Abandon Hope or Abandon Net Zero
By Jason Isaac | RealClear Energy | February 1, 2023
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” reads an inscription at the gate to Hell in Dante’s “Inferno,” but in the modern world, Dante might as well be referring to the gates of Net Zero. After walking through those gates for a few days—maybe just a few minutes—most people would recoil at the effects of Net Zero: higher prices for everything, unreliable electricity, and a plunge into poverty. But as in “Inferno,” there is hope: you just have to abandon Net Zero. Cases-in-point include San Antonio, Texas; Huntington Beach, California; and Orange County, California.
For the past four years, San Antonio has been, by some metrics, the most-impoverished large metro area in the United States, surpassing Detroit. Despite its community’s pressing needs, San Antonio enacted a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) in 2019, with a vote of 10-1, to focus on “reducing the carbon intensity” of San Antonio’s electric generation instead of reducing the city’s poverty by providing more affordable and reliable energy.
At the time, more than half of San Antonians polled said they were not willing to pay a single dime more for climate change programs. And yet, the city’s misguided climate plan was going to lead to higher utility bills by at least $1,000 a year per household.
That was in 2019. Regardless of whether San Antonians and Americans-at-large were willing to pay more for energy, inflation and the Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels has now caused energy prices to soar. A nationwide survey released in October 2022 said that “32% of Americans have paid a bill late in the past six months — and 61% of them say it’s because they didn’t have enough money to cover the costs.” A $1,000 a year increase—at least—with a net-zero campaign is not sustainable for a city already overrun by poverty and hurting from inflation and soaring energy prices.
In recent months, the city’s electric utility management and its rate advisory committee adopted a plan that will have the utility invest in significant new natural gas generation, eschewing calls from environmental groups to adopt a more wind and solar heavy mix. On Jan. 17, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg threw his support behind the proposal, noting that “People want to make sure that we can affordably keep the lights on in San Antonio,” and “In this scenario, we are owning more of that ability [to generate power] ourselves.” While not formally abandoning the city’s Net Zero by 2050 plan, the change is a tacit acknowledgement that the city’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, its electric utility, cannot affordably meet that goal.
Similarly, the Huntington Beach City Council just voted to pull out of its plan for 100% renewable energy with the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA). Like San Antonio, Huntington Beach has concerns for its residents, including the increasing homelessness in the community. Orange County had already bailed on the plan, claiming that “the authority failed to inform the public that their electricity bills were increasing.”
While citizens of San Antonio, Huntington Beach, and Orange County have averted the left’s woke Green New Deal for now, many cities and countries are still headed down the path of decarbonization to the detriment of their citizens’ livelihoods. Think about the countries that actually live at Net Zero. Malawi’s life expectancy is a full 20 years less than developed countries; a man can’t expect to live past 57. In Ethiopia, many girls walk more than three miles daily, spending eight hours walking to collect water, instead of attending school. Sri Lanka went from economic growth to plunging its people into hunger because of the (now former) president’s policies as the first ever Net Zero chief executive. He banned the use and importation of nitrogen-based fertilizer. Food production dropped 40% and prices rose 80%.
That’s the impact of Net Zero that the US will not have to feel if its cities and states continue to come to their senses about the impossibility of such a goal. Expensive energy hurts the poor; affordable and reliable energy has the power to lift millions out of poverty.
It’s time to abandon Net Zero.
Returning to COVID19
By Dr. Malcolm Kendrick | January 31, 2023
With the resignation of Jacinda Ardern, my thoughts were dragged back to Covid once more. Jacinda, as Prime Minster of New Zealand was the ultimate lockdown enforcer. She was feted round the world for her iron will, but I was not a fan, to put it mildly. Whenever I heard her speak, it brought to mind one of my most favourite quotes:
‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’ C.S. Lewis
At one point she actually said the following:
“We will continue to be your single source of truth” “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.’
If I ruled the world, anyone who said, that, or anything remotely like that, would be taken as far as possible from any position of power, never to be allowed anywhere near it again. Ever.
Yet, there are still many who believe her to have been a great and caring leader. She certainly hugged a lot of people with that well rehearsed pained/caring expression on her face.
Enough of that particular woman. But it got me thinking about lockdowns again and the whole worldwide madness of Covid. This was a time of such blundering idiocy that I find increasingly difficult to believe it ever happened. A bad dream.
‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling…’ Cue, everyone running about in panic. People, allegedly, dropping dead on the streets. Mortuaries, allegedly, overflowing. Freezer lorries, allegedly, stacked with dead bodies. Bring out your dead!
I worked with doctors who strode around the wards in positive pressure protective gear. There were GPs who simply refused to visit elderly residents in nursing homes. On my patch this was all GPs and all nursing homes. Meanwhile I happily visited away with a mask stuck to the top of my head.
During the Covid pandemic I travelled far past angry, to reach a point of utter weariness. Instead of becoming outraged by the latest rubbish that was being pronounced, I very nearly washed my hands of it. However, after learning of Jacinda’s resignation I roused myself to have another look at what actually did happen. Or to be more specific, what was the impact of Covid on overall mortality. The only outcome that really matters.
