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This Was a Test of the Emergency Use Authorization System

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | February 27, 2023

Data continues to emerge according to which not only were the mRNA shots ineffective at preventing infection and transmission of COVID-19, but they may have caused widespread harm to persons cajoled or coerced into undergoing vaccination, despite their own relative invulnerability to the worst effects of the virus. Anecdotal cases abound, but diehard regime narrative devotees continue to dismiss such “incidents”—thousands of which are recorded in the government’s own VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System) database—as purely coincidental. It is more difficult to downplay reports involving entire cohorts, such as the increased incidence of myocarditis among young males, which the CDC itself has acknowledged. Some critics have suggested that a disproportionately high percentage of pregnant women in Pfizer’s initial trial of the shots suffered miscarriages.

Back in November 2021, in the midst of the widespread and aggressive “Vaccinate everyone!” campaign, I spoke with a woman in Oregon who matter-of-factly mentioned that her (vaccinated) daughter had suffered three recent miscarriages. Recognizing that it was too late to do anything anyway, given that the daughter had already been vaccinated, I did not dare to suggest that her troubles may have been caused by the shots she had no doubt been exhorted by her doctor to take. At that time, following the lead of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, health officials everywhere were in the midst of a marketing blitz according to which COVID-19 vaccination would protect mothers and their babies alike.

I said nothing to the woman in Oregon about the dangers of introducing foreign substances into pregnant women (although I had written about it), but I did naturally wonder at the time whether there might be a causal connection between the poor daughter’s miscarriages and the shots, given the biological activity of the spike protein already known to induce blood clotting and heart troubles. The mother of the young woman—who was pregnant again, for a fourth time—seemed optimistic that somehow there was nothing to worry about, even after three failed attempts to bring a baby into the world. It is possible, I realized then and continue to own, as I must, that the woman was simply unable, for unrelated reasons, to carry a child to term. But given that the biologically active spike protein is what the original virus used to access cells, and production of lots of it was induced by the injected mRNA, it would not take a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to surmise that the pregnancies may have been sabotaged by the shots.

Critics such as feminist scholar Naomi Wolf, who early on in the pandemic raised questions about the shot’s safety, given many reports of irregular menstrual cycles in women who under went vaccination, were denounced as purveyors of misinformation and immediately deplatformed by the social media giants. Only recently have such “conspiracy theorists” been permitted to articulate their concerns in the public sphere once again—and only on some platforms, including Twitter, which to Elon Musk’s credit reinstated thousands of accounts shut down for the crime of deviating from the narrative favored by the pharma-government alliance. If the shots are indeed dangerous to fetuses, it is needless to say too late for all of the pregnant women tricked into believing that because the CDC insisted that there was no evidence of risk to them and their offspring, they should therefore roll up their sleeves.

That Pfizer knew all along that their mRNA shots had effects upon women’s hormonal systems was corroborated through Project Veritas’ sting operation involving a Pfizer research director, Jordon Triston Walker. In the recorded interview thought by him to be a friendly conversation with a date, Walker observed that the shots seemed somehow to be affecting the endocrine systems of women. The delicate hormonal balance needed to maintain a pregnancy suggests an immediate connection between the widely reported menstruation irregularities of women and the incidence of miscarriages in some of the initial trial subjects.

The data interpreted by some critics to imply that miscarriage was one of the many possible side effects of the Pfizer shot were made public only recently, with the release of a large trove of court-ordered documents which the company is now required by law to provide, despite its initial insistence that it would take seventy-five years to do so. Setting aside the question of whether miscarriage is in fact a side effect of the shots, the very idea that it would take so many years to make public the documents said to have served as the basis for the FDA’s (Food and Drug Administration’s) decision to grant the Pfizer product Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), so that it could forego the customarily stringent multi-year testing program required of pharmaceutical products more generally, struck many people as absurd.

To my mind, the situation constituted a classic Charybdis and Scylla. If it was humanly impossible to process and assess all of the data (all 451,000 pages of it) in the short period between the creation of the vaccines and December 11, 2020, when the EUA was granted, this could be taken to imply that the persons on the committee incompetently executed their role and indeed based their decision to approve the shots primarily on Pfizer’s obvious wish that they do so. Alternatively, it was always possible to process the documents for publication, and the company’s resistance to doing so was due to the content of the documents themselves, which might harm the ambitious sales program to vaccinate everyone on the planet with the new product.

The director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, encouraged pregnant women from the beginning to get the shots, quite deceptively claiming that there was no cause for worry about possible health risks to fetuses. The safety information provided with the original shots itself indicated that pregnant women had been excluded from the initial trials, as they are for most pharmaceutical products. The reason why pregnant women are not included in early stage clinical trials of products intended for the general population is because they represent a special case, given the fragile chemical environment enveloping the fetus. It is a matter of common knowledge that developing human beings are highly sensitive to and often endangered by foreign substances—alcohol and nicotine being two well-documented examples. The vulnerability of fetuses was most notoriously and unforgettably demonstrated when pregnant women were prescribed Thalidomide on the basis of clinical trials which, again, excluded pregnant women. As in the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, Thalidomide was distributed by doctors under the misleading marketing line that there was no evidence that it would harm fetuses. Thalidomide killed thousands of babies and deformed thousands more before it was finally withdrawn from the market.

