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Variants and scariants – the Covid joke is on us

By Roger Watson | TCW Defending Freedom | September 9, 2023

Far from bringing down the final curtain, it seems that the Covid comedy show is going to run and run.

First up (as they say), there is the seemingly unending stream of Covid variants. It is almost as if someone is making them up. In the middle of August, I wrote in these pages about Eris, but now others have emerged such as BA.2.86 which may evade the Covid vaccines (code for ‘we need more vaccines’) and Pirola. While we are exhorted to ‘be worried’, if you dig deep into the details it transpires that there is little to worry about.

After all, we have been here before. We were warned about BA.4 and BA.5 (‘variants of concern’) late in 2021 but, probably much to the surprise of the doom-mongers, humanity has survived. Who can forget Omicron which even those who discovered it described as nothing to worry about? But we were urged to worry about it nevertheless. Even more baffling is that some people who did not fall for the Covid vaccine propaganda are still with us. Quelle surprise!

Next on the bill is animal-to-human transmission. There has long been speculation that Covid may spread from humans to animals, so they could become a reservoir for the virus which could then spread back to humans. Early in 2020 the British government issued mundane advice (e.g. ‘wash your hands’) for people with animals and provided a list of the creatures to which it was considered Covid-19 may spread. The list was extensive and may as well have proclaimed ‘the animal kingdom’ as a potential reservoir for the virus. Though little advice related to specific animals, the government saw fit to include a specific section: ‘If you own a ferret’. Sadly, it did not contain the advice ‘don’t put it down your trousers’; a comedy opportunity missed, in my view.

There remains concern that humans are spreading Covid to deer. We first read about this early in the pandemic but, unless we are concerned about the welfare of deer, which surely have better things to worry about than Covid, it is unclear why we should be concerned now. It is suspected (not confirmed) that three humans have contracted Covid from deer in the United States from a population of around 334,233,000 where 120 people are killed annually in road accidents involving deer. The animal crackers continue with the risk of zoo employees contracting Covid from lions. It may just be me, but if I was working with lions, catching a dose of Covid would be way down my list of concerns.

Long Covid is an old favourite on the comedy circuit, and by special request, it is here tonight courtesy of our sponsors Medscape. Concern is now turning to long Covid in children, and we are told: ‘Long Covid most often strikes seniors and adults, but children are also affected, even though they get less attention, new research shows.’ It was only a matter of time, and the irony is lost on the authors that children were given undue attention by the vaccine obsessed during the ‘pandemic’ given that they were at such low risk from Covid. Some children are suffering from extreme debilitation but the possibility of this resulting from vaccine injury is not even contemplated.

In another Medscape article the ‘mystery’ of long Covid is explored. A single case is presented of someone disabled with post-viral symptoms. His symptoms are not in doubt, but the cause seems to be unknown, yet Medscape is convinced this is long Covid. After all, it must be as the list of symptoms associated with long Covid, having been whittled down to a mere seven, now seems to have expanded again to 37, which does not exactly narrow down to a precise diagnosis.

In breaking news, again in that redoubtable organ Medscape, ‘some people with long Covid tested negative for Covid-19’. Intellectual gymnastics from various sources are drawn on to explain this phenomenon. Primarily it is attributed to not diagnosing the original Covid infection properly (code for ‘we need more Covid testing’). It never seems to enter the heads of these Covid boffins that long Covid either does not exist or is something else altogether. We already know that half of people reporting long Covid symptoms also reported that they had never had Covid and that some long Covid symptoms in women bear a remarkable resemblance to early onset menopause. Nevertheless, it is clear that someone has an interest, presumably financial, in perpetuating the long Covid narrative which, if they succeed, may well prove to be as lucrative as the HIV/AIDS narrative which is still giving good returns forty years on.

However, the team at TCW are at pains to let you know that there is no cause for alarm, be it scariant variants, transmission from rampaging lions or the dreadful prospect of long Covid (everyone has at least one symptom after all). We are here to spread a message of hope and that comes with the information that our caring and sharing government are going to prepare new vaccines against the new variants and bring forward the autumn vaccine programme. What’s more, some of you lucky people who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines will continue to produce harmless spike proteins . . . for ever. So, you see, there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

DID NO ONE BOTHER TO LOOK UP THIS WORD?!