Rid your mind of the numbers claimed to have died of Covid. The, never to be clarified distinction between those who died ‘of’ or ‘with’ Covid. Or those who read an article on Covid and then, overwhelmed with fear, stepped out in front of a bus. Thus, becoming a Covid related… associated, something, anything to do with Covid, death.
Over time the Covid figures became so ridiculous and unreliable as to become meaningless. I should know, I wrote some of the death certificates myself. Let me think… ‘She died of COVID, she died of COVID not. Eeny, meeny, miney mo…’
I am not saying that Covid did not kill a large number of people. But the fact that deaths from influenza disappeared completely for two years tells me all I need to know. ‘Roll up, roll up, Ladies and Gentlemen, to see the amazing lady influenza disappear before your very eyes.’ An astonishing trick, all the way from La La Land. ‘You expect me to believe that? Ho, ho, ho, very funny…. Oh, sorry, you actually do.’
Anyway, to clear my internal database of horribly unreliable figures, I went back to look at my favourite graphs on EuroMOMO. This website looks at overall mortality, and only overall mortality. Their data comes from countries who do know how to record deaths, honestly. Unlike some others, who shall be nameless … China.
However, the main reason to focus on EuroMOMO is that overall mortality is something you cannot fake. About the only thing you can do to manipulate the figures is hold back data for a month or two – which has been done, but not to any great degree. So, without further ado, let us move onto EuroMOMO. Below is a recent graph. I have deliberately removed most of the information you need to know what it is showing. I wanted people to avoid jumping to conclusions … that they might then find it difficult row back from.
I found myself examining this graph idly and thought. Imagine if you had no idea what you were looking at here. What would you think? It’s a squiggly line, yes. Very good, gold star. What else?
To give you a bit more detail. This is a graph of overall mortality, across a large number of European countries. All of those who provide data to the EuroMOMO database anyway. Norway, the ultimate European lockdown champion, has mysteriously disappeared from the database. Maybe they shall return …. I have begun to see everything as a conspiracy nowadays.
The graph itself begins in January 2017 and finishes in January 2023. As you can see (if not terribly clearly) there are two wavy dotted lines. These lines rise up in the winter, and then fall back down in the summer. Something seen every year. This is because, every year, more people die in the winter than in the summer.
Everyone thinks they know the reason for this winter summer effect, but I am not so sure they do. But that is an enormously complicated topic for another time.
The lower, dotted lines represent the ‘average’ mortality you would expect to see [with upper and lower ‘normal’ limits] year on year. Above those wavy dotted lines sits a solid spikey line. This represents the actual number of deaths that occurred. Not just from Covid, but from everything.
This does raise an immediate question. If we keep seeing more deaths than we would expect in the winter, year on year, then the ‘average’ number of deaths should rise? Thus, the wavy dotted lines ought to be going up and up, in the winter. But they don’t.
I am not entirely sure why this is not the case. But it is a statistical question of such mind-boggling complexity that I am, frankly, unable to answer it. I have looked into it, but I was scared off by the sheer scale and difficulty of the mathematics involved. Too many equations for my poor wee brain.
Anyway, this graph starts in the winter of 2017 and ends about now. The vertical lines are drawn at midnight on Dec 31st each year. Which means that we have almost exactly six years of data. Excellent data, not manipulated in any way. I say this because, whilst the diagnosis of ‘Covid death’ may be disputed, the diagnosis of death cannot.
What stands out? Well, there was a very sharp peak of deaths in early 2020. This, as you have probably worked out, was when Covid first hit. I find it fascinating that it was so transient. It came, it went… gone. For a bit anyway.
Was the precipitous fall due to strict lockdowns? Some will doubtless argue this. However, we all locked down again in autumn 2020 and the death rate went up, and stayed up, for about six months. Until, that is, January came along, and it all settled down again. Which follows pretty much the pattern of 2017, 2108 and 2019. And the pattern of all pandemics. They come, and they go. Some a little earlier, some a little later.
What else do you see – now that we are all pretty much fully vaccinated? I think another thing that stands out is the sudden and sharp rise in mortality in November 2022. Which is virtually identical to the spike in 2020. Strange?
However, to my mind, the thing that shouts most loudly about this graph is that the years of Covid pandemic panic really do not look that much different from the previous three years. Half close your eyes, and there is almost nothing to see. The Covid peaks were a little higher, and a little longer – maybe.
If you knew nothing about the Covid pandemic I don’t think you would exclaim. ‘My God, look at these vast waves of death in 2020, 2021. What amazing, never seen before thing, happened here?’ Yes, first spike of early 2020 was certainly sharp, and unusual, but it was short. And very little different to the spike at the end of 2022. As for the rest?
Now, I would like to turn your attention to Germany. The most populous country in Europe. Here it is even more clear that the years of the Covid pandemic are not remotely unusual. If I had removed the calendar years off this graph, you would be hard pressed to spot the Covid pandemic. In truth, you would be more than hard pressed. You couldn’t.
