Archive for the ‘Media Control’ Category

Taliban 2.0 aren’t so different from the first regime, after all – The Conversation AU

The international community is closely monitoring the Taliban, after the group re-seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021.

There is legitimate reason for concern. The Taliban are again ruling through fear and draconian rules.

The Talibans last regime, in the mid-1990s, was marked by human rights violations, including massacres, mass detentions and rape. The regime collapsed on Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after the U.S. launched its global war on terrorism.

Even after the Taliban officially fell from power, their subsequent two decades of insurgency produced various gross human rights violations, an encompassing term under international human rights law.

When the Taliban regained control over Afghanistan last year, some outside observers speculated that an evolved version of the group might materialize. These spectators assumed that the Taliban recognized it cannot govern merely with fear and bans.

Many Afghan people still expressed widespread fear and skepticism about the Talibans return.

The Taliban have now been in power for almost five months. A clearer image of the human rights and personal freedoms situation in Afghanistan is emerging.

As political science professors specializing in conflict and violence, we find that the Talibans changes are limited to international public relations campaigns on social media and other outlets.

While promoting a moderate face to the world, with promises of living peacefully and respecting womens rights, the regime has continued to systematically violate human rights and strengthen its autocratic grip.

Theories about what experts called Taliban 2.0 continued after the group assumed control over Afghanistan.

Representatives from countries such as Turkey and Qatar encouraged the international community to engage with the Taliban.

While international donors have frozen about $5 billion in foreign aid to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, some Western countries, including the U.S., have announced increases in aid to address the countrys humanitarian crisis.

The Taliban have undertaken a systematic media crackdown to achieve their contradictory goals of presenting a softer face to the international community while violating Afghans rights.

The group is forcing media to follow two of the Talibans dogmatic and moral regulatory bodies guidelines.

The Taliban also announced the 11 journalism rules, which include forbidding journalists from publishing or broadcasting stories that are contrary to Islam or insult national figures.

About 40% of the countrys media sources have shut down, 6,400 journalists lost their jobs, including 84% of female journalists. Violence against media and journalists has again become widespread.

Many other journalists have left the country.

The media crackdown has a practical reason: limiting the flow of information about the regimes continued rights violations.

United Nations human rights experts say they have received credible reports of the Taliban killing civilians, as well as hundreds of former Afghanistan security personnel across the country.

The Taliban have shown gruesome hangings of dead bodies and stoning of people to death.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated under the Taliban. Approximately 23 million Afghans are facing hunger, including 3.2 million children who are suffering from severe malnutrition.

The Taliban leadership denies any responsibility for alleviating the looming humanitarian crisis.

In November 2021, Taliban Prime Minister Mullah Hasan rejected the regimes responsibility for food insecurity in Afghanistan and asked people to cry to God to alleviate famine and drought.

Anas Haqqani, a senior member of the Taliban negotiation team in Doha, also downplayed the seriousness of the looming hunger crisis by rhetorically asking a BBC reporter if she had ever witnessed someone dying of hunger.

The Talibans conduct toward girls and women also reveals a return to previous ways.

The Taliban has banned women from traveling more than 72 kilometers from home without a male relative.

In early December, the Taliban released a decree saying a woman is a noble and free human being and should not be forced into a marriage. The international community largely welcomed the announcement.

However, a closer look at the decree reveals that the Taliban formalizes the regimes right to determine whether a woman actually consents to a union.

The Taliban have systematically reinstated old restrictions on girls education and female employment.

While most primary girls schools are closed across the country, secondary and tertiary education remains completely banned for girls.

In 2017, U.N. Childrens Fund figures showed that 3.7 million Afghan children were out of school, 60% of them girls. This percentage is now likely much greater with the Talibans ban on girls education.

This differs from the Talibans recent public messaging on girls and womens right to education and work.

[The Conversations Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]

To the domestic audience, the regimes messages are vague. Leaders condition reopening girls education, for example, to unclear economic and moral conditions. Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar said recently that once economic challenges are resolved, we will provide education for all those who want to pursue their studies.

The Taliban have also banned most female government workers from returning to their jobs, resulting in a workforce restriction that would result in economic losses totaling $1 billion.

