The Modelling-paper Mafiosi
The Pandemic Modellers Have a Conflict of Interest Problem from Rosemary Frei on Vimeo.
By Rosemary Frei, MSc | February 11, 2021
John Edmunds is on top of the world. He’s one of the modelling-paper mafiosi. The London, U.K., professor is a key government advisor on COVID-19-related policies.
Edmunds also was a co-author of one of the primary modelling papers that have been used to convince the masses that vigilance against Variant of Concern (VOC) B.1.1.7 should be their top priority.
And Edmunds co-wrote an influential January 21, 2021 report that concluded:
There is a realistic possibility that VOC B.1.1.7 is associated with an increased risk of death compared to non-VOC viruses.”
In addition, he speaks often to reporters about the deadliness of the new variant. Edmunds tells them, for example, that a “disaster” would ensue if lockdowns are eased too soon, because what first must be done is to “vaccinate much, much, much more widely than the elderly.”
FOLLOW THE FUNDS
Edmunds also happens to be the spouse of someone who, at least until April 2020, was an employee of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and held shares in the company. (Edmunds doesn’t disclose this in any of his media interviews that I’ve read and watched. He also doesn’t disclose his own stock holdings.)
According to an April 2020 Daily Telegraph article, Edmunds’s wife is Jeanne Pimenta and she works for GSK. The Daily Telegraph article states Edmunds asserted his partner had recently resigned from GSK. So it’s unclear whether Pimenta currently works there or not.
I did a little digging and found that the only Jeanne Pimenta LinkedIn profile indicates she’s currently director of epidemiology at GSK, while Jeanne Pimenta’s ResearchGate profile says she’s an epidemiologist at BioMarin Pharmaceutical. (I’ll have a bit more about Edmunds being married to a present or former Glaxo employee later in this article.)
In any case, GSK’s financial success is skyrocketing. On February 3 the company announced it’s collaborating with mRNA-vaccine company CureVac to spend 150 million Euros — approx $180 million — to make vaccines for the new variants. That effectively gives them first-entrant advantage in vaccines for the new variants. And that same Feb. 3 news release touts the new-variant vaccines as also able to serve as ‘booster’ shots after the initial rounds of vaccination.
In addition, GSK joined forces with CureVac to pump out, later this year, 100 million doses of CureVac’s ‘first-generation’ COVID-19 vaccine called ‘CvnCoV.’
Not only that: this fall GSK together with another international pharmaceutical firm, Sanofi, are scheduled to start producing what could turn out to be up to one billion doses of their COVID-19 vaccine annually. GSK’s understated Feb. 3 announcement of its Q4 2020 financial results said it will “continue to expect meaningful improvement in revenues and margins” because they are “building a high-value biopharma pipeline.”
Note that GSK and other pharma companies like Moderna and Pfizer are not responsible for damage and compensation payments to people seriously injured and killed by COVID-19 vaccines. Governments will pay instead – that is, if those injured and killed and their loved ones are able to beat the long odds and get any compensation at all.
And a remarkable February 8, 2021, investigative report in the German news outlet Welt Am Sonntag (which translates to World on Sunday) reveals another impetus for the wildly inaccurate modelling governments use to keep populations in a state of fear and control.
The German article shows that in March 2020 government officials enlisted [emphasis added]:
leading scientists from several research institutes and universities. Together, they were to produce a [mathematical-modelling] paper that would serve as legitimization for further tough political measures.”
These scientists obediently wrote a modelling paper tailored to the government’s instructions. The then-secret paper asserted that if lockdown measures were lifted immediately, up to one million Germans would die from COVID-19, some “agonizingly at home, gasping for breath,” after being turned away from overflowing hospitals.
EDMUNDS IS DEEPLY INVESTED IN THE VACCINE WORLD
There’s still more to the web of money and influence surrounding Edmunds and other modelling-paper mafiosi, including Neil Ferguson (information on Ferguson is in the section below titled More Modelling Mafiosi).
The first new-variant modelling paper Edmunds co-wrote, which I mention in the second paragraph of this article, was posted on December 23, 2020. Edmunds co-authored it with his fellow members of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). People in the centre’s COVID-19 Working Group also contributed.
The modelling paper was posted on the e-journal Medrχiv, which publishes only non-peer-reviewed papers. The journal is the creation of an organization headed by Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. I discuss Medrχiv and the Zuckerberg connection in my Feb. 3 article on the baselessness for the modelling papers that claim the new variants are very dangerous.
Edmunds also is dean of the LSHTM’s Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health. I contacted the institution’s media-relations department to request an interview with one of the Dec. 23, 2020, modelling paper’s authors. I didn’t receive a response.
In a Feb. 2017 video interview, Edmunds enthused that the LSHTM specializes in every aspect of vaccine development, from basic science to large-scale clinical trials. In the video he also touts using mathematical modelling as a good way to show that vaccines protect individuals and society. (And among other things he describes his group’s efforts in giving children flu vaccines and — in conjunction with Public Health England — promoting human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccines for girls and boys.)
In addition, Edmunds is a key member of the UK Vaccine Network (which until recently was known as the UK Vaccines Network – the URL for the organization has ‘UK Vaccines Network‘ in it).
