This is the first of a two-part discussion by a consultant surgeon of the damage done by the government’s irrational Covid policies.
WHEN it comes to the last three years, there is a lot I do not know. What I do know is that I have many questions. Was the ‘pandemic’ a ‘plandemic’? It certainly felt like it. Did the virus escape from a lab? What exactly is a virus? What precisely was the role of the US Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Dr Anthony Fauci in the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2? Why would anyone in their right mind carry out gain of function experiments; isn’t this simply biowarfare by another name? Why did our Government, in lockstep with most other countries, introduce lockdowns, mask mandates and social distancing when there has never been any evidence to show their efficacy? Why were alternative, cheap and easily available therapeutics not considered, instead ridiculed and even banned? Surely in the presence of a lethal pandemic one would explore all options?
I do not understand why the UK introduced lockdown on March 20, 2020, when one day earlier the government had downgraded SARS-CoV-2 as no longer a high consequence infectious disease. I do not understand why certain billionaires and personalities held so much sway over domestic and international politics especially when it comes to health and in particular Covid policies. I do not understand why our governments would self-inflict such tremendous damage on their already weak economies through their Covid policies. And why did questioning the Covid narrative and government result in censorship and de-platforming on all major social media platforms? Why, if the masks worked, did we have to stand six feet apart? If standing six feet apart worked, why the need to wear masks? If both worked, why the need for lockdowns? If all three worked, why the need for a rushed vaccine? And make no mistake, it was rushed. If the vaccines were safe and effective then why the added ‘no liability’ clause? How, finally, can an experimental novel gene therapy be called a vaccine?
What I do know, as a surgeon who qualified 25 years ago, is quite a lot about medical ethics and informed consent. Medical ethics are the moral principles by which doctors must conduct themselves, that govern the practice of medicine. The four pillars of medical ethics are Non-maleficence (to do no harm), Beneficence (doing good), Autonomy (giving the patient the freedom to choose freely, where they are able) and Justice (ensuring fairness).
Non-maleficence is often described by the Latin phrase Primum non nocere, which means ‘first, do no harm’. Given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good. It prompts vigilance as to the possible harm that any intervention might do. That is why alarm bells rang for me in late spring 2020 when there was much discussion about how vaccines would get us out of the pandemic. Never before had we been able to produce a vaccine for a coronavirus (one of the common cold viruses) due to their high rate of mutation. Drug development is a notoriously long drawn-out affair taking roughly a decade to complete multiple key safety steps, each of which must be passed to progress to the next. First, preclinical drug trials when the drugs are tested using computer models and human cells grown in the laboratory. In these studies researchers determine the following information about the drug: its absorption, biodistribution, metabolisation and excretion. Next, animal trials. Finally come the human clinical trials.
The clinical stage usually has three to four phases. Phase I tests the safety of a new treatment. Phase II tests the new treatment against a placebo or other treatments. Phase III trials involve larger numbers of patients, usually in the hundreds and thousands. Finally Phase IV trials come after a drug has been approved to test its ongoing efficacy and safety.
The Covid vaccines were all rushed through the normal process. Questions remain about which steps were skipped. While I identified three early animal studies: Corbett et al (2020): Evaluation of the mRNA-1273 Vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 in Nonhuman Primates, New England Journal of Medicine; Vogel et al (2020): A prefusion SARS-CoV-2 spike RNA vaccine is highly immunogenic and prevents lung infection in non-human primates, bioRxiv; Vogel et al (2021): BNT162b vaccines protect rhesus macaques from SARS-CoV-2, Nature, none looked at the safety and potential adverse effects of the Covid vaccines.
Were any biodistribution studies carried out? Was the safety profile of the lipid nanoparticles, their biodistribution and toxicity levels ever tested? Were animal tests done specifically looking at this? These questions have not been answered, suggesting either that none were or they were never published – both equally reprehensible.
It is safe to say the world had never seen vaccines like these before. Both the use of lipid nanoparticles and mRNA are novel and experimental. Yet at the time the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Pfizer emergency use authorisation, the company ended their trial prematurely. This was when they gave the vaccine to the placebo arm (the trial comparison group), thereby removing the possibility of critical long-term comparative safety and efficacy data. Pfizer claimed it was unethical to withhold the vaccine from the placebo group as it was safe and effective, though it was scientifically impossible to assert this at that early juncture. It was certainly unethical to end the study and deprive us of critical long-term safety data.
It was also unethical to claim, as they did, that their experimental vaccine had 95 per cent efficacy. This piece of statistical conmanship was premised on a deeply misleading relative risk reduction percentage calculation when what actually matters is the absolute risk reduction. Absolute risk reduction gives the actual difference in risk between one group and another. This is important since the absolute risk reduction in this case was less than 1 per cent – information which if known might well have changed people’s opinions as to the vaccine’s value to them, or to society for that matter. It leads us straight to question of informed consent, the critical second pillar of medical ethics. I will discuss this in Part 2.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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Much like a Bill of Rights, a principal function of any Code of Ethics is to set limits, to check the inevitable lust for power, the libido dominandi, that human beings tend to demonstrate when they obtain authority and status over others, regardless of the context.
Though it may be difficult to believe in the aftermath of COVID, the medical profession does possess a Code of Ethics. The four fundamental concepts of Medical Ethics – its 4 Pillars – are Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice.
Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice
These ethical concepts are thoroughly established in the profession of medicine. I learned them as a medical student, much as a young Catholic learns the Apostle’s Creed. As a medical professor, I taught them to my students, and I made sure my students knew them. I believed then (and still do) that physicians must know the ethical tenets of their profession, because if they do not know them, they cannot follow them.
These ethical concepts are indeed well-established, but they are more than that. They are also valid, legitimate, and sound. They are based on historical lessons, learned the hard way from past abuses foisted upon unsuspecting and defenseless patients by governments, health care systems, corporations, and doctors. Those painful, shameful lessons arose not only from the actions of rogue states like Nazi Germany, but also from our own United States: witness Project MK-Ultra and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
The 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics protect patients from abuse. They also allow physicians the moral framework to follow their consciences and exercise their individual judgment – provided, of course, that physicians possess the character to do so. However, like human decency itself, the 4 Pillars were completely disregarded by those in authority during COVID.
The demolition of these core principles was deliberate. It originated at the highest levels of COVID policymaking, which itself had been effectively converted from a public health initiative to a national security/military operation in the United States in March 2020, producing the concomitant shift in ethical standards one would expect from such a change. As we examine the machinations leading to the demise of each of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID, we will define each of these four fundamental tenets, and then discuss how each was abused.