We now know from Pfizer safety data recently released that some of the women in the initial trial were in fact pregnant—apparently without having known that this was the case at the time, which was why they were not excluded from the trial. The vaccines may or may not have caused their reported miscarriages, but the fact that the CDC would encourage pregnant women, on the basis of nearly no data, to undergo vaccination betrays a reckless disregard and their true goals in injecting everyone everywhere, even members of low risk cohorts, with the mRNA treatment. Ignorance is bliss for pharmaceutical companies, which can continue to market and sell products for years, reaping billions of dollars of profits, before finally halting sales on the basis of widely reported and what come eventually to be undeniable post-launch problems, as in the cases of Vioxx, Belviq, Baycol, etc.

Above and beyond the profit motive was plausibly the desire to test the newfangled mRNA technology on the largest sample of human beings possible—whether or not they actually needed any treatment whatsoever in contending with COVID-19. Of course, if the desire on the part of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel was to make strides ahead in the research and development of other lucrative medications, then the quest for data, too, was ultimately driven by the profit motive—albeit looking forward, to future possible blockbuster drugs.

Certainly, the steadfast resistance, indeed, the outright refusal on the part of public health authorities such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, for more than a year after the launch of the COVID-19 vaccines, to acknowledge the relevance of natural immunity in those persons previously infected, and to recommend appropriate adjustments to the U.S. government’s mandates—for both health care workers and military personnel—supports the hypothesis that one of the overarching aims of the aggressive, relentless vaccine campaign was not to save the lives of the small percentage of human beings vulnerable to the virus, but to amass data.

Corroborating this interpretation, according to which the companies hoped not only to reap a windfall of profits but also to collect a huge amount of data, is the explanation by many critics (including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Peter McCullough) of the assiduous suppression of any and every other therapeutic which the vaccine salespersons recognized would compete with and diminish the uptake of the newly patented products. Most importantly of all, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were dismissed and denounced by public health authorities, and ridiculed by parroting pundits throughout the media, because EUA cannot be granted to products when alternative therapies are available.

In his conversation with a Project Veritas reporter, Dr. Jordon Triston Walker also shared the potentially explosive piece of information that Pfizer executives had floated ideas such as mutating the COVID-19 virus so as to be able to develop vaccines preemptively. It was not entirely clear from Walker’s remarks whether the intention would be to release those mutated viruses so as to direct the course of the disease in populations, or simply to predict which variants would pop up on the scene naturally, through mutations of the virus in its effort to self-propagate by evading the antibodies induced by the latest shots.

Pfizer responded to the bombshell revelation by effectively minimizing the story through suggesting that the process described by their (now former, I presume) employee was essentially part of the normal, necessary research conducted in producing, for example, the flu shot each year. Nearly everyone by now is more or less aware that the flu shot is a gamble, involving researchers predicting which strains will be most prevalent and virulent. People who undergo inoculation against those versions may still fall ill because they may or may not come in contact with the predicted dominant strains. Some individuals report anecdotally that they were never more ill than during a year when they opted for the “free” flu shot, which clearly indicates that they encountered versions of the pathogen not expected by the researchers who determined the ingredients for the products distributed during that particular flu season. Unsurprisingly, neither anecdotal reports, nor adverse effects, nor even consistently poor efficacy rates have deterred pharmaceutical firms from pushing for widespread uptake of their mediocre flu shot products in very public and misleading advertising campaigns fronted by government health authorities.

Needless to say, if the intention of Pfizer in mutating the COVID-19 virus was to release it into the human population in order to induce countless numbers of persons to seek protection by purchasing (or obtaining from their government) the “vaccine” developed in order to stop that strain, then that would constitute a flagrant violation of any decent person’s basic sense of ethics. Such a possibility would moreover, and disconcertingly, be taken by some to accrue a degree of plausibility to the conspiratorial notion according to which the original COVID-19 virus was not only a gain-of-function product, created by researchers in a lab, but also intentionally released into the world in order to initiate The Great Reset being promoted by members of the World Economic Forum (WEF), led by Klaus Schwab.

More plausible, I believe, is that Pfizer and Moderna, et al., are primarily focused on the future of their other new mRNA products in the works. It is not at all far-fetched to surmise that the relentless, divisive push to vaccinate everyone everywhere with the first mRNA treatment ever tested on a population of human beings, made possible only by the FDA’s EUA, was spearheaded by companies with much broader goals in mind. The CEOs of these companies have publicly vaunted their plans to use mRNA to cure cancer and other intractable diseases, which in fact best explains their manifest fervor to acquire as much data as possible, by all means necessary. Such a program, albeit less explicitly heinous than creating illnesses in order to be able to sell patented cures for the symptoms caused by them, nonetheless involved using all of the people coerced into undergoing treatments for which they had no need as the means to the companies’ mercenary ends.