And he’s a member of the U.K. government’s Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which provides Covid-measure advice — much of it related to the push for an unprecedently forceful push for mass vaccination — to U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet.
On top of that, Edmunds is a member of the U.K. government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG). It works hand in hand with SAGE, and it also heavily promotes vaccination.
And as mentioned earlier, Edmunds is married to a current or former GSK employee. A 2015 article that Edmunds co-authored states under ‘Competing interests’ for Edmunds that “My partner works for GSK.” Similarly, on the NERVTAG website’s conflict-disclosure pages – which for some reason haven’t been updated since Oct. 2017 – it reveals that Edmunds’s spouse works for GSK.
As a quick other note, the ‘Author Contributions and Acknowledgements’ section of the PDF of the December 23 modelling analysis of B.1.1.7 (pages 15 and 16) shows that almost all of the paper’s authors and members of the modelling centre’s COVID-19 Working Group receive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and/or Wellcome Trust. (By the way, a search for Wellcome Trust yields the Wellcome website.)
And there’s more to the Edmunds story. Among other of my finds: he’s also on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Coalition for Epidemic Innovations (CEPI). CEPI was created primarily by the BMGF, the World Economic Forum and the major pharma company Wellcome. CEPI’s website states it was:
launched in Davos [at the meeting of the World Economic Forum in January] 2017 to develop vaccines to stop future epidemics. Our mission is to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable equitable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.”
Investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley last year wrote a must-read two-part analysis of the ties between the key individuals, institutions, companies and funders of the UK’s Covid-19 response. She mentioned that GSK is working with CEPI to develop COVID-19 vaccines. This alliance is still going strong today.
Note also that the LSHTM’s Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, which Edmunds heads, is primarily funded by the BMGF and the Gavi alliance.
Gavi promotes mass vaccination of people around the world — including by quarterbacking the COVAX program. Gavi’s biggest funders include the BMGF. Doctors Without Borders has criticized GAVI for being:
aimed more at supporting drug-industry desires to promote new products than at finding the most efficient and sustainable means for fighting the diseases of poverty.”
BMGF funding for the LSHTM’s Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health is growing very fast. For example, BMGF’s new grants to the faculty rose from $4.9 million USD in 2013-2014 (see page 14 [p. 9 in the PDF] of the LSHTM’s 2014 annual report) to $13.19 USD in 2015-2016 (see page 14 [p. 9 in the PDF] of the LSHTM’s 2016 annual report) (top new research grants to each faculty at the LSHTM stopped being reported in the annual reports after 2017). Funding from the BMGF to the LSHTM as a whole was 30.2 million pounds ($40.2 USD) in 2017-2018 (see page 9 [p. 6 in the PDF] in the school’s 2018 annual report).
By the way, the LSHTM also has a Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre. It develops, tests and commercializes vaccines. (I couldn’t find any information on where the vaccines centre’s funding comes from.)
The vaccines centre also performs affiliated activities like combating ‘vaccine hesitancy.’ The latter includes the Vaccine Confidence Project. The project’s stated purpose is, among other things:
to provide analysis and guidance for early response and engagement with the public to ensure sustained confidence in vaccines and immunisation.”
The Vaccine Confidence Project’s director is LSHTM professor Heidi Larson. For more than a decade she’s been researching how to combat vaccine hesitancy. LSHTM underpins the project, which also is a member of the WHO’s Vaccine Safety Net.
MORE MODELLING MAFIOSI
Here’s information about two other members of this club:
Public Health England (PHE) issued its first detailed report on the new variant in late December 2020 and continues to provide updates. None of their reports are peer-reviewed. One of the highest-profile co-authors of the PHE reports is PHE director Susan Hopkins. She’s also a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London.
The college receives tens of millions of dollars a year from the BMGF. See for example this grant, this one, this one and this one.
(I emailed PHE media relations to request an interview about PHE’s new-variants reports. PHE communications person Zahra Vindhani responded, “Dr. Hopkins won’t have the capacity for this in the upcoming weeks, and we aren’t able to confirm anyone else for this either.)
PHE is guided in its approach to vaccination by PHE’s “Strategic Priority 1” for combating infections diseases in 2020-2025. It is to “Optimise vaccine provision and reduce vaccine preventable diseases in England” (see p. 9 of PHE’s Infectious Disease Strategy 2020-2025).
Neil Ferguson is a co-author of the PHE reports and also of a widely quoted December 31 modelling paper on the dangerousness of B.1.1.7. He’s Acting Director of the Imperial College London-based Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium.
Ferguson’s modelling has been extremely faulty again over the years. This has been thoroughly documented.
For example, as investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley wrote in Part One of a two-part investigative report in April-May 2020, Ferguson’s modelling over-estimated by about three million-fold the death toll from the bird flu, also known as H5N1. As a result, a lot of money was made by bird-flu-vaccine manufacturers, ranging from Roche (for its now-infamous, ineffective Tamiflu) to Sanofi, and they were used widely.
Ferguson also grossly overestimated the effects of swine flu, or H1N1. As a result, millions of people were needlessly given GSK’s Pandemrix. It caused brain damage, primarily narcolepsy and cataplexy, in hundreds if not thousands of vaccine recipients, mostly children. The pharma giant was granted no fault in any damage claims. Therefore the British government paid more than 60 million pounds (approx. $80 million USD at 2017 conversion rates) to victims.
