Israel demolished 69 homes, issued 172 demolition orders in Silwan in the year 2021
WAFA | December 30, 2021
JERUSALEM – Israeli occupation authorities demolished 69 homes belonging to Palestinians in the East Jerusalem town of Silwan, and issued 172 other home demolition orders during the year 2021.
Fakhri Abu Diab, the member of the Defense of Silwan Land Committee, said the Israeli municipality of West Jerusalem, and its Planning and Building Committee, delivered during the year 2021, 172 demolition orders against Palestinian homes in Silwan, noting that 150 other homes are threatened with demolition under the Israeli Kaminitz Law; which means that the occupation municipality can demolish it at any moment.
He said that the occupation demolished 69 houses in the town of Silwan in 2021, and displaced 342 Jerusalemites; 66% of whom are children and minors. The occupation during the year 2021 filed indictments against 90 houses and fined their owners 4,370,000 Shekels under the pretext of the so-called illegal construction, he added.
The number of demolition orders against homes and structures in Silwan has reached 7800 orders since the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, he added.
The implementation of the demolition and eviction orders will leave 10,000 Jerusalemites threatened with displacement and ethnic cleansing.
He noted that settlers and Israel’s ‘Nature Authority’ confiscated 2015 dunums of land during the year 2021.
Israeli soldiers watch as settlers open fire at Sheikh Jarrah homes
MEMO | December 30, 2021
Israeli Occupation Forces stood by as settlers opened fire on Palestinian homes in the occupied East Al-Quds neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
According to a Wafa News Agency correspondent, the soldiers also detained a 13-year-old Palestinian boy from the flashpoint neighbourhood.
More than five hundred Palestinians living in twenty eight houses in the neighbourhood are facing threats of forced expulsion at the hands of settlement associations, backed by the Israeli government and its judiciary system, which recently issued a decision to displace seven families.
Jewish settler groups claim the homes were built on land owned by Jews before 1948, claims which official Jordanian and UN documents refute.
The United Nations Special Coordinator for the peace process in the Middle East, Tor Wennesland, last week, called on Israel “to cease the advancement of all settlement activities immediately,” describing the move as a “flagrant violation of UN resolutions.”
Referring to the evictions carried out against Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighbourhoods of occupied East Jerusalem, at a UN Security Council briefing, Wennesland called on the occupation authorities “to end the displacement and eviction of Palestinians, while enabling them to build legally and address their development need.”
The UN official also expressed his “continued concern” over the “deteriorating security situation in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
Extremist Israeli settlers’ violence against Palestinians and their property is routine in the West Bank and is rarely prosecuted by the Israeli authorities.
They often coordinate their raids and assaults against the Palestinians with Israeli Occupation Forces, who provide them with cover and protection.
High Energy Costs the Christmas Gift of ‘Green’ Politicians
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Energy | December 29, 2021
The coming cold of winter is being paired with “green-inspired” energy policies that have created higher energy prices and fuel shortages.
Historically, winters have been big killers. But centuries of innovation made us more resilient to the cold as we fully utilized the naturally available fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity. However, today these modern advantages are being sacrificed at the altar of climate change in exchange for the purported magic of wind, solar and batteries.
Though the pandemic-led economic recovery has contributed to a surge in energy demand, the real reason for shortages and price hikes is the anti-fossil fuel policies of political leaders.
In the U.S., motorists have faced rising gas prices as President Joe Biden has suffered dropping approval ratings in polls. The president first blamed OPEC for the price hike and then pleaded to the same OPEC to increase production. International oil prices are inelastic, meaning they closely follow the rise and fall of demand. It should be no surprise that fuel costs rose as a result of Biden’s restraint on all things fossil.
As soon as Biden became president, he cancelled the Keystone pipeline, which would have delivered high quality oil from friendly Canadian neighbors. The president also brought in regulations that made drilling for oil more difficult, rendering the U.S. more dependent on Middle East producers.
As a stop-gap measure Biden has asked U.S. companies to produce more oil and for strategic reserves to be used. Nonetheless, the effects of his policies will be felt in the coming months and years. Americans may have to deal with energy insecurity for the next three years as Biden is determined to reduce consumption of fossil fuels.
In addition, there is a looming crisis in the power sector across the globe, courtesy the obsession with so-called renewables — also known as unreliables. Many places — like Colorado, Texas, Germany, and the U.K — are staring at the possibility of power blackouts. The situation is predominantly driven by an overreliance on renewable energy sources, which are intermittent year-round and cannot supply on-demand base load during peak hours.
In the modern world, blackouts result in extensive disruption to life as almost all sectors are power-dependent. An increased interest in electric vehicles could aggravate the problem with a higher demand for electricity.