The 2018 influenza spike was equally dramatic to Covid peak of 2021, if not more so. [You may have noticed that there was no peak in 2020] In addition, at the end of 2022, we have the highest peak of all. Future historians might well look at this graph and ask. ‘Tell me, why did the world go mad in 2020, and remain mad through 2021? Why did everyone lockdown in March 2020, and then do nothing whatsoever in December 2022?’
It almost goes without saying that, had we locked down again in November 2022, it would have been claimed that lockdown saved us all. Look at how quickly it came, then went. Well, they could have claimed it. But we didn’t lock down again, did we? In direct contrast to Germany. What of the people living in Luxembourg?
Luxembourg is surrounded by Belgium France and Germany. People move freely from one to the other, always have done, and still do. The ‘deadly’ Covid pandemic raged all around them. Here, absolutely nothing happened. Mind you, they also seem to have been unaffected by influenza.
Whilst the Germans were dying in large numbers in 2018, the Luxembourgians carried on serenely, not an extra death to be seen. Why? Discuss. [It seems that most/all countries unaffected by Covid, were also unaffected by earlier flu epidemics].
I know some of you may be thinking that Germany is much bigger than Luxembourg so … so what? If you are going to see an effect on mortality, you are more likely to see it happen, more dramatically, and rapidly, in a country with fewer people.
I should explain that the figures on the left axis, on the German and Luxembourg graphs (unlike the first one), do not represent total deaths, they are the ‘Z score’. That is, the deviation from the mean.
The upper dotted line represents a Z score of five. That means, five standard deviations above the mean. It has been decreed that if you hit more than five standard deviations above the mean, for any length of time, this is a signal that ‘something bad’ is happening. The alarm starts goes off, and epidemiologists run around bumping into each other. ‘The sky is falling… etc.’
If you use the Z score it makes no difference how large the population is. It has been specifically designed to make it possible to compare changes in overall mortality, in populations of very different sizes. I feel the need here to make it clear that Luxembourg is not that small. It has more than twice the population of Iceland, for example.
Enough of the maths already.
So, deep breath, and trying to bring all these random thoughts together. What does EuroMOMO tell us? It tells us that Covid was a bit worse than a bad flu season, with 2018 being a good reference point. [There have been far worse flu epidemics than 2018, and I am not talking about 1918/19].
What EuroMOMO makes most clear, at least to me, is that Covid was not, repeat not, a pandemic of unique power, and destructiveness. It could have never remotely justified the drastic actions that were taken to combat it.
Belatedly, this is becoming recognised, as has the damage associated with lockdowns. Here is the abstract of an article from 2022. A bit dry, but worth a read. ‘Are Lockdowns Effective in Managing Pandemics?’
‘The present coronavirus crisis caused a major worldwide disruption which has not been experienced for decades. The lockdown-based crisis management was implemented by nearly all the countries, and studies confirming lockdown effectiveness can be found alongside the studies questioning it.
In this work, we performed a narrative review of the works studying the above effectiveness, as well as the historic experience of previous pandemics and risk-benefit analysis based on the connection of health and wealth. Our aim was to learn lessons and analyze ways to improve the management of similar events in the future.
The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past.
The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.’ 1
In the face of such evidence, the argument for lockdown seems to be transforming into a somewhat pathetic whinge. ‘We didn’t know. It’s all very well people saying we shouldn’t have locked down now. We didn’t hear you saying it at the time. We were just following The Science, don’t blame us. Better safe than sorry. Don’t blame us … I think you’re being very nasty to us.’
This, of course, is nonsense. There were plenty of scientists arguing against lockdown at the time. However, they were all ruthlessly censored, attacked, and silenced. Experts such as Prof. John Ioannidis, Prof. Karol Sikora, Prof. Sunetra Gupta, Prof. Carl Heneghan. These last two UK professors argued very strenuously against lockdowns. They were ignored, then vilified. Here from an article written in January 2021:
‘… Sunetra Gupta. She’s been getting flak from the mob for months but it reached a crescendo yesterday when she was on the Today programme. Why is the BBC giving space to a nutter, people asked? She isn’t a nutter, of course. She’s an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford University. But she bristles against the COVID consensus and that makes her a bad person, virtually a witch, in the eyes of the zealous protectors of COVID orthodoxy. Professor Gupta has written about the barrage of abuse she receives via email. ‘Evil’, they call her.’
‘… her chief crime, judging from the hysterical commentary about her, is that she is critical of harsh lockdowns. She is a founder of the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposes that instead of locking down the whole of society we should shield the elderly and the vulnerable while allowing other people to carry on pretty much as normal. It is this perfectly legitimate discussion of a social and political question — the question of lockdown — that has earned Gupta the most ire.’ 2
I would like to point out that I was arguing against lockdown, right from the very beginning. Yes, I do enjoy saying, ‘I told you so’ from time to time. It is one of the few satisfactions I get in life nowadays. Here is a section from a blog I wrote in March 2020. Once again, right from the start:
‘… However, there is also a health downside associated with our current approach. Many people are also going to suffer and die, because of the actions we are currently taking. On the BBC, a man with cancer was being interviewed. Due to the shutdown, his operation is being put back by several months – at least. Others with cancer will not be getting treatment. The level of worry and anxiety will be massive.