Autonomy
Of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, autonomy has historically held pride of place, in large part because respect for the individual patient’s autonomy is a necessary component of the other three. Autonomy was the most systemically abused and disregarded of the 4 Pillars during the COVID era.
Autonomy may be defined as the patient’s right to self-determination with regard to any and all medical treatment. This ethical principle was clearly stated by Justice Benjamin Cardozo as far back as 1914: “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”
Patient autonomy is “My body, my choice” in its purest form. To be applicable and enforceable in medical practice, it contains several key derivative principles which are quite commonsensical in nature. These include informed consent, confidentiality, truth-telling, and protection against coercion.
Genuine informed consent is a process, considerably more involved than merely signing a permission form. Informed consent requires a competent patient, who receives full disclosure about a proposed treatment, understands it, and voluntarily consents to it.
Based on that definition, it becomes immediately obvious to anyone who lived in the United States through the COVID era, that the informed consent process was systematically violated by the COVID response in general, and by the COVID vaccine programs in particular. In fact, every one of the components of genuine informed consent were thrown out when it came to the COVID vaccines:
- Full disclosure about the COVID vaccines – which were extremely new, experimental therapies, using novel technologies, with alarming safety signals from the very start – was systematically denied to the public. Full disclosure was actively suppressed by bogus anti-“misinformation” campaigns, and replaced with simplistic, false mantras (e.g. “safe and effective”) that were in fact just textbook propaganda slogans.
- Blatant coercion (e.g. “Take the shot or you’re fired/can’t attend college/can’t travel”) was ubiquitous and replaced voluntary consent.
- Subtler forms of coercion (ranging from cash payments to free beer) were given in exchange for COVID-19 vaccination. Multiple US states held lotteries for COVID-19 vaccine recipients, with up to $5 million in prize money promised in some states.
- Many physicians were presented with financial incentives to vaccinate, sometimes reaching hundreds of dollars per patient. These were combined with career-threatening penalties for questioning the official policies. This corruption severely undermined the informed consent process in doctor-patient interactions.
- Incompetent patients (e.g. countless institutionalized patients) were injected en masse, often while forcibly isolated from their designated decision-making family members.
It must be emphasized that under the tendentious, punitive, and coercive conditions of the COVID vaccine campaigns, especially during the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” period, it was virtually impossible for patients to obtain genuine informed consent. This was true for all the above reasons, but most importantly because full disclosure was nearly impossible to obtain.
A small minority of individuals did manage, mostly through their own research, to obtain sufficient information about the COVID-19 vaccines to make a truly informed decision. Ironically, these were principally dissenting healthcare personnel and their families, who, by virtue of discovering the truth, knew “too much.” This group overwhelmingly refused the mRNA vaccines.
Confidentiality, another key derivative principle of autonomy, was thoroughly ignored during the COVID era. The widespread yet chaotic use of COVID vaccine status as a de facto social credit system, determining one’s right of entry into public spaces, restaurants and bars, sporting and entertainment events, and other locations, was unprecedented in our civilization.
Gone were the days when HIPAA laws were taken seriously, where one’s health history was one’s own business, and where the cavalier use of such information broke Federal law. Suddenly, by extralegal public decree, the individual’s health history was public knowledge, to the absurd extent that any security guard or saloon bouncer had the right to question individuals about their personal health status, all on the vague, spurious, and ultimately false grounds that such invasions of privacy promoted “public health.”
Truth-telling was completely dispensed with during the COVID era. Official lies were handed down by decree from high-ranking officials such as Anthony Fauci, public health organizations like the CDC, and industry sources, then parroted by regional authorities and local clinical physicians. The lies were legion, and none of them have aged well. Examples include:
- The SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a wet market, not in a lab
- “Two weeks to flatten the curve”
- Six feet of “social distancing” effectively prevents transmission of the virus
- “A pandemic of the unvaccinated”
- “Safe and effective”
- Masks effectively prevent transmission of the virus
- Children are at serious risk from COVID
- School closures are necessary to prevent spread of the virus
- mRNA vaccines prevent contraction of the virus
- mRNA vaccines prevent transmission of the virus
- mRNA vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural immunity
- Myocarditis is more common from COVID-19 disease than from mRNA vaccination
It must be emphasized that health authorities pushed deliberate lies, known to be lies at the time by those telling them. Throughout the COVID era, a small but very insistent group of dissenters have constantly presented the authorities with data-driven counterarguments against these lies. The dissenters were consistently met with ruthless treatment of the “quick and devastating takedown” variety now infamously promoted by Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins.
Over time, many of the official lies about COVID have been so thoroughly discredited that they are now indefensible. In response, the COVID power brokers, backpedaling furiously, now try to recast their deliberate lies as fog-of-war style mistakes. To gaslight the public, they claim they had no way of knowing they were spouting falsehoods, and that the facts have only now come to light. These, of course, are the same people who ruthlessly suppressed the voices of scientific dissent that presented sound interpretations of the situation in real time.
For example, on March 29, 2021, during the initial campaign for universal COVID vaccination, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky proclaimed on MSNBC that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” or “get sick,” based on both clinical trials and “real-world data.” However, testifying before Congress on April 19, 2023, Walensky conceded that those claims are now known to be false, but that this was due to “an evolution of the science.” Walensky had the effrontery to claim this before Congress 2 years after the fact, when in actuality, the CDC itself had quietly issued a correction of Walensky’s false MSNBC claims back in 2021, a mere 3 days after she had made them.
On May 5, 2023, three weeks after her mendacious testimony to Congress, Walensky announced her resignation.
Truth-telling by physicians is a key component of the informed consent process, and informed consent, in turn, is a key component of patient autonomy. A matrix of deliberate lies, created by authorities at the very top of the COVID medical hierarchy, was projected down the chains of command, and ultimately repeated by individual physicians in their face-to-face interactions with their patients. This process rendered patient autonomy effectively null and void during the COVID era.
Patient autonomy in general, and informed consent in particular, are both impossible where coercion is present. Protection against coercion is a principal feature of the informed consent process, and it is a primary consideration in medical research ethics. This is why so-called vulnerable populations such as children, prisoners, and the institutionalized are often afforded extra protections when proposed medical research studies are subjected to institutional review boards.
Coercion not only ran rampant during the COVID era, it was deliberately perpetrated on an industrial scale by governments, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment. Thousands of American healthcare workers, many of whom had served on the front lines of care during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 (and had already contracted COVID-19 and developed natural immunity) were fired from their jobs in 2021 and 2022 after refusing mRNA vaccines they knew they didn’t need, would not consent to, and yet for which they were denied exemptions. “Take this shot or you’re fired” is coercion of the highest order.
Hundreds of thousands of American college students were required to get the COVID shots and boosters to attend school during the COVID era. These adolescents, like young children, have statistically near-zero chance of death from COVID-19. However, they (especially males) are at statistically highest risk of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis.