In developing nations, energy disruption has the potential for more dire, life-and-death circumstances for millions of poor people in Africa, Asia, and South America. Both India and China faced a severe coal shortage in 2021, which was partly the result of diverting a lot of public funds, time, and energy to creating wind and solar resources. The countries’ large-scale renewable installations could not provide on-demand electricity. Seventeen provinces in China experienced severe blackouts, forcing the closure of factories and offices, which resulted in unemployment among the poorest.
These episodes of energy shortages in Asia could serve as a sobering warning to other countries. The future of energy security will be dependent on the policies adopted, and it doesn’t look very good at this point.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
No, 500 Children were NOT admitted to hospital with Covid this week
OffGuardian | December 30, 2021
Two days ago Sky News reported that, in the week from December 20th to Boxing Day (December 26th, for our non-UK readers), over 500 British children had been admitted to hospital with Covid19.
The story has been picked up by other outlets too, with the Metro headlining:
More than 500 children admitted to hospital with Covid in Christmas week
The Mirror went with:
More than 500 children admitted to hospital with Covid in week leading up to Boxing Day
Going on to say [our emphasis]:
A record number of new Covid infections were reported today with the easily transmissible Omicron strain being named as the driving force for the surge – now the variant is having an unprecedented impact on Britain’s younger population
Other publications cited “concerning data” that 50 babies had been admitted to hospital with Covid on Christmas day alone.
But is any of this true?
In short, no. It is a meaningless number created by deliberately misleading statistical definitions.
This is actually the easiest fact-check we’ve ever done, because Sky literally fact-checked themselves in their own subheading:
Let’s repeat that with some added emphasis:
The definition used to identify a hospital admission with coronavirus is that someone either tested positive for the virus in the 14 days before their admission, or during their stay in hospital. It could mean someone goes into hospital for a non-COVID reason and later tests positive.
So no, 512 children were not admitted to hospital for Covid infection, 512 children were admitted to hospital for potentially “non-COVID reasons”, and either tested positive while they were in hospital or had tested positive sometime in the previous two weeks.
We’ve gone over this many times before.
The official definition of a “Covid death” is death by any cause, in someone who tested positive in the month preceding their death.
The official definition of a “covid hospitalisation” is anyone who is admitted to hospital for any reason after testing positive, or tests positive while they are already in hospital for something else.
We don’t need to explain, yet again, how meaningless the resultant statistics will be if you use these definitions.
But if they keep lying about the figures, we will keep correcting them.
Three more studies show negative vaccine efficacy. When will health authorities face up to what the data is telling us?
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | December 28, 2021
The last two weeks have brought three new studies finding negative efficacy for two vaccine doses, meaning the vaccinated are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. These are study findings, not raw data, so have been adjusted for various biases and confounders, making it harder to dismiss them as anomalous or skewed.
The first is a pre-print study from Denmark, published on December 23rd, which looked at nearly all PCR-positive SARS-CoV-2 infections in Denmark from November 20th to December 12th and investigated them to see if they were likely to be the Omicron variant. By comparing the vaccination status of those infected, the researchers found a vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron variant of minus-76.5% for Pfizer and minus-39.3% for Moderna three months after double vaccination (see chart above), meaning the double-vaccinated were considerably more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. They found the vaccine effectiveness against Omicron was significantly lower than against Delta, with Pfizer vaccine effectiveness at 53.8% and Moderna at 65% against Delta after three months. They reported that a third dose of Pfizer got vaccine effectiveness against Omicron back up to 54.6%, at least for a month. The full results are in the table below.
Hansen et al
The latest vaccine effectiveness study from the UKHSA confirms these results. Against Omicron, the UKHSA reports zero or negative vaccine effectiveness from a double-dose of all three vaccines (AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna) after five months. The third dose takes it up again, but only into the 40-60% range, and dropping fast.
AstraZeneca
Pfizer
Moderna
A new study in Eurosurveillance from Norway also backs up the observation of negative vaccine effectiveness against Omicron, with a higher proportion of those who tested positive in the particular outbreak in the study being double-vaccinated than those who did not test positive (98% versus 93%).
Some studies had already found negative vaccine effectiveness against Delta, in line with the unadjusted figures from the UKHSA, though many people had dismissed these results as anomalous or biased. With Omicron, the reports of negative efficacy are becoming impossible to ignore, with even the UKHSA publishing graphs showing it after three months on two doses. At some point, health authorities are going to need to grapple with what the data is showing on this and stop pretending it isn’t there.
Why Have Our Points Landed After All?
