Ukrainian soldiers underestimated Russia – Western media
By Lucas Leiroz | August 12, 2023
Apparently, the Ukrainian armed forces were not aware of the defense capabilities of the Russian Federation, having underestimated the enemy during the counteroffensive. According to an article recently published by CNN, Ukrainian soldiers did not expect their opponents to be so efficient on the battlefield, which is supposed to explain why Kiev’s counteroffensive was so overrated – and is now being so criticized for its irrelevant results.
The article was written by on the ground reporters, war correspondents who interviewed Ukrainian troops to find out their opinion on what is happening in the frontlines. In the text, the interviewees unexpectedly “admitted” to have underestimated the Russian opponents, virtually assuming responsibility for the failure of the counterattack.
“It won’t be as easy as in [Russia’s tactical retreat from] Kharkiv. Here the enemy was ready, unfortunately. Everybody chatted for months that we would move here (…) We expected less resistance. They are holding. They have leadership. It is not often you say that about the enemy”, a tank unit commander named “Lotos” told CNN’s journalists. Also, “Vlad”, “a medic with the 15th National Guard”, stated: “You shouldn’t honor the enemy (…) But don’t underestimate him”.
The article, however, also shows some optimism about the future of the counteroffensive. It is said that the Ukrainians already learned “not to underestimate their enemy” and now they can do something really efficient, despite the difficulties. Interviewees claim that there is a kind of “thirst for revenge” that motivates them to keep fighting, which is why “CNN saw a palpable improvement in morale”.
Julia, another military medic interviewed by CNN, states that her colleagues are optimistic about the future of the offensive, since “revenge” and “hatred” would be motivating them. According to her, now there is a different optimism, possibly more realistic, knowing the enemy’s capacity, but still very strong, since the Ukrainians are enthusiastic about the possibility of attacking, as they spent more than 18 months just defending themselves. She says, for example, that the wounded soldiers she takes care of are eager to return to the front and resume their duties as their “thirst for revenge is very strong”.
“We are still optimistic but not as we used to be. Assaulting is emotionally easier. It was very hard standing in defense for 18 months (…) They (wounded Ukrainian troops) know it’s not going to be the same – they won’t be in the assault squad. But they want to come back. Because thirst for revenge is very strong. Hatred is very strong”, she said.
It is curious to read this type of information in the Western media when, on the other side, prisoners of war captured by the Russians claim that they learned about the existence of a “counteroffensive” through TikTok, since their officers had not told them anything on the battlefield. There is clearly an inconsistency between the data. Soldiers who were not aware of the counteroffensive cannot have overestimated the attack or underestimated the enemy. They did not even know what they were doing to have any critical assessment of the topic.
CNN’s interviewees speak as if they were to blame for military failure, when in fact those responsible for calculating the chances of victory are not military personnel on the frontlines, but intelligence officers who have access to sensitive data about the enemy. What seems most likely is that the media is manipulating the reports made by the sources saying that there were errors in calculating the possible results of the counteroffensive, blaming the Ukrainians and trying to clean up their own image.
Along with Ukrainian state officials, the Western media were primarily responsible for spreading the narrative that a large-scale attack was being planned by Kiev. Western journalists overestimated this alleged attack more than any Ukrainian military and now they seem to be trying to save their own credibility by bringing new “explanations” about what supposedly prevented the move from succeeding.
Furthermore, it is hard to believe that there really is so much motivation and high morale among the Ukrainian troops after so many recent defeats. What has been seen in recent months is a series of pessimistic statements by the Ukrainian military, with fewer and fewer people believing in any possibility of victory. In fact, the tendency is that territorial losses and battlefield defeats generate deterioration of credibility, moral discouragement and capitulation, not “thirst for revenge”.
In this sense, it seems more likely that the Western media itself is initiating a new propaganda campaign, focused on asserting that there will be a new wave of counterattacks in the near future, which is supposed not to repeat the errors of the previous one. An indication of this is the fact that in the article CNN journalists also made some criticisms of NATO’s weapons sent to Ukraine, stating that they are “donated” ones, “not always kept at NATO service standards”. This appears to be a psychological move to convince public opinion that what has been sent to Kiev so far is still “not enough” for the counteroffensive to succeed, and there needs to be more efficient, lethal weapons in the military aid packages.
In the end, the Western media outlets seem to be doing once again what they have been doing throughout the entire conflict: encouraging war, demanding more weapons and trying to disguise their own analytical errors.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
China is run by ‘bad folks’ – Biden
US President Joe Biden greets people after speaking on Thursday at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. © Getty Images / George Frey
RT | August 11, 2023
US President Joe Biden has escalated his attacks on Chinese leaders, reportedly telling donors to his re-election campaign that China’s government is run by “bad folks” who may take dangerous actions as their economy teeters on the brink of collapse.
Biden claimed on Thursday at a fundraising event in Park City, Utah, that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government was in “trouble” because Beijing’s economic problems were a “ticking time bomb,” according to multiple media reports. He backed up his assertions with several erroneous claims about China’s economy and demographics.
“They got some problems,” Biden told supporters. “That’s not good because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” He falsely stated that China had the “highest unemployment rate going” and more people of retirement age than of working age. He mocked Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative as the “debt and noose,” alluding to the loans China provides to developing nations.
The remarks were reminiscent of comments Biden made at a similar political event in June, when he referred to Xi as a “dictator.” Chinese officials lodged a formal complaint in Washington and called the insult a “political provocation.” Biden dismissed the controversy when asked at a press briefing about Beijing’s reaction, saying he didn’t think there would be “any real consequence.”
At Thursday’s fundraising event, the 80-year-old US president said he wants to have a “rational relationship” with China, adding, “I don’t want to hurt China, but I’m watching.” He didn’t specify which potential Chinese actions concern him, though US-China tensions over self-governing Taiwan have escalated in the past year.
Biden claimed that China’s economic growth has slowed to 2%. Chinese GDP rose at a 5.5% pace in this year’s first half, compared with the US rate of around 2.2%. As Western economies feel the effects of historically high inflation, China is dealing with deflation.
The country has more than three times as many people of working age as people 60 and older. China’s unemployment rate is around 5.2%, compared with 6.4% in the Eurozone. Spain and Greece both have double-digit jobless rates.
Biden has made incendiary comments about Xi’s government at a time when his administration is trying to improve strained relations between the world’s two largest economies. His “dictator” remark came just one day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded a long-awaited visit to China. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and US climate envoy John Kerry later made visits to Beijing.
The Utah fundraiser was held at the home of Mark Gilbert, a former US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Donors reportedly had to pay at least $3,300 to attend. Hosts paid $100,000, and guests who contributed at least $50,000 were allowed to speak with Biden and have a picture taken with him. Those paying $10,000 to $25,000 could get a photo with the president.
Maine Hospital That Fired Unvaccinated Nurses Over Mills’ Mandate Is Begging Them to Return Two Years Later
By Steve Robinson | Maine Wire |August 9, 2023
Nurses and other health care workers at MaineGeneral Health, one of Maine’s largest healthcare providers, were unceremoniously fired two years ago if they refused to take the experimental mRNA injections touted as COVID-19 preventatives.
Some of those workers were even slapped with misconduct charges for refusing to comply with the mandate, many were later denied unemployment benefits, and no requests for religious exemptions were honored.
Now, one of the nonprofit hospitals that left some employees jobless and without recourse to Maine’s unemployment insurance benefits is sending text messages to the same employees it cast aside practically begging them to come back to work.
“You were once a proud member of the MaineGeneral team. Would you consider rejoining us? We would be pleased to discuss options with you,” the MaineGeneral Health Recruitment team said in a text message to former registered nurse Terry Poland.
“As you know, nearly 2 years ago MaineGeneral had to comply with a state mandate for COVID-19 vaccination. We lost a number of great employees as a result, including you,” MaineGeneral said.
“MaineGeneral has eliminated the COVID-19 vaccination as an employment condition,” MaineGeneral said.
Poland, who lives in Augusta, had worked as a registered nurse for 33 years. Her career included employment with MaineGeneral, Central Maine Medical Center, Pen Bay Medical Center, and the Aroostook Medical Center.
She couldn’t believe that the hospital would contact her in such a manner after casting her life into chaos for nearly two years.
“I was livid. Like, how dare you force me out of a career that I’ve dedicated my whole life to, taken away my livelihood, my ability to earn a good income, and now you think I’m gonna come grovel back to you?” Poland said. “I don’t hardly think so. And that’s the attitude of most everybody that I’ve been in contact with since yesterday.”
A source told the Maine Wire that about 15 former MaineGeneral Health employees received similar text messages.
Poland refused to take the experimental COVID-19 shots after Gov. Janet Mills decreed on August 12, 2021 that healthcare workers would be forced to receive the shots as a condition of working in healthcare by October 1, 2021.
Documents reviewed by the Maine Wire show that MaineGeneral established a speedier timeline of Sept. 17 for compliance.
Eventually, the State pushed back the deadline to the end of October.
Poland was never opposed to vaccines generally speaking. Though she previously used a religious exemption to avoid taking an influenza shot, she willingly took the other vaccines required to work in healthcare prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, including immunizations for Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Hepatitis-B.
She said she was concerned about the novel nature of the mRNA technology, a form of gene therapy, which prior to COVID-19 had not been used in the standard schedule of immunizations.
“I knew enough not to take it. I’ve been a nurse long enough to know I need to question what new products are,” Poland said. “I’m not going to be the first one to jump on board of an experiment.”
When she discovered that fetal tissues are commonly used in the development and production of the drugs, that only strengthened her resolve as a Christian not to get the injections.
In previous years, Poland has said she was allowed an exemption from taking the influenza shot so long as she wore a mask during flu season. However, the hospital was unwilling to provide this accommodation for COVID-19.
As a result of her choice, Poland faced not only termination, but also an allegation of misconduct from her former employer.
When she applied for unemployment benefits, she was rejected because of the misconduct allegation.
When she appealed, she was turned away.
Documents reviewed by the Maine Wire show that the Maine Department of Labor determined that MaineGeneral Health “discharged” her; however, the agency concluded that Poland’s refusal to get the injections was a violation that constituted a “culpable breach of obligations to the employer.”
As a result, Poland had to rely on her savings to get by in the middle of economically disastrous government lockdowns and soaring inflation.
Poland then sought help from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that she’d been discriminated against on the basis of her religious beliefs.
