnowJanuary 11, 2023

https://creativedestructionmedia.com/news/politics/2023/01/11/penn-biden-center-funded-with-54-6-million-from-anonymous-chinese-donors/

Penn Biden Center Funded With $54.6 Million From Anonymous Chinese Donors
by Jen SnowJanuary 11, 2023