Hip replacements are also being postponed and other, hugely beneficial interventions are not being done. Those with heart disease and diabetes will not be treated. Elderly people, with no support, may simply die of starvation in their own homes. Jobs will be lost, companies are going bust, suicides will go up. Psychosocial stress will be immense.
In my role, working in Out of Hours, we are being asked to watch out for abuse in the home. Because we know that children will now be more at risk, trapped in their houses. Also, partners will suffer greater physical abuse, stuck in the home, unable to get out. Not much fun.
Which means that we are certainly not looking at a zero-sum game here, where every case of COVID prevented, or treated, is one less death. There is a health cost.
There is also the impact of economic damage, which can be immense. I studied what happened in Russia, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the economic and social chaos that ensued. There was a massive spike in premature deaths.
In men, life expectancy fell by almost seven years, over a two to three-year period. A seven-year loss of life expectancy in seventy million men, is forty-nine million QALYs worth. It is certainly a far greater health disaster than COVID can possibly create…’ 3
And lo, the damage is coming to pass. Maybe not so many people dying of starvation as I predicted, at least not in the West. In poorer countries, however …
Another terrible thing that happened during lockdown was the vilification of anyone who dared question the official narrative. Yet almost everything they predicted has come true. Have the likes of Professor Gupta been forgiven and welcomed back into the fold? Have a wild guess on that one.
What of those who deliberately whipped up the panic and led the dreadful behavioural psychology teams. They quite deliberately frothed the population into a state of terror. What of those, whose ridiculous models kicked the whole damned thing off? The Professor Neil Fergusons of this land? Yes, you.
These people are all still comfortably ensconced, advising away. Their positions fully secure. In the UK they were mostly given knighthoods, damehoods, and other shiny gongs to impress their friends with. This, I find hard to swallow.
More worrying is that there will never be an honest review on the pandemic. Why, because so many people in positions of power would be seriously threatened by it. Which means that any such review will end up as a completely bland whitewash. ‘In general the actions taken were reasonable, and in a situation where so much was unknown, it was better to try and protect the public … blah, blah.’ Case closed.
The reality is that these lockdowns were a complete disaster. A complete disaster. The fact that we will never have a proper debate about them, means that we will learn nothing from what happened. This, in turn, means that another disaster is on the way. Those who should be listened to will be attacked, silenced and censored, again.
Those who got it all horribly wrong last time will be handed even greater powers … next time. The reason why lockdowns did not work, they will argue, is because they were not strict enough, or long enough. We need proper lockdowns next time. You have been warned. Cast your eyes over China.
I will leave you with the conclusion of the paper ‘Are lockdowns effective in managing pandemics?’
- Neither previous pandemics nor COVID19 provide clear evidence that lockdowns help to prevent death in pandemic
- Lockdowns are associated with a considerable human cost. Even if somewhat effective in preventing COVID19 death, they probably cause far more extensive (an order of magnitude or more) loss of life
- A thorough risk-benefit analysis must be performed before imposing any lockdown in future.
Which can probably be summed in in the words: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.
The central guiding principle of medicine that was hurled out of the window in March 2020 by people who seem not to exhibit a scrap of humility, or humanity. Nor apology.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9368251/
2: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-censorious-war-on-lockdown-sceptics/
3: https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/03/29/a-health-economic-perspective-on-covid-19/
Overnight in Bangkok
Don’t listen to those rumors!
By Clif High | February 2, 2023
Sitrep:
It seems that the Thai Royal family had a Princess who was a good global citizen. She took 3/three of the Pfizer shots. She went into a coma a while back.
The Thai Royal family was/is very distressed. Investigations were ordered.
The distress of the Royals was increased by the reports coming back from their investigators. It seems that Pfizer, apparently, did NO safety studies on this shot. Shortly thereafter, Thailand cancels the covid contracts with Pfizer on the basis of fraud.
As may be expected, all this has taken weeks. The investigators are still at work as this is a giant, global scam/fraud with many threads to trace back to sources.
People known to me for decades are living as ex-pat Americans in Thailand. Two of them are outstanding, though now ‘retired’ into a different life, investigators. One worked for over 30 years as a US Naval officer, the last 15 of which were involved in criminal fraud cases. The other was an investigator for the Washington State Patrol, again, Criminal investigations.
Both are in resident in Bangkok these last few years. My ex-Navy friend is a serious linguist, concentrating on 7 Asian languages. That’s how I know him.
Rumors:
They have revealed to me that several, different, sources, are reporting to them, that ‘something’, a really big ‘something’, is disturbing the Bangkok ‘underworld’. My guys have contact with it through a couple of martial arts dojos. Both are hearing the same rumors, ‘disturbance in the force’ kind of rumors.
The rumor to NOT listen to says that ‘assassins’ are being ‘recruited’ out of very deep holes in the martial arts world.
