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Donald Trump’s top coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas: Lockdowns have been a FAILURE!

RT | November 1, 2020

Trump administration Covid-19 adviser Scott Atlas ripped public-health officials for “egregious” policy failures – only to be forced to apologize after mainstream media deflected his points by attacking him for appearing on RT.

On Saturday, the Stanford University doctor, who has emerged as President Donald Trump’s top adviser on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,” while speaking with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground show.

“The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Atlas told RT.

“The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept they were wrong – were wrong, refused to accept they were wrong, didn’t know the data, didn’t care. And it became a frenzy of stopping Covid-19 cases at all costs, and those costs are massive,” he said.

“The argument is undeniable: The lockdowns are killing people.”

Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. One study showed that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown,” he said.

“We’re creating a generation of neurotic children, forcing them to wear masks and be six feet apart from their friends, or not even have school in person.”

While Atlas’ counter-narrative comments might have been fodder for a serious discussion of public-health policy, mainstream media outlets instead spun the interview into a controversy over a Trump administration official granting an interview to a Russian state-owned outlet.

Reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta, Politico’s Ryan Lizza and NBC’s David Gura immediately pounced, ignoring the substance of his comments and breathlessly telling their followers that he spoke to an alleged Kremlin mouthpiece. “White House Covid adviser appears on outlet that is described by US intel as one of the Kremlin’s main propaganda platforms,” Washington Post national-security correspondent Greg Miller said.

The controversy was so fierce that Atlas was forced to apologize. “I recently did an interview with RT and was unaware they are a registered foreign agent,” he said Sunday on Twitter, adding that he now “regrets” doing the interview and also apologizing “to the national-security community who is working hard to defend us.”

The apology wasn’t accepted. Christian Science Monitor reporter Dan Murphy tweeted that Atlas, who he has called a “lying Trump goon,” was lying about not knowing about RT’s foreign registration. Illustrator Chris Morris mocked Atlas for supposedly not knowing what “RT” stands for. CNN analyst Sam Vinograd said the interview “raises a lot of counterintelligence red flags.”

No explanation was offered for how voicing opinions on a Russian-funded television outlet might jeopardize US national security. None was needed.

Democrats and mainstream media outlets have repeatedly squashed discussion of undesirable information or viewpoints, by alleging a nefarious Russian plot behind the report. Such tactics were used, for example, to dismiss damning information about the Hillary Clinton campaign – released by WikiLeaks in 2016 – and recent revelations about alleged influence-peddling by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s family.

Media critic Mark Dice pointed out that no objections were raised when US Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) and other Democrats appeared on RT in the past.

The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal tweeted he was “surprised it took this long for the US center-right opposition to merge Covid panic with Russia hysteria.”

MSNBC host Matt Negrin may have revealed just a hint of anti-Trump media vitriol when he responded to Atlas’ apology by saying, “Are you the dumbest motherf***er in the f***ing world?”

 

Atlas told RT he wrote about the issues discussed in the interview back in April or May, long before he joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

“I wasn’t the villain of the world when I wrote it, but when you come up and you stand next to the president of the United States – in an attempt to help the country in the biggest crisis in the world – you must be destroyed by the media in the United States. And so it’s a sad statement on America that the US is hysterical over this.”

November 1, 2020 Posted by | Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | 1 Comment

New Lockdowns Announced in UK

By Samuel May | OffGuardian | November 1, 2020

So, during ‘Prime Minister’s statement on coronavirus, 31 October 2020’, the usual trio of Johnson, Whitty and Vallance ‘did their thing’ once again, and sold us a lie.

We were shown some graph projections, made by the same people who were wrong in all their previous graph projections and which lacked any context whatsoever (like, for instance, what did last autumn’s hospital admissions look like by comparison?).

Yet these graphs were nevertheless unanimously and alarmingly clear, apparently: We’re all terribly, terribly at risk from the RONA, don’t you know, and we need a further 4 weeks of lockdown.

Johnson said:

From Thursday until the start of December, you must stay at home.

Although initially sold as ‘time-limited’, Michael Gove has already announced this will be extended if their computer models happen to show the mythical ‘R’ rating hasn’t gone down far enough.

So, consider yourselves primed.

Johnson described this latest lockdown as “less prohibitive and less restrictive” than April/March, although even the most lay of laymen will be acutely aware by now of what the true repercussions of this lockdown will be.