And as mentioned earlier in this article, GSK and other pharma companies are similarly protected from having to pay damages to people injured or killed by their COVID-19 vaccines.
Ferguson also is a member, together with Edmunds and others, of SAGE.
Another group he’s a member of is the highly influential NERVTAG. It’s the group that issued the January 21, 2021 warning, mentioned earlier in this article, that B.1.1.7 is deadly.
Ferguson is a NERVTAG member even though he was reported to have resigned last spring after being caught visiting with his married lover when everyone in England was supposed to only be having contact with members of their own households (based in large part on Ferguson’s modelling and his urging the government to lock the country down).
Ferguson also is a member of the UK Vaccines Network, along with Edmunds and others such as the Network chair Chris Whitty, who’s also the UK government’s top Covid-19 adviser Chris Whitty. The network’s focus, according to its website:
to support the [U.K.] government to identify and shortlist targeted investment opportunities for the most promising vaccines and vaccine technologies that will help combat infectious diseases with epidemic potential, and to address structural issues related to the UK’s broader vaccine infrastructure.”
These ties bind Edmunds, Ferguson and Hopkins – along with the rest of the modelling-paper Mafiosi — to the bidding of governments, Big Pharma, Bill Gates and other powerful players.
They present an image of being fully devoted to the public good, while in fact actively helping to destroy it.
Fauci follows Wiki co-founder, ‘death panels’ inventor, warmonger Blair & WEF creator as winner of Israeli prize
By Helen Buyniski | RT | February 18, 2021
US corona czar Dr. Anthony Fauci has been awarded the Dan David Prize for “defending science in the face of uninformed opposition,” joining a rogues gallery of former winners including Jimmy Wales and Tony Blair.
The Dan David Foundation, which is based out of Tel Aviv University and counts such dubious luminaries as war criminal Henry Kissinger on its board of directors, has gifted $1 million to Fauci for “courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition during the challenging Covid crisis.”
It’s not clear from whence this “uninformed opposition” emerged – indeed, one of Fauci’s most vocal opponents has been Dr. Anthony Fauci, who spoke up against the wearing of face masks and other mandates just weeks before he came out swinging in support of such rules.
Presumably, though, the Dan David Foundation was referring to popular opposition to that version of science that more closely resembles religious dogma. Fauci’s smug, self-satisfied and above all brittle variant of “science” cannot be questioned, lest it shatter into a million pieces, and the man’s stubborn use of thought-terminating clichés makes him resemble more of a cult leader than a public health official.
The Dan David Foundation has quite a history of honoring dodgy figures, and it’s no surprise to find them promoting dogmatic Fauci-flavored science over the true scientific method. Wikipedia co-founder and famed fabulist Jimmy Wales was among its prize-winners in 2015, gifted the $1 million treasure for his work in the field of “the Information Revolution.”
While Wales generally defends his truth-averse creation by waxing poetic about a world “in which every person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” Wikipedia has instead mounted a full frontal assault on human knowledge, seeking to destroy all that which does not conform to its founder’s preferred version of reality. Despite presenting itself as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia even admits it does not traffic in “truth,” but merely “verifiability,” and the site’s disclaimer notes “that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.”
Fauci is in good company at the Dan David Foundation. Just as the good doctor has done for Big Pharma fraudsters like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, Wales has taken great care to treat Israel and the many “alternative facts” with which it shrouds its own crimes with kid gloves, ensuring the average Wikipedia user doesn’t learn the truth about the horrific oppression Tel Aviv deals out to occupied Palestine on a daily basis.
The Israeli government and its private-sector collaborators have long operated ideologically-driven editing cells, a massive violation of Wikipedia’s rules but one whose owners straight-facedly describe as merely an effort to make Wikipedia “balanced and Zionist in nature.” Many of the Israelis who operate these editing initiatives receive valuable rewards from their government, and some even rise to plum positions therein – Ayelet Shaked became the Israeli Minister of Justice after putting together the pro-(illegal)-settlement Yesha Council’s editing initiative, and Naftali Bennett rose to Education Minister not long after serving in that same organization.
As a Dan David Foundation winner, Fauci will also be mingling with Ezekiel Emanuel, the oncologist who infamously devised the notion of rationing healthcare – “death panels” – and suggested humans should aspire to live to no more than 75 years of age. He won the prize in 2018 for his work as “pioneer in the field of end-of-life care.” You can’t make this stuff up.
Speaking of “end-of-life care,” the Foundation also counted Tony Blair, the former UK PM who joined US President George W. Bush in his illegal and monstrous assault on Iraq, among its winners in 2009. Blair’s bio deems him “one of the most outstanding statesmen of our era,” presumably with a straight face. In his post-PM career, Blair has traveled around giving expensive speeches to repressive dictators and counseling them on how best to extract themselves from pesky human rights charges (see: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, UAE and Israel itself), while Wales follows him around like a lovesick puppy, setting up Wikipedia projects for aforementioned dictators. After all, nothing says “democratic” like a “people’s encyclopedia” run like a Ministry of Truth!