Me? I would NOT want to have this logo on my letterhead as an executive:
Congressman Thomas Massie Obliterates Vaxx Mandate Against Healthcare Workers
By J.D. Rucker • The Liberty Daily • February 1, 2023
The House of Representatives is very different than it was a year ago. Back then, any notion of ending vaccine mandates was shuffled into a memory hole. Anyone who opposed them was dismissed as an anti-vaxxer. Today, we may be seeing progress. Finally.
On Tuesday, Congressman Thomas Massie gave a speech explaining the reasons the vaccine mandate against healthcare workers must end.
“I rise in support of this resolution because it would facilitate the passage of HR 497, the Freedom for Healthcare Workers Act,” he said. “What does that bill do? It ends the unscientific, illogical, immoral, unconstitutional, unethical vaccine mandate on healthcare workers that is predicated on lies.”
He listed the five predicates for the mandate that turned out to be lies:
- The vaccine prevents spread
- The vaccines don’t cause any harm
- The mandates are scientific
- Natural immunity should be ignored
- Nobody’s liable for the damage the mandate can cause
As he put it, “We’re living under medical malpractice martial law right now under the PREP Act and the EUAs.”
He concluded by dropping the ultimate truth bomb. “This is the epitome of hypocrisy. Nobody in this room was mandated to take a vaccine, and we’re voting on whether we’re going to force people who want to take care of people whether they have to take the vaccine.”
Spycraft or Not, Shootdown of Chinese Weather Balloon Using 5th-Gen Jet Looks ‘Silly’
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 05.02.2023
A US jet destroyed a Chinese weather balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, with US officials saying the balloon had engaged in espionage as it flew over US airspace over the past several days. Beijing insists the dirigible was just a meteorological research balloon that drifted off course.
It’s unclear whether the Chinese weather balloon downed over the Atlantic was an intelligence-gathering vessel, but the incident has certainly given Washington the pretext it needs to feed anti-China hysteria amid tectonic shifts being witnessed in the global geopolitical and economic order, former Department of Defense analyst-turned anti-war whistleblower and activist Karen Kwiatkowski has told Sputnik.
“The only reason to shoot down the balloon after it had completely transversed the continental US would be to confirm exactly what the balloon was carrying before it got out of the 200 nautical mile exclusion zone. If we do hear about any analysis from the Pentagon later, this could be used to inform or propagandize the Biden administration’s actions or inaction,” Kwiatkowski explained.
“If the balloon constituted a legitimate threat, and apparently this is not the first time such balloons have drifted this way, then the Biden administration obviously failed to react in defense of the US. More likely they knew it wasn’t a threat but as it was observed by civilian Americans on the ground, it technically became a UFO, they didn’t know what to do, and eventually acted in a way that could be explained, albeit weakly,” she said.
“The Chinese response may have been to chuckle, or it helped inform the Chinese government as to the air defense capabilities of the US, or both. Obviously, if it is determined that [the US] belatedly shot down a weather balloon with a 5th generation fighter jet with a standoff air-to-air Sidewinder missile, it feeds into the global narrative of the US military as an offensively-oriented warmonger, and kind of silly,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
Either way, Washington’s overreaction (or untimely underreaction, as the case may be) will be sure to inform Beijing’s perceptions of US air defense capabilities, as well as perceptions of the US leadership in general, according to the retired officer.
“From a Chinese perspective, the whole event was handled weakly, and I think reveals leadership vacuums and US confusion, and these conditions will inform Chinese relations with the US, and their long-term strategy in dealing with Washington. I don’t see how DC can be treated seriously by the Chinese government, notwithstanding the large, offensive-oriented US military and the US policy for nuclear first strike, Kwiatkowski said.
Conceding that “any airborne object can and probably does collect data,” and that “all countries do this, whether they admit it or not,” Kwiatkowski believes that the longer the Pentagon waits to produce evidence of the balloon’s malicious nature, the more likely it will be that it really was just a harmless weather balloon, as the Chinese say it was. However “if the surveillance equipment on this balloon is found to be interesting, we can be sure this will be used to whip up Chinese war narratives,” she said.
PR Stunt?
Kwiatkowski emphasized that as a critic of the Biden administration, she would actually be “gratified” to learn that the spy balloon drama was just a PR stunt on the part of the White House, since this would at least “indicate some strategic unity and a well-defined set of military and diplomatic objectives vis-à-vis China in the coming years.”
Instead, she said, this administration has so far only demonstrated its propensity to bicker, and faces a massive trust deficit with the public due to difficulty communicating “honestly and clearly” with the American people.
“Officials in the Biden administration are not only bickering amongst themselves over the Ukraine tar-baby, they are not trusted by anyone, and will not be until Blinken and Victoria Nuland and others are removed from their posts,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
Ominous Omen
There is also a more ominous aspect of the balloon story, related to the growing push by Washington to prepare Americans for a possible direct conflict with China, according to the observer.