This lockdown will further widen the rich/poor divide, further depress the UK economy by shutting down ‘non-essential’ businesses etc., further isolate the young, needy and vulnerable and further cheapen the lives of the very elderly people whose wellbeing has endlessly and hypocritically been used to justify this evil charade.

Johnson said:

And even if I could now double [hospital] capacity overnight – and obviously I am proud that we have massively increased capacity, we do have the Nightingales, we’ve got 13,000 more nurses now than last year, we have many more doctors – but it still would not be enough, because the virus is doubling faster than we could conceivably add capacity.

So you see, anything that could possibly have been done would never have been enough. They know this. That’s probably the only reason they didn’t massively boost the NHS during the quiet summer months, despite the fact they’ve been warning of a possible resurgence for ages. You aren’t being conned here. We need to be very clear on that point. Move along now.

Oh…. and the army will be on our streets this time, testing lots and lots of people. Won’t that be nice. Johnson stated (our emphasis):

“… over the next few days and weeks, we plan a steady but massive expansion in the deployment of these quick turnaround tests.

Applying them in an ever-growing number of situations

From helping women to have their partners with them in labour wards when they’re giving birth to testing whole towns and even whole cities

The army has been brought in to work on the logistics and the programme will begin in a matter of days.

Working with local communities, local government, public health directors and organisations of all kinds to help people discover whether or not they are infectious, and then immediately to get them to self-isolate and to stop the spread”

You may remember we warned this was looming back in early October, when MP and 77th Brigade reserve officer Tobias Ellwood stood up in Parliament to request greater military involvement. It seems he was listened to. Or, at least, he popped up to ask a convenient question and plug a narrative hole at an opportune time.

Throughout this Number Ten briefing, Johnson/Vallance/Whitty seemed a bit nonchalant this time around, as they condescended to inform the unwashed masses of their fate. Or perhaps they were overcompensating, for there was a certain tenseness about their eyes, as of someone placing a powerful mousetrap behind a wardrobe…

November 1, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

“Pulled from Thin Air”: The 97 Percent “Consensus”

‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’

By – Climate Depot

Book Excerpt – Chapter 3: “Pulled from Thin Air”: The 97 Percent “Consensus” (Page 27)

A Harvard Consensus

In 2017 Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer drew parallels to today’s man-made climate change claims. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the  consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem, the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100% science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.

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Economists versus Climatologists
“You take 400 economists and put them in the room and give them exactly the same data and you will get 400 different answers as to what is going to happen in the economic future. I find that refreshing because it tells me that these guys don’t have an agenda. But if you take 400 climatologists and put them in the same  room and give them some data about a system which they understand very imperfectly, you are going to get a lot of agreement and that disturbs me. I think that’s arguing with an agenda.” —geologist Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Dubious Evidence for a Ubiquitous Number

The alleged “consensus” in climate science does not hold up to scrutiny. But what about the specific claim that 97 percent of scientists agree? MIT’s Richard Lindzen has explained the “psychological need” for the 97 percent claims. “The claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97 percent will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people,” Lindzen said in 2017.

But what is the basis for this specific number, and what exactly is this overwhelming majority of scientists supposed to be agreeing on? In 2014, UN lead author Richard Tol explained his devastating research into the 97 percent claim. One of the most cited sources for the claim was a study by Australian researcher John Cook, who analyzed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1991 and 2011. Cook and his team evaluated what positions the papers took on mankind’s influence on the climate and claimed “among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” The 97 percent number took off. This 97 percent claim was despite the fact that 66.4 percent of the studies’ abstracts “expressed no position on AGW” at all.

“The 97% estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, this estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers are supported by the data that is actually in the paper,” Tol said. “But this 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.” Tol’s research found that only sixty-four papers out of nearly twelve thousand actually supported the alleged “consensus.” Tol published his research debunking the 97 percent claim in the journal Energy Policy.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts summed up Tol’s research debunking Cook’s claims. The “97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process,” Watts wrote.

Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation had authored a critique of Cook’s claim the previous year. “The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent,” Montford found. “The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate.”

Climatologist Roy Spencer and Heartland Institute’s Joe Bast noted that even if a certain study accepts the premise of man-made global warming, that paper may not even study how CO2 impacts temperatures: The methodology is “flawed,” noted Spencer, adding, “a study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.”