Further evidence for this admittedly unsavory interpretation can be seen in the push to vaccinate children, even infants, despite the minimal danger posed to them by the COVID-19 virus. If, in reality, the chances of a child dying from COVID-19 is less than the chance of their being hit by a bolt of lightning, then it is hard to see why anyone would push for uptake under a public health pretext. Yet those who wish to foist the product on young persons, including infants, have continued to press the line according to which the virus poses a serious health risk to everyone, and the vaccine will help to protect children along with their parents, this despite data according to which the protection provided by the shots, even to the vulnerable persons who might be said to benefit, plummets to nothing after only a few months. (Preposterously enough, according to one recent study at the Cleveland Clinic, in the longterm, the more shots one has received, the greater become one’s chances of contracting COVID-19!)

A second reason why children have been important for the product companies is peculiar to the United States, where the PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act) protecting companies from liability in the event of adverse effects covers any product approved as a part of the child immunization schedule. Demonstrating their complete capture by pharmaceutical industry forces, on February 9, 2023, the CDC added the COVID-19 shots to the long list of those recommended in the childhood vaccination schedule (which now includes dozens of shots), thus ensuring the product companies massive profits for years to come through the inoculation of persons not at significant risk from the virus, using a product whose already nearly negligible protective capacity for invulnerable persons (a risk reduction of ~1%—or less) spans less than a few months.

Unbelievably enough, the new CDC recommendation for children (beginning at six months) includes the original COVID-19 vaccine, though the wild strain of the virus may no longer exist, along with booster shots, for which the only clinical trial on human beings is currently underway—on the millions of persons who rolled up their sleeves on the basis of safety data gathered from only animal trials. The results are trickling in on the first-round of “bivalent” booster shots, which have so far been demonstrated to have only middling (30%) efficacy in preventing infection by the variant they are attended to address. But the virus will continue to mutate, thus serving as the pretext for producing new booster formulas. This implies that, under the CDC’s immunization guidelines, each new booster shot will of necessity constitute yet another experimental trial, to be conducted, shockingly enough, upon children throughout the years of their development into adults. In other words, children have been set up to serve as test subjects (i.e., human guinea pigs) for each newly developed “booster” to follow in the future as the virus continues to mutate, despite the fact that they make up the least vulnerable cohort of them all.

Why should “vaccines” which do not offer longterm immunity to anyone and are not even necessary for children—the CDC itself explicitly claims that most children will experience only mild symptoms from COVID-19—be included in the battery of time-tested vaccines such as those against polio, measles, etc.? Along with the desire to sell products, and to be able to test new products on children, is, again, scandalously enough, the fact that the CDC’s addition of the mRNA shots to the children’s immunization schedule protects the manufacturers in perpetuity from lawsuits, even after the State of Emergency has ended. President Biden has announced that the State of Emergency will be lifted on May 11, 2023, two months after the CDC added the COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule.

Because state and local officials follow the cues of the CDC, we can expect to see its recommendation for childhood inoculation by the COVID-19 shots swiftly transformed into mandates for public school children in states throughout the country. This will likely happen in places such as Massachusetts, California, and New York, where health authorities have persisted in retaining laws which restrict the behavior of residents even as new data continues to refute the erroneous premises widely embraced by officials in the spring of 2020 regarding masks, social distancing, etc. Although states such as Florida rescinded the COVID-19 emergency laws, and have passed legislation to protect children, the fact remains: with the federal level CDC recommendation in place, the product companies will retain their protection from future litigation arising from adverse effects, even if the data currently being collected and analyzed eventually demonstrate widespread harm to either children or adults.

It would be a mistake to judge corporations by the moral standards appropriate to individual persons. Corporations are beholden only to their stockholders, and their sole goal is to maximize profit. But the spokespersons for such companies are themselves individual human beings, as are all of the authorities representing public health organizations whose ostensible raison d’être is to protect members of society, not to maximize the profits of their sponsors. When institutions such as the FDA are coopted by mercenary forces, they cease to perform the function which citizens are depending upon them to execute. Because this already happened in the case of the opioid crisis, the fact that people fell for the trick once again in the case of the COVID-19 “vaccines” is best and perhaps only explained by the fearmongering campaign used to psychologically traumatize them to the point where they lost all critical bearings and agreed to undergo an experimental treatment of which most of them had no need.

Every healthy, nonobese person under the age of seventy who underwent COVID-19 vaccination was deceived into serving as a pro bono experimental subject in a pharmaceutical product trial. That millions of well-meaning parents, believing that they are doing the right thing, will on the basis of the CDC’s addition of the COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule, enroll their progeny in an entire series of such experimental trials, using substances never before tested on human beings, is nothing less than tragic.

Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CDC Admits It Has No Data to Support Recommending COVID-19 Booster Shots for 12- to 49-Year-Olds

Informed Consent Action Network | February 27, 2023

It can be difficult to keep up with the CDC’s ever-changing COVID-19 booster recommendations, but what is consistent is that the number and frequency of boosters are continually increasing and data supporting these recommendations keeps decreasing. At one point, even mainstream media called out the CDC for the lack of data for these recommendations.