“The US government-controlled media has hyped [the spy balloon story] because it feeds into an overall fear narrative that the government wishes to stoke, given a loss of popular interest in continuing to subsidize and extend the war in Ukraine, and to help feed anti-Chinese hysteria among the people. Just last week, [US General Mike] Minihan… publicly proclaimed that the US would be in a hot war with China by 2025. The story [about the balloon] fits with that kind of propagandizing. More than a military war with China is really the impending economic and government problems with the rest of the world’s oil consumers and producers moving decisively off the petrodollar system. If US government debt cannot be supported on the back of its formerly dominant dollar, that government must collapse or go completely autocratic to survive. Meanwhile, global gold and energy and actual productive capabilities are entirely outside of US control or influence, or will soon be. When empires collapse, they seek war, and they propagandize and threaten war,” Kwiatkowski explained.
Did Someone Forget What Century They’re In?
Commenting on the balloon incident and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin’s remarks about the Chinese dirigible being used to monitor American military facilities, Russian military observer Oleg Glazunov told Sputnik that it seemed like Washington had forgotten what century they’re in as far as intelligence-collecting methods go.
“When was the last time you heard of reconnaissance by balloon? This was over 50-60 years ago. Moreover, there is a Chinese diaspora in the United States of over 2 million people, with their position so strong in some cities that the FBI can’t do anything. What balloon are we talking about?” he said.
For his part, former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a US-based non-partisan non-profit, pointed out that “there is no established law regarding satellites or other flying objects passing through someone’s airspace as a violation of sovereignty or international agreements if that object is well beyond the atmosphere, as this balloon was. Satellites cross most nations in the world at a high altitude and many of them are, in fact, spying, but Washington has not begun shooting down those that transit the United States.”
Giraldi echoed Kwiatkowski’s sentiments that the balloon hysteria supports the Biden administration’s push to portray China as a future “adversary” or even “enemy” of the United States. However, he doesn’t expect China to react to the “provocation” through escalation, “as its leadership is more sensible than what we are forced to suffer with here in the United States.”
“I believe that the relationship between Beijing and Washington will continue to be difficult, with most of the problems coming from the political posturing engaged in by a clueless White House,” the observer concluded.
US ‘empire of lies’ should be investigated – top Russian MP
RT | February 5, 2023
The UN should open an investigation into Washington’s crimes against humanity, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin suggested on Sunday.
Writing on Telegram on the 20th anniversary of the infamous 2003 speech by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN Security Council, during which he justified the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Volodin offered a scathing criticism of what he described as the American “empire of lies.”
According to the speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, this date marks “one of the biggest deceptions of the global community by the United States.” He recalled that during the landmark Security Council meeting Powell “accused Iraq of producing weapons of mass destruction, providing a vial with ‘white powder’ as proof.” At the time, the US secretary of state said the vial could be used to store anthrax.
While the UN did not approve the Iraq invasion, the US attacked the country anyway, he added. “Half a million civilians fell victims, the president was executed, the country was gone,” Volodin wrote, pointing out that Powell later admitted that the vial stunt was “a hoax,” but Washington was never held to account.
“All policies of the United States and the collective West are based on lies,” the Duma speaker stressed.
He noted that the same applied to NATO’s promises not to expand eastwards after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, as well as to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements. The latter were signed by Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany in a bid to pave the way for peace in Ukraine by granting the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics special status within the Ukrainian state.
These accords “also turned out to be a deception – but [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [former French President Francois] Hollande acted as Powell did”, Volodin said. He was referring to the bombshell confessions by the two ex-leaders, who admitted in December that the Minsk Agreements were simply meant “to give Ukraine time” to strengthen its army.
“The UN should investigate Washington’s crimes against humanity. And the decision-makers should be punished for the millions of victims, refugees, broken destinies, destroyed states,” Volodin added.
Gmail’s Czech Election Campaign Interference
By Přemysl Janýr | February 5, 2023
On 18 January, a few days before the presidential election, I received an email from a non-political group of friends with an anti-Babiš pamphlet. I replied with an anti-Petr picture that I had received shortly before. Out of a group of forty recipients, seven emails were returned to me as undeliverable because “This message does not pass authentication checks” (SPF and DKIM both 5.7.26 do not pass).
This has never happened to me in decades of assiduous email communication. From time to time some mail is undeliverable, the address no longer exists, it has overflowed, etc., but so far no one has ever blocked the delivery of my message and withal to such an extent. I checked all seven error messages, all of them gmail.com addresses. So a few minutes later I sent out another email to the group informing that gmail.com was blocking Petr Pavel’s picture. It was delivered to all of them, including the seven.
So the difference in deliverability was clearly not related to authentication requirements, but to Petr Pavel’s picture. I pasted it directly into the email body without any comment, not as an attachment. I don’t know how long it had been circulating on the Internet, but gmail.com knew it, recognizes it in emails by the content, and takes it into account in its algorithms to determine which messages to deliver to its clients and which to hide from them. Gmail is owned by the US corporation Google. And since Czech elections have to be irrelevant to it from a business point of view, it is obviously accommodating other entities for which they are not irrelevant. Of course, someone familiar with the Czech conditions had to evaluate Petr Pavel’s picture for them.