In 2015, former Margaret Thatcher advisor Christopher Monckton also examined the 97 percent claim. Monckton’s analysis found that “only 41 papers—0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0% of the 4014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1%” had actually endorsed the claim that “more than half of recent global warming was anthropogenic.”

As Monckton explained, “They had themselves only marked 64 out of 11,944 of the papers as representing that view of the consensus, and that is not 97.1% that’s 0.5%…. There is no consensus.” The 97 percent claim is “fiction. ‘97 percent’ was a figure that was arrived at many years ago by the people who’ve pushed this ‘agenda,’” Monckton noted. “They then realized that they needed some sort of support for it, so they did a couple of very dopey papers.”

In 2013, climatologist David Legates from the University of Delaware and his team of researchers had also challenged Cook’s 97 percent claims. “The entire exercise was a clever sleight-of-hand trick,” Legates explained. “What is the real figure? We may never know. Scientists who disagree with the supposed consensus—that climate change is man-made and dangerous— find themselves under constant attack.”

Another survey that claimed 97 percent of scientists agreed was based not on thousands of scientists or even hundreds of scientists … or even ninety-seven scientists, but only seventy-seven. And of those seventy-seven scientists, seventy-five formed the mythical 97 percent consensus. In other words, in this instance the 97 percent of scientists wasn’t even ninety-seven scientists. This was a 2009 study published in Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master’s thesis advisor Peter Doran.

As Lawrence Solomon revealed in the National Post, The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers—in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.

The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth—out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus.

This was “a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online.” And still less than a third of those surveyed even sent in an answer! The questions, as Solomon noted, “were actually non-questions”:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

As Solomon explained, those two points do not give a complete picture of what’s at issue. They don’t even mention carbon dioxide—which, as we’ll explore at length in the next chapter, is the heart of the climate change debate. “From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming—quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate,” Solomon pointed out.

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Order Your Book Copy Now! ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’ By Marc Morano

November 1, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

Bernie’s DSA blacklists Iran media: No change with Biden win?

By Ramin Mazaheri – Press TV – November 1, 2020

PressTV’s motto is to give “voice to the voiceless” and so we have given priority to non-mainstream political groups during our coverage of the US presidential election. We have spoken with socialists, Greens, Libertarians and more, but the Democratic Socialists of America – perhaps best exemplified by failed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – has openly blacklisted Iranian media.

After repeated requests, the Chicago chapter of DSA wrote to Press TV that, “The officers of our organization have decided that it would not serve our interests to do an interview.”

This caused PressTV management to contact DSA’s headquarters in New York City to confirm if this allegedly-leftist political group was really enforcing a blacklist on the entire media of an internationally-recognized nation. As expected, no response was given, so – crucially – no denial either.

It is a disheartening policy for a group which openly promises that – if elected in greater numbers – their members will push the Democratic Party and thus the entire nation to an unprecedentedly progressive left.

Take, for example, their most prominent member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She said as recently as September, “I think, overall, we can likely push Vice-President Biden in a more progressive direction across policy issues. I think foreign policy is an enormous area where we can improve; immigration is another one.”

That begs obvious questions: How can DSA officials from the national down to the local level make US foreign policy more progressive if they refuse to talk to foreigners and their representatives? Should DSA members get elected or be appointed to public office, their members are willfully ignorant of foreign viewpoints.

Just as worrying regarding the quality of the public service they will provide, DSA cadres are being trained to use a unilateral approach when dealing with non-Americans. Lastly, how authentic and patriotic is DSA if they are not reflecting the values which the average American seems to champion, such as the freedom of the press?

While Americans are days away from voting in their election, Iran’s next presidential election is in June.

It appears critical for Iranian voters to consider that if DSA – the allegedly-leftist wing of the Democratic Party – refuses to engage in normal cooperation with friendly Iranian media, then what is the likelihood that such people are going to truly push Washington’s Iran policy in a more open and progressive direction?

So even if Democrats win next week, DSA’s blacklist raises the question: How could a Joe Biden presidency drastically alleviate the US-led sanction war on Iran?

The Democratic Socialists of America should immediately reform their wrongly-guided decision to blacklist Iranian media. Refusal to do so would be an extremely belligerent policy which only helps to lay the groundwork for ignorance, murderous sanctions, war and anti-internationalism, and by a group which claims to be “Democratic” and “Socialist.”

November 1, 2020 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , | 1 Comment