The only indication of a new Taliban is a much more sophisticated and strategic public relations approach for masking ongoing human rights violations.

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Taliban 2.0 aren't so different from the first regime, after all - The Conversation AU

InvestmentPitch Media Video Discusses Reliq Health, a Rapidly Growing Global Telemedicine Company, and its Partnership with Cognizant to Expand Care…

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - January 6, 2022) - Reliq Health Technologies (TSXV: RHT) (OTC Pink: RQHTF) (WKN: A2AJTB), a rapidly growing global telemedicine company developing innovative Virtual Care solutions for the multibillion-dollar Healthcare market, has partnered with Cognizant to expand care management capabilities to large scale clients. Cognizant, a multinational information technology company with a capitalization of close to US$50 billion, is part of the NASDAQ-100, where it trades under the symbol CTSH.

For more information, please view the InvestmentPitch Media "video" which discusses this news, along with some video comments by Reliq Health's CEO Dr. Lisa Crossley. If this links is not enabled, please visit http://www.InvestmentPitch.com and enter "Reliq" in the search box.

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Cognizant currently provides services to more than 300 health systems and approximately 347,000 care providers, who together provide care to more than 200 million lives globally. Reliq plans to leverage Cognizant's Care Management resources for future deployments of its iUGO Care software to large scale clients thereby expanding Reliq's capabilities and reach, allowing Reliq to provide its iUGO Care solution to managed care organizations, large health systems and health insurance providers.

Based in Hamilton, Ontario, with offices in Florida and Texas, Reliq's iUGO Care solutions improve health outcomes, allow clinicians to provide high quality care to patients anytime, anywhere, while reducing the cost to the healthcare system, benefiting patients, clinicians and payers.

Reliq's iUGO Care and iUGO Home products are a critical component of a fully connected healthcare system. Reliq's remote patient monitoring platform, iUGO Care, is currently used by a diverse array of healthcare organizations in the US, including primary care practices, specialist practices, home care agencies, skilled nursing facilities, HIV clinics and hospice care agencies. The provision of real-time access to remote patient monitoring data allows for timely interventions by the care team to prevent costly hospital readmissions and emergency room visits.

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The shares are trading at $1.23. For more information, please visit the company's website, http://www.ReliqHealth.com or email IR@ReliqHealth.com. Investor Relations in the United States is handled by Ben Shamsian of Lytham Partners, who can be reached at 649-829-9701 or by email at shamsian@LythamPartners.com.

About InvestmentPitch Media

Investmentpitch Media leverages the power of video, which together with its extensive distribution, positions a company's story ahead of the 1,000's of companies seeking awareness and funding from the financial community. The company specializes in producing short videos based on significant news releases, research reports and other content of interest to investors.

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What Will 2022 Bring in the Way of Misinformation on Social Media? 3 Experts Weigh In – Scientific American

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media, given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines.

To get a sense of what 2022 could hold, we asked three researchers about the evolution of misinformation on social media.

Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University

While misinformation has always existed in media think of theGreat Moon Hoax of 1835that claimed life was discovered on the moon the advent of social media has significantly increased the scope, spread and reach of misinformation. Social media platforms have morphed intopublic information utilitiesthat control how most people view the world, which makes misinformation they facilitate a fundamental problem for society.

There are two primary challenges in addressing misinformation. The first is the dearth of regulatory mechanisms that address it.Mandating transparency and giving users greater access to and control over their datamight go a long way in addressing the challenges of misinformation. But theres also a need for independent audits, including tools that assess social media algorithms. These can establish how the social media platformschoices in curating news feeds and presenting contentaffect how people see information.

The second challenge is that racial and gender biases in algorithms used by social media platforms exacerbate the misinformation problem. While social media companies have introduced mechanisms tohighlight authoritative sources of information, solutions such as labeling posts as misinformation dont solve racial and gender biases in accessing information. Highlighting relevant sources of, for example, health information may only help users withgreater health literacyand not people with low health literacy, who tend to be disproportionately minorities.

Another problem is the need to look systematically at where users are finding misinformation. TikTok, for example,has largely escaped government scrutiny. Whats more,misinformation targeting minorities, particularly Spanish-language content, may be far worse than misinformation targeting majority communities.