Mail, like a letter or any verbal or telephone conversation, is a private communication between two or more persons. The censorship of content described is analogous to the post office unsealing letters and deciding whether to deliver them based on their content. Or to a telephone provider listening to what you are talking about and cutting the connection if the subject matter is inappropriate. According to Czech law, it is a criminal offence.
This is compounded by the delicate fact that our private communications concerned electoral preferences, and that gmail.com was apparently disturbed not by a pamphlet disparaging Andrej Babiš, but by a picture disparaging Petr Pavel. This corresponds to a manipulation of the Czech election campaign by a foreign entity in favour of one of the candidates. And if we consider that Google offers not only an e-mail server, but also a virtually monopolistic search portal and a number of other services used by Czech citizens, it can covertly influence electoral preferences to a considerable extent. Even this is a criminal offence.
On the same day, I filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutor and a notification of election manipulation with the Ministry of the Interior. I published both submissions, including the suppressed image, in a posting on my blog http://www.janyr.eu and sent out a notice to my readers with a link, but forgot to release the posting before doing so. The notifications reached all recipients without any problems.
In no time, the first responded that the posting was unavailable. I immediately corrected that and sent out the notification again with an apology. Twenty addresses on gmail.com denied the delivery. I sent another email to those affected informing them that they had not received the link to the posting together with a link to my blog where they could find it. It went through to all twenty.
Thus over a course of hours, I‘ve accumulated a lot of material to analyze. In the first case, gmail.com recognized the suppressed image in the message body. In the second, it had to double-check the contained link and determine that the image was located at the destination address.
A statistical recap:
– I sent a total of 220 emails to recipients on gmail.com. 90 of them contained the suppressed image or a link to the posting where it was used.
– Of the emails with the image or link, 27 were undeliverable.
– All emails without the image or link, including those to “undeliverable” addresses, were delivered without issue.
Thus, the dependence of delivery on content is evident, but at the same time, gmail.com also delivered most of the emails with a link to my posting. So how is the decision actually made?
I sent out the notification in five batch emails. So I listed the recipients and marked those undelivered. In fact, the censorship affected only one of the five emails and consistently blocked all twenty gmail.com addresses contained. So apparently the censorship check is done randomly. If I add the original email with the picture, which just as consistently blocked all of the gmail.com addresses, only two, or one-third, of the six emails were censored. So if you get mail returned to a recipient on gmail.com with the reasoning that it doesn’t meet the authentication requirements, it will probably bypass censorship when resent.
If the reader is communicating with friends about topics that may contain a critical political charge, I can only recommend that he use a mail server other than gmail.com. Out of over a hundred servers, it is the only one I have encountered this behavior on.
What looks, acts and smells like a Global News Cartel and just got hit by an Antitrust lawsuit…
By Jo Nova | February 5, 2023
What if the news media formed a global monopoly to control the news?
Imagine if the media and tech giants of the world banded together behind-the-scenes to rule certain stories were “misinformation” and all their agencies thus reported the same “news”?
That’s what the Trusted News Initiative aimed to do — decide what ideas were and were not allowed to be discussed.
It’s like “free speech” but without the free part.
Not only could the media bury things but they could get away with it if no upstart competitor could red-pill their audience.
It would be the death of the Free Press
In a world like that the people would be ruled mostly by whomever it was that decided what was “misinformation”. Those controllers would be the defacto Ministry of Truth.
We all saw it happen over the last three years, so it’s good to put a name on the beast, but even better, Robert F Kennedy is suing them for anti-trust violation.
Trusted News Initiative, TNI
The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and bad vaccine reactions. TNI practically told us that in 2020:
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was set up last year [2019, just in time, eh?] to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy, such as elections.
Nearly everyone’s on board:
Core partners in the TNI are: AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta [Facebook], Microsoft, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompass – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express – India, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.
Which is a handy list of “where not to get your news”.
It’s a news cartel begging to be busted
Tony Thomas at Quadrant not only alerted me to the TNI but also to the news that a lawsuit has been filed in the US for damages and to break it up:
… on January 10 President John Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in a Texas District Court launched an anti-trust lawsuit for treble damages from TNI’s biggest news providers, namely the BBC, Washington Post, and global news syndicators Reuters and Associated Press. He wants TNI disbanded as an unlawful cartel. He cites the BBC because of its TNI lead role and US commercial operations involving millions of users.[1] The Kennedy lawsuit is here.[2] His brief says “It is also an action to defend the freedom of speech and of the press.”
This is rather like the Big Money Cartel of bankers and asset managers like BlackRock who are now facing anti-trust legal action all of their own.
The suit names the BBC because they were “the leaders” in at the start. But Thomas points out that the consequences are uncertain for the ABC, SBS and others. Though they are not named in the suit, they can still be liable:
The suit says,
Each participant in an antitrust conspiracy is jointly and severally liable for all the damages (including treble damages and attorneys’ fees) caused by the conspiracy, and the victims of an unlawful antitrust conspiracy are not required to sue all participants therein. (My emphasis, p93).