By Dr. David McGrogan | The Daily Sceptic | December 29, 2021
I can’t be alone in noticing that the public mood has quite radically shifted. There are still, I am sure, plenty of people who are scared, and still plenty of people who think that restrictions ‘work’ and should continue to be used. But in conversations with dozens of friends, family members and colleagues over the past month or so, I have noticed a particular phrase coming up over and over again, with slight variations: “We have to learn to live with it now.” There is a benign resignation (“We’re all going to catch it eventually so we might as well get on with it”) where once there was anxiety. It is profoundly irritating, of course, to have to grit one’s teeth and resist pointing out that some of us were of the view that we had to learn to live with the virus in February 2020. But it is also heartening – there will, after all, be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance. I could of course be wrong – God knows I’ve consistently underestimated the capacity of the population to stoically go along with the mainstream narrative from the very beginning of the Covid era. But I hope I don’t jinx things to say that I think it is now politically impossible for the government to do much in the way of strict lockdowns.
What explains this? The reasons are not, I think, very complicated. First, a critical mass of people are not scared anymore. They’ve had three jabs, they know omicron causes mostly mild symptoms, and many of them have actually had Covid and discovered it’s not the end of the world. Fear was a powerful motivating factor in support for lockdowns; now it’s on the retreat. Second, war weariness has set in. Young people especially are just sick of all of this, and want to live their lives. On shopping excursions on December the 27th and 28th I was surprised at just how many people in the bustling shops were not wearing masks. I’d say in the region of 30% at least, and among young people the proportion was even higher. They’ve simply had enough. And third, there is a real feeling abroad these days that the SAGE modellers are just a glorified boy crying wolf – we’ve been told too many times now that we’re on the brink of catastrophe and found out that we’re faced with nothing of the sort. Their warnings are no longer taken very seriously.
What is perhaps a little galling about all of this to lockdown sceptics is that these reasons are all emotional, not rational. It’s not that anybody has been persuaded by our wonderful knockdown arguments. It’s that a different narrative – “the virus is never going away, so let’s just get on with our lives” – has set in.
This ought not to be very surprising. It is almost exactly a year ago that I wrote a post on Lockdown Sceptics, making the claim that the most important reason why we sceptics were being ignored (or pilloried) was that the points that we were making simply did not accord with a particular ‘moral truth’. There was a prevailing social narrative which said, in essence, that lockdowns stop people dying. Our arguments, in going against this moral truth, were by definition immoral in the eyes of the vast majority of our compatriots, and highly unlikely to win popular support as a result. In other words, it doesn’t matter how well-reasoned one’s critique is, if what one is critiquing is perceived almost universally as being The Right Thing To Do.
This is in fact in keeping with what psychologists tell us about the way human reason works. We don’t generally look dispassionately at the evidence and then make up our minds what to believe. Rather, we believe something to begin with, and then we go out and look for evidence to support it. In March 2020 people were scared, and wanted to hide from the nasty virus, and went and found a great deal of data that explained why they were right to do so. Fast forward to January 2022: people are sick of thinking about Covid and want to get back to normal, and it would not be at all surprising if all of a sudden they suddenly begin to find a lot of evidence to justify them doing so. Reason follows emotion – not the other way round. It is ultimately how people feel that dictates everything that follows.
Since it’s mostly just about feelings, does this mean that the efforts of Toby, Lord Sumption, Peter Hitchens, Neil Oliver, Brendan O’Neill and the like have had no effect at all? Would the madness all have ended in the fullness of time anyway?
I’m not so sure. Milton Friedman once said that he thought his basic function was to “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” In other words, yes, public opinion is led by emotion, but this makes it fickle. It can shift, and shift quickly. The trick is to make sure that, when this happens, it is your ideas that are the ones “lying around” (to use Milton’s phrase) for them to seize up.
People in other words, will increasingly start to feel that this lockdown nonsense has to stop. As they do, they will start to look for evidence and arguments to support that view. Thanks to the efforts of Toby and those like him, they will find a huge wealth of this in the public domain. Lockdown sceptics, in other words, probably haven’t been very persuasive or influential when it comes to the broad swathe of the population. But that hasn’t been the point. We’ve been keeping the alternative view alive, so that when eventually public opinion shifts, it is our ideas that they will pick up, and which will increasingly therefore begin to drive the agenda.
David McGrogan is a Professor at Northumbria Law School.
NY State Dept. of Health Still Can’t Provide Any Proof that Vaccinated Children are Healthier than Unvaccinated
Informed Consent Action Network | December 29, 2021
Last month, yet another letter had to be sent to the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) and the New York State Education Department (NYSED) calling out their failure to provide any proof to dispute extremely important and revealing data reflecting that unvaccinated children have far better health outcomes than vaccinated children.