I believe the lack of independent audits, lack of transparency in fact checking and the racial and gender biases underlying algorithms used by social media platforms suggest that the need for regulatory action in 2022 is urgent and immediate.

Dam Hee Kim, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Arizona

Fake news is hardly a new phenomenon, yet its costs have reached another level in recent years. Misinformation concerning COVID-19 has cost countless lives all over the world. False and misleading information about electionscan shake the foundation of democracy, for instance, by making citizenslose confidence in the political system. Research I conducted with S Mo Jones-Jang and Kate Kenski on misinformation during elections,some publishedand some in progress, has turned up three key findings.

The first is that the use of social media, originally designed to connect people, can facilitate social disconnection. Social media has becomerife with misinformation. This leads citizens who consume news on social media to become cynical not only toward established institutions such as politicians and the media, but also toward fellow voters.

Second, politicians, the media and voters have become scapegoats for the harms of fake news. Few of them actually produce misinformation. Most misinformation is produced byforeign entitiesandpolitical fringe groupswho create fake news for financial or ideological purposes. Yet citizens who consume misinformation on social media tend to blame politicians, the media and other voters.

The third finding is that people who care about being properly informed arenot immune to misinformation. People who prefer to process, structure and understand information in a coherent and meaningful way become more politically cynical after being exposed to perceived fake news than people who are less politically sophisticated. These critical thinkers become frustrated by having to process so much false and misleading information. This is troubling because democracy depends on the participation of engaged and thoughtful citizens.

Looking ahead to 2022, its important to address this cynicism. There has been much talk aboutmedia literacy interventions, primarily to help the less politically sophisticated. In addition, its important to find ways to explain the status of fake news on social media, specifically who produces fake news, why some entities and groups produce it, and which Americans fall for it. This could help keep people from growing more politically cynical.

Rather than blaming each other for the harms of fake news produced by foreign entities and fringe groups, people need to find a way to restore confidence in each other. Blunting the effects of misinformation will help with the larger goal of overcoming societal divisions.

Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information, UMass Amherst

I expect the idea of misinformation will shift into an idea of propaganda in 2022, as suggested by sociologist and media scholar Francesca Tripodi in herforthcoming book, The Propagandists Playbook. Most misinformation is not the result of innocent misunderstanding. Its the product of specific campaigns to advance a political or ideological agenda.

Once you understand that Facebook and other platforms are the battlegrounds on which contemporary political campaigns are fought, you can let go of the idea that all you need are facts to correct peoples misapprehensions. Whats going on is a more complex mix of persuasion,tribal affiliationandsignaling, which plays out in venues from social media to search results.

As the 2022 elections heat up, I expect platforms like Facebook will reach a breaking point on misinformation because certain lies have become political speech central to party affiliation. How do social media platforms manage when false speech is also political speech?

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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What Will 2022 Bring in the Way of Misinformation on Social Media? 3 Experts Weigh In - Scientific American

Emergency Management Director has seen Calhoun County through oil spill, bad weather, and COVID-19 – Concentrate

Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Calhoun County series.

Durk Dunham says when he was younger he couldnt wrap his head around the idea of retirement. He also never thought hed live to be 50. But he did live and he has retired -- almost.

Dunham retired Dec. 16 as director of Calhoun Countys Emergency Management Department after 14 years with the county.

He originally began working with the Countys Emergency Management department as a volunteer and since he is not quite ready to completely step away from the workaday world, he has agreed to once again serve in a volunteer capacity as one of three of the countys Deputy Emergency Management Directors. He also will work part-time with a major local company in their security area.He first volunteered while holding down his day job at Olivet College as Director of Admissions and Financial Aid and later as interim Vice President in the 1990s and serving as a firefighter with the city of Marshall.