According to the advocacy group nocollegemendates.com, as of May 2, 2023, approximately 325 private and public colleges and universities in the United States still have active vaccine mandates for students matriculating in the fall of 2023. This is true despite the fact that it is now universally accepted that the mRNA vaccines do not stop contraction or transmission of the virus. They have zero public health utility. “Take this shot or you cannot go to school” is coercion of the highest order.
Countless other examples of coercion abound. The travails of the great tennis champion Novak Djokovic, who has been denied entry into both Australia and the United States for multiple Grand Slam tournaments because he refuses the COVID vaccines, illustrate in broad relief the “man without a country” limbo in which the unvaccinated found (and to some extent still find) themselves, due to the rampant coercion of the COVID era.
Beneficence
In medical ethics, beneficence means that physicians are obligated to act for the benefit of their patients. This concept distinguishes itself from non-maleficence (see below) in that it is a positive requirement. Put simply, all treatments done to an individual patient should do good to that individual patient. If a procedure cannot help you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. In ethical medical practice, there is no “taking one for the team.”
By mid-2020 at the latest, it was clear from existing data that SARS-CoV-2 posed truly minimal risk to children of serious injury and death – in fact, the pediatric Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 was known in 2020 to be less than half the risk of being struck by lightning. This feature of the disease, known even in its initial and most virulent stages, was a tremendous stroke of pathophysiological good luck, and should have been used to the great advantage of society in general and children in particular.
The opposite occurred. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 causes extremely mild illness in children was systematically hidden or scandalously downplayed by authorities, and subsequent policy went unchallenged by nearly all physicians, to the tremendous detriment of children worldwide.
The frenzied push for and unrestrained use of mRNA vaccines in children and pregnant women – which continues at the time of this writing in the United States – outrageously violates the principle of beneficence. And beyond the Anthony Faucis, Albert Bourlas, and Rochelle Walenskys, thousands of ethically compromised pediatricians bear responsibility for this atrocity.
The mRNA COVID vaccines were – and remain – new, experimental vaccines with zero long-term safety data for either the specific antigen they present (the spike protein) or their novel functional platform (mRNA vaccine technology). Very early on, they were known to be ineffective in stopping contraction or transmission of the virus, rendering them useless as a public health measure. Despite this, the public was barraged with bogus “herd immunity” arguments. Furthermore, these injections displayed alarming safety signals, even during their tiny, methodologically challenged initial clinical trials.
The principle of beneficence was entirely and deliberately ignored when these products were administered willy-nilly to children as young as 6 months, a population to whom they could provide zero benefit – and as it turned out, that they would harm. This represented a classic case of “taking one for the team,” an abusive notion that was repeatedly invoked against children during the COVID era, and one that has no place in the ethical practice of medicine.
Children were the population group that was most obviously and egregiously harmed by the abandonment of the principle of beneficence during COVID. However, similar harms occurred due to the senseless push for COVID mRNA vaccination of other groups, such as pregnant women and persons with natural immunity.
Non-Maleficence
Even if, for argument’s sake alone, one makes the preposterous assumption that all COVID-era public health measures were implemented with good intentions, the principle of non-maleficence was nevertheless broadly ignored during the pandemic. With the growing body of knowledge of the actual motivations behind so many aspects of COVID-era health policy, it becomes clear that non-maleficence was very often replaced with outright malevolence.
In medical ethics, the principle of non-maleficence is closely tied to the universally cited medical dictum of primum non nocere, or, “First, do no harm.” That phrase is in turn associated with a statement from Hippocrates’ Epidemics, which states, “As to diseases make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.” This quote illustrates the close, bookend-like relationship between the concepts of beneficence (“to help”) and non-maleficence (“to do no harm”).
In simple terms, non-maleficence means that if a medical intervention is likely to harm you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. If the risk/benefit ratio is unfavorable to you (i.e., it is more likely to hurt you then help you), then it shouldn’t be done to you. Pediatric COVID mRNA vaccine programs are just one prominent aspect of COVID-era health policy that absolutely violate the principle of non-maleficence.
It has been argued that historical mass-vaccination programs may have violated non-maleficence to some extent, as rare severe and even deadly vaccine reactions did occur in those programs. This argument has been forwarded to defend the methods used to promote the COVID mRNA vaccines. However, important distinctions between past vaccine programs and the COVID mRNA vaccine program must be made.
First, past vaccine-targeted diseases such as polio and smallpox were deadly to children – unlike COVID-19. Second, such past vaccines were effective in both preventing contraction of the disease in individuals and in achieving eradication of the disease – unlike COVID-19. Third, serious vaccine reactions were truly rare with those older, more conventional vaccines – again, unlike COVID-19.
Thus, many past pediatric vaccine programs had the potential to meaningfully benefit their individual recipients. In other words, the a priori risk/benefit ratio may have been favorable, even in tragic cases that resulted in vaccine-related deaths. This was never even arguably true with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Such distinctions possess some subtlety, but they are not so arcane that the physicians dictating COVID policy did not know they were abandoning basic medical ethics standards such as non-maleficence. Indeed, high-ranking medical authorities had ethical consultants readily available to them – witness that Anthony Fauci’s wife, a former nurse named Christine Grady, served as chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a fact that Fauci flaunted for public relations purposes.
Indeed, much of COVID-19 policy appears to have been driven not just by rejection of non-maleficence, but by outright malevolence. Compromised “in-house” ethicists frequently served as apologists for obviously harmful and ethically bankrupt policies, rather than as checks and balances against ethical abuses.
Schools never should have been closed in early 2020, and they absolutely should have been fully open without restrictions by fall of 2020. Lockdowns of society never should have been instituted, much less extended as long as they were. Sufficient data existed in real time such that both prominent epidemiologists (e.g. the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) and select individual clinical physicians produced data-driven documents publicly proclaiming against lockdowns and school closures by mid-to-late 2020. These were either aggressively suppressed or completely ignored.
Numerous governments imposed prolonged, punishing lockdowns that were without historical precedent, legitimate epidemiological justification, or legal due process. Curiously, many of the worst offenders hailed from the so-called liberal democracies of the Anglosphere, such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and deep blue parts of the United States. Public schools In the United States were closed an average of 70 weeks during COVID. This was far longer than most European Union countries, and longer still than Scandinavian countries who, in some cases, never closed schools.
The punitive attitude displayed by health authorities was broadly supported by the medical establishment. The simplistic argument developed that because there was a “pandemic,” civil rights could be decreed null and void – or, more accurately, subjected to the whims of public health authorities, no matter how nonsensical those whims may have been. Innumerable cases of sadistic lunacy ensued.
At one point at the height of the pandemic, in this author’s locale of Monroe County, New York, an idiotic Health Official decreed that one side of a busy commercial street could be open for business, while the opposite side was closed, because the center of the street divided two townships. One town was code “yellow,” the other code “red” for new COVID-19 cases, and thus businesses mere yards from one another survived or faced ruin. Except, of course, the liquor stores, which, being “essential,” never closed at all. How many thousands of times was such asinine and arbitrary abuse of power duplicated elsewhere? The world will never know.
Who can forget being forced to wear a mask when walking to and from a restaurant table, then being permitted to remove it once seated? The humorous memes that “you can only catch COVID when standing up” aside, such pseudo-scientific idiocy smacks of totalitarianism rather than public health. It closely mimics the deliberate humiliation of citizens through enforced compliance with patently stupid rules that was such a legendary feature of life in the old Eastern Bloc.
And I write as an American who, while I lived in a deep blue state during COVID, never suffered in the concentration camps for COVID-positive individuals that were established in Australia.
Those who submit to oppression resent no one, not even their oppressors, so much as the braver souls who refuse to surrender. The mere presence of dissenters is a stone in the quisling’s shoe – a constant, niggling reminder to the coward of his moral and ethical inadequacy. Human beings, especially those lacking personal integrity, cannot tolerate much cognitive dissonance. And so they turn on those of higher character than themselves.
This explains much of the sadistic streak that so many establishment-obeying physicians and health administrators displayed during COVID. The medical establishment – hospital systems, medical schools, and the doctors employed therein – devolved into a medical Vichy state under the control of the governmental/industrial/public health juggernaut.
These mid- and low-level collaborators actively sought to ruin dissenters’ careers with bogus investigations, character assassination, and abuse of licensing and certification board authority. They fired the vaccine refuseniks within their ranks out of spite, self-destructively decimating their own workforces in the process. Most perversely, they denied early, potential life-saving treatment to all their COVID patients. Later, they withheld standard therapies for non-COVID illnesses – up to and including organ transplants – to patients who declined COVID vaccines, all for no legitimate medical reason whatsoever.
This sadistic streak that the medical profession displayed during COVID is reminiscent of the dramatic abuses of Nazi Germany. However, it more closely resembles (and in many ways is an extension of) the subtler yet still malignant approach followed for decades by the United States Government’s medical/industrial/public health/national security nexus, as personified by individuals like Anthony Fauci. And it is still going strong in the wake of COVID.
Ultimately, abandonment of the tenet of non-maleficence is inadequate to describe much of the COVID-era behavior of the medical establishment and those who remained obedient to it. Genuine malevolence was very often the order of the day.
Justice
In medical ethics, the Pillar of justice refers to the fair and equitable treatment of individuals. As resources are often limited in health care, the focus is typically on distributive justice; that is, the fair and equitable allocation of medical resources. Conversely, it is also important to ensure that the burdens of health care are as fairly distributed as possible.
In a just situation, the wealthy and powerful should not have instant access to high-quality care and medicines that are unavailable to the rank and file or the very poor. Conversely, the poor and vulnerable should not unduly bear the burdens of health care, for example, by being disproportionately subjected to experimental research, or by being forced to follow health restrictions to which others are exempt.
Both of these aspects of justice were disregarded during COVID as well. In numerous instances, persons in positions of authority procured preferential treatment for themselves or their family members. Two prominent examples:
According to ABC News, “in the early days of the pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo prioritized COVID-19 testing for relatives including his brother, mother and at least one of his sisters, when testing wasn’t widely available to the public.” Reportedly, “Cuomo allegedly also gave politicians, celebrities and media personalities access to tests.”
In March 2020, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine directed nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, despite warnings against this by trade groups. That directive and others like it subsequently cost tens of thousands of lives. Less than two months later, Levine confirmed that her own 95 year-old mother had been removed from a nursing home to private care. Levine was subsequently promoted to 4-star Admiral in the US Public Health Service by the Biden Administration.
The burdens of lockdowns were distributed extremely unjustly during COVID. While average citizens remained in lockdown, suffering personal isolation, forbidden to earn a living, the powerful flouted their own rules. Who can forget how US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi broke the strict California lockdowns to get her hair styled, or how British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defied his own supposedly life-or-death orders by throwing at least a dozen parties at 10 Downing Street in 2020 alone? House arrest for thee, wine and cheese for me.
But California Governor Gavin Newsom might take the cake. At first glance, given both his BoJo-esque, lockdown-defying dinner with lobbyists at the ultra-swanky Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry, and his decision to send his own children to expensive private schools which were fully open for 5-day in-school learning during the prolonged California school closures, one might think of Newsom as a COVID-era Robin Hood. That is, until one realizes that he presided over those same punishing, inhumane lockdowns and school closures. He was actually the Sheriff of Nottingham.
To a decent person with a functioning conscience, this level of sociopathy is difficult to comprehend. What is crystal clear is that anyone capable of the hypocrisy that Gavin Newsom displayed during COVID should not be anywhere near a position of power in any society.
Two additional points should be emphasized. First, these egregious acts were rarely, if ever, called out by the medical establishment. Second, the behaviors themselves show that those in power never truly believed their own narrative. Both the medical establishment and the power brokers knew the danger posed by the virus, while real, was grossly overstated. They knew the lockdowns, social distancing, and masking of the population at large were kabuki theater at best, and soft-core totalitarianism at worst. The lockdowns were based on a gigantic lie, one they neither believed nor felt compelled to follow themselves.
Solutions and Reform
The abandonment of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID has contributed greatly to an historic erosion of public trust in the healthcare industry. This distrust is entirely understandable and richly deserved, however harmful it may prove to be for patients. For example, at a population level, trust in vaccines in general has dramatically reduced worldwide, compared to the pre-COVID era. Millions of children now stand at increased risk from proven vaccine-preventable diseases due to the thoroughly unethical push for unnecessary, indeed harmful, universal COVID-19 mRNA vaccination of children.
Systemically, the medical profession desperately needs ethical reform in the wake of COVID. Ideally, this would begin with a strong reassertion of and recommitment to the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, again with patient autonomy at the forefront. It would continue with prosecution and punishment of those individuals most responsible for the ethical failures, from the likes of Anthony Fauci on down. Human nature is such that if no sufficient deterrent to evil is established, evil will be perpetuated.
Unfortunately, within the medical establishment, there does not appear to be any impetus toward acknowledgement of the profession’s ethical failures during COVID, much less toward true reform. This is largely because the same financial, administrative, and regulatory forces that drove COVID-era failures remain in control of the profession. These forces deliberately ignore the catastrophic harms of COVID policy, instead viewing the era as a sort of test run for a future of highly profitable, tightly regulated health care. They view the entire COVID-era martial-law-as-public-health approach as a prototype, rather than a failed model.
Reform of medicine, if it happens, will likely arise from individuals who refuse to participate in the “Big Medicine” vision of health care. In the near future, this will likely result in a fragmentation of the industry analogous to that seen in many other aspects of post-COVID society. In other words, there is apt to be a “Great Re-Sort” in medicine as well.
Individual patients can and must affect change. They must replace the betrayed trust they once held in the public health establishment and the healthcare industry with a critical, caveat emptor, consumer-based approach to their health care. If physicians were ever inherently trustworthy, the COVID era has shown that they no longer are so.
Patients should become highly proactive in researching which tests, medications, and therapies they accept for themselves (and especially for their children). They should be unabashed in asking their physicians for their views on patient autonomy, mandated care, and the extent to which their physicians are willing to think and act according to their own consciences. They should vote with their feet when unacceptable answers are given. They must learn to think for themselves and ask for what they want. And they must learn to say no.
Clayton J. Baker, MD is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Australia, Canada, CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gavin Newsom, New Zealand, Rachel Levine, Rochelle Walensky, United States |
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‘Just Like Regular Pork’
Describing it as the “future of how we need to feed people,” a group of scientists and researchers from Washington State University (WSU) enjoyed some “smoky, and mildly salty” pork sausage earlier this month — derived from gene-edited pigs.
The WSU research team recently received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow pork meat from gene-edited pigs into the human food supply — resulting in the celebratory barbecue featuring sausage with “a good snap to the casings … just like regular pork.”
The FDA approval, which does not appear on the agency’s website, is investigational and limited to the specific pigs raised by the research team for this purpose. It is touted as evidence that “gene-editing livestock to quickly produce desirable traits for improved food production is a viable strategy for helping feed the planet’s growing population.”
However, some scientists and food safety advocates question the safety of the gene-editing technology — CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) — used by the WSU researchers and backed by investors like Bill Gates, and wonder if the products produced by the technology are really safe for human consumption.
‘Gene-edited meats could be mass produced for human consumption in 10 years’
CRISPR acts as a “precise pair of molecular scissors that can cut a target DNA sequence, directed by a customizable guide.”
Put differently, this technology allows scientists to edit sections of DNA by “snipping” specific portions of it and replacing them with new segments. Gene editing is not a new concept, but CRISPR technology is viewed as being cheaper and more accurate than other gene-editing technologies.
The WSU research team, led by Jon Oatley, Ph.D., associate dean for research for the College of Veterinary Medicine and tenured professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences, used CRISPR “to improve genetic traits in livestock.”
According to Nextgov, Oatley sought “to demonstrate that food made from the [gene-edited] animals is safe to eat and that it is possible for an academic institution to achieve this type of FDA authorization.”
“Gene-editing can make changes in an organism’s DNA that could occur in nature or through selective breeding but would take much longer without a tool like CRISPR,” Nextgov writes.
Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that WSU “is also studying CRISPR gene editing on cattle and sheep,” and wrapped up a goat study last year. “If all goes as planned … gene-edited meats could be mass produced for human consumption in 10 years.”
FDA’s investigational authorization is limited to five pigs. A WSU announcement described the work by Oatley and his team as “essentially a high-tech form of selective breeding,” adding that the pigs were originally gene-edited in a way that “would enable researchers to use them to sire offspring with traits from another male pig.”
According to WSU:
“Known as surrogate sires, this technology first gene-edits male animals to be sterile by knocking out a gene called NANOS2 that is specific to male fertility. These animals can then be implanted with another male’s stem cells that create sperm with that male’s desired traits to be passed on to the next generation.”
The research “has the potential to not just improve meat quality but the health and resilience of livestock in the face of changing environmental conditions, a critical goal for increasing protein sources in developing nations,” WSU said.
According to the university’s announcement, Oatley said:
“It’s important for a university to set the precedent by working with federal regulators to get these animals introduced into the food supply. … If we don’t go through that process, all of the research we’re doing is for naught because it will never make it out into the public.”
“The original intent in making these animals was to try to improve the way that we feed people,” Oatley said. “And we can’t do that unless we can work with the FDA system to get these animals actually into the food chain.”
WSU’s announcement did not mention Oatley’s membership on the Gene Editing in Agriculture Task Force, a collaboration of the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities created in June 2020.
According to the June 2021 report by the task force:
“The next frontier in devising strategies to effectively feed a growing global human population will be defined by genetic enhancement; gene editing technologies are a key component in this endeavor.”
The task force also suggested the same June 2021 report be distributed “to interested organizations,” including the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to WSU, “The surrogate sires’ progeny, which are themselves not gene-edited, have not yet been reviewed by the FDA for possible inclusion in the food chain.” However, the original pigs “were processed at the WSU Meat Lab, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected the meat as it does with all meat products.”
The meat “will be used in catering services that raise travel funds for the student members of the WSU Meat Judging team,” WSU said.
CRISPR: ‘It’s not precise and it’s not breeding’
The public often holds “many misconceptions about gene-editing,” Oatley said, adding:
“There’s a trust that comes with university-based research. … At WSU, we’re all about the science. We just want to make sure the research is valid, and the animals we produce are healthy.”
However, other experts have previously raised questions about the potential safety risks of inserting gene-edited and lab-grown meat into the human food supply and using tools such as CRISPR for this purpose.
In October 2022 interviews with The Defender, Michael Antoniou, Ph.D., head of the Gene Expression and Therapy Group at King’s College London, and Claire Robinson, managing editor of GMWatch, explained why they believe the risks of developing gene-edited meats and using CRISPR in this process outweighs the benefits.
Though CRISPR is often described as a “precision” gene-editing technology, Antoniou told The Defender, “It is not precise and it’s not breeding.”
Robinson told The Defender :
“These were also risks with the old-style GMOs [genetically modified organisms], and they are still risks with these gene-edited GM plants and animals.
“The risks, if you’re gene editing them … are that there will be knock-on effects on the animals, welfare or health that we can’t anticipate, such as deformities or changes in the function of certain genes in the animal.”
Antoniou warned that there may be unintended or unforeseen effects arising from this process. He said:
“Innately, gene editing also can bring about unintended DNA damage … even at the site of your intended edit or elsewhere in the DNA of your target cells, with unknown downstream consequences.
“None of these products … have been tested properly.”
A report published in the Journal of Genetics and Genomics in 2020 found that CRISPR gene-editing in rice resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable on-target and off-target mutations.
However, major investors like Gates see significant potential in foods created via gene editing and CRISPR.
According toBusiness Insider, Gates has said, “Researchers are studying ways to modify the genes of livestock animals … to make them produce milk more like dairy cows” and “make dairy cattle more resilient in hot weather.”
Gates and other proponents of CRISPR also claim that such tools — and the development and production of gene-edited meats — can serve as a solution to increased food demand due to a growing global population.
Robinson, in her October 2022 remarks, disputed such claims. She said:
“There’s no shortage of food in the world. Even in those countries where there are terrible hunger problems, they are producing food and it is available for those to buy if you have money.
“But the problem with hunger is, of course, poverty. The failure of infrastructure, the fact that you cannot get food to the hungry people. But mostly it’s inequality, things like wars and conflicts that are going on in some countries that mean that supply chains are disrupted. So really, there is no shortage of food and there isn’t ever likely to be.”
Instead, Robinson said that major corporate interests lie behind the use of CRISPR for the development of gene-edited food products.
“What we want to avoid,” said Robinson, “is a situation where the food supply ends up entirely patented, owned by big corporations … The patents on CRISPR are mostly owned by Corteva. Another patent owner used to be Monsanto, now owned by Bayer.”
Robinson added:
“The technology is patented; the products are patented. Therefore, it is all about increasing corporate control of the food supply.”
Corteva Agriscience, a conglomerate formed via the merger of Dow AgroSciences and DuPont/Pioneer, owns many CRISPR patents.
More FDA approvals of gene-edited meats likely coming soon
The FDA has approved only one other organization’s gene-edited animal for entering the food supply, according to WSU. The company, Acceligen, produces “slick-haired cattle,” which are gene-edited to grow coats that increase their resilience to higher temperatures.
The FDA’s March 7, 2022, announcement about the approval stated that “the intentional genomic alteration (IGA) does not raise any safety concerns” and that this was the agency’s “first low-risk determination for enforcement discretion for an IGA in an animal for food use.”
“We expect that our decision will encourage other developers to bring animal biotechnology products forward for the FDA’s risk determination in this rapidly developing field, paving the way for animals containing low-risk IGAs to more efficiently reach the marketplace,” said Dr. Steven M. Solomon, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine.
In recent years, the FDA also approved — or is close to granting full approval to — other gene-edited meat products for human consumption.
On Dec. 14, 2020, the FDA approved “a first-of-its-kind intentional genomic alteration (IGA) in a line of domestic pigs, referred to as GalSafe pigs, which may be used for food or human therapeutics. This is the first IGA in an animal that the FDA approved for both human food consumption and as a source for potential therapeutic uses.”
According to the FDA, the IGA in GalSafe pigs is intended to eliminate alpha-gal sugar on the surface of the pigs’ cells. “People with Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) may have mild to severe allergic reactions to alpha-gal sugar found in red meat,” the FDA said, adding that the potential environmental impact “is no greater than from conventional pigs.”
The FDA also said it noted “no animal safety concerns” for GalSafe pigs “beyond those that would be expected in well-managed, commercial swine operations,” and “the microbial food safety risk is low and is mitigated by the low number of GalSafe pigs entering the food supply and the ongoing surveillance for antimicrobial resistance, among other factors.”
And in November 2022, the FDA declared lab-grown chicken meat developed by Upside Foods, a California-based firm, safe for human consumption, as part of its completion of a pre-market consultation that will likely lead to full FDA approval.
The FDA’s Nov. 16, 2022, announcement described this development as “a food revolution” that enables “food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future.”
The lab-grown chicken appears to have been developed using a process involving CRISPR. In 2019, it was reported that Memphis Meats — the former name of Upside Foods prior to a 2021 rebrand — was employing CRISPR as part of its process for curating lab-grown meat, and even received a patent for this purpose.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | FDA, United States |
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Electricity rationing could become unavoidable in Germany as part of an energy transition strategy starting from next year, public broadcaster BR24 reported on Friday.
Germany’s Federal Network Agency is considering limiting the use of power in peak hours as local grids fail to cover rising demand, which is expected to surge by over 10% in the coming years driven by a shift to clean energy, the outlet said.
More e-cars and heat pumps mean greater demand for electricity but local networks are not always designed for high loads, the article stated. Another problem for the country’s power operators is insufficient network expansion which currently lacks around 14,000 kilometers of infrastructure.
The head of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Muller, suggested allowing German network operators limit the use of electricity at peak hours to avoid overload, from January 2024.
“If it is proven that this network overload could occur, then the distribution network operator has the right to dim,” he told BR24.
In addition to the EV transition, the German government also faces the challenge of switching heating systems from oil and gas. Abandoning hydrocarbons means they will have to be replaced with electric heating pumps, but the cables and transformers presently in use are not suitable for the increasing needs of the future, the outlet noted.
“So that there are no delays when connecting the heat pumps and charging devices, the distribution system operator also needs an instrument for control,” the Federal Network Agency told BR’s political magazine, Kontrovers.
The only feasible measure to maintain the stable operation of power networks is to take heat pumps and electric vehicles off the grid during peak load times, the outlet said, adding that the Federal Network Agency is now working out the details of the new regulation.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Germany, Human rights |
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Donald Trump is, in many ways, an odious figure. A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel who doesn’t even pretend otherwise, his primary redeeming qualities are a talent for channeling populist outrage and a certain reluctance to engage in bloody, pointless wars.
Normally I only vote for people I like (i.e. Cynthia McKinney and RFK Jr.) which is why I’ve never voted for a major-party candidate in a general election. I doubt very much that my first-ever vote for a mainstream candidate will be for the loathsome Trump. But the fake-left oligarchs and their lapdog media are working overtime to convince me to at least entertain the possibility.
The thing is, the media, legal, and political landscape has grown so grotesquely one-sided that Trump’s claims that the system is rigged against him, which once seemed whiny and petulant, are increasingly being validated. Big media’s Deep-State-assisted suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was, for many of us, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Since that election-deciding outrage, it has been obvious and undeniable that just because Trump is paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get him.
And the outrages just keep coming. As J-Mike Springmann and I remarked on False Flag Weekly News, the week’s two big Trump events—his civil conviction for libel and sexual assault, and his CNN Town Hall battle with Kaitlan Collins—almost seemed to have been orchestrated to spotlight Trump’s unfair treatment at the hands of the Establishment.
Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?
My advice to the Democrats is that they might as well go all the way and prosecute Trump for murder. Why murder? For one thing, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so they won’t have to bother suspending it. And just as Trump once said a stupid thing about grabbing women’s genitals that made him sound like “the kind of person who might do something like that,” he also once said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” So why not bring an evidence-free prosecution against him for shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue? Just find someone willing to claim they saw Trump shoot someone to death in the middle of Fifth Avenue in 1995, or was it 1996? It will be their word against his. And we all know Trump is a liar. Why? Because the media never stop telling us so. No New York jury could possibly fail to convict. And no New York judge could resist sentencing Donald J. Trump to death. (Yes, I know New York suspended the death penalty in 2004, but they could temporarily change that, just like they temporarily removed the statute of limitations, in order to dispose of Trump.)
Once Trump has been convicted and sentenced to death, we’ll all be able to breathe freely and get on with our lives, right? Not so fast! Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly find a way to string out the appeals process, allowing him to become the first-ever candidate to run for president from death row. But what happens when he wins the election and his scheduled rendezvous with the electric chair happens to coincide with inauguration day? Will Trump be helicoptered to Washington, DC in handcuffs on January 20th, 2025, frog-marched into the Capitol, administered the oath of office, and then strapped into a special portable electric chair designed just for him and zapped like a bug? Will his hair turn an even brighter shade of orange as it bursts into flame? The Democrats would no doubt view it as inadequate payback for the horrors Trump unleashed there on January 6, 2021. But still…think of the ratings!
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | United States |
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The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.
The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself. It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.
But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart.
It is reasonable to question the assertion that eliminating fossil fuels will inevitably result in an impoverished society subject to punitive restrictions on individual behavior. But the numbers are compelling and can be distilled to two indisputable facts: First, fossil fuel continues to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. Second, if every person living on planet Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to double.
Several inescapable conclusions derive from these two facts, if one assumes that energy is the driver of prosperity. Just in case that is not obvious, imagine Americans living with half as much energy as they use today. Where would the cuts occur? Would they drive their cars half as much? Heat their homes half as much? Operate manufacturing, farming, and mining equipment half as much? They would need to do all those things and more. The economy would collapse.
These consequences don’t escape the intelligentsia who promote “net zero” policies. These consequences explain the policies they advocate. The recent promotion of “15-minute cities” that will inform rezoning and redevelopment to put all essential services within a 15-minute walk of every residence. The rise of “congestion pricing” to charge automobiles special tolls if they drive into an expanding footprint of urban neighborhoods. “Smart growth.” “Infill.” “Urban Service Boundaries.” Bike lanes. “Smart buildings,” “smart meters,” and “smart cities.”
These innovations, all in progress, only begin to describe what is coming. By restricting new development and systematically reducing the use of fossil fuels, the global middle class will shrink instead of grow. The wealthiest elites will buy their way out of the smart slums. Everyone else will be locked down. This is how energy poverty will play out in the modern era. It cannot be emphasized enough: If energy production is restricted, this will happen. It’s algebra. It is objective fact.
Hardly less speculative is the reaction outside the Western world. What are our elites thinking? Do they intend to start World War III? Perhaps they do. Because nothing short of war is going to stop the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Nigerians, or Bangladeshis from developing every source of energy they possibly can. Just those seven nations account for half the world’s population. That’s 4 billion people. Will they stop developing energy until they at least achieve half the per capita energy consumption that Americans currently enjoy? Not a chance. Will they get there by relying exclusively on wind and solar? Dream on.
Sadly, the seductive pitch America’s climate crisis lobby lobs at the elites running the aspiring nations of the world may find the strike zone. It goes like this: Let us help you keep your people in poverty and misery because we will make sure you stay rich while our military helps you stamp out insurrections. And as we prevent your nations from achieving food and energy security, we will drown you in debt to pay for imported food aid and “renewables” projects. But as one of us, you will not suffer with your people. You will have a Swiss bank account and a mansion in Malibu, where you will be feted by stars who honor you for helping prevent a climate catastrophe.
Fossil Fuel Will Not Cause a Climate Catastrophe
If you only believe half of the preceding arguments, you must realize that Americans have been backed into a corner. If anyone calls for abundant energy—or abundant anything, since energy, and fossil fuel in particular, is the prerequisite for virtually all goods and services—they are shouted down as “climate deniers.” And the way to upset the entire edifice is not to merely argue that fossil fuel is essential to the survival of civilization. Because the counterargument is that eliminating fossil fuel is essential to the survival of the planet.
That is an unwinnable argument. It is not possible to reason with an opponent of fossil fuel if you concede their fundamental premise: that burning fossil fuel will cause catastrophic climate change. You either become a “denier,” or you submit to energy poverty.
This is the tough decision facing Americans. And it’s accurate to also say it is a decision facing Republicans since literally every prominent, mainstream, housebroken, accommodating establishment Republican will not challenge the assertion that we’re experiencing a “climate crisis,” even though most of them know better. But this should be a bipartisan issue. For Republicans, this is an opportunity to show some backbone by rejecting the most destructive and fraudulent premise of our time. In so doing, they would unify their party, attract independent voters, and realign the nation.
Claiming that climate change is not catastrophic and unprecedented, or that fossil fuel is necessary to power civilization, remains today the territory of outliers. Tagged as contrarians at best, more often as eccentrics, lunatics, fanatics, shills, dupes, and morons, the “denier” community remains on the fringes. Joining this community risks losing personal credibility and the ability to work with every self-styled moderate, serious activist that just wants to recognize the political and commercial reality in America and get along.
And then there’s Donald Trump.
Alone among major politicians in America, Trump openly proclaims that anthropogenic carbon dioxide causing a climate catastrophe is a poorly supported theory, not a fact that is supposedly beyond debate. He’s right, but he’s given the climate crisis crowd another label with which to stigmatize deniers with guilt by association. Now they’re MAGA Nazis, part of the terrifying plot to engineer a fascist coup and plunge America into a dark age.
The irony is stupefying. Without fossil fuel, America will enter a dark age, and the only way to control a restive population that’s seen its standard of living plummet will be through the establishment of a technology-driven police state. They are the fascists. The so-called climate deniers are fighting for prosperity and freedom.
Matching the irony here in its shocking, stupefying absurdity is the arrogance and certainty of the climate alarmists. From the brainwashed ignoramuses pouring out of public education year after year, to pseudointellectuals marinated for decades in NPR newspeak, to brilliant scientists who spend their entire careerist careers bouncing around in a brilliant echo chamber without ever considering opposing scientific viewpoints, listening to these minions recite the approved narrative is reminiscent of a cult. The climate cult. The useful, smothering, sanctimonious, intolerant, indignant, self-righteous, energized, pacified, out-of-control but controlled and manipulated, Kool-Aid guzzling climate cult, driving humanity off the cliff.
If you want to save civilization, be a denier. Say it loud and without reservations, and say it every chance you get. Demand that politicians publicly refute climate alarmism. It isn’t necessary to claim that the powers behind the climate cult want to enslave the world. We don’t know what motivates them. Some just want to get rich on renewables. Some want to use climate change to advance American global hegemony. But all of them rely on a fundamental moral justification: By eliminating fossil fuel, we are saving the planet from certain destruction. Focusing on the possible ulterior motives of climate alarmist leaders without first challenging their core moral argument is a fool’s errand.
The scientific body of evidence against climate alarmism is robust, but you won’t find much if you search Google. You have to dig it up piece by piece. One good denier database can be found here. Organizations and individuals posting useful climate contrarian material and links on Twitter include Climate Dispatch, Patrick Moore, Climate Realist, Steve Milloy, and Pierre Gosselin, and many, many more. Like all movements, the climate contrarian movement has its share of hacks and hyperbole. So be careful and diligent, but be resolute. Examine the data. Check and recheck sources. Make up your own mind. And make yourself heard.
There are plenty of environmental challenges. Being an environmentalist is a good thing. But there has to be balance, and there has to be debate. Claiming that anthropogenic CO2 will not cause catastrophic climate change is a credible, necessary point of view backed up by scientific evidence. If more people make that claim, the climate cult can be broken, and civilization can be rescued from oblivion.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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The NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine has been replete with sabotage and terrorism by the United States and its Kiev vassals. Now, some in Washington seem to want to apply these same tactics against China in Taiwan as well.
Fresh revelations from the so-called Pentagon Leaks of Ukraine-related US intelligence have exposed evidence of discussions between President Zelensky and his staff about the need to bomb a major Russian oil pipeline going to Hungary, occupy Russian territory and strike the country using long-range NATO missiles.
In one of the leaked conversations, dated from late January, Zelensky reportedly proposed “conduct[ing] strikes in Russia” and “occupy[ing] unspecified Russian border cities” in a bid to “give Kiev leverage in talks with Moscow.”
In another, this one taking place in February between Zelensky and Ukrainian Armed Forces commander in chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian president “expressed concern” about Kiev’s lack of “long-range missiles capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia nor anything with which to attack them,” and recommended targeting “deployment locations in Rostov” using drones.
In a third, also from February, this time with deputy prime minister Yuliya Svyrydenko, Zelensky proposed “blowing up” the massive Soviet-built “Druzhba” (“Friendship”) oil pipeline running from Russia through Ukraine in the direction of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to “destroy” Hungarian industry, “which is based heavily on Russian oil.”
US intelligence officials qualified in the latter conversation as a matter of frustrated Zelensky possibly “expressing rage toward Hungary and therefore… making hyperbolic, meaningless threats.”
However, the record of Kiev’s actions over the course of the past year in the conflict with Russia shows otherwise – with assassinations of officials in the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye, terror bombings targeting journalists, attacks on infrastructure, air bases, nuclear power plants and even the Kremlin demonstrating that Zelensky and his government have no qualms about using terrorist methods.
Neither does the Biden administration. Last September, three of the four lines of the Nord Stream pipeline network running from Russia to Germany along the bottom of the Baltic Sea were damaged in a large-scale sabotage attack, with the long-term economic impact on Europe estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of higher energy prices and deindustrialization. Veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later revealed direct US culpability in the act of sabotage and terrorism.
Two of a Kind
Amid the ratcheting up of tensions over Taiwan, some US officials also seem to want to apply Ukraine-style terror tactics to the showdown against China. Last week, a US congressman received a rare rebuke from Taiwan’s defense minister after suggesting that the US “blow up” the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – the integrated circuit-making giant.
Taiwan’s military are there to “protect” the island and its people, materials and strategic resources. “How can our armed forces tolerate this situation if someone says they want to bomb this or that?” Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng asked in a press conference this week.
Chiu’s comments were a response to remarks by Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton, who told the audience of a think tank forum earlier this month that the US should consider destroying Taiwan’s economic crown jewel if it was threatened by Beijing.
“One of the interesting ideas that’s been floated out there for deterrence is just making it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC. I’ll just throw that out not because that’s necessarily the best strategy, but because it’s an example of the debate out there,” the lawmaker said.
Chinese media blasted Moulton’s suggestion, accusing US policymakers of openly talking about Taiwan’s destruction. “American politicians do not even pay lip service to Taiwan’s interests let alone think about them. Are they planning to turn TSMC into the next Nord Stream?” the Global Times asked in a tweet.
US defense policy advisor Michele Flournoy also challenged Moulton’s proposal, saying that “if you do that [blow up TSMC] you have a $2 trillion economic impact on the global economy within the first year and you’d put manufacturing around the world at a standstill. This is a terrible idea.”
In US hawks’ foreign policy playbook, the world appears to run on “terrible ideas.” Moulton’s proposal to destroy Taiwan’s chipmaking infrastructure, and Zelensky’s propensity for terrorism and escalatory rhetoric are nothing new –with the recent CIA dirty war in Syria, and US support for terrorism against Moscow-allied governments and movements throughout the Cold War demonstrating that for Washington, such tactics are the rule, not the exception.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Russia could terminate its membership in the Arctic Council if Western member states discriminate against it, the country’s Foreign Ministry has warned. Nikolay Korchunov, ambassador-at-large and Moscow’s senior representative in the organization, noted that the group’s role and effectiveness have diminished of late due to the policies being pursued by the Western powers.
In an interview with Russia’s TASS media outlet published on Sunday, Korchunov said that should Norway, which became the Council’s chair on Thursday, choose not to invite Russia to take part in its activities, this would constitute a violation of Russia’s rights.
“In this case, the continuation of our country’s participation in this organization’s activities will hardly be possible,” the diplomat clarified.
Following the start of Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine last February, the other members of the intergovernmental body, which includes Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and the US, effectively cut all contact with Moscow and froze over a hundred joint projects.
In his interview, Korchunov warned that Western countries’ growing insistence on confrontation and the pursuit of their own interests at the expense of the interests of other nations in the Arctic could potentially lead to escalation.
He cited NATO’s “expansion” in the region, which has seen ever more military drills held there recently.
The official also noted the Council’s weakening role and waning effectiveness, adding that Russia is engaging “in active dialogue in various formats with other countries and organizations.” Korchunov pointed out that Moscow would be working with constructive partners.
He also revealed Moscow’s plans to put Arctic issues on the agenda of other international entities, citing interest among members of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
Among Russia’s priorities in the region is the development of the northern shipping routes connecting Asian economic powerhouses with European markets, Korchunov stressed.
Speaking to RT in early April, Russia’s minister responsible for developing the Arctic, Aleksey Chekunkov lamented that “one-sided unfriendly actions” by the other members of the Arctic Council and lack of cooperation could “destabilize the Arctic” and lead to chaos.
May 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | NATO, Russia |
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