Soon after that letter was sent, a new Acting Commissioner of NYSDOH was appointed and so a letter was also sent to Dr. Mary Bassett, welcoming her to her new role and asking that she provide proof disputing these findings.
As explained to Dr. Bassett through the historical correspondence detailing the issue, on May 21, 2021, the attorneys that regularly represent ICAN sent a demand letter on behalf of a group comprising all the families of unvaccinated children in four contiguous school districts in New York. The demand explained that there is an abundance of evidence to support that unvaccinated children have better health outcomes than vaccinated children and shared the following results for the children in the four school districts:
Although not shocking to ICAN, these results should elicit a reaction from and a response by public health authorities and an education department which mandates vaccines. Instead, NYSED chose to completely ignore these findings and sent an inadequate, half-page response almost a full month later.
On August 11, 2021, a response letter was sent to NYSDOH pointing out the glaring omission from the NYSDOH’s response of even a shred of evidence to support that the growing rate and list of chronic diseases and disabilities affecting children are not caused by vaccination. NYSDOH was therefore warned that, absent receipt of this proof, the attorneys have been directed to commence an action challenging the school immunization requirements for kindergarten through the twelfth grade. Still no proof has been provided by the NYSDOH.
One must continue to wonder whether there is any data that could be submitted to these public health agencies that will change their unwavering belief in and allegiance to vaccines. And aren’t they troubled by the fact that they cannot produce any evidence to support their claims? Let’s see if the new Acting Commissioner provides any better response than her predecessor.
After Thousands Of Parents Refused To Comply, California School District Reverses Child Jab Mandate
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | December 23, 2021
San Diego, CA — Forgoing any legal democratic processes, multiple school districts in California began mandating the COVID-19 vaccination for children earlier this year. Set to go into effect in January, any child, 16 and older, who did not get the jab, was banned from campus in all San Diego public schools.
This authoritarian move caused a mass of backlash and thousands of children and parents refused to comply. The refusal to get vaccinated set the stage for a showdown that was to unfold on January 24 when the children would be kicked out of school for non compliance.
There will be no showdown, however, as a San Diego judge struck down the mandate this week, accurately pointing out that a school district has no authority to mandate medical procedures for children.
CBS 7 reports that Superior Court Judge John S. Meyer granted a writ of mandate for a lawsuit filed by the group “Let Them Choose,” which sought to keep the school district‘s COVID-19 vaccine mandate from going into effect by arguing it did not comply with state law.
Meyer noted in the ruling that the school district‘s COVID-19 vaccine mandate cannot move forward because it conflicts with state law, which says any decision to mandate vaccines must be made at the state level and must also include a “personal belief exemption” if the mandate is not imposed by the state Legislature.
San Diego Unified’s policy did not contain this exemption.
“SDUSD‘s Roadmap appears to be necessary and rational, and the district’s desire to protect its students from COVID-19 is commendable. Unfortunately, the field of school vaccine mandates has been fully occupied by the State, and the Roadmap directly conflicts with state law,” the judge wrote in a tentative ruling.
Naturally, the school district disagreed and claimed they have the right to dictate what children can and can’t be injected with. For now, however, their objection is meaningless and the children and parents who did not want to take the vaccination, will no longer be forced to do so.
“I am overjoyed. We knew that our legal argument was strong, and we brought this case on behalf of thousands of concerned parents and students and to hear the judge say no student should be coerced into getting this vaccine was just a wonderful thing to hear,” said Sharon McKeeman, founder of the group behind Let Them Choose.
As TFTP reported earlier this month, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) — which is the second largest school district in the country — made a similar move and mandated shots for all children aged 12 and older.
Students were told they would be banned from campus on January 10, 2022 if they failed to comply and take the shot.
NBC4 spoke to an attorney who is following these cases, Jennifer Kennedy, who explained that school districts do not have the authority to mandate medical procedures. Just like the San Diego school district did not have the authority to mandate the jabs, the LAUSD did not have it either.
“These grotesque contests and displays of treatment and candy and gifts and favors, raffles and cash prizes inducing the kids to the vaccination…. Here is the problem, kids in California cannot consent to vaccination.”
She added, “The LAUSD does not have the power to add a vaccine to the California school schedule,” she said. “You couldn’t do it if you were a po-dunk school district and you can’t do it if you’re LAUSD, the second largest district in the nation. You don’t have that legal authority.”
Several parents of students filed lawsuits against the LAUSD over the mandate and thousands of children remained unvaccinated in LAUSD. This line in the sand forced the school district to postpone their mandate last week after a whopping 28,000 children refused the jab.
It is only through resistance that the change we seek will come. As history shows us, one cannot comply their way out of tyranny.