To pin down the CDC on one of its recommendations, in April 2022, ICAN asked the CDC to produce its data that support the efficacy of COVID-19 boosters for 12-49 year olds. The response? Shocking.

The CDC admitted that “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request.” None. Not one record. Not one study. This means the CDC did not have any data to back up its claims or recommendations for boosters in this age group.

For anyone that has looked at the data regarding boosters, the CDC’s response is unsurprising because study after study shows that repeated boosters increase the chances of contracting COVID-19 disease. For example, as a recent Cleveland Clinic study showed (see Figure 2 in the study), the chances of contracting COVID-19 increase with each additional dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

The above is another piece of evidence in ICAN’s snowballing work to hold our “health” agencies accountable for every unsupported recommendation and false claim made to the public.

See below for more instances where ICAN uncovered “health” agencies making unsupported claims to the public:

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

What hasn’t the CDC lied about?

The agency must have told some truths, but it’s hard to identify those statements.

By Bill Rice, Jr. | February 27, 2023

Substack All-Star Igor Chudov just published another important article. This article asks if the CDC was lying all along about “vaccine effectiveness?”

My question (and it’s a serious one) is this: Can someone name ONE pronouncement of CDC officials that either wasn’t a lie or of highly-dubious veracity?

Partial List of Lies …

Per my assessment, the CDC and other national public health agencies and their key experts …

Lied about there being no evidence of early cases in America.

Lied when they said there was no possibility this virus leaked from a lab.

Lied about the effectiveness of masks.

Lied when they said the virus could be spread on physical surfaces.

Lied when they said it would take only two weeks to “flatten the curve.”

Lied when they said that virus transmission could easily happen outside.

Lied about the stats of “cases” and “deaths.”

Lied about the mortality risk to children and healthy young adults.

Lied about ivermectin and HCQ being worthless drugs for treatment.

Lied about remdesivir being a safe drug.

Lied about the vaccines being “safe and effective.”

Lied when they labeled these shots as “vaccines.”

Lied about the “vaccines” and boosters preventing “severe” cases and deaths.

Lied about the necessity or importance of testing people (including the asymptomatic) over and over.

Lied when they attacked and sought to censor people who were telling the truth.

Lied when they “adjusted” estimates of ILI in the Flu Season of 2019-2020 … to make it seem this flu season did not produce “widespread” and “severe” ILI (Covid?) outbreaks.

Before Covid, lied about the effectiveness of the flu vaccines.

A few other questions …

Do liars continue to lie? Will liars lie again?

Do liars often try to cover-up their lies?

Do liars in positions of great power often attack people who try to expose their lies?

Is it smart to continue to trust proven or known liars?

How many lies does some person or agency have to tell before people start to realize they are listening to a liar?

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Hurricane activity not getting worse, new paper shows

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 24, 2023

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has today published its periodic review of hurricane activity around the world. The author, climate writer Paul Homewood, says that official data is absolutely clear: they are not getting worse. Indeed, there is some evidence that they are less active in recent years.

Homewood says:

“2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980, and this comes against long-term hurricane activity trends that are essentially flat.”

And Homewood calls on journalists to start reporting these undisputed facts to the public:

“While scientists are quite clear that we are not seeing a dramatic increase in hurricanes, or even any increase at all, the public have been conned into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse. It’s high time the mainstream media came clean and told people what is really going on.”

Executive summary

It is widely believed that hurricanes are getting worse as a consequence of climate change. This belief is fuelled by the media and some politicians, particularly when a bad storm occurs. This belief is reinforced because the damage caused by hurricanes is much greater nowadays, thanks to increasing populations in vulnerable coastal areas and greater wealth more generally.

But is this belief correct, or is it a misconception? This study has carefully analysed official data and assessments by hurricane scientists, and finds:

• 2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980.
• The apparent long-term increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observational practices over the years, rather than a real increase.
• Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity.
• Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many hurricanes were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either.
• Globally there are also no trends in hurricanes since reliable records began in the 1970s.
• Evidence is also presented that wind speeds of the most powerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones, because of changing methods of measurement.
• The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is simply a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

These findings are in line with those of hurricane scientists generally, as well as official bodies such as NOAA and the IPCC.

Paul Homewood: The 2022 Hurricane Season (pdf)

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Study Finds Zero Loss of Antarctica Sea Ice – But BBC Spins as “New Record Low”

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 21, 2023

The catastrophisation of natural events and weather is relentless across the mainstream media as populations continue to be nudged towards an elitist command-and-control Net Zero future. The BBC recently copied a headline from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) claiming Antarctica sea ice had hit a “new record low”. Inexplicably missing from the story was the later observation from the NSIDC that since accurate satellite records began in 1979, the trend in the minimum ice extent is “near zero”. Any loss was said to be “not statistically significant”.