MaineGeneral Health, in responding to the commission, argued that allowing Poland religious accommodations would impose an “undue hardship” on the hospital. On that basis, the commission declined to take on her case.
The Maine Human Rights Commission also rejected her discrimination complaint.
“[T]here has been positive energy between human resource personnel and managers who are in the process of working together to reach out to former employees to see if they are interested in returning,” said Joy McKenna, director of communications for MaineGeneral, in an email.
“Since Monday, we are only aware of a few people who have indicated that they are interested in having a conversation about applying for an open position,” she said. “We currently have 453 open positions, which is similar to our pre-COVID open position count.”
McKenna said the hospital did not intentionally fire unvaccinated employees in a way that would block them from getting unemployment benefits.
Some of those positions have been filled by foreign nationals with greencards, McKenna said, though she was not able to provide an exact number on Wednesday.
At the time MaineGeneral fired her, Poland was working at the MaineGeneral Rehabilitation and Long Term Care at Gray Birch facility in Augusta.
The facility provides nursing home and assisted living services and has a 37-bed capacity. Federal stats show the facility had 141 staff before the mandate and 110 after it was enforced.
In the years since she was fired, she estimates she’s earned only $12,000 and $17,000 as a home healthcare worker, a position that hasn’t provided similar benefits to the job she lost.
As a registered nurse, Poland was making about $75,000 per year.
She’s still not willing to give MaineGeneral another shot.
Poland is not the only one whose career was derailed by Gov. Mills’ mandate policy.
Jessie Boda worked for St. Mary’s Health System as a registered nurse in Psychiatric and Detox services for 13 years, her first job out of college.
When the mandate came down, she applied for a religious exemption.
In her letter requesting the exemption, Boda pointed to her religious faith and her concern over adverse vaccine reactions.
She also pointed out that natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection was in some cases a better protection against contracting the virus.
St. Mary’s, which has a formal affiliation with the Catholic Church, denied the request.
Like MaineGeneral, St. Mary’s also found a way for Boda’s exit from the company to prevent her from getting unemployment benefits.
“I did not comply and I never submitted a letter of resignation. Nor would they give me a letter of termination,” Boda said.
“The kind lady in the HR office gave me a letter stating my start date and end date of employment but told me she could not use the words ‘terminated’ or ‘fired’,” she said.
Boda took her case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which agreed to investigate her case but concluded there was no grounds for the complaint.
Kevin Palmer worked as a credentialing coordinator for Southern Maine Health Care, the Biddeford location of MaineHealth.
Palmer, who is in his 30s, was never opposed to taking vaccines before COVID-19, but he was skeptical of what he saw as a rushed process to roll out the COVID-19 shots.
“I had heart surgery in high school, survived brain cancer in my 20s, and now they’re telling me I have to get this shot over a virus with a 99.99 percent survival rate?” he said.
Like Boda and Poland, Palmer sought a religious exemption and was denied.
Like Boda and Poland, Palmer was fired in a way that later prevented him from obtaining unemployment.
In his termination letter, the HR department wrote: “This is also to confirm that September 30 will be your last day of employment. We want to thank you for your service.”
Even though the hospital gave him an employment date in an email, the Maine Department of Labor ruled against him.
“I never got a penny,” Palmer said.
He wasn’t able to find another job until four months later and the job he eventually found came with a 20 percent pay cut.
“I ran out of money like everybody else. It was crazy. I was trying to apply to jobs, similar to what I had done in credentialing. And I couldn’t even get a job with with the experience I had because they were mandating the vaccine even for remote positions,” said Palmer.
“How crazy is that?” he said.
A Healthcare Worker Crisis Caused by Authoritarian Policies
Thousands of former healthcare workers in Maine are currently unemployed or working in other fields because they refused to comply with Gov. Mills’ order that they receive injections.
Some refused because they were skeptical of all vaccines or because of religious beliefs concerning the ethical problems with vaccine research that uses fetal tissue.
Others were fearful that the long-term consequences of the experimental products were unknown, unknowable, and potentially harmful.
But in every case, the substantial drop in employment in Maine’s healthcare sector because of the mandate has severely exacerbated a workforce shortage that threatens to undermine healthcare quality in the state.
Text messages like the one Poland received will hardly fix the problem.
It’s virtually impossible to determine how much of the sharp drop in healthcare employment has been caused by Mills’ order, how much of it was caused by COVID-19, and how much of it was caused by lockdown policies generally.
Regardless, labor statistics show Maine is in the middle of the steepest decline in healthcare jobs. Ever.
According to stats from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, those losses have been particularly acute in Maine’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities, like the facility where Poland worked.
In 2019, Maine had more than 22,600 individuals employed at nursing homes.
That number hit 19,800 in 2022.
At skilled nursing facilities, employment dropped from 8,426 in 2019 to 6,907 in 2022, according to Maine Department of Labor statistics.
The shortage of long-term care workers is all the more severe in Maine since the state consistently ranks as the oldest in the nation. As demand for nursing home beds increases, the number of workers available to provide that care has plummeted.
In home healthcare, total employment has declined from 4,401 workers in 2019 to 4,054 in 2022.
The same shortage can be seen in employment figures for hospitals in Maine. Mainers working in Maine hospitals declined from 33,000 in 2019 to 30,900 in 2021, according to federal statistics.
Even as Maine’s opioid epidemic has continued to break records for overdoses and deaths, the number people employed in the health sector that includes substance abuse facilities has declined from 7,509 workers in 2019 to 7,149 in 2022, according to Maine Department of Labor numbers.
One health care area that hasn’t seen such sharp declines is ambulatory health care, which includes facilities that are out-patient only, such as urgent care clinics and dentists offices.
At the same time the medical field is suffering from a lack of employees, Mainers have never spent more money on their health care.
Personal consumption of outpatient and in-home care topped $11,897,000,000 in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s a massive increase over the $11.2 billion reported for 2019.
At least some of that money is making its way into the pockets of Maine’s remaining health care workers. According to federal stats, Mainers who work in health care or social assistance made a record $7,028,362,000 in collective wages — the highest ever in Maine history.
Vaccine Mandate Victims Seek Discrimination Case
Gov. Mills’ mandate was based on the theory that the pharmaceutical products being touted as “vaccines” or “immunizations” would prevent healthcare workers from contracting the virus or transmitting it to patients.
It’s now generally understood that the vaccine never inhibited transmission of the virus.
Mills, who has followed the recommended injection schedule, has herself caught COVID-19 twice despite getting the jabs.
The Aug. 3 decision by the Mills Administration to rescind the mandate after nearly two years followed on the heels of an embarrassing legal defeat in a case challenging the constitutionality of Mills’ decision to eliminate religious and philosophical exemptions from the mandate.
That court case hinges on the fact that Mills continued to allow medical exemptions while denying a comparable exemption for medical reasons.
Although the plaintiffs in that case, several healthcare workers who lost their jobs over the mandate, initially lost in Maine District Court, an appeals court panel has determined that the lower court erred when it rejected their claim of religious discrimination.
In May, when that decision came down, Matt Staver, who represents the plaintiffs via Liberty Counsel, said he was looking forward to discovery.
“We’re frankly looking very much forward to going to discovery and holding Governor mills and the Maine authorities accountable for this terrible and, frankly, unconstitutional decision,” said Staver.
‘So Many Pitfalls’: Feds Push School-Based Health Centers as Critics Sound Alarm Over Lack of Parental Consent
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 9, 2023
The recent push by the U.S. federal government to rapidly expand the use of school-based health centers (SBHCs) across the country has some critics concerned children will receive, or be pressured into receiving, unnecessary or unwanted medical interventions — including vaccines — without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Georgia attorney Nicole Johnson, co-director of Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice and a consultant to the Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) legal team, told The Defender :
“It’s scary because these health centers sound really good. In some of the rural and poor communities especially, this is going to seem like a really good way for children to get this care.
“And while there may be some conveniences, there are so many concerns with allowing medical exams and treatments at school. Parents need to be involved in all medical decisions and I fear they are being left out of the equation.”
SBHCs are intended to provide high-quality healthcare to kids by offering “primary care, mental health care, and other health services in schools,” particularly in underserved communities.
This includes services “to prevent disease, disability, and other health conditions or their progression” such as “immunizations” and “well-child care.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Community Preventive Services Task Force, SBHCs can improve educational and health outcomes.
The CDC also considers SBHCs as integral to its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model because they provide health services and mental health counseling.
But critics like Johnson worry that though there may be benefits to SBHCs, there are also downsides — including lack of regulation of the centers and the fact that parents may not be aware of the broad range of medical and behavioral services being provided in their children’s schools.
SBHCs have been linked to higher human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates, according to a 2022 report by Harvard University’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and the University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The report — written expressly to “address vaccine hesitancy” — concluded: “These results suggest SBHCs create a considerable opportunity … to implement successful school based HPV vaccination programs.”
Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, is one of the funders of the School-Based Health Alliance, a large networking organization that “works on policy, standards, data, and training issues” regarding SBHCs.
Federal, state authorities pour taxpayer money into school-based health centers
The idea of running full-service health centers in public schools has been around for more than two decades, but events in 2022 caused SBHCs to catch on like wildfire.
Congress and President Joe Biden in June 2022 passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which allowed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award $50 million in grants to states “for the purpose of implementing, enhancing, or expanding the provision” of healthcare assistance through SBHCs using Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
The legislation charged the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with expanding access to Medicaid healthcare services — including behavioral health services — in schools, and reducing the administrative burden for states and schools.
A CMS spokesperson told The Defender that Medicaid and CHIP now can provide reimbursement for services given in SBHCs for children and youth who are covered by those programs.
Additionally, in May 2022 HHS awarded $25 million in grants to 125 SBHCs “to improve and strengthen access to school-based health services in communities across the country.”
State public officials also are dedicating funds to expand SBHCs. For instance, the governor of Georgia in fall 2022 announced an investment of $125 million to expand school-based health services to rural communities in Georgia.
Pediatricians can ‘partner’ with schools
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports SBHCs and said in a policy statement that pediatricians may act as “sponsors” by partnering with a school to establish the SBHC as an extension of their practice or by supervising the care given at a SBHC.
“Sponsors also include local hospitals that can provide prearranged after-hours and school vacation coverage and financial support for SBHCs,” the AAP said.
The Defender reached out to the AAP statement’s lead authors for comments on how parental consent is handled in SBHCs, but they did not respond by our publication deadline.
SBHCs also have the support of the School-Based Health Alliance. In addition to funding from Merck, the alliance receives financial support from HHS’ Health Resources & Services Administration.
Documents obtained in June by CHD revealed that the HHS gave $4.7 million to research headed by a Merck consultant that focused on developing “The Announcement Approach Training,” where providers simply “announce” a child will be receiving the HPV vaccine as part of a routine office visit, instead of discussing it with the family first.
The government-funded research also is testing whether financial incentives and peer pressure can “nudge” doctors to change how they talk to their patients in order to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
Meanwhile, a fierce battle is taking place in multiple states where some lawmakers are pushing legislation that would allow minors to receive treatments to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — including Merck’s HPV vaccine — without parental knowledge or consent.
‘So many pitfalls … so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions’
Justine Tanguay, an attorney with nearly 20 years of experience advocating for children in various areas of the law, told The Defender :
“Don’t be fooled! This year many schools will be sending home blanket consent-to-treat forms for parents to sign.
“Parents need to be aware that these forms are not the traditional authorization requests for the school nurse to give first-aid or to treat minor illnesses.”
Tanguay, CHD’s director of campaign and research, explained that the forms may give those who run the SBHC the legal authorization to provide “comprehensive healthcare.”
This could include — but may not be limited to — “the ability to provide preventative treatment, behavioral and mental health services, reproductive counseling, lab and prescription services, various medical screenings, immunizations and disease management,” Tanguay said.
Moreover, SBHC staff will have “direct access” to a minor child, Tanguay said, “as well as the ability to encourage a minor child to make personal healthcare decisions without the need to consult with and seek approval from a parent.”
“The opportunity to circumvent both parental rights and informed consent is ripe for abuse,” Tanguay warned.
Johnson agreed, saying, “There are just so many pitfalls here, so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions.”
Johnson shared with The Defender a consent form currently used in a school district north of Atlanta, Georgia.
The form says nothing about parents being notified before, during or after treatment. It reads:
“I hereby voluntarily give my consent for [my child] to receive health services with Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cumming Elementary School.
“I further authorize any health care provider and professional staff working for the clinic to provide such medical tests, diagnoses, procedures, and treatments as are reasonably necessary or advisable for the medical evaluation and management of my child’s health care.”
The form does not clarify who determines what services are “reasonably necessary or advisable” and does not explain how parents will be involved in that process. It states:
“I understand that my signing this consent allows the health care provider and professional clinic staff of Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cummings Elementary Schools to provide comprehensive health services which includes physical and behavioral health services.”
Again, the form does not clarify what specifically falls into the category of “physical and behavioral health services” or how parents will be involved in the determination for what services their child may need.
“I think about my own kids when they were in school,” Johnson said, “how easily they could have been swayed to get a vaccine or a medical treatment just because an adult told them that they should.”
“It’s really dangerous to have all of these things offered to them without the parents even being aware,” she said. “A lot of kids — most kids — are compliant. They want to do what the adults are telling them to do.”
According to the CDC, a key component of its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, which includes SBHCs, is “family engagement.”
However, the agency’s 37-page document about family engagement mentions parental permission only once and does not discuss parental consent for medical treatment beyond the application of sunscreen during recess.
According to a CMS spokesperson, SBHCs “follow the same practices as any other medical center or Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provider … including parental consent requirements.”
The spokesperson did not go into detail on whether consent would be requested generally or for each specific medical treatment.
Where’s the regulatory oversight?
Tanguay pointed out that SBHCs exist without proper regulatory oversight.
According to Stand for Health Freedom, a nonprofit “dedicated to protecting informed consent in medical care,” SBHCs are “completely unregulated.”
For instance, it is presently unclear how HIPAA law (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and FERPA law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) will be applied to SBHCs and students’ health information.
Stand for Health Freedom also pointed out that although in-school clinics may relieve busy parents of the burden of taking their children to the doctor, “medical ethics do not allow physicians to treat minors without a parent or guardian present, which is why parents cannot simply drop their child off at the doctor’s office and come back later to collect them.”
Stand for Health Freedom said:
“Parents must engage politically and work with state health freedom leaders to ask lawmakers to either ban SBHCs in favor of the existing limited school-nurse model, or place guardrails on SBHCs to protect parental consent and involvement in their minor children’s medical care.”
Meanwhile, proponents of SBHCs, such as the School-Based Health Alliance, argue that SBHCs are a “powerful tool for achieving health equity among children and adolescents who unjustly experience disparities in outcomes simply because of their race, ethnicity, or family income.”
Johnson said she disliked being “so skeptical of something that may potentially benefit some people” but added, “as a parent, it is your job and your right to be a part of the decisions that affect the health and well-being of your child.”
Johnson said parents who experienced or witnessed vaccine injury would be particularly skeptical of putting medical decisions in the hands of government agencies, including schools.
“And the COVID response created even more skeptics,” she said, adding:
“It’s unfortunate that we have to approach this [SBHCs] with the thought, ‘How could this be abused?’ But that’s where we are.”
The Defender on Aug. 3 reached out to the School-Based Health Alliance to ask how parental consent in SBHCs is handled and what they’d like parents who may feel distrustful of the U.S. medical system to know about SBHCs. The alliance did not respond by our publication deadline.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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.
Coral at the Great Barrier Reef Holds on to Recent Record Gains, Defying All Doomsday Predictions
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 10, 2023
Coral at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) faces another year of exile from the climate scare headlines with news that the record levels reported in 2021-22 have been sustained in the latest annual period to May 2023. A small drop in the three main areas of the reef was well within margin of error territory, with the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reporting that regional average hard coral cover in 2022-2023 was similar to last year at 35.7%. Most reefs underwent little change during the year.
Coral at the reef has been bouncing back sharply for a number of years, with a record 36-year high reported in 2022. But the news of this spectacular recovery has been largely ignored in most media since it had previously been a go-to poster scare story for collectivist Net Zero promoters. But connecting the fate of tropical corals to global warming was always a difficult ask since they grow in waters between 24-32°C. Short boosts in local temperatures can cause temporary bleaching, but it is scientifically impossible to pin it on human-caused climate change, although pseudoscientific ‘attribution’ computer models try very hard.
In the latest year, there was a short local temperature rise, but little bleaching was reported during the 2023 summer. No cyclones hit the reef and crown-of thorns starfish attacks were limited. Nevertheless, natural stresses will always affect the eco-system and AIMS states that these paused the growth of hard coral on some of the reefs.
Like most state-funded scientific bodies, AIMS is fully signed up to climate extremism and delivering politically correct messages to promote the Net Zero solution. Despite reporting what is now a substantial multi-year recovery, it notes that the future is predicted to bring more frequent, intense and enduring marine heatwaves, alongside the persistent threat of crown-of thorns starfish outbreaks and tropical cyclones. More frequent mass coral bleaching is a sign that the GBR is experiencing the consequences of climate change, it claims. However, in a different part of its latest report, AIMS accepts that the recent substantial recovery occurred despite two mass coral bleaching events in 2020 and 2022. There is an acceptance that this underlines that “widespread coral bleaching does not necessarily lead to extensive coral mortality”.
But pockets of extremist catastrophism remain in the mainstream media, notably in the Guardian, fighting to keep the coral destruction story going. A year ago, the newspaper reported that the GBR still had “some capacity” for recovery, but the window was closing fast as the climate continued to warm. Of course the Guardian has form as long as your arm on this score. Back in 1999, George Monbiot told its readers that the “imminent total destruction of the world’s coral reefs is not a scare story but a fact”.
In last year’s Guardian report, Dr. Mike Emslie, who leads the AIMS monitoring service, said he felt a “couple of bullets” had been recently dodged. While the recovery is great, “the predictions are the disturbances will get worse”, he suggested. “The naysayers can put their heads in the sand all they like, but the frequency of disturbances is going gangbusters,” he claimed. Dr. David Wachenfeld from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority claimed “global heating” of 1.5°C is considered a “guardrail for reefs”, after which the bleaching comes along too quickly for strong recovery.
Coral reefs have been around in one form or another for hundreds of millions of years. Current global temperatures are towards the lower end of the paleoclimatic record. One might wonder how corals manage to survive temperatures up to 10°C higher in the past?
Back in the real world, we can see how the recent solid recovery was sustained across the three main areas of the GBR.
The recovery in the northern GBR actually started around 2017. Last year the coral declined slightly from 36.5% to 35.7%, and was easily within the margin of error calculated by the AIMS. Typhoon Tiffany passed through at the end of the previous reporting season, and could have been responsible for some loss.
In the centre of the reef, the strong recovery of hard coral cover to 32.6% last year eased slightly, but again, as the AIMS noted, it was within the margin of error.
The southern end of the GBR has generally had higher coral cover than elsewhere, but has shown greater variability over the observed record. Last year’s cover was 33.8%, compared with 33.9% the year before. Some coral was reported to have been lost due to starfish predations.
The GBR is the largest reef system on Earth and runs for over 1,400 miles down the eastern side of Australia. It is also the most surveyed reef in the world and the results of scientific endeavour are widely distributed. While this work is often politicised, it is clear that recent evidence shows that temporary spikes in temperature, which occur naturally in the oceans, can cause bleaching. However, this bleaching process can rapidly go into reverse when local conditions stabilise. These findings have been confirmed elsewhere, notably in the remote Palmyra Atoll, 1,200 kms south of Hawaii. A 10-year survey recently observed sudden changes in temperature up to 3°C on two occasions, leading to substantial damage to the coral. A 2015-16 spike led to 90% of the coral bleaching, but the researchers found that within a year only 10% of the coral had died. Within two years, the corals had returned to pre-bleached levels.
The researchers concluded that the coral structures “show evidence of long-term stability” – but don’t hold that front page.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
Winter Cold, Darkness Kill, While Summer Heat And Sun Save Lives Data Clearly Show
Cold and stupid policies are the real killers, not heat
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | August 11, 2023
German data from Bestattungen.de (Funerals.de) show that far more people die from cold winter weather than they do from hot summer weather.
Lately in Germany there’s been a coordinated disinformation campaign by policymakers and the media. all aimed at getting people to believe that summer heat is the real killer. And so, during heat waves, governments should declare states of emergency and usher restrictions, which could entail cancelling large outdoor events like festivals and sports matches, driving bans and lockdowns.
It’s all about saving thousands of lives and ensuring your safety, they (falsely) claim! And never mind that the mean summer temperature in Germany is under a comparatively cool 20°C.
All the focus on the dangers of summertime warmth seems odd, especially when most of us look forward to this season the most and dread the horrible long winters, a time when people are forced to spend so much time confined inside.
Winter kills, summer saves lives
Today I came across a report from Bestattungen.de (Funerals.de), a site that of course would be familiar with the business and statistics of dying. Clearly cold winter temperatures are far more dangerous than warm summer temperatures, according to their data:
Image: Besttatungen.de (translated in the English).
As the chart shows, mortality is 9.7% above the mean in the dead of winter, February, and is 7.1% below the mean right after Germans have been exposed to 3 summer months of now “deadly heat”. In fact, all the mortal suffering begins to end only once the temperatures finally warm up in April. Of course the report isn’t so recent, but we can rest assured that the mortality behavior hasn’t changed that much.
The data also suggest how crucial Vitamin D is.
The data also suggests the power of vitamin D. Fully tanked up on this crucial nutrient, people are much more resistant to infections and disease well into the fall. By mid winter, once vitamin D levels become depleted, far more become prone to disease, many experts say. This is why so many advised taking vitamin D during the COVID “pandemic”.
The following table shows the ranking, from the most deadly month to the least deadly month:
Source: Bestattungen.de
Summer saves lives
Again, the bitter cold months of January and February are the real killers, while the summer months are the real life savers. It’s absolutely idiotic of policymakers to be focused and obsessed on summer heat plans. The only heat plan people need is: Get outside, take off your clothes and enjoy the hot weather! Shade and cold water is all you need to cool off.
According to Bestattungen.de:
The German Weather Service sees weather-related factors as the main reasons for the variance in mortality risk. Damp, cold air increases the risk of aggravating existing illnesses. Respiratory diseases in particular can become more severe in the winter months. Heart attacks can also be triggered by the weather.”
Other factors also include psychological aspects and the lack of daylight and its associated “winter depression” increased melatonin and reduced serotonin.
We need a “stupid-policy-protection plan”
We really need to ask ourselves and policymakers: Why is heating fuel being made so expensive when we know that it would save a lot more lives? Stupid government policy is what’s killing people, and not the life-saving German summers.
ULEZ – Another Imperial Con
Ulez Expansion Predicted to Cut Air Pollution by Just 1.5%
By Alex Kriel | Thinking Coalition | August 9, 2023
Listening to the discussion over Ulez expansion feels like an action replay of the way in which many were convinced to overreact to Covid, leading to policy responses which caused significantly more harm than good. The Ulez ‘discussion’ has all of the same elements, with modelled health benefits calculated by Imperial College and Mayor Khan’s justification that he is “saving lives”, implying that opponents are wannabe murderers. Of course, this time around, the public is thankfully much more sceptical.
In this short note, we wanted to set out how those ‘lives saved’ numbers are derived and to demonstrate that at best the numbers are seriously misrepresented and at worst completely wrong. In fact, applying the Government and Imperial’s own logic, there is a very strong case to say that the expansion of Ulez will, on balance, harm Londoner’s health when considering the downstream economic consequences of this policy.
The major flaw in Imperial’s model is the one-dimensional nature of its assumption that air pollution drives health and life expectancy. In the real world health is driven by a number of interacting factors with income being the primary driver. There are many assumptions one could dispute that (perhaps unsurprisingly) work towards inflating the claimed health benefits of reducing air pollution, but we focus only on the flaw of largely ignoring policy consequences.
The Imperial team presents several numbers, including: attributable deaths (3,600 to 4,100), improved life expectancy (five to six months) and life-years saved (6.1 million). We wanted to focus on the claimed benefits of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy in terms of life expectancy and life-years saved.
Before leaving attributable deaths, it is important to note that these are not in any sense deaths that can be avoided, nor are they deaths that are subject to reduction by the Transport Strategy. The figure appears to compare current death rates with death rates if all human emissions had been removed for all prior periods. It is a theoretical construct (similar to an unmitigated pandemic) and only a small fraction of this number would be theoretically impacted by road transport (around 15%). Only the going-forward numbers (life-years saved) relate to the Transport Strategy and there the benefits are relatively low at 0.4%. It is important to note that there has only ever been one death, of a young and chronically unwell girl ever recorded in England (56 million population) where the death certificate mentions air pollution. Tragic as this death clearly is, it again highlights the disconnect between the theoretical attribution number and actual deaths recorded; we suggest ignoring the attributable deaths figure.
Looking at the claimed benefits of implementing the Transport Strategy, it is possible for a layman to understand the main assumptions on which these health benefits are based. In summary, it is assumed that reducing 10 µg m-3 achieves roughly a 6% reduction in all cause mortality. Note however 10 µg m-3 is more than all anthropogenic PM 2.5 emissions as estimated for England as a whole, so any benefits are scaled down from 6%. So a 1 µg m-3 reduction generates roughly a 0.6% improvement in life expectancy (i.e., ten times less).
Looking at life-years saved and extended life expectancy, the key assumptions are poorly explained. For those in a hurry, the detail shows that all of the Transport Strategy initiatives to 2050 combined will deliver a projected 0.4% reduction in life-years lost to air pollution using projections to 2154. There is a claimed five to six month extension in life expectancy, so the life expectancy of a London male of around 80 years would be extended to around 80.4 years.
These gains are stated relative to a baseline and for some inexplicable reason the Imperial team has decided to use 2013 pollution levels to establish the baseline and in the process to ignore the available data for 2019. This serves to inflate the baseline.
The acid test is: are the results of modelling compatible with observed reality? And on that basis the Imperial Ulez modelling falls flat. The model covers the impact of the entire Transport Strategy to 2050 which covers many more steps than Ulez. The Imperial document is somewhat vague about what those steps are – they are cryptically referred to as 2025 LES, 2030 LES and 2050 LES. It is enough to note that the goal of Mayor Khan’s 2018 Transport Strategy is to “aim for 80% of all trips in London to be made on foot, by cycle or using public transport by 2041”. So the first thing to clarify is that the claimed 6.1 million saving of life years relates to a significant number of measures, well beyond Ulez expansion. In effect these combined steps will largely eliminate private car traffic.
The chart below is constructed from the Imperial material and shows that PM 2.5 µg m-3 population weighted (PWAC) pollution falls over a number of steps and Ulez on a standalone basis has a near zero impact. Also, you can also see that a fair chunk of gains have already been banked between 2013 and 2019.
The failure of Ulez to achieve any meaningful reduction in pollution is very clearly shown in a separate document prepared by Jacobs which looks at the impacts of Ulez only. The table below shows the impact of Ulez expansion on PM 2.5 µg m-3 concentration, with an estimated improvement of less than 2%.
There is a slightly better outcome for NOx pollutants which are reduced by 5.4% across Greater London. This feeds in to the health impact assessment which unsurprisingly shows near zero benefit from Ulez for PM 2.5 reductions, for most health-related metrics.
Looking at life expectancy, the report does acknowledge that due to the large population (around 8.9 million) and the extraordinary long time period over which these benefits are expected to crystalise (up to 2154) then there are around 1.5 billion life-years involved (years × population). For any stated benefit to be meaningful, it needs to referenced to the base case value. The 6.1 million life-years saved is then within the context of a total of around 1.5 billion life-years; this saving is around 0.4%. Correspondingly, the impact on life expectancy from all of the pollution schemes (not just Ulez) adds up to around 22 to 27 weeks additional life expectancy. In the context of male life expectancy of 80 years (roughly) this would improve to 80.4 years as a consequence of 30 years’ worth of restrictive climate policies (ignoring any economic consequences).
The core flaw in the calculation is the one-dimensional thinking that underpins this (and all similar calculations) in that all reductions in PM 2.5 concentrations lead to a reduction in the mortality rate. This thinking ignores any link between people’s incomes and health outcomes, which is the primary driver of health. This is the same dishonest cop out that Professor Ferguson made in his infamous Covid paper. This facilitates a myopic focus on ‘safety’ and generates solutions that do far more harm than good.
In setting out the methodology that states that health outcomes will improve with a reduction in air pollution on a more or less linear basis, the Government’s own figures show that real world data prove that this assumption is not correct (or at least over-simplified). Its own data for the regions of the U.K. show that (if anything) this relationship is reversed.
Life expectancy in Scotland is much lower despite having far and away the lowest concentration of anthropogenic PM 2.5 pollutants. Many studies with and between countries show this clearly (e.g. life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England: 2018 to 2020).
In order to get a handle on how much more significant factors other than PM 2.5 can be, we looked at a recent paper that considers the impact of changes in different factors on life expectancy across 29 European countries (the paper also looks at each factor in isolation using multivariate analysis). The chart below shows the life expectancy impact of a 1% change in the listed factors. There are of course some caveats, but you can immediately see that economic activity dominates the outcomes with a 13-month gain in life expectancy for a 1% gain in GDP versus say a 2.7 month gain for a 1% change in PM 10-2.5. Also note there is no statistically significant relationship between CO2 and life expectancy.
In another section of the same paper the author states: “France and Sweden, some of the countries closest to their potential LE (life expectancies), are also amongst those with the highest NOx level.” The real message, though, is that if you dent people’s income by narrowly pursuing PM 2.5 reduction, you will, on balance, shorten life expectancy and not increase it. The Jacobs’ report confirms that there will be multiple negative impacts on business and economic activity. We guess that on balance Ulez will lower life expectancy when factoring in the impacts on business and family incomes, as well as quality of life considerations.
In the post Covid world, we have understood that politicians of all stripes will shamelessly use emotional manipulation in order to get reasonable people to comply with their unreasonable edicts. That is why understanding how reliable, or otherwise, attributable deaths, life-years saved and life expectancy figures are is so important. You can almost guarantee that these estimates will be manipulated and potentially used to rationalise illogical and damaging policies.With opaque models it is relatively easy to produce results to order.
The political process assumes that the individuals involved are able to understand competing objectives and arrive at a sensible compromise. However, we saw in the case of Covid that many politicians have limited scientific understanding and will tend to pursue unachievable safety, at any cost.
The State seems to be redefining its role with a narrow group of ideologically-driven technocrats setting somewhat arbitrary targets. Achieving those targets requires wholesale changes to people’s lives. Very often economic, mental health and other impacts are barely considered and historically established constitutional boundaries between the State and the citizen are often ignored.
In the case of Ulez expansion, the 59% of respondents to the public consultation who clearly opposed the expansion were simply ignored.
Various sops will no doubt be offered to voters, but is it important that readers realise that there is a direction of travel to these various steps. Finally, remember Albert Camus’s wise warning that, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was an early critic of the Imperial Covid model. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition, which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach.
WHY IS THE WEST SO WEAK (AND RUSSIA SO STRONG)?
THE ROLE OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND WESTERN EDUCATION
BY GAIUS BALTAR | AUGUST 2, 2023
It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people in the West that something has gone terribly wrong with the Ukraine project. Predictions and projections didn’t pan out and the West doesn’t seem to know what to do. The Russian economy wasn’t a house of cards as predicted, Russian weapons weren’t inferior as predicted, Russian soldiers and commanders weren’t incompetent as predicted, and Russian technology wasn’t inferior as predicted.
In some respects the Russians even seem to be superior to the West. Their weapons are effective and in many cases outright technologically superior, as clearly demonstrated by their hypersonic missiles, SAM systems and electronic warfare systems. Their economy appears to be surprisingly advanced and diversified and based on real wealth creation rather than financialization and debt like the West’s. Their strategic and tactical thinking also seems to work, while the West‘s clearly doesn‘t.
The whole mess is often explained as a result of a miscalculation by the western elites – they underestimated Russia and overestimated the West. The situation, however, is far worse than that. Every day that passes reveals the impotence of the West more and more and the situation is becoming outright humiliating. At this point the rest of the world either shakes their heads or simply laughs at the West and its politicians and diplomats – not to mention its crazed populations.
The dysfunction of the West is far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. It’s absolutely everywhere. The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal. The West’s control mechanisms over the rest of the world are also crumbling, including the dollar, sanctions, color revolutions, military interventions and threats. Nothing seems to work and everything the West does seems to make things worse.
Any rational person upon hearing a western leader, diplomat or “expert” speak, asks himself this question: “Are they just lying or are they really this incompetent and delusional?” The answer is “both” but the incompetence factor is far greater than most people can imagine.
Why has this happened? It’s clear that the cause is far deeper than the deindustrialization of the West or economic problems in general. The economy doesn’t explain the incredible incompetence shown by the West before and during the war in Ukraine.
I suggest that the cause of this unfolding disaster is a serious structural problem in the West – which Russia seems to have largely avoided. This structural problem is a necessary condition for the current western system and has been purposely created to bring it about and maintain it. This problem is the subject of this article – as well as the “mechanism” behind it. This is unfortunately a long article, but the subject matter demands it.
The current ideologically-based power structure of the West outright requires that certain types of people be in positions of influence and certain types of people be sidelined. This applies to all steps of the social ladder; from kindergarten teachers to university teachers and corporate executives, and all the way up to the leaders of society itself. This has been progressing steadily for the last five decades or so, and has resulted in a major structural problem for the West. That problem is the obvious and massive degradation and misallocation of human capital in the West.
Human capital can be described as the quality of a company’s or nation’s workforce, or more specifically how competent the employee pool is – how well they are trained, how quickly they can be trained, how they are educated in general, and how they make decisions. In order to understand what competence really means, let’s define it further.
Competence can be described as specific or general. This distinction is extremely important and must be understood by anyone who attempts to manage human capital on a small or large scale.
Specific competence is the ability to do a certain type of work. This can be carpentry, coding, chemistry, medicine, piloting an airliner, and so on and so forth. Some of these types of jobs may require a lot of competence, training and intelligence, but what they have in common is that their scope is limited and clearly defined. They exist within clear boundaries, separate from the complexities and vagueness of the world in general. Each type of work requires certain abilities innate in the person, as well as varying degrees of training. People, of course, differ a lot in their level of specific competence within each field.
General or high-level competence is the ability to do work that is beyond clearly defined boundaries. The subject matter of those types of work exists in a complex “variable universe” and can be exceedingly vague and confusing. It requires the ability to be adaptive and be able to transfer skills between different types of work. This also applies to expertise in one field being applied to a completely different field – such as applying psychology to economics or astrophysics to climate science.
Examples of positions requiring general or high-level competence people are corporate executives, all kinds of planners and administrators, product developers, inventors, high-level consultants and analysts, military leaders and planners, diplomats, judges, political leaders, and high-level scientists and theoreticians, to name a few.
Specific and general competence types of work are not two separate things. Types of work or “jobs” can be said to range from almost completely specific up to almost completely general. Almost all types of work have elements of both but in varying proportions. To illustrate this I will take an example from a company I’m personally familiar with. This is a software company with several owners, most of whom work at the company. One of the owners is an exceptionally competent database specialist. However, when he contributes to decision making for the company as a whole, he becomes an outright problem. The management structure of the company had to be “modified” to neutralize him in that role, as well as a few others. This employee has exceptional specific competence but very poor general competence. He cannot “transfer” his specific database competence over to competence in moving the company into the future. He simply cannot operate objectively or sensibly outside his database job.
So what makes this employee have such poor general competence – or more specifically – what is general competence? General competence requires three necessary conditions: a) High general intelligence or IQ, b) the ability to be objective, even in situations where the result of your conclusions may not be to your liking, and c) the ability to reach conclusions without being influenced by others (i.e. independent thinking). The latter two conditions are a direct result of how the human brain interacts with the environment. The mechanism behind it is too complicated to describe here, but in simplistic terms it can be said that humans range in their relationship with reality from the emotional-outward/subjective to the introspective/objective. This variable, like all evolutionary traits, including IQ, is normally distributed. This has rather disturbing implications which may be difficult for some people to understand.
Let’s first look at IQ, or general intelligence. In order to be able to deal with seriously complicated work or get through a real university program, an IQ of about 125 is necessary. Only about 5% of the population in the West has this IQ or higher. This means that the pool of potentially high-level competence people is very small to begin with. Even if we use a cut-off of an IQ of 115, which is sufficient for most semi-complicated work, the potential pool only goes up to 16% of the population.
Now let’s take a look at the other variables, i.e. objectivity and independent thinking. Those two are correlated and we will, for the sake of convenience, handle them as the same variable or trait, even though they aren’t. They are normally distributed, much like IQ, with most in the middle and fewer toward the extremes in both directions. On one side of the distribution are people who, to state it bluntly, are incapable of thinking objectively about any issues that may interact with their personal views about anything at all. They can be competent in a limited field which is “neutral” to them (such as databases), but not involving anything else. They can’t run a company in a competitive environment, except into the ground. They can’t run a city, a country, a military campaign, an economy, or anything requiring general competence, except into the ground, regardless of their intelligence. These people are clearly not suitable for general/high-level competence jobs.
So, what is the proportion of the population that is objective enough and independent thinkers enough to be suitable for those jobs? That’s difficult to determine but it’s clear that it is maximum 50% of the population. In reality it’s far less but let’s be generous and say it’s 30%. What does that mean?
IQ and objectivity/independent thinking are somewhat correlated but let’s assume they are not. Let’s say that we have a pool of potentially objective and rational people that is 30% and a pool of people with IQ of 125 that is 5%. That means that the pool of high-level general competence people is 5% of 30%, or 1.5% of the population.
If we are really generous and assume that 50% of the population is objective and rational and an IQ of 115 is sufficient for those jobs, then we have 16% of 50%, which is a pool of 8% of the population.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. This group, whether we define it as 1.5% of the population or 8% of the population, is extremely valuable. This is essentially the only group in society that can reliably evaluate complex situations and make subsequent rational decisions. Without it, modern technological society simply cannot be built or maintained – let alone advanced. Let me rephrase this – if we do not identify and utilize this group, we cannot run our complicated societies except into the ground.
Modern western society is from a governance standpoint ideologically motivated and ideologically controlled. It is being pushed in a very clearly defined ideological direction, led by the European Union and the current US administration. This ideology is not the subject matter of this article, but it can be seen everywhere by any rational and independent-thinking person. For the uninformed-curious a good place to start is the website of the EU’s policy-making body; the World Economic Forum.
In order to achieve these ideological goals for the West, two things must happen: a) The right people must be put into power at all levels of society and b) any disruptive elements must be eliminated or suppressed. Since all ideological goals tend to be more or less in conflict with reality, there is no group more disruptive to them than the one who operates objectively and independently. People like that simply cannot be allowed into positions of power, and if they must be, they must be kept quiet and/or forced to toe the line.
The objective/rational/general competence group, whether it is 1.5% or 8% of the population, therefore becomes a problem rather than a resource. This is exactly the situation in the West today.
Many people have noticed that meritocracy has been systematically abandoned in the West and the relationship between competence and reward severed in giant swaths of the economy – and almost completely in government. What few people seem to realize is that this is a necessity for the West’s ideological goals to be reached. High-level competence cannot be promoted because it is a threat. It cannot therefore be rewarded.
In order to illustrate this, let’s take a look at what happens when a member of the 1.5% is allowed to gain significant power. Elon Musk is a smart man, probably with an IQ of 150 or more. He is also quite objective and realistic in his assessments, and an independent thinker. His ownership and governance of Twitter/X is a major problem for western ideological goals. Free speech is an obvious threat to any ideology and, to rub salt in the wounds, Musk belittled the guardians of the Ideology at Twitter by making fun of them, then by firing them all and only keeping the competent ones. This cannot be allowed to stand and we can already see the response. The EU is planning to use force to stop this affront to the Ideology and may actually block Twitter in Europe. Ideological champion (and suspected lizard robot) Mark Zuckerberg was even instructed to cook up an ideologically pure Twitter copy in response – but seems to have failed. We eagerly await further responses, which may range from lawfare up to more “direct” actions, and will most likely be directed at Musk personally.
As previously noted, two things must happen for the ideological goals to become reality: The right people must be promoted and the wrong people must be suppressed. This process of elevation/suppression has become the main goal of the western education system – all the way from kindergarten up to university. If we look at what the education system has been doing, this becomes extremely obvious. Here are a few examples:
- Evaluation of competence is being systematically degraded to avoid comparison between the competent and the incompetent. Exams are being discarded in favor of constant “projects” and students work in groups so the incompetent may hide. Schools avoid testing the individual directly as much as they can – and thereby comparing him to others. The competent ones must not be encouraged, and if at all possible, they themselves must not realize that they are above others.
- Universities are increasingly basing admittance on other criteria than competence, including quotas based on non-competence variables. The most insidious selection method is the “personal essay” which applicants must submit – and is sometimes even more important than grades. All applicants know that the more they signal virtue in the essay, the more likely they are to be admitted. On the basis of the essay, the universities can pick the ideologically pure – which is the only purpose of the essay requirement to begin with.
- Almost every academic subject is being turned from the objective to the subjective to assist the irrational-incompetent student. This even applies to hard subjects such as mathematics – where nowadays 2+2 doesn’t necessarily equal 4. Even intelligence is now subjective and the stupid can be as smart as the intelligent – it’s just a question of perspective, the right measuring tools, and idiotic inventions such as “emotional intelligence.”
- Almost every subject has been made easier than before to help the incompetent students and even critical fields such as medicine are now graduating people who are utterly incompetent and clueless – on a large scale. This systematic lowering of standards also has the added benefit of creating disinterest in smart and rational students. A smart student performs better and better relative to others as the subject gets harder. If the subject is easy or made uninteresting, he will sink down to mediocracy – which is a part of the purpose of lowering the standards to begin with.
- Disciplines which may be a threat to the irrationality of the Ideology have been massively subverted and corrupted. This applies to several fields, but particularly to psychology and history, which in their proper forms would be a massive threat to western ideological goals. Psychology has been twisted into an almost unrecognizable abomination, and history is mostly just lies these days.
- Fake disciplines have been invented from the ground up for the purpose of training the ideologically pure without the need for competence or intelligence or any connection to reality. These disciplines can be found in lists of “most useless university degrees” all over the internet, but that is a misunderstanding. Those degrees are not useless at all – they elevate the ideologically pure in society by awarding them university “certification.” This certification justifies giving them important positions in society.
I could go on but you get the picture. What we are looking at here is not the failure of the western education system, but a very carefully planned “pivoting” toward new objectives. The primary purpose of the education system is no longer education. The entire education system of the West has been reconfigured to carry out a “filtration” process. The purpose of this process is to identify, instruct and elevate the ideologically pure while suppressing the dangerous 1.5/8 group. The education system, particularly the universities, has largely abandoned real education and is almost solely focused on this mission. This mission is not just carried out by the education system, but by all institutions of governments and a large part of the corporate sector. A side-result of this filtration process is the degradation of all education in the West, and subsequently, degradation of its human capital in general.
Western society, in general, has abandoned rationality and replaced it with subjectivism (formally designated as “post-modernism”). The purpose of that is not just to train and advance the ideologically pure, but to use subjectivism as an oppression tool against the 1.5/8 group and the rational part of the population outside of it. The best way to suppress a rational person is to subject him to an existence of total and constant irrationality. It is essentially gaslighting on a civilizational scale, directed at the dangerous rational group.
While the dangerous rational group is being suppressed and subverted, the ideologically pure “leaders of tomorrow” are indoctrinated rather than educated, given university certifications rather than real degrees, and finally provided with an unending amount of fake and well paid jobs in both the private and public sector. This well-paid ideologically pure group then becomes the power base of the new ideological system.
The goal of this deliberate intervention into the educational system is to create what you might call a “migration pattern” in society based on (lack of) competence and ideological purity. The right people need to be put into the right positions and the right jobs, and since they are incompetent, this needs to be managed for them. After they leave school with their certifications, government and the private sector take over and actively push them upward, while pushing the dreaded 1.5/8 group away from influence and well-paid jobs.
Two developments in the West have been godsends for these efforts: the outsourcing of western manufacturing to Asia and the virtual abolition of competition in the corporate sector. This massively decreased the complexity level of the western economy and subsequently the need for the 1.5/8 group. When most companies operate services in a protected environment, there is far less need for high-level/rational people – while in a “real economy” these people simply cannot be sidelined. Also, when you can get away with operating a fake economy based on the dollar reserve status, you can also operate a fake society run by incompetents.
Let’s take a closer look at how this upward migration of the ideologically pure is managed after they receive their university certifications – and how the 1.5/8 group is systematically blocked. There are five main methods being employed – which together form a long-term takeover process of society. These methods are the following:
- Public sector filtering
- Public sector stuffing
- Job-creation by decree
- Private sector filtering
- Private sector stuffing
Public sector filtering – This describes the job selection process in the public sector. Initially the “foot-in-the-door” method is used. A few ideologically pure politicians and bureaucrats position themselves within the system and start controlling who is hired. This increases exponentially over the decades as more and more purists gain access to the levers of power. Currently the process is so overt that it is starting to become expressed in recruitment policy papers – such as the recent example of the British government excluding “white men” from becoming fighter pilots. The West has almost completely been able to exclude the 1.5/8 group from public-sector positions using this method – including its armed forces.
Public sector stuffing – As the public sector filtering process advances, the purists inside the system start creating more and more positions for their purist brethren. New departments are created, work groups and committees appear, and the public sector expands. Publicly owned companies, such utility companies, hospitals and schools are also often used as storage units for large numbers of the ideologically pure. This is extremely obvious in the West. Every unnecessary law or initiative requires more and more people – and these people are all carefully selected.
Job-creation by decree – This method is directed at the private sector, as well as the semi-public sector. Government purists start creating new laws and standards which all companies must fulfill. Those are justified on the basis of “goodness” and usually involve the environment, equality, safety and such things. This creates a large number of positions within private companies which are tailored for the ideologically pure – particularly in support functions such as human resources, compliance functions and others. This enables a “foot-in-the-door” situation in the private sector and gives the purists access to the levers of powers there – much like they already have in the public sector.
Private sector filtering – As the purists have gained access to the private sector – particularly human resources (which is the standard purist Trojan horse in private companies) – they start filtering new recruits exactly the same way the public sector does. As in the public sector, this filtering process is becoming more obvious. A significant number of companies are now specifying which groups will not be hired in their job advertisements. Since they can’t overtly say “we don’t hire smart, independent thinkers” they usually use “white men” as a proxy for that group for some reason. That group is considered to be a particular threat, although you can be sure that anyone who doesn’t follow the program will be fired, regardless of their gender or the color of their skin.
Private sector stuffing – Shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter he fired something like 80% of its employees. That 80% was the company’s private sector stuffing ratio – quite high. Companies, particularly in sectors which can influence public opinion – but not solely, are increasingly creating a large number of positions which are either totally superfluous or intended for influence operations against the public.
Those filtering and stuffing methods are the primary mechanisms that have been used for the takeover of western societies by the ideologically pure. There are other mechanisms, such as ESG, filtering by certain banks and investment funds regarding who gets financing and who doesn’t – and the uncontrolled immigration engineered by the ideologically pure which is seen by them as a continuation of the internal migration process. However, all that is beyond the scope of this article.
The ideologically pure have systematically been moved into almost all positions of power in the public sector and a large part of the private sector – and the situation in the private sector is increasingly mirroring the public sector in hiring practices and employee stuffing. The dangerous 1.5/8 group is being kept away by all means, and with great success. The power base of the Ideology is firmly in place.
This job migration program hasn’t been cheap. Millions of unnecessary jobs cost money and it is clear that a significant part of western public debt can be attributed to this program, a fact which doesn’t seem to have been noticed by many people.
The consequences
The main thing to understand is that western societies and economies have been put on an ideological footing. Productivity, competitiveness, technology and science are simply not priorities anymore in the West. Explaining the consequences of this process for the West would take many articles, or a book of several hundred pages. Still, let’s mention a few examples.
The inverse competence crisis – The goal of this entire project has been to place the ideologically pure in all positions of power at all levels of society. These positions are, in a normal and competitive society, occupied by the highly competent 1.5/8 group. The process has now reached near-completion with most positions of power occupied by the ideologically pure. Some of those people have high IQs but they are neither objective nor independent thinkers. The Ideology they must subscribe to is simply incompatible with those qualities. This has some serious consequences.
Remember that positions of power and influence are more likely to demand general competence than other positions (as opposed to specific competence). The greater the power, the more the position demands general competence. The people in these positions now are selected by ideological fervor and reliability – so the higher you go, the more ideologically enthusiastic the people who hold them. This means that the least objective and independent thinking people hold the positions which require the greatest objectivity and independent thinking. Therefore, in the West incompetence becomes greater and more common the higher you go. As someone said – “a general is an incompetent colonel.” This can be seen absolutely everywhere except in some holdout private companies. Those exceptions are of course being addressed as we speak.
The second problem is that many of the irrational/subjective people holding all the power have reasonably high IQs. That may seem to be a positive thing but it has a major disadvantage. Moderate to high IQ irrational/subjective people are the easiest to brainwash of all people. The reasons for that are complicated and need to be addressed in another article – but what this means is that the top tier in the West is not only the most incompetent it can possibly be in comparison to what their jobs require – but are also the most malleable and delusional.
The cost and debt crisis – The migration of the ideologically pure into the ideological power base and positions of influence has created millions of jobs in western societies which create no value. These jobs are much more numerous and more widespread than most people realize, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something like 20%-30% of the entire labor force of the West could be fired without any adverse effect. In fact, the effect would be positive, especially if those people could be made to work the (mostly menial) real-economy jobs they are suitable for.
Deindustrialization has been blamed for the extreme debt levels and tax burdens of the West. That is, as far as it goes, true – but maintaining this giant group of incompetents in their fake jobs is also placing an extreme burden on the West. Western societies are now completely unsustainable and cannot be run without constant debt increase.
The competition crisis – This crisis can be explained by the following example: Let’s say there are three companies with combined 100% market share in some sector. There is no real competition between them and everybody can just relax because the customers can’t go anywhere else. These companies can get away with absolute incompetence on most levels, including in management. They don’t need to think about efficiency, safety, productivity or costs, except on their websites and in annual reports. However, if a competitor with competent employees manages to infiltrate the sector, those three companies will hit a wall. There will be an enormous crisis and one or more of them will most likely go under.
This is exactly the situation in the western economies now. Monopoly and oligopoly is the rule and the main objective of most large western companies is to prevent anyone from infiltrating their sector – usually by bribing regulators or by buying the competition. This is a necessity because a huge number of western companies are now run by incompetent management and staffed by incompetent people, particularly in support and management functions. The immortal words of the nameless Boeing employee about the 737 MAX apply to most large western companies; “this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Western companies are no longer competitive. They cannot compete with Chinese companies now and soon they won’t be able to compete with companies in general outside the West. They simply can’t function except inside an economic safe-space. In fact, the situation is such that the Chinese already do the real work for many of them and reshoring the work is problematic because of (surprise!) the human capital degradation in the West caused by the repurposing of its education system.
This also applies to western societies as a whole. The entire leadership and diplomatic classes of the West are no longer competitive against the rest of the world for exactly these reasons. They are being outmaneuvered by the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, and everybody else at every turn. Even African leaders are now more competent than western leaders. They have consistently made decisions that are better for their people than leaders in the West – for the last few years anyway.
The complexity crisis – Earlier in this article I stated that the 1.5/8 group is extremely valuable for modern societies and without it complicated modern societies cannot be managed. In the West this group has been successfully sidelined to a great degree and a good part of it doesn’t even bother with university education anymore. The situation, however, is even worse than that. The reconfiguration of the education system and the break between competence and reward in the job market has fundamentally changed the decision making process behind the selection of university education. Why study engineering (which is hard) when you can get an even better paying job with a degree in psychology (which is easy nowadays)? The reconfiguration of the western education system has changed the reward structure, encouraging young people to pursue easy and useless education – simply because the “system” will provide them with jobs.
This has already caused a major crisis in western societies, particularly in the US. The “maintenance” of complex aspects of US society needs a large group of engineers and people with related education. This maintenance is faltering now, and significantly relies on foreign engineers educated in US universities. You see, why would Americans study engineering in a system which doesn’t reward it? If China and India could somehow recall their engineers and others with hard education from the US, the US system could probably not be maintained, let alone advanced. This will get progressively worse and we will soon reach a point where complex systems which underpin society cannot be kept running. That will require some kind of “reset” to a less complex society, with less prosperity of course.
There are far more crises than those four, but I wouldn’t want to sound like a doomsayer by listing more.
So, what about Russia? Firstly, there are clear signs that the Russians have figured out what is happening in the West and are learning from it. Recently they left the “Bologna process” which is a European education standardization system. The Bologna system has the express purpose of diluting education in member states, implementing certifications rather than real degrees, and filling European societies with badly educated and generally incompetent “experts” who follow the consensus, no matter what. The Russians saw this system as a threat to their country, which it is, and have, at least partly, reverted to the older and more hardcore Soviet system.
Secondly, the Russians seem to be carrying out purges of the incompetent and corrupt within state structures, including the military. Meritocracy seems to be on the agenda, a radical concept these days. The Russians most likely see these efforts as critical to the continuation of their state and nation – and they would be right.
The situation in China is much the same and there are indications that the rest of the non-western world is catching on. Remember that one of the results of the recent Russia-Africa summit was a Russian-organized education effort in Africa. I doubt that women’s studies will be a part of that curriculum.
The current clash between the West and Russia – and increasingly between the West and the rest of the world – is becoming a clash between the incompetent and irrational and the competent and rational. The result is obvious – but what happens when an irrational person who is backed into a corner has access to nuclear weapons? That’s anybody’s guess.
By putting its societies on an ideological footing the western elite has backed itself into a corner. They can’t compete; they can’t develop their economies or societies; and they can’t go back. Fixing the problems of the West will require an economic revival, where a real economy will replace the current fake financialized service economy. This cannot be done without putting the hated 1.5/8 group into positions of power. Therefore, it will not be done as long as the current western ruling class is in power. Western societies will not survive an economic revival in their current ideological configuration. Conflict is therefore the only remaining option for the ruling class to hang on to power.
Russian energy revenues higher than last year – Handelsblatt
RT | August 11, 2023
Russia saw revenues from energy exports surge last month despite Western sanctions that include embargos and price caps on the country’s oil, German news outlet Handelsblatt reported on Thursday.
According to the publication, Moscow’s revenues from oil and gas sales grew 5.3% year-on-year in July and amounted to $8.66 billion. Profits were said to be the largest in gas exports, while those from crude sales rose by 2.6%. The outlet noted it was the first time this year that Russia had increased state revenues from energy exports in comparison with 2022.
Russia is earning more from energy exports and “thus is in a better position than a few months ago,” Giovanni Staunovo, a commodity analyst at Swiss bank UBS, told the news outlet. He claimed that as a result, many have started to doubt the effectiveness of sanctions on Russia.
Robin Brooks from the Institute of International Finance (IIF) noted that sanctions “can be very effective when used against countries with current account deficits,” which depend on loans from foreign investors on the global capital market to finance imports. He noted, however, that Russia is not among that group and argued that the restrictions imposed on it are becoming increasingly ineffective.
An EU embargo on seaborne exports of Russian crude was introduced last year along with G7 price caps on oil and petroleum products originating from Russia, in response to Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine. The measures were presented as an effort to deprive Moscow of funds to finance its military effort.
While the restrictions have barred Russia from accessing its traditional Western markets, they have triggered a large-scale reshuffle in global oil supply, with Moscow successfully redirecting exports to Asia. According to the latest OPEC calculations, Russia has been the largest exporter of oil to India for the past year, accounting for 45% of India’s crude purchases in June. It has also been China’s top supplier since January.
The Polish President Said Kiev Isn’t Doing The West Any Favors & Its Counteroffensive Failed
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | AUGUST 11, 2023
Two of Kiev’s top propaganda narratives nowadays are that it’s selflessly sacrificing itself for the sake of the West by fighting Russia instead of surrendering and that its ongoing counteroffensive is succeeding in pushing that country’s forces out of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. The first largely remains above official criticism or skepticism since those who dare to doubt it risk being “canceled”, but the second has suddenly begun to be debunked by the Mainstream Media as proven by the following articles:
* NBC News: “Is Ukraine’s counteroffensive failing? Kyiv and its supporters worry about losing control of the narrative”
* CNN: “Why a stalled Ukrainian offensive could represent a huge political problem for Zelensky in the US”
* The Hill: “Alarm grows as Ukraine’s counteroffensive falters”
* Washington Post: “Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine”
In the face of this rapidly shifting narrative that threatens to topple one of the pillars of Kiev’s Western-directed propaganda, Zelensky’s senior advisor Mikhail Podolyak lashed out at critics in a tweet thread here where he demanded that they “be patient and closely monitor” his side’s progress. Polish President Andrzej Duda has been doing precisely that since the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine began, however, and he’s concluded that Kiev isn’t doing the West any favors and its counteroffensive failed.
He dropped both bombshells, the first of which debunked the claim that Kiev is selflessly sacrificing itself for the sake of the West and which hitherto hadn’t ever been officially challenged by any Western leader before, in an interview with the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen from 1 August that was published nine days later. The relevant excerpts will be republished below for the reader’s convenience before analyzing them in the context of this conflict and evolving Polish-Ukrainian ties in particular:
“Q: At the NATO summit when President [Volodymyr] Zelensky criticized the [leaders’ joint statement about Ukraine’s prospective membership], there was criticism of him that he was ungrateful for all the help [given to] Ukraine. That suggests that our help to Ukraine is charity. Is our help to Ukraine charity, or is Ukraine really doing us a favor by giving its children, its lives to defend us against the Russian threat?
A: I would say it this way: I don’t see it in these categories — neither that we are doing an act of charity for Ukraine, nor that Ukraine is doing charity for us… We are sending them arms. Why? Because we want to support them in defending their own territory. … We Poles have many reasons to supply Ukrainians with weapons. … But the whole democratic world also knows that any aggressor who violates the borders of a democratic state in the 21st century in Europe must be stopped.”
…
Q: Could Poland fight a combined arms operation without long-range weapons and without air power? Because that’s what we’re forcing the Ukrainians to do today. What does Ukraine need that it’s not getting today?
A: Ukraine has been supplied with long-range artillery, and it is being supplied with long-range artillery to this day. … One could go as far as to say that Ukraine now has much more modern military capabilities than Russia.
The question is: Does Ukraine have enough weapons to change the balance of the war and get the upper hand? And the answer is probably no. They probably do not have enough weapons. And we know this by the fact that they’re not currently able to carry out a very decisive counteroffensive against the Russian military. To make a long story short, they need more assistance.”
…
Casual observers might be shocked by the Polish leader’s candidness, while Kiev’s supporters might accuse him of “betraying” their regime after becoming the first Western leader to debunk its top two lies nowadays, but his words weren’t unprovoked nor said in a vacuum. The background is that political ties between these wartime allies have tremendously worsened since late July as was documented in the following analyses:
* “Poland & Ukraine Are Arguing Over Grain Once Again”
* “Ukraine’s Ungratefulness Is Finally Starting To Perturb Poland”
* “Kiev’s Prediction Of Post-Conflict Competition With Poland Bodes Ill For Bilateral Ties”
In brief, each side finally began prioritizing their national interests, which resulted in public tensions due to the absence of any pressure valve for dealing with sensitive disagreements such as those over agricultural cooperation and historical memory. Moreover, each side has self-interested political reasons in escalating rhetoric against the other: Ukraine wants to distract from its failing counteroffensive while the ruling Polish party wants to rally its nationalist base ahead of mid-October’s elections.
It was against this backdrop that Duda did the previously unthinkable by telling one of the US’ most influential Mainstream Media outlets that Kiev isn’t doing the West any favors by fighting Russia and that its counteroffensive failed. Granted, he conveyed these two points in a “polite” way that signaled his continued support for NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine, but it’s still an unforgivable offense from that regime’s perspective.
NBC News warned earlier this month that Kiev and its supporters are worried about losing control of the narrative, which has now come to pass after what Duda just said. He and his country are much more popular and less polarizing among average Westerners than Zelensky and Ukraine, plus nobody doubts their anti-Russian credentials due to widespread awareness of Poland’s difficult history with that country. These observations mean that his words will likely have an outsized impact on reshaping the narrative.
As for the future of Polish-Ukrainian relations, it’s looking dimmer by the day due to their spiraling disputes becoming self-sustaining at this stage. That’s not to suggest that Warsaw will cut Kiev off from arms and other forms of support, but just that the trust which used to characterize their relations since February was finally exposed as illusory. This could complicate their reported plans to form a joint military unit and could lead to Poland acting unilaterally in Western Ukraine in the worst-case scenario.