Thomas sent questions to the ABC and SBS in Australia asking them if they are involved in the lawsuit; whether they had advised their Minister about the potential legal exposure, and for details of how they had been implementing TNI policies. None have so far replied.
Perhaps it’s time for an FOI?
By the way, this is an actual BBC header, not a satirical dig.
The only thing “beyond” fake news is 100% managed propaganda.
By combining the major news and social media outlets, little competitors could be crushed
Even the media outlets that are not members of TNI would get this message — stray from the line and Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter (pre Elon Musk) will hurt you:
Robert Kennedy’s own newsletters had 680,000 followers before being de-platformed, censored and shadow-banned by Google/YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook/Instagram. His writ says BBC’s Jessica Cecil, TNI’s head in 2020-21, took evident pride in the assertion that the TNI’s suppression of others’ online reporting did not “in any way muzzl[e] our own journalism”. He adds, “It was apparently of no consequence that the TNI muzzles other news publishers’ journalism.” (p44). Cecil spoke of TNI’s “clear expectations” for members to “choke off” alleged online misinformation. This incidentally prevents any one member gaining traffic by publishing “prohibited reporting” the others have binned.
Kennedy says TNI’s Big Tech members collectively have a gatekeeping power over at least 90 per cent of online news traffic. De-platforming a small news publisher typically costs at least 90 per cent of its traffic. Even well-known major online news publishers can lose up to 50 per cent of their traffic from a seemingly minor change to Google’s search algorithms. Smaller online news publishers have been destroyed completely when shadow-banned, throttled, de-monetized, or de-platformed.
The real free press are the bloggers now
The big threat to the legacy media and corruptocrats everywhere was the rise of the independent bloggers and influencers who could easily outscore the boring media bloc that repeated the same tedious lies. Ten years ago an army of blogs like this were growing every year and getting front page in many searches:
Kennedy’s lawsuit, less kindly, claims TNI’s commercial goal is to deplatform and crush the myriad of upstart online publishers who are contradicting the official lines and reducing trust in big media, along with its ad revenues. The legacy, high-cost media are smarting over competition from bloggers in the shift to digital publishing, with 85 per cent of Americans now getting their news online. US newspapers’ ad revenue between 2000 and 2020 plummeted from $US48.7 billion to only $US9.6 billion, Kennedy says (p28).
A further motive for the TNI censorship, Kennedy says, is to placate governments that are threatening adverse new regulations, potentially costing Big Pharma billions in fines, liabilities and lost revenue. US conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has satirised the Big Media censorship as: “We have a monopoly on telling lies. No one else can talk.”
In a free market for news, the same players compete with each other to get to the truth the fastest. In the TNI cartel, all the decisions about what “the truth is” are played out behind closed doors. The ABC News Director Justin Stevens claims the TNI is just a system of “fast alerts” about disinformation and “information sharing” about things like “how audiences react to disinformation”. But in a free market all that happens all the time. Stupid ideas get crushed by great responses. That’s how it works.
The best answers win in the court of public opinion. It’s democratic, people vote with their remotes, their wallets and on their ballots. TNI wants to hide that debate, take it away from the people, and put it in the hands of The Ministry of Truth.
Nice racket you have there
Read it all at Quadrant — as Tony Thomas tells it, it’s a profit making cartel. The Kennedy suit explains how the TNI members were promoting vaccines while silencing all the cheaper medicines. And Big Pharma was sending money back to TNI members in advertising. The conflicts of interest are brazen — the President of Reuters News, James C Smith, sits on the board of Pfizer. When someone pointed this out on Linked In they were banned for life. See how this works?
Why is a single dollar of our tax money supporting a news service that doesn’t know what journalism is? If cartels like this are not exactly the kind of thing we pay the ABC to expose, why pay them at all?
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Why vaccines for children are Big Pharma’s holy grail – Part 1
By Serena Wylde | TCW Defending Freedom | October 18, 2023
James A Shannon, director of the US National Institutes of Health 1955-68, said: ‘No vaccination can be proven safe before it is given to children.’
When he made that statement, it was still possible in the US to sue vaccine manufacturers under tort law for vaccine-induced deaths and injuries, which is no longer the case.
Today the US has the world’s most aggressive vaccine schedule and ranks as the sickest country, with the highest infant mortality, in the developed world. The UK does not lag far behind.
Vaccines carry three separate areas of potential risk. Firstly, they artificially stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies, which temporarily inhibits another part of the body’s defence mechanism. In an infant, whose immune system is just developing, this high demand of energy can in some cases overwhelm its metabolic reserves, and cause brain inflammation. The brain is the highest energy-consuming tissue in the body, followed by the gastro-intestinal tract and the immune system.
Secondly, vaccines contain chemicals, metals and drugs. Thirdly, according to the former pharmaceutical R&D executive Sasha Latypova, traditional vaccines are consistently contaminated with plant and animal proteins which hyper-sensitise the body, especially in children, giving rise to allergies.
In the US in the 1970s there were three inoculations recommended for children… continue
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