To be fair to the writer, BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos, he did report later in the story that scientists consider the behaviour of Antarctica sea ice to be a “complicated phenomenon which cannot simply be ascribed to climate change”. Of course, as regular Daily Sceptic readers are aware, the Antarctic is a difficult hunting ground for climate catastrophists since over the last seven decades there has been little or no warming over large areas of the continent.

According to a recent paper (Singh and Polvani), the Antarctica sea ice has “modestly expanded”, and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% per year. Down at the South Pole, even the most inventive climate alarmists are defeated. In 2021 it recorded its coldest six-month winter since records began, and last year the temperature was 0.4°C colder than the average over the last 30 years. In addition, the Pole recorded no less than seven new daily temperature lows.

The map above shows some warming in the western part of Antarctica, and it is to this area that climate warriors return – again and again. The day before his sea ice story was published, Amos ran with a routine BBC house scare about the Thwaites glacier, often known in green circles as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. Amos states that glaciers such as Thwaites located in the west may be more sensitive to changes in sea temperature than was thought. “Its susceptibility to climate change is a major concern to scientists because if it melted completely, it would raise global sea levels by half a metre,” he said.

Many of the problems surrounding the unproven hypothesis of human-caused global warming is that it often fails to correlate with observable reality. Why would well-mixed atmospheric carbon dioxide produce a relative warm spot in Antarctica, but leave the rest of the vast continent in a static deep freeze? In 2017, scientists discovered 91 volcanoes in the West Antarctica Rift System. It brought the number of volcanoes discovered in the area to 138. Their heights ranged from 300 to 12,600 feet, with the tallest as high as Mount Fuji in Japan. The scientists noted that even dormant volcanoes can melt ice because of the high temperature they generate. “Volcanic activity may increase and this, in turn, may lead to enhanced water production and contribute to further potential ice-dynamical instability,” the scientists stated.

Again, to be fair to Amos, he does consider other causes of Antarctica ice stability, although the article is headlined “climate change”. His reporting is mercifully free of the emotional gushings produced by the BBC’s green activist-in-residence Justin Rowlatt. When Rowlatt flew to the area, he witnessed “an epic vision of shattered ice”. To him, the Antarctic is the “frontline of climate change”. Amos does note that Thwaites, a glacier the size of Florida, has retreated in some places by 14 km since the late 1990s. But such movement does not seem unusual. Recently a group of oceanographers discovered that parts of Thwaites had retreated at twice the rate in the past, when human-caused CO2 could not have been a factor. The retreat could have occurred centuries ago, and is said to have been “exceptionally fast”.

Meanwhile, research has just been published that indicates Antarctica could have been warmer in the recent past from 7,000 to 500 years ago. This type of research is always interesting since it helps debunks a common claim made by alarmists that current temperatures are the highest over the last three million years. But numerous scientific studies have shown that temperatures across the planet have been much warmer for recent periods in the Holocene. This latest study in Antarctica found remains of elephant seals along the Victoria Land Coast of the Ross Embayment, which borders both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets. These days, the area is largely free of elephant seals because of shelves of permanent sea ice frozen to the beaches. It is suggested that seals were able to occupy the beaches in a period of warmth before extensive sea ice pushed them off the present day coast.

“Our work shows that for much of the Holocene, the Ross Sea was less icy and presumably warmer than it is today, and this warmth may have driven retreat of the West Antarctica ice sheet from the Ross Sea during the last 8,000 years, and future warming could continue to push ice retreat,” conclude the researchers.

For climate alarmists, the ice is the gift that keeps on giving – every day is a “new record low”.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 2 Comments

How Scotland pays back for Malawi (non existent) climate damage

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 26, 2023

Today’s climate disinformation from the BBC:

image

Scotland is one of the first countries in the world to stump up cash for “loss and damage” caused by climate change in poorer countries.

When torrential rains came to the village of Mambundungu in Malawi, people’s homes were washed away but that was not the worst of it.

The flood waters were infested with crocodiles. Children were carried away by them. It was terrifying.

Eventually, in 2015, the villagers couldn’t take any more and moved their entire community to higher ground.

Then the new village began to flood too.

Malawi in southern Africa has been hard hit by the effects of climate change

But it is one of the poorest countries in the world and struggles to pay for the measures needed repair the damage.

That’s where the Scottish government has stepped in, promoting the notion that rich nations should help pay for the damage from climate change in less developed countries.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64501975

There is naturally no evidence provided of just how these floods are caused by climate change. (Well this is the BBC – what do you expect?)

And if you look at the three long running weather stations in  Malawi, no evidence exists that daily rainfall extremes are increasing:

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi

So why do these floods appear to be getting worse? There is a very simple reason – deforestation.

According to the BBC themselves:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210420-the-underappreciated-power-of-human-poo

As we know, deforestation leads to increased rainfall runoff, siltation and floods down valley.