The college was going through some major transitions at the time he was interim Vice President of Enrollment Management. He agreed to take the position with the understanding that once things had stabilized, he would go back to being Director of Admissions because he loved that job and the students he got to work with.Director of Calhoun Countys Emergency Management Department Durk Dunham retied in December.My intention was to go back to being director of admissions, Dunham says. During the course of replacing three vice presidents and a president in a three-year span I decided to leave. Lets just say I was opposed to what the new president stood for and who he was as a human being. I could either stay there and suck it up or leave with my morals and integrity intact and thats what I did with the severance package I took in 1993.His departure marked the end of a long history with Olivet College that began while he was a student there. He graduated with a Bachelors degree in Psychology and would go on to work at a psychiatric hospital in Lansing, the former General Motors plant in Kalamazoo, at radio stations in Battle Creek, and the college.Throughout these job changes, the one constant was his volunteer service with the County. That did not go unnoticed by former Calhoun County Sheriff Al Bynum. The two were friends as well as work colleagues. He asked Dunham to become the Director of Emergency Management. In making the job offer, Dunham says Bynum told him, Weve got some issues here and I want you to take care of them.It was a time when cell phones had not yet solidified their place as a necessity in peoples everyday lives and Dunham relied on police and fire radio and pagers to stay on top of potential emergency situations that would require emergency preparedness planning.He was the only paid member of the Emergency Management Department and was supported by three volunteers who are sworn Sheriffs deputies. Dunham says these volunteers play an absolutely crucial role alongside him. He says he would have liked to have had a part-time administrative assistant, but there was no funding for such a position.This is a tough job and there is a mountain of paperwork and federal, state, and local laws and regulations that go a mile deep, Dunham says. The requirements of this position are really formidable.Prior to 9-11, weather-related events were recognized by the Emergency Management department as among the highest risks in the County because they impacted every resident.Before 9-11, we chased weather. There were required components to this position, and things we had to do, but it wasnt anything that was taxing. After 9-11 hit everything changed, Dunham says. If I had to put it on a sliding scale and start with 9-11, thats when phone calls to our department gradually started to increase every year going forward. Because of more stipulations and regulations that have followed since 9-11, our workload has risen steadily. Its a completely different operation now. Its much, much more complex because society has become more complicated and more difficult.Director of Calhoun Countys Emergency Management Department Durk Dunham and the volunteers in his department have dealt with everything from bad weatther to the Enbridge oil spill to COVID-19.The complexities and complications became even more challenging with the arrival of COVID-19 and the ensuing shutdowns throughout the County in March, 2020. Dunham was among city and county leadership who are part of the Joint Information Center that was formed in response to the pandemic. The JIC began hosting weekly virtual meetings to disseminate information about the virus and its ensuing variants, the number of COVID-related infections and deaths, and how key stakeholders were supporting efforts to manage the pandemic and take care of the needs of all residents. Dunham put his radio voice to use as the host for some of the more recent Joint Information Center meetings.

Prior to COVID, Dunham says the top major emergencies for the county were the Enbridge oil spill in July 2010 and a severe storm over the 2011 Memorial Day weekend.The Enbridge oil spill was the largest inland oil spill in the history of the United States, Dunham says. Ninety percent of Emergency Managers across the nation would never go through a crisis of that magnitude.Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, Enbridge, and the Michigan State Police, worked alongside Dunham and other local leaders to manage the spill and the cleanup.There were textbooks and training materials written from the data gathered from that oil spill. People documented it very, very carefully, Dunham says. We had some of the worlds smartest scientists visiting this county after the oil spill happened and they used what they learned here to create a plan for the mitigation of future oil spills. We knew there was going to be an ending, and that it wouldnt go on forever, and that we were going to clean the river up.Fortuitously, Dunham says an emergency incident like the oil spill was included in the countys Hazard Mitigation Plan, which defines the 10 most likely risk-oriented disasters in Calhoun County.Though the oil spill and the destructive 2011 Memorial Weekend storm taxed the Emergency Management departments resources, Dunham says the pandemic has been the greatest challenge for him and his volunteer staff to manage.On of the more challenging events of Durk Dunham's career as director of Calhoun Countys Emergency Management Department was dealing the Enbridge oil spill of 2011.With the pandemic, we dont have an end in sight, he says. When the Delta variant emerged that was an eye-opener for anyone not involved in emergency management. Part of our challenge is to try to keep people in a positive frame of mind while trying to stay ahead of the virus and its variants. The pandemic has been a heavy lift.In addition to providing people with the most accurate and up-to-date information about COVID and its variants and addressing other emergencies impacting the county and its residents, Dunham has some standard messaging that he has consistently been sharing. He says a very huge part of his job is to communicate countywide about family emergency and disaster preparedness.A big part of my job responsibility is about keeping our residents, their kids, and their friends as safe as possible, he says. I ask questions like, Do you have a flashlight and a case of water in the basement? What I am putting out there has never been more important at this time in the history of our country. People need to prepare for natural disasters and any situation that would affect their safety or the safety of family and friends. Because of our internet, there are resources like FEMA.gov that are fingertips away to tell you how to prepare.He says his message to residents is, Each individual in this county has to take on the personal responsibility to mitigate risk for themselves, friends, loved ones, and pets. Its a responsibility I would love people to take on thats as important as brushing their teeth.He will continue to highlight the importance of having a plan in place for emergencies as he slides into the next phase of his life.That he will miss the people he works with on a daily basis, is a given. He calls them special human beings.But he knew it was time to step down when a sense of calm set in after he had made his decision.I remember through the years as an upper-level manager that I would start to see people retire and one of the things they used to say to me with this big, calm look on their faces was that You will know when its time and you will feel it inside. It was a very calming feeling that said to me its time. Im relaxed and ready and super-excited about what comes next.