And what gathering of ruling class ghouls would be complete without the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab? The real-life Bond villain won the Dan David Prize in 2004 for “his significant contribution in fostering international dialogue and activism to resolve some of the world’s greatest issues.” So what if the corporations that comprise his little organization caused a whole bunch more “issues” in the mean time? Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!
As a central figure in the US medical establishment for four decades who’s personally presided over the declining life expectancy of its people, Fauci fits perfectly into the malevolent ruling class soup cooked up by the Dan David Foundation. Wikipedia made a formal alliance with the World Health Organization last year, supposedly part of an effort to fight “disinformation” related to the novel coronavirus epidemic, and Wales has long considered his website a prize weapon in the armory of modern medicine against what he calls “lunatic charlatans” – those medical practitioners who dare to dream that cures may exist outside the money-paved halls of Big Pharma.
And Fauci himself is a true believer in the wide world of orthodox pharmaceutical treatments, unwilling to concede any validity on the part of natural medicine and determined to come out of the Covid-19 pandemic looking good – no matter how many people have to die for his public relations campaign.
In reality, Fauci has done a substandard job throughout his tenure, whether it was denying access to a potentially lifesaving antibacterial drug that could have saved the lives of AIDS patients infected with a killer variant of pneumonia or pushing a dangerous swine flu vaccine for an epidemic that turned out to be largely imaginary. Unfortunately for all of humanity subject to his policymaking decisions, he’ll fit right in with Kissinger and his sorry array of pals.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram
Yes, the NY Times exposed the PCR test
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | February 18, 2021
As I’ve been telling readers for many months, even if you assume SARS-CoV-2 is real, the test is useful, and the case and death numbers are meaningful, there are vast and crippling internal contradictions within the official portrait of COVID-19.
Currently, I’m focusing on the PCR test and its fatal flaws.
The test is a MAJOR weak point in the enemy’s attack on humanity. If the test falls, the case and death numbers are shown to be wildly false, and the whole pandemic narrative collapses.
I urge readers to spread this information far and wide.
On August 29, 2020, the New York Times published a long article headlined, “Your coronavirus test is positive. Maybe it shouldn’t be.” [1] [2]
Its main message? “The standard [COVID PCR] tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus…Most of these people are not likely to be contagious…”
“In three sets of testing data… compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.”
“On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.”
TAKEAWAY from The Times : Up to 90% of ALL people who have been labeled “COVID cases” are not COVID cases. This fact would downgrade the pandemic to “just another flu season.” And there would be no reason for lockdowns.
Of course, the Times goes on to say the solution to this problem is MORE TESTING. Only a moron would accept that notion.
The enduring message of their article still stands: the PCR test apparatus is a fraud, through and through. It enables the recording of monumentally false case numbers, which are used to declare unnecessary lockdowns and wall-to-wall economic destruction.
Make the truth known.
SOURCES:
[1] nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
New York Waitress FIRED For Not Getting Covid Jab
By Richie Allen | February 18, 2021
A New York City waitress was sacked on Monday, after telling her employer that she had concerns about the safety of coronavirus vaccines and would rather wait until more was known about the jabs.
Bonnie Jacobson from Brooklyn said that her manager at Red Hook Tavern fired her a few days after she had expressed concern about how the vaccine affects fertility. She had been working at the tavern since August and she and her husband had been planning to have a baby. Speaking to NBC News yesterday, Bonnie said:
“I do support the vaccine. I’m not, as they say, an anti-vaxxer.”
She went on to say that she feels there is still a lack of research about how the vaccine affects pregnant women. She said her manager understood her concerns and assured her that the tavern wouldn’t be requiring staff to have the jab. A few days later, workers received an email which stated that the vaccines would be mandatory for all staff. NBC has seen the email:
“Please be advised that we will require that all employees receive the vaccination. This will be mandatory for all existing employees and any new hires. The exception to this policy will be if your own personal health or disability prohibits you from obtaining this vaccination. We encourage you to consult your healthcare professional to determine if getting a vaccine is right for you.”
Jacobson replied:
“While I fully support the vaccine and understand its importance I do believe this is a very personal choice. I really hope this choice would not affect my employment at Red Hook Tavern. Also once there is more research to support that it does not affect fertility I would reconsider my position.”
Two days later, she was fired.
“It was really impersonal. I was honestly shocked,” she told NBC. “My gut reaction was to just say, OK. Fine, I’ll get it. I need my job. But that just didn’t sit right with me. I was like, actually, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s the choice I need to be making here.”
The owner of Red Hook Tavern, Billy Durney, released a statement saying:
“Once New York state allowed restaurant workers to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, we thought this was the perfect opportunity to put a plan in place to keep our team and guests safe. No one has faced these challenges before and we made a decision that we thought would best protect everyone. We now realize that we need to update our policy so it’s clear to our team how the process works and what we can do to support them. We’re making these changes immediately.”
Biden Administration Sending Emergency Diesel Generators to Texas
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 18, 2021
If you were expecting [proclaimed] President Biden to ship emergency solar panels to Texas, you were wrong. Looks like when renewable energy fails, as it did in Texas, even the Biden administration turns to more reliable forms of energy.
Biden administration sending generators to Texas amid power outages
Ursula Perano | February 18, 2021
… White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing on Wednesday that the Biden administration is sending emergency generators to Texas amid ongoing power outages and freezing weather.
Why it matters: Huge swaths of Texas have been without electricity for days due to critical failures in the state’s power grid. The outages come while a winter storm continues to pummel the state, causing unsafe conditions and a desperate need for heat. … Read more
Click here to see a video of Jen Psaki explaining the plan to send diesel generators to Texas and other states likely to be affected by winter storms.
Even if a storm like this only happens every 20 years, going 100% renewable is clearly now unacceptable. People who rely on electricity for heating are in deadly danger, if the only source of power is renewable energy, and the renewable energy systems freeze solid during severe ice storms.
If the plan is to maintain enough diesel backup to keep the lights on when renewables fail, renewables will never be affordable. Consumers will be saddled with the expense of maintaining the renewable infrastructure, and the additional expense of maintaining a complete second set of power infrastructure at operational readiness, ready to switch on when the renewables fail.
Midwest Have No Surplus Power For Texas
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 18, 2021
Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)
It is claimed that Texas would be better off as part of a wider grid. The obvious one would be MISO, to which there is already a small interconnector.
However MISO has been having severe difficulties due to the cold spell:
https://www.misoenergy.org/mcsnotification/?id=1131
As with Texas, MISO is currently relying almost entirely on coal, gas and nuclear power. If they had been operating with a quarter of the power from wind, as Texas was last week, I suspect that they would have been experiencing the same blackouts as Texas has had.
https://www.misoenergy.org/#
It is also not much bigger capacity wise than Texas, which has been running at around 60 GW this week. I suspect that any extra demand from Texas would quickly destabilise the MISO grid.
There is an interesting backstory to this.
The Natural Resources Defense Council says the Midwest energy grid operator known as MISO hasn’t planned enough interstate transmission lines.
MISO manages the system of utilities and transmission lines that operate in a wide region, from Manitoba, Canada to Louisiana.
John Moore is a senior attorney with the Council. He says MISO for too long has approved numerous local transmission projects, but only a tiny number of interstate transmission lines – which operate much like interstate highways, moving energy, rather than vehicles, from state to state.
He says MISO needs to plan more aggressively to meet the economic and environmental needs of the region.
“If we let business as usual take its course, then MISO may not be as bold as it needs to be,” he says.
Moore says the lack of interstate transmission capacity is leaving clean energy projects on the table.
That includes 42 clean energy proposals in Michigan since 2016 that were unable to proceed, because the existing transmission system couldn’t handle them.
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/nrdc-midwest-grid-operator-plan-blocking-clean-energy
Installing more wind power inevitably means more long distance transmission capacity is needed. The unpredictability of wind power results in huge surpluses at times, which require transmitting to areas short of power. This could often be over distances of hundreds of miles.
Since that is the case, surely it is a cost that wind farms should be paying, something that would probably make them totally unviable economically.
Climate Facts or Leaps of Faith? Governments Can’t Tell the Difference
We have no hard evidence of a crisis. Only expert opinion and best estimates.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | February 17, 2021
Governments are currently fighting climate change to the tune of billions. For this to make sense, each idea in the following chain of reasoning needs to be bulletproof:
#1 – scientists know there’s a climate crisis
#2 – scientists know it’s humanity’s fault
#3 – scientists know we can alleviate the crisis by changing our behaviour
But each of these amounts to a leap of faith. Let’s start with the conviction that something unusual is going on. This planet is more than 4 billion years old. The climate was marching to its own drummer long before humans appeared. It has changed numerous times – sometimes gradually, sometimes violently. Twenty thousand years ago, much of North America was covered by ice.
Because humans weren’t recording and analyzing those billions of years of climatic history, today’s scientists have no way of knowing if anything unusual is going on now.
They can surmise. They can speculate. They can extrapolate. But they have no smoking gun. I’ve written two books about the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That organization says it’s “extremely likely that more than half” of the global warming between 1951 and 2010 was caused by human activity. It talks about its “best estimate.”
click to enlarge; source here
Please note the startling imprecision here: Extremely likely. More than half. Best estimate. These aren’t facts. They’re educated guesses. They’re opinion. It’s absolutely crucial that we grasp this point: the IPCC has no hard evidence of a crisis. It has no math that can be examined and verified. It has only expert opinion. Estimates.
If you choose to take this leap of faith, you’re immediately invited to take another – to embrace the notion that the alleged climate crisis was triggered by human activity. As I’ve just outlined, the IPCC can’t prove this. It merely believes humans caused more than half of the warming over a 60-year period. That’s a long way from demonstrating clear human responsibility for imminent catastrophe.
On these two decisive questions – is there really a climate problem, and are humans really to blame – the IPCC has nothing definitive to contribute. Governments have, nevertheless, taken these leaps of faith.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that scientists are fallible. Like the rest of us, they know a great deal about their own field, but can be surprisingly misinformed about broader trends. Like the rest of us, they are susceptible to groupthink. Many IPCC personnel subscribe to a belief system that regards human activities as unnatural and therefore automatically threatening to the natural world. But belief systems are not proof.
Leap of faith #3 – the idea that humanity can fix whatever is currently going on with the climate – is equally dubious. Even if something alarming is happening, even if it is our fault, that doesn’t mean it lies within our power to influence, interrupt, or steer the powerful natural forces that have already been set in motion. It certainly doesn’t mean there’s only one sure-fire, anointed fix – slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Governments are obsessed with greenhouse gases because they signed a UN treaty back in 1992. Long before the IPCC had produced its multi-thousand-page reports the cart was put before the horse. The UN – a political body – decreed that human-generated emissions were a problem that governments should do something about. The IPCC has struggled ever since to build a scientific case in support of that position.
No one actually knows whether reducing emissions will work. No one knows how long it might take to ‘stabilize’ the climate via this means. Yet governments are piling on the carbon taxes. Year after year, they divert billions away from healthcare and education to fight climate change with ever-expanding emissions reduction policies.
In 1992, the UK was led by John Major, Germany was led by Helmut Kohl, America was led by George H.W. Bush, and France was led by Francois Mitterrand. The Internet barely existed in 1992, the founding of Google was still years away.
That treaty belongs to a different era. There is no shame in walking away from outdated, 30-year-old thinking.
The Decline of the West: American Education Surrenders to ‘Equity’
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 18, 2021
Public education in the United States, if measured by results, has been producing graduates that are less competent in language skills and dramatically less well taught in the sciences and mathematics since 1964, when Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked. The decline in science and math skills has accelerated in the past decade according to rankings of American students compared to their peers overseas. A recent assessment, from 2015, placed the U.S. at 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD), the United States came in at 30th in math and 19th in science. Those poor results must be placed in a context of American taxpayers spending more money per student than any other country in the world, so the availability of resources is not necessarily a factor in most school districts.
Much of the decline is due to technical advances that level the playing field for teachers worldwide, but one must also consider changing perceptions of the role of education in a social context. In the United States in particular, political and cultural unrest certainly have been relevant factors. But all of that said and considered, the U.S. is now confronting a reassessment of values that will likely alter forever traditional education and will also make American students even more non-competitive with their foreign peers.
Many schools in the United States have ceased issuing grades that have any meaning, or they have dropped grading altogether, which means there is no way to judge progress or achievement. National test scores for evaluating possible college entry are on the way out almost everywhere as they are increasingly being condemned as “racist” in terms of how they assess learning based solely on the fact that blacks do less well on them than Asians and whites. This has all been part of an agenda that is being pushed that will search for and eliminate any taint of racism in the public space. It has also meant the destruction or removal of numerous historic monuments and an avoidance of any honest discussion of American history. San Francisco schools are, for example, notoriously spending more than $1 million to change the names of 44 schools that honor individuals who have been examined under the “racism and oppression” microscope and found wanting. They include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Paul Revere.
The new world order for education is built around the concept of “equity,” sometimes described as using the public education system to “ensure equitable outcomes.” But the concept itself is deeply flawed as the pursuit of equity means treating all Americans unequally to guarantee that everyone that comes out of the schools is the same and has learned the same things. That is, of course, ridiculous and it penalizes the good student to make sure that the bad student is somehow pushed through the system and winds up with the same piece of paper.
And the quality overall of public education will sharply decline. One might reasonably observe that imposition of a totalitarian style “equity” regime based on race will inevitably drive many of the academically better prepared students out of the system. Many of the better teachers will also move to the private academies that will spring up due to parental and student demand. Others will stop teaching altogether when confronted by political correctness at a level that prior to 2020 would have seemed unimaginable. The actual quality of education will suffer for everyone involved.
All of that has been bad enough, but the clincher is that this transformation is taking place all over the United States with the encouragement of federal, state and local governments and once the new regime is established it will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that sometimes requires hard work and dedication. In many school districts, the actual process of change is also being put on the back of the taxpayer. In one Virginia county the local school board spent $422,500 on a consultant to apply so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) to a new program of instruction that will be mandatory for all employees and will serve as the framework for teaching the students. When schools eventually reopen, all kindergarteners, for example, will be taught “social justice” in a course designed by the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center and “diversity training” will be integrated in all other grade levels. Teaching reading, writing and arithmetic will take a back seat of “social justice.”
Critical Race Theory, which is being promoted as the framework for reorganizing the schools along lines of racial preferences, has been fairly criticized as it pretends to be an antidote to systemic racism but is itself racist in nature as it opposes a race neutral system that equally benefits everyone. It proposes that all of America’s governmental bodies and infrastructures are racist and supportive of “white supremacy” and must be deconstructed. It requires everything to be examined through a value system determined by identity politics and race and it views both whites and their institutions as hopelessly corrupted, if not evil.
Fortunately, some pushback to the Jacobins of political correctness is developing. Parents in many school districts are starting to attend school board meetings to register their opposition and even some school board members and teachers are refusing to cooperate. The teachers do so at risk of losing their jobs. At the elite Dalton private school in New York City parents have sent a letter to the Head of School Jim Best complaining how the newly introduced “anti-racist” curriculum has been gravely distorted by Critical Race Theory and the pursuit of “equity” to such an extent that it has included “a pessimistic and age-inappropriate litany of grievances in EVERY class. We have confused a progressive pedagogical model with progressive politics. Even for people who are sympathetic to that political viewpoint, the role of a school is not to indoctrinate politically. It’s to open the minds of children to the wonders of the world and learning. The Dalton we love, that has changed our lives, is nowhere to be found. And that is a huge loss.”