The World Resources Institute studied the problem in 2017, writing:

Nearly a year ago, the New York Times ran a devastating story about the deforestation crisis in Malawi and its impact on residents of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city. Illegal cutting of nearby forests was causing water shortages and disrupting the city’s hydroelectric power supply, forcing the government to deploy soldiers to protect the forests. The root of this problem was Malawi’s dependence on wood for meeting energy needs―more specifically, charcoal. Nearly 97 percent of Malawian households depend on wood or charcoal for cooking or heating. Even in urban areas, 54 percent of households use charcoal (a product of wood) for cooking. But there are only so many trees.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa, where electricity is an uncommon luxury and subsistence farming is the norm. With seemingly few options and climate change adding uncertainty, the situation depicted in the New York Times article seemed hopeless.

https://www.wri.org/insights/malawi-turns-corner-solving-its-deforestation-crisis

Instead of blubbering on about climate change, maybe the Scottish government should be helping Malawi to build a reliable electricity grid, based on fossil fuels.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

When I covered climate change for Reuters I thought CO2 was certainly to blame for rising temperatures. I was wrong

BY NEIL WINTON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 23, 2023

The BBC and the mainstream media regularly frighten everyone with the latest climate disaster news with pictures of floods, fires and hurricanes, always followed by scary predictions that things will only get worse unless mankind mends its irresponsible ways.

My alma mater Reuters, the global news agency, used to be above all this hysteria and would relentlessly apply its traditional standards of fairness and balance, but even this mainstream outfit seems to have sold out to the hysterics and axe grinders.

The trouble is, many if not all of these disaster stories, far from being another step in a worsening scenario, are often nothing of the kind. In a recent book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters, Steven Koonin uses the UN’s Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change data to show that if reporters took the trouble to do a minimum amount of checking, most of these incidents would appear to be natural disasters, yes, but not part of some ever worsening syndrome.

Economist Bjorn Lomborg has been pointing out for years that humans are having an impact on the climate, but technology will be a match for any problems. Current Government plans to combat climate change will squander massive amounts of taxpayers’ money and achieve very little in terms of stopping rising global temperature, Lomborg says.

Warmist politicians and lobby groups regularly trash the work of a significant group of climate experts, insulting them with unfounded accusations that they can’t be taken seriously because they have barely perceptible links with ‘Big Oil’ and are ‘climate change deniers’. Criticisms are mainly personal and not aimed at their work. Koonin and Lomborg also suffer the unethical ‘denier’ slur, so let’s destroy that canard first.

Every scientist knows the world’s climate has been gradually and occasionally irregularly warming since the last Ice Age over about 10,000 years. Nobody denies the climate is changing. The ‘denier’ charge is nonsensical. But it performs the useful function of making clear the user knows nothing about climate science. The argument is about the ‘why’ not the ‘if’. Warmists say all the warming is because of man’s activity. The rest say some, a little or none.

Education is another area where balance has been replaced by hysteria-inducing propaganda. Children shown demonstrating on the news are often borderline hysterical. No doubt their teachers didn’t bother to tell them that man-made global warming is a theory not a proven fact, and that it’s okay to talk about different opinions.

If you wonder why much of the mainstream media seem united in accepting that the world will soon die unless humans don hair shirts, freeze in winter and walk instead of driving, you need to know about websites like Covering Climate Now (CCN).

Reuters and some of the biggest names in the news like Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, CBS News, and ABC News have signed up to support CCN, which brags that it is an unbiased seeker after the truth. But this claim won’t last long if you peer behind the façade. CCN may claim to be fair and balanced, but it not only won’t tolerate criticism, it brandishes the unethical ‘denier’ weapon with its nasty holocaust denier echoes. This seeks to demonise those who disagree with it by savaging personalities and denying a hearing, rather than using debate to establish its case.

CCN advises journalists to routinely add to stories about bad weather and flooding to suggest climate change is making these events more intense. This is not an established fact, as a simple routine check would show.

I asked CCN about the nature of its dealings with Reuters and the likes of Bloomberg. Was it to thrash out a general approach to climate change reporting or to be more partisan?

CCN hasn’t replied.

I have a particular interest in Reuters’ attitude because I spent 32 years there as a reporter and editor. The global news agency’s traditional insistence on high standards in reporting makes this liaison with CCN seem questionable.

When Reuters announced its tie-up with CCN in 2019 it said this, among other things.

The (CCN) coalition, which includes more than 350 organisations [there are many more now] has no agenda beyond embracing science and fair coverage and publishing more climate change content.

That is clearly not true. It has a partisan agenda and encourages reporters to dismiss those with contrary opinions as ‘deniers’.

The statement went on to quote Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler:

Reuters is committed to providing the most accurate and insightful coverage of the climate crisis, as it threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people world-wide. Our hope is that our careful, factual reporting will help nations, businesses and individuals respond to the challenge rapidly and intelligently.

The idea of a ‘climate crisis’ is not widely accepted, but partisans shout about it. It is a very vague claim and hard to define or prove. By Reuters standards shouldn’t this include a balancing view? Certainly, many people believe that there is such a crisis, but lots of people don’t. The idea climate change threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people worldwide is an assertion, not a fact.