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Emergency Management Director has seen Calhoun County through oil spill, bad weather, and COVID-19 - Concentrate

They ‘let her rip’, and she ripped; government collapses in Australia – Michael West News

Image by Alex Anstey

Its a dang good thing were winning the cricket because the government has collapsed. Scott Morrisons Team Australia has left the health system to fail; the virus is out of control, tracking and testing has crashed, and Liberal Party corporate mates Harvey Norman and Chemist Warehouse are profiteering. Michael West looks at the price of Scomos personal responsibility.

They let it rip. And it ripped. Three Covid infections in Bali yesterday, 35,000 in NSW. Nursing homes are locking down so Australias elderly can once again die in peace, untroubled by the distraction of having their loved ones around them. Restaurants, a slew of businesses going belly up. Hospitals in such crisis that Covid-positive nurses are being called back to work.

Its ripped alright. Australia. Government, broken. Its a good thing there are things the government doesnt control because they are going well. The Ashes, the share market, iron ore prices. The stuff they do control however, but for which they are apparently not responsible, things like the health system, defence spending, nursing homes, quarantine; falling apart.

The single most important duty of government is to keep the people safe. Theyve failed.

They do control the media though, or most of it at least, and thats still going well for them. Somebody from the ABC was complaining that Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt, Dom Perrottet and a few of the personal responsibility crew knocked back an offer from 7.30 Report to go on tele to explain themselves. Naturally they refused.

Why would Scomo front Laura Tingle anyway when he can hop on the JobKeeper subsidised Seven Sunrise at do some public relations and marketing?

Day-in-day-out, he can rely on the corporate media at the government subsidised News Corporation, Sky News, Seven and Nine Entertainment to create the illusion everything is somebody elses fault.

It was only yesterday that Rupert Murdochs courtiers at The Australian were claiming free Covid tests are wrong. Nine media timidly accepted too that its big advertiser Harvey Norman, yet to pay back its JobKeeper despite record profits, was entitled to make a profit from selling Covid tests.

Then Morrisons black arts department in PMO chucked a 180 and suddenly it was PM to the rescue a bold red non-exclusive Exclusive about our ScoMo, genuflecting about the white knight riding to the rescue.

Chronic rapid test shortage to continue for days as PM offers states more free kits, splashed The Age and SMH about the PMs new plan.

Good thing they did not elect to do journalism and tell the truth; that the government is out of its depth, sinking the tumultuous seas of its own incompetence and crony capitalism, and the real plan is just to do a Donald Trump and keep the PR coming via its subsidised and compromised corporate media outlets.

Checking in on what our white knights up to, we strayed unwittingly this morning onto the website of the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC).

The National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC) website and social media channels are now live, it declared. Alas, no they werent. Page not Found, was the search result. Quite symbolic really because what we are dealing with here is Government not Found.

Like most Coalition plans, the NCCC was secretive and didnt work out. Despite the grand ambitions and the curtseying media which accompanied its inception, the commission was quietly disbanded a few months later and after some lavish fees for the assorted fossil fuel directors and Liberal Party acolytes.

Thank heavens for independent media and independent politicians. This from Crikey: Last July the commission was granted a new mandate that allowed much of its work to be deemed cabinet in confidence meaning it could operate largely behind closed doors. This was challenged by independent Senator Rex Patrick.

The commission spent more than $1 million on market research, none of which has been released publicly. About $541,000 of that went to former Liberal Party pollster Jim Reed another $500,000 went to Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for management advisory services. BCG was also hired by the government to advise it on gas modelling. PricewaterhouseCoopers was also given $79,200 for management advisory services.

Plus cest la mme chose, as they say in France, where incidentally a new mutant strain of the virus has just bobbed up, reportedly originating in Cameroon. We dont know what this Ihu variant will bring but its a fair bet the government here will ignore the scientific and medical advice and the empirical evidence of how best to handle it.

It is also a fair bet that the looming election campaign will be more ludicrous than any before. There are countless examples but this weeks Murdoch oped claiming rapid test *should* be free, then the exclusive the very next day saying how great it was that the PM was providing free kits is a classic of the captured media genre.

This is not journalism, it is not media in any traditional sense, it is a foreign media company given to warmongering and running daily propaganda for the Coalition.

What the Coalition really needs is a good enemy. It is shaping as a Covid election otherwise, and even with the support of its media allies and a $16bn war-chest of publicly funded bribes to fork out to marginal seats, this will be a challenge because everybody now has a personal Covid experience and only the most strident of Tories will contend with any conviction that the government is competent.

It is fair to say that governing in this pandemic is no cakewalk. Mistakes will inevitably be made, and both public health and economic measures change according to changing circumstances. The problem for Australia is more systemic. This is a government which ignores sound, scientific advice on everything from climate and energy to health.

It is a government of business lobby marionettes, a government which listens to those who give the Coalition money. How else could it ignore medical advice on the Pandemic, or allow 50 new fossil fuel projects to be on the boil? How else could it blow up $40bn in JobKeeper hand-outs to Italian fashion houses and other foreign multinationals as well as large local corporations and other entities with record incomes.

So to the inevitable distractions. The China rhetoric will intensify. Comically, The Australian ran this during the week: Nuclear submarine pact has Beijing rattled. The governments outhouse PR operatives in the Murdoch media love a war and the China-threat stories are daily fodder. So much so that surveys find millions of Australians actually fear a Chinese invasion.

To address the actual facts though, there is no submarines deal. There is some sort of secret agreement with the US and Britain to buy submarine technology under the AUKUS treaty.

The claim that China is shaking in its boots thanks to Australias deal to get some subs sometime in the next 20 years will be a bit late for the Election in May but that wont stop the propagandists concocting an immediate threat and decisive action by the Morrison government.

If there was a deal we would probably know what sort of subs there were by now, US or UK technology, old or new. There would be a cost, which at this point is only an estimate of $90bn.

For its part, China has 60 or 70 submarines itself. It exports the things to at least four other nations. The very notion that Australia ought to go to war with China over Taiwan, or for that matter any other reason than an invasion of Australia which is a bizarre notion in itself is simply ridiculous. We would be shellacked in quick order, despatched like the English batting line-up, even with our entire GDP spent on weaponry.

If it were not so tragic it would be funny. Here is a media machine, arrant apologists for Donald Trump, which brought us the Wuhan lab theory, a Chinese conspiracy to spread the pandemic, then the Chinese military threat daily.

It can only be a matter of time before they join the dots between the shortage of RAT tests and Chinese profiteering. Meanwhile, there would be no profiteering if there was a competent government which reacted to independent, rational advice rather than whispers from the business lobby.

There is no public appetite for more lockdowns and the latest variant of the virus is less dangerous. Yet people will die as a result of the collapse of government and the failure of our elected leaders to take proper advice. Its not hard, just a matter of listening to people who know what they are talking about, seeing how other countries are managing public health, acting decisively and ignoring the siren calls of business lobbyists.

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They 'let her rip', and she ripped; government collapses in Australia - Michael West News