The letter also stated that “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘decentering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly age-inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.”
Ironically, much of the new curriculum is being driven by a core of radicalized Dalton faculty members, who in December signed on to an “anti-racism manifesto” which demanded that the school “hire 12 full-time diversity officers, abolish high-level academic courses if Black students’ performance isn’t on par with White students’, and require anti-racism ‘statements’ from all members of the staff.”
Inevitably what is going on at Dalton and elsewhere is also playing out at many of America’s top universities, so the rot will persist into the next generation when today’s college students themselves become teachers. A black Princeton professor of classics is calling for all classics departments to be done away with because they promote “racism, slavery and white supremacy.” America’s education system, once upon a time, benefited the nation and its people, but we are now watching it in its death throes. And please don’t expect the Joe Biden administration to do anything to save it. They are on the side of the wreckers.
Unelected President Kamala Harris?
By Stephen Lendman | February 18, 2021
Harris is substituting for Biden on calls to foreign leaders.
Is she de facto president, Joe Biden a mere figurehead?
Is he too cognitively impaired to fulfill the duties of any public office, let alone the nation’s highest?
Occasional misstatements, mangling of words, and forgetfulness aren’t signs of dementia.
According to Washington insiders willing to speak candidly, Biden is cognitively impaired, his condition worsening over time, likely heading for Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s an advanced stage of dementia that destroys normal memory, thinking and behavior.
Biden appears well on the way to this state.
He forgot lines adolescents know from the Declaration of Independence, jumbling them saying:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.”
He momentarily forgot what office he was running for, saying:
“My name’s Joe Biden. I’m a (Dem) candidate for the United States Senate.”
Earlier he said “I think we can win back the House” now controlled by Dems. He called Super Tuesday “Super Thursday.”
Twice he confused Trump with GW Bush as his challenger for the White House.
Time and again, he’s been factually incorrect in explaining what he was involved in earlier, requiring damage control corrections from staff.
He falsely claimed to have worked with China’s Deng Xiaoping on the 2016 Paris Climate Accord. Deng died in 1997.
He falsely claimed that “150 million people have been killed (by guns) since 2007” in the US.
He said Dems should “choose truth over facts.” At times campaigning last year he was unsure what state he was in.
Campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he thought he was in Vermont.
Early last year, he falsely said he was arrested in South Africa for trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, what his campaign explained never occurred.
He claimed his tax credit plan will put 720 million US women back to work. He told Iowans “(w)e choose truth over facts.”
He falsely called his late son Beau “attorney general of the United States.”
He confused former UK prime minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher.
He mistook the Second Amendment for the First one.
He called Obama “the first African American in the history of the United States.”
He once introduced Obama as his “Barack America” running-mate.
He also called him “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
He claimed Franklin Roosevelt appeared on television in 1929, long before it existed.
Last year before chosen as Dem standard bearer, the Washington Post said it’s “fair to ask whether voters are choosing a candidate who’s not up to the job.”
In summer 2019, the Washington Post called him a “gaffe machine.”
Biden earlier had brain surgery twice. According to Science Daily, “(m)ajor surgery is associated with a small long-term decline in cognitive functioning.”
Was running mate Harris chosen as de facto president? Will she formally assume the role when Biden’s cognitive is too impaired to pretend otherwise?
On Wednesday, the New York Post reported that Harris “held her second call with a foreign leader — speaking with French President Emmanuel Macron after a talk earlier this month with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as with World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in January,” adding:
Harris stressed to Macron “her commitment to strengthening bilateral ties between the United States and France and to revitalizing the transatlantic alliance,” adding:
They “agreed on the need for close bilateral and multilateral cooperation to address covid, climate change, and support democracy at home and around the world (sic),” according to her office’s readout.
“They also discussed numerous regional challenges, including those in the Middle East and Africa, and the need to confront them together.”
She “thanked… Macron for his leadership on the issue of gender equality and for France’s contribution to NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover.”
On February 1, she and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau discussed “covid… climate change, and expanding our economic partnership in ways that advance the recovery and create jobs.”
On February 17, AP News said Harris appeared on NBC’s Today show to discuss widespread power outages in Texas that are denying heat and electricity to many state residents during a severe cold snap.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that “Harris is taking a (significant) foreign policy role” in place of Biden.
On the same day, Fox News said Harris “is proving that she will play an important role in the White House as she hosts calls with foreign leaders without Biden.”
In 2019, former US war secretary Robert Gates questioned whether someone of Biden’s age has the mental and physical ability to serve as president.
Separately last Sunday, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham said if Republicans retake the House in 2023, “I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached… because she bailed out (BLM) rioters, and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open.”
Well before Biden was chosen as Dem standard bearer, it was clear that he’d be a figurehead leader if inaugurated into office — others behind the scenes running things.
After a few weeks in office, Harris may have taken over some of his duties.
Is it just a matter of time before he steps down and she replaces him?
Contact Stephen Lendman at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Pelosi’s 9/11-Type Commission to Give More Powers to US Domestic Spying Apparatus
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 18.02.2021
On 15 February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans to form a “9/11-type commission” to probe the Capitol protests. The Dems real aim is to give more powers to US spy agencies, expand homeland security, and anti-terrorism measures and use them against the American right-wingers, US observers say.
A new independent 9/11-type Commission will be assigned to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021 domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex,” Pelosi wrote to her party fellows on Monday. According to CNN, the commission of this nature is typically established by a statute, passed by both chambers of the Congress and signed into law by the president.
9/11-Type Commission to Bolster Domestic Surveillance
The original 9/11 Commission was established on 27 November 2002 by President George W. Bush and the United States Congress with the aim “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks.” The bipartisan body consisted of five Democrats and five Republicans and was chaired by former New Jersey Republican Governor Tom Kean.
”The 9/11 Commission was supposed to be a bipartisan effort to find out what went wrong on 9/11,” says American author and political analyst William Stroock. “Today the Dems will use this ‘9/11’ style commission to stoke fears of Q, white nationalism, Trump and his supporters in general. This commission will not be independent at all and will not be interested in ascertaining facts, only in assigning blame to Republicans, conservatives and Trump supporters.”
Nearly 20 years on, it’s clear that 9/11 has proven disastrous for the US in many ways, according to Strook. However, first and foremost it led to the creation of a “vast domestic spying apparatus with secret courts and gave the Feds vast new spying powers,” says the political analyst. Stroock suggests the Democrats “will want to give even more power to the domestic spying apparatus and turn it upon the right.”
Irreconcilable Contradictions in Democratic Party’s Policies
Meanwhile, the Biden administration plans to expand grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for studying and preventing “domestic violent extremism”, according to NBC News’ Friday report. Earlier, on 27 January, the DHS released its first-ever national terrorism bulletin warning about the looming threat of violent domestic extremism supposedly encouraged by the Capitol Hill protests.
In the wake of the DC incident, the Democratic Party also pushed ahead with the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act (DTPA). Andrew McCarthy, former assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, suggested in his January op-ed for National Review that the bill “is not about countering terrorism” but “weaving a political narrative.”
The legislation fell short of targeting jihadists, Antifa or Black Lives Matter militants, while focusing on white supremacists, “or, more specifically, Trump-inspired insurrectionists in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot,” according to the lawyer.
“The double standard here is appalling,” says Stroock. “The Democrat Party has winked and nodded at the BLM/Antifa riots… The media even invented a new term to describe the orgy of looting and destruction, ‘mostly peaceful.’ To see them comparing the Capitol Hill riot to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is pretty rich.”
It’s not the only controversy haunting the Democrats, according to American independent journalist Max Parry: the Dems have previously supported the BLM’s “defund the police” movement and now they are advocating the expansion of homeland security and anti-terrorism measures.
“These are an inherent and irreconcilable contradictions,” Parry says. “Meanwhile, curiously absent is any mobilisation to demilitarise the police, which under the 1033 Program with the Pentagon has hyper militarised US domestic law enforcement even in small towns in the past few decades, yet numerous studies shows has not resulted in lower crime rates… So the irony of calling to ‘defund’ the police while trying to ram through legislation that would likely increase their counter-terrorism training and militarisation is incompatible.”
The movement to “defund the police” was well intentioned but potentially misguided where the legitimate concerns of citizens about the need to reform law enforcement could be used for other agendas, the journalist warns.
How GOP May Give Dems a Taste of Their Own Medicine
While cracking down on Trump supporters in the aftermath of the DC protests, the Dems have failed to convict former President Donald Trump over the alleged incitement of insurrection. As a result, Trump was once again acquitted in the Senate.
”It seems they really thought they would convince 17 Republicans to crossover and vote to convict”, notes Stroock. “Only seven Republicans did so and they’re now in deep trouble with their voters back home. Several have already been censured by their state parties. The Democrats had a plan, a bad one, and had no idea what to do when the plan was foiled by reality.”
Now that the Dems created a new legislative tool, the “snap impeachment,” the GOP could hypothetically fight back and give their political opponents a taste of their own medicine, the political analyst presumes.
“Given the way political gravity works, the Republicans will almost certainly win control of the House and Senate in 2022,” he says. “The Republican base will call for the GOP to impeach Joe Biden. Given the Dem’s own precedent, why not?”
Kamala Harris may also find herself in a heap of trouble given that she earlier tweeted support for a fund that bailed out rioters, according to Strook. Following Trump’s acquittal Republican Senator Lindsey Graham warned that Harris could be impeached because she “actually bailed out [BLM] rioters,” pointing to her support of a Minnesota-based bail fund.
“It’s quite a bit of a stretch to say that Harris could be impeached for asking to contribute to a fund that went towards bailing out activists, especially since there is no evidence she herself bailed anyone out,” Parry suggests. “However, that Graham made such threats does show how the prospect of impeachment is now being thrown around so loosely as a political football since the bar has been set so low by the Democrats who impeached Trump over a dubious phone conversation.”
While a lot may happen before the 2022 midterms, the GOP should jump at the opportunity to instrumentalise the potential 9/11-style Commission, argues Strook.
“The Republicans will (or should) approach this commission with great skepticism, turn the camera around and highlight the violence and racism of the left. This commission is a tremendous opportunity for the GOP,” the political analyst believes.
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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