The involvement of Reuters in CCN seems to me to be in direct contradiction to three of its 10 Hallmarks of Reuters Journalism – Hold Accuracy Sacrosanct, Seek Fair Comment, Strive For Balance and Freedom From Bias.

I asked Reuters for its reaction to criticism of its CCN involvement in a new book Not Zero by Ross Clark, published by Forum, and it said this in a statement.

Reuters is deeply committed to covering climate change and its impact on our planet with accuracy, independence and integrity, in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.

My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO2 was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO2 had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.

My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists.

Fast forward 20 years and firm proof CO2 was warming the climate still hasn’t been established, but politics has taken over. Sure, there are plenty of computer models with their hidden assumptions ‘proving’ man is guilty as charged, and the assumption that we had the power and knowledge to change the climate became embedded.

The Left had lost all of the economic arguments by the 1990s, and its activists eagerly grabbed the chance to say free markets and small government couldn’t save us from climate change; only government intervention could do that. Letting capitalism run free was a certain way to ensure the end of the planet; smart Lefties should take charge and save us from ourselves.

The debate about climate change is far from over. I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not. But politicians and lobbyists have decided that we are all guilty. They are in the process of dismantling our way of life, ordering us to comply because it’s all for the future and our children. If we are going to give up our civilization, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.

Reuters should be leading this movement. All it has to do is stand by its 10 Hallmarks. And maybe tell CCN thanks but no thanks; it needs to apply Reuters principles to its climate reporting.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Israeli rampage on West Bank village leaves one dead, 390 injured, 75 burnt homes

The Cradle | February 27, 2023

Scores of Israeli settlers rampaged for several hours in the West Bank town of Huwara late on 26 February, leaving one Palestinian dead, at least 390 injured, and setting fire to at least 75 Palestinian homes and 100 cars.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said 37-year-old Sameh Aqtash was shot and killed by Israeli fire. The Palestinian Red Crescent medical service said two other people were shot and wounded, a third person was stabbed, and a fourth was beaten with an iron bar.

The settlers descended on the Palestinian village brandishing firearms, knives, sticks, and stones under the protection of the Israeli army.

Images posted on social media show settlers killing an entire herd of sheep and uprooting olive trees and other crops from Palestinian farmers.

According to WAFA news agency, early on Monday, an Israeli settler tried to run over a group of journalists covering the raid in Huwara.

The attack on the Palestinian village came in response to the killing of two Israeli settlers on highway 60 near Huwara by a Palestinian gunman. Israeli Channel 12 reported that the man intercepted the settlers’ vehicle by ramming into it, got out and shot both of them, then escaped by foot.

Sunday’s violence occurred just as senior officials from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and the US met in the Red Sea resort of Aqaba, where they announced that Tel Aviv and the Palestinian Authority (PA) reached an agreement to “de-escalate tensions” for a period of three to six months.

“They reaffirmed the necessity of committing to de-escalation on the ground and to prevent further violence,” the Jordanian Foreign Ministry announced in a statement.

The statement also claimed Israel agreed to “stop discussion of any new settlement units for four months and to stop authorization of any outposts for six months.”

However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly denied this claim, tweeting that “the building and authorization in [the West Bank] will continue according to the original planning and building schedule, with no change.”

Tel Aviv has also tightened its siege on the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, imposing a closure on the checkpoints of Huwara, Awarta, Al-Murabaa, Zatara, and entrances to Beita.

Over the past year, the occupied West Bank has witnessed a severe uptick in violence, both from settler assaults and Palestinian retaliatory attacks, in addition to the intense, often violent raids the Israeli army carries out on a near-daily basis.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | 6 Comments

Russia explains halt in oil exports to Poland

RT | February 27, 2023

Russian oil flows to Poland have been halted due to the stoppage of payment for deliveries, Russia’s state-owned pipeline transport company Transneft announced on Monday.

Transneft, which operates Russia’s section of the Druzhba pipeline, explained that it transfers oil to other countries in line with the export schedule approved by the Russian Ministry of Energy, as well as routing orders processed by freight forwarders.

“Transneft is not currently transporting oil to Poland,” the company’s spokesman Igor Demin said. He noted that pumping to Polish refineries was scheduled for “the third ten-day interval” of February. However, “routing orders with confirmed resource and transit payments were not processed,” he explained, adding that “operational changes were made to the schedule, excluding supplies for Polish consumers.”

On Saturday, Poland’s largest oil company PKN Orlen said it had stopped receiving oil via the Druzhba pipeline from Russia. While the EU banned seaborne oil imports from the country last December, pipeline deliveries were exempted from the sanctions package in order to secure supplies to landlocked members of the bloc.

Poland has been getting piped oil under a contract with Russian oil and gas company Tatneft after a previous supply agreement with oil major Rosneft expired.

According to Orlen’s CEO Daniel Obajtek, Russian oil currently accounts for 10% of Poland’s imports, after Warsaw slashed shipments from the sanctioned country. The current contract with Tatneft provides 200,000 tons of oil per month to Polish refineries and expires in December 2024.