Ukraine “cannot decide its destiny” because it depends on US political climate
By Ahmed Adel | August 11, 2023
The Ukrainian Army’s high dependence on Western military support to continue its fight against Russian troops has placed Kiev in a position where it cannot decide its path for itself, said an analyst on CNN. The outlet also indicated that after more than 17 months of active combat, the Ukrainian conflict had entered a decisive stage since Kiev now depends on the decisions taken in Washington more than ever, which will be worrying for Ukraine since there is every chance that the next US president ends up being a Republican.
The current situation in Eastern Europe will depend on “outside factors,” such as “shifting political forces in the US, Moscow and European capitals,” Stephen Collinson points out in his analysis on CNN. “One of Ukraine’s greatest tragedies as it pursues a critical offensive that has, so far, failed to meet its own and Western expectations is that it cannot, by itself, decide its destiny.”
According to him, the results of the Ukrainian counteroffensive — which began in June and has shown no progress — “would have particular ramifications in the United States since it could heighten questions over US support for the war that will be pushed into an acrimonious election year.”
In fact, former Republican lawmaker Adam Kinzinger recently acknowledged widespread pessimism within his party about the billions of dollars delivered to Kiev since February 2022.
The CNN analyst also pointed out that the Americans are preparing for a possible election contest between President Joe Biden —a Democrat and radical supporter of Kiev — and former president Donald Trump, a supposed NATO sceptic who has promised to end tensions between Russia and Ukraine in just one day.
Collinson believes that even if Trump does not win the presidential nomination, it is not certain that voters will support Biden because there is increasing disbelief about the growing involvement of Washington in the conflict. In his text, Collinson recalls recently published information on CNN that US officials are receiving adverse reports about the scant progress of Ukrainian troops against Russian forces.
“Ukraine’s struggles – and heavy combat losses – stem in part from entrenched, layered defensive positions, trenches and minefields that Russia had months to construct and the battlefield reality that an attacking force needs a numerical advantage over well dug-in troops,” wrote the expert.
For Collinson, the conflict could end after the US fully enters the electoral process to define a new president.
“There is so far no clear path even to a ceasefire,” he observed. “Ultimately, the capacity of both Russia and Ukraine to sustain heavy battlefield losses will be critical in deciding the point at which either side might be open to a settlement – when the cost of continuing to fight might be outweighed by the rewards of ending it.”
According to the journalist, the stagnation of the conflict could gain more weight in the political debate within the US.
“While foreign policy is rarely a deciding factor in presidential elections and the war in Ukraine is not a dominant issue in the GOP primary, some party supporters in early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire do raise it and question US generosity after months of high inflation, which, even if it’s cooling, has contributed to persistently dour views of the American economy,” said the expert.
“So when US voters decide their own futures in November 2024, there’s a good chance they will be playing a large role in sealing Ukraine’s fate as well,” Collinson concluded.
The possibility that the Democratic Party could be back out of power next year is hurrying Biden to maximise his opportunities to funnel US taxpayer money into the financial blackhole that Ukraine has become. Biden’s endless attempts to seek the US Congress’ approval to transfer billions of dollars in additional support to Ukraine in a bid to prolong the war against Russia is a demonstration of this, especially when considering that Washington has already transferred to Ukraine at least $76.8 billion in assistance since February 2022.
According to an older estimate by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Ukraine, by May 2023, had received more than $100 billion in humanitarian aid and military support from more than 40 countries. Of that amount, Washington has contributed around $51 billion dollars, more than half, in military, security, financial and humanitarian assistance.
At the end of July, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Kiev does not have sufficient resources. However, the US, NATO members, and other institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, delivered all the money to Ukraine. Rather, if Zelensky is struggling now, he will have an even bigger problem in the coming months because the money from the West will dry up as the level of support cannot be maintained, especially in the context of the failed counter-offensive.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Preprint Servers Censored Research That Contradicted Government’s COVID Narrative
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 9, 2023
Preprint servers are being used to censor scholarly papers critical of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and policy errors made by the Biden administration, according to Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH.
Prasad, hematologist-oncologist, professor and director of a medical policy lab at the University of California San Francisco said his lab has submitted hundreds of papers to preprint servers — but only those that deviate from the official COVID-19 narrative have been rejected.
The basis for rejecting those papers is inconsistent with standards applied for other topics or with the fundamental rules of the servers, Prasad explained in a recent Substack post and YouTube video on the topic.
“All [rejected papers] are consistent with scientific practices and norms, and similar papers not critical of the CDC or Biden administration have been accepted,” Prasad wrote.
“If only papers that praise the CDC are acceptable by preprint servers,” he added, “then the role of science as a check and balance on incorrect policy is subverted.”
Preprint servers were established to address inefficiencies in academic publishing. The peer-review process typically takes months or more, delaying the real-time sharing of scientific findings with the public.
Also, many journals are proprietary and can only be accessed through expensive personal or institutional subscriptions.
Preprint servers offer a location for scientific reports and papers to be available to the public while the paper goes through peer review — making scientific findings available immediately and for free and opening them up to broader public debate.
There is no peer-review process for preprints, although there is a vetting process.
Prasad said preprint servers are supposed to be neutral and supposed to post all research conducted with a clearly explained and reproducible methodology. The goal, Prasad said, is to be inclusive and make scientific debate possible.
But instead, Prasad said, several of the preprint servers have become “gatekeepers” for what science gets published.
“When the people who work there are rabid, politicized and biased,” he said, “I think that’s a problem.”
‘The preprint servers are really a disgrace’
To test the bias of preprint servers, Prasad’s lab did a comprehensive analysis of its own preprints. Lab staff analyzed outcomes for all preprints they submitted to SSRN, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”) and Zenodo servers — which he noted is a “reproducible systematic methodology.”
They found “a startling pattern of censorship and inconsistent standards from preprint servers. Preprint servers appear to be playing politics,” Prasad wrote.
Specifically, MedRxiv and SSRN have declined to post articles critical of the CDC, mask and vaccine mandates and the Biden administration’s healthcare policies.
“Preprint servers are not supposed to be journals — they are not supposed to reject articles merely because the people running them disagree with the arguments within.”
But the analysis suggests they are doing just that. Even the preprint of Prasad’s analysis was rejected by both medRxiv and SSRN.
“They don’t want to post a preprint that makes their own preprint server look bad,” he said, adding, “That’s pathetic. You have to post it because it’s factually true.”
Examples of censored articles demonstrate the bias behind the servers’ decisions.
One paper re-analyzed a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found cloth masks reduced the rates of COVID-19 transmission in some Massachusetts schools.
Prasad’s lab found that by simply lengthening the timeframe of the data analyzed in the observational analysis, the paper’s conclusion was invalidated. The data showed instead that masks did not slow the spread.
The servers didn’t post their paper, he said, citing “the need to be cautious about posting medical content.”
Prasad said the article was censored, “because it calls into question something that, frankly speaking, is pretty stupid, which is masking children with cloth masks — a stupid intervention derived by someone who cannot read randomized controlled trials and then pushed with the full force of the federal government — with no credible evidence and no randomized data.”
The servers censored Prasad’s lab’s comprehensive analysis of preprint bias using the same justification — “the need to be cautious about medical content.”
He said, “No one could possibly believe that this paper would require the need to be cautious — it merely documents your [preprint server’s] prior screw-ups.”
Another censored preprint reported on the lab’s systematic review and meta-analysis of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination in 5 to 11-year-olds. The paper critiqued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the drug for that age group.
The SSRN also removed that preprint citing, again, “the need to be cautious about medical content.”
SSRN used the same “boilerplate language” to remove the lab’s review of methodologies and conclusions in Cochrane reports. Those findings supported the controversial conclusion of the Cochrane review that community masking had no impact on slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Another article, rejected by medRxiv, which documented statistical and numerical errors made by the CDC during the pandemic, was already accepted by a journal and is one of the 10 most downloaded articles of all time on SSRN.
“Here’s the point,” Prasad said, “You don’t have to agree with me, but this preprint server is not even letting the audience of scientists decide. Who gave them this authority? They don’t get to peer review the article. That’s not their purview.”
Overall the team found that 38% of their submissions to preprint servers were rejected or removed. Yet, these rejected articles eventually were published and extensively downloaded.
“The median number of downloads for a rejected/removed article that was later accepted by a different server was 4,142 vs. 300 for articles submitted and accepted without rejection or removal,” he said.
Their analysis found that overall, Zenodo does not censor articles, but SSRN and medRxiv do.
So, he said, these organizations, established to make science transparent and uncensored have become gatekeepers “for their friends, for the views that they like.”
He also said their policies were inconsistent, with no clear scientific principles guiding rejection.
“They’re rejecting 38[%] of our articles because these are critical of establishment COVID-19 policies,” he said, adding:
“The COVID-19 pandemic is in fact a great example of … how people in power suppress minority views even when those views are meritorious — like toddlers shouldn’t mask, school should be open, you don’t need to mandate boosters, you shouldn’t mandate boosters for young men, nobody who had COVID should have to get the vaccine — those are sensible medical policies that are correct.
“History will vindicate them. They were all censored at one time or the other… The preprint servers are really a disgrace.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
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On The Transgender Agenda
Lies are Unbekoming | May 12, 2016
I’ve been following Jennifer Bilek’s reporting on the Transgender Agenda for the last year.
In my opinion, she is doing the best investigative journalism, in the world, on the top-down nature of this society deforming “input” and “normalization”.
What we don’t understand is the scale of money behind this push, and the individuals controlling this weaponized capital. These are questions that go to the heart of Jennifer’s work. … continue
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- Starmer Will Sack Shadow Ministers Who Vote For Gaza Ceasefire
- AI Tool Can Predict Heart Attacks Years In Advance
- Nepal Bans TikTok To Preserve Social Harmony
- Bloke Appointed Boss Of Womb Health Charity
- WHO – “Gaza’s Biggest Hospital Becoming A Cemetery”
- No Tricks Zone
- Using Nets On The Seafloor To Retrieve Seafood ‘Roughly The Same As Running 100 Coal-Fired Plants’
- New Paper: Global Warming Leading To HIMALAYAN COOLING, Preventing Glacial Melt!
- DNA Evidence Reveals Domestic Cats, Dogs, African Wildcats, Frogs Lived In The Arctic 9000 Years Ago
- -80°C: Antarctic Vostok Station Records “Extreme Winter Cold”…Not Even Winter Yet!
- The German E-Vehicle Nightmare, 2024 Q1 Sales Plummet 14%… “Graveyard” For Unsold Cars
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
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