Truthstream Media | September 4, 2023

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Whatever Happened to Informed Consent?

By Stella Paul | American Thinker | September 7, 2023

Here’s what never happened in the hospital during COVID: a doctor sat down next to a patient and said, “You have a choice. We can give you Remdesivir, which killed 53 percent of the patients in an Ebola trial. It was so bad the trial had to be shut down. And you’ll notice here in Remdesivir’s fact sheet, it says, ‘Not a lot of people have used Remdesivir. Serious and unexpected side effects may happen.’ Or we can give you ivermectin, a safe and effective drug that’s been successfully used for decades, and send you home. Which do you prefer?”

The reason that conversation never happened is that it would have cost the hospital too much money. If the hospital gave you ivermectin and sent you home, the federal government paid the hospital $3,200. If the hospital gave you Remdesivir, the federal government paid the entire hospital bill, plus a 20 percent bonus. So the hospital executives’ choice was to receive $3,200 or $500,000, which was the average hospital bill. No contest. Patients were going to get Remdesivir — whether they wanted it or not.

Informed consent died a grotesque death in the hospitals during COVID, and we need an autopsy. There was no information, and there was no consent, and without them, patients are reduced to helpless victims, exploited for corrupt financial gain and immoral experiments.

Informed consent has been enshrined in numerous judicial rulings as the foundation of ethical medical practice and seared into the public’s conscience from the Nuremberg trials. Seven Nazi doctors were hanged in Germany by an American military tribunal for “murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.” Yet murders, tortures, and other atrocities are exactly what was committed by medical staff in the hospitals against thousands of Americans during COVID.

Take, for example, Ray Lamar, who arrived in the emergency room with a message written with a black sharpie pen on his arm: “NO VENT NOREMDESIVIR.” On his other arm, he wrote the same message and added his wife’s name and phone number. Yet the doctors gave him Remdesivir anyway, without ever informing him. His widow Patti told me she constantly wonders what she could have done to save him.

Christine Johnson told the doctors that she discussed all her medications with her daughter, who is a nurse, and she concluded that she didn’t want Remdesivir. It didn’t matter. Christine was given Remdesivir while she was sleeping, and now her daughter Michelle doesn’t have her mother.

Rebecca Stevens was an avid reader of Epoch Times, where she learned about Remdesivir’s dangers. She declined Remdesivir on five separate occasions, as her hospital records confirm. But the medical staff didn’t care what Rebecca wanted. She was given Remdesivir without her knowledge, and now Rebecca’s five grandsons are bereft.

I asked Michael Hamilton how it’s possible to give Remdesivir to patients without them knowing. Hamilton is a lawyer for several families who are suing California hospitals for the murder of their loved ones, and he’s heard thousands of victims’ stories. “They would lie right to your face,” he said. “You’d tell the nurse that you didn’t want Remdesivir and she’d say, ‘Fine. But you’re a bit dehydrated, so let’s get some fluids in you.’ And she’d hook up the IV, but it wasn’t fluids. It was Remdesivir.”

Hamilton told me that another favored tactic was to knock out patients with sedatives like morphine and fentanyl. While they lay there in a stupor, they were injected with Remdesivir.

If secret injections of Remdesivir weren’t enough to kill you, the hospitals had more torture lined up. After all, the federal government paid hospitals a big bonus to ventilate patients — so patients were going to get ventilated, whether they wanted to or not. A lot of patients turned down being vented, because the whole process is a nightmare. You’re painfully intubated, rendered unable to talk; your lungs start shredding, and you may acquire bacterial pneumonia, which the hospital will refuse to treat.

But “no” is not an acceptable answer when the hospital has money at stake. The medical staff’s preferred method for gaining “consent” was relentless bullying, screaming, coercion, and threats until the patient finally caved. Patti Lamar, Ray’s widow, told me that when she refused to let them ventilate her husband, the doctors screamed at her over and over, “You’re killing him! You’re killing him! You’re killing him!” When she couldn’t take it anymore, she reluctantly gave in. Ray died shortly thereafter, and Patti lives with the trauma of that moment.

Michael Hamilton told me the fate of his friend who was a nurse, hospitalized in the place where she had worked for 26 years. When she refused ventilation, the doctor shrieked, “You’re refusing medical advice! Now your insurance company won’t pay your hospital bill when you die! Do you want to bankrupt your family? Do you? Do you?” The nurse panicked, and to protect her family, she “consented.” Two days later, she died.

“This was a very common technique,” Hamilton said. “I’ve heard it hundreds of times. You tell the patient that unless they do what the doctor says, they’ll bankrupt their family because insurance won’t pay the hospital bills. Nobody wants to do that to their family.” Does this sound like informed consent to you? It sounds more like medical battery to me.

The entire hospital environment was a hellscape of abuse in which informed consent wasn’t even a distant memory. Hamilton told me that patients were routinely denied all access to food and water, stupefied with 50 medications that included drugs contraindicated for each other, tortured with oxygen machines set at such high levels that they couldn’t breathe, and zip-tied to the bed till their wrists bled and their hands turned black. His stories align with 1,000 collected testimonies of the COVID-19 Human Betrayal Memory Project, which documents the victims’ fates.

The ultimate denial of informed consent was the hospitals’ refusal to allow the patients to leave. “Patients lost all rights when they went in the hospital,” Senator Ron Johnson told Patty Myers in her documentary, Making A Killing. “They became prisoners.” A cottage industry of hospital rescues cropped up, as desperate family members hired lawyers to try to spring their loved ones out of hospital “care.” Ralph Lorigo, a lawyer in Buffalo, told me that in every case when he succeeded in getting a patient’s case before a judge and the judge ruled in the family’s favor, the patient went home and survived. In all cases where the judge refused to hear the case or ruled against the family, the patient died.

Every American is a sovereign individual with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not a sack of meat to be treated as a profit opportunity. Informed consent must be revived from the grave if Americans are to have a fighting chance against powerful financial interests allied against them.

Stella Paul is the pen name of a writer in New York who has covered medical issues for over a decade. In 2021, she lost her husband in a locked down nursing home in New York City where he had been brutally isolated for almost a year. He died one week after getting the vaccine. Stella is focused on exposing the Hospital Death Protocol to honor her husband’s memory and to support thousands of bereaved families.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Vaccination Makes Long-COVID Syndrome Worse and Last Longer

Lancet Paper Inadvertently Discloses Data on Vaccination Worsening Long-COVID Symptomatology

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH |  Courageous Discourse  | September 9, 2023

I have seen patients in my practice become progressively more ill with fatigue, weakness, hair loss, headaches, effort intolerance, sleep disturbance and in some cases cardiac and neurological symptoms with progressive mRNA injections every six months. Meanwhile the Biden Administration US HHS National Action Plan on Long COVID-19 has been running a billion dollar research plan with no consideration that the vaccine could be the cause of symptoms. The medical literature is loaded with papers on long-COVID ignoring the fact the same patient groups have all been taking COVID-19 vaccines. In essence, there is a global coverup of vaccine injury syndromes as “long-COVID.”

Mateu et al studied 548 individuals, 341 with long-COVID, followed for a median of 23 months (IQR 16.5–23.5). With continued vaccination, only 26 subjects (7.6%) recovered from long-COVID during follow-up; almost all of them (n = 24) belonged to the less symptomatic cluster and importantly the syndrome finally lessened when they dropped vaccination. The authors fail to include vaccination in their multivariate models, thereby missing this effect in the patient population. However, they inadvertently show the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on persistent long-COVID in a figure shown in the Lancet manuscript.

No wonder people are sick with long-COVID! The vaccines install long-lasting genetic code for the Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein which deposits in tissues and organs and directly causes cardiovascular, neurological, thrombotic, and immunologic disease which is being blamed on “long-COVID.” Thus an important part of treatment for long-COVID is to stop ill-advised every six-month mass vaccination.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

Lourdes Mateu, Cristian Tebe, Cora Loste, José Ramón