The northern part of the Druzhba pipeline system feeds two refineries in eastern Germany as well as plants operated by Orlen in Poland. Warsaw has repeatedly pledged to replace Russian oil with crude from the US, the Middle East and other sources.

Oil shipments via the pipeline’s southern branch to Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where Orlen operates two refineries, remained unchanged.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

African Nations Reportedly Boost Russian Oil Imports Amid EU Sanctions

By Maria Konokhova – Sputnik – 27.02.2023

Following the onset of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the US-led West embarked on a crusade aimed at isolating the country by sanctioning its economy and political establishment. Among other things, Western sanctions have targeted Russian hydrocarbons.

In recent months, North African countries have ratcheted up imports of diesel and other refined petroleum products from Russia, as the latter is now cut off from the European market, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The European Union bloc has imposed a ban on the purchase and import of seaborne Russian crude oil starting from December. Moreover, EU member states, which accounted for about 60% of Russian exports of refined petroleum products before the start of the hostilities in Ukraine, have recently reduced these flows.

This month, a EU ban on imports of refined petroleum products from Russia, including diesel and jet fuel, came into effect.

African Countries Step Up to the Plate

According to the newspaper, the barrage of sanctions has forced Moscow to pursue new partnerships and redirect exports away from Europe to alternative markets. It was noted that against this backdrop, North African countries “picked up the slack,” increasing imports from Russia.

The report drew several examples that advocate this notion, citing data from Kpler, a data and analytics company.

First, Tunisia, which had imported almost no Russian petroleum products in 2021, has recently started to receive supplies of diesel, gasoil, gasoline and naphtha from Russia. In January, the country acquired 2.8 million barrels of Russian oil products. This month, it was emphasized that Tunisia was going to import another 3.1 million barrels from Russia.

Along with Tunisia, another North African country, mentioned by the newspaper, significantly enhanced cooperation with Moscow in this field. In 2021, Moroccan imports of Russian diesel stood at around 600,000 barrels. However, this figure swelled to 2 million barrels last month. In February, Morocco is expected to import 1.2 million barrels. It was also noted with no specific details that Algeria and Egypt boosted their imports of Russian oil products as well.

Frustrating Western Efforts to Shun Russian Oil

The newspaper noted that the increase in Tunisia’s and Morocco’s imports from Russia coincided with that of their own exports of refined products to the global market. Therefore, it was assumed, Russian hydrocarbons could be mixed with other petroleum products and re-exported to other countries, including European ones.

The US-based paper stated that this process disguises the ultimate origin of the products and, therefore, undermines Western efforts aimed at cutting off Russian fossil fuels from their economies, and frustrates efforts to end their energy dependence on Russia and limit Moscow’s sources of funds. The newspaper concluded, citing analysts, that if this trend continues, depriving Moscow of revenue would be difficult.

According to the International Energy Agency, Russian oil exports increased to 8.2 mb/d last month ahead of the EU embargo and the G7 price cap on refined products taking effect. The refined-product exports “held steady.” Meanwhile, Moscow’s export revenues were estimated at $13 billiion.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Hungary calls for UN probe into ‘terrorist attack’

RT | February 27, 2023

The UN should provide a framework for investigating last year’s attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has suggested. He called the incident “scandalous” and said Budapest wanted to get to the bottom of it.

“This is basically the first time when such a major European critical infrastructure was attacked. By whoever – but it was attacked,” the diplomat told RIA Novosti news agency. It should be considered an act of terrorism, he added.

Budapest supports a “comprehensive, deep, structured and detailed” probe into what happened, Szijjarto said. Hungary wants to know “who committed it and why.”

He said the UN should have a role in investigating the sabotage, because the organization was not created “as an integration of like-minded countries,” but as a “platform for countries to talk to each other, who even consider each other as enemies.”

“I think the UN should give a framework for such kind of an investigation,” regardless of who initiates one, Szijjarto added.

The Nord Stream natural gas pipelines connecting Russia and Germany were ruptured in late September by explosive devices planted by an unknown party, which is largely presumed to be a nation state. According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the clandestine operation was conducted by the US with the assistance of Norway. Both nations have denied any involvement.

Before Hersh published his findings earlier this month, Moscow argued that the US had most to win from disabling the undersea pipelines, as it has long sought to stop the EU from buying Russian energy.

American producers of more expensive liquefied natural gas have captured a large share of the European energy market, since Brussels declared decoupling from Russia as a priority, after the Ukraine conflict escalated into open hostilities a year ago.

In the interview, which the Russian news agency released on Monday, Szijjarto reiterated his country’s commitment to opposing any attempts to ban cooperation with Russia on nuclear energy, and questioned the rationale for the EU’s blacklisting of Russian journalists.

February 27, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Tucker Carlson interviews Ed Dowd

Author Ed Dowd joins ‘Tucker Carlson Today’ to discuss the ‘very large’ measurable increases in excess deaths across the Western world

Tucker Carlson Today | February 22, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6321006774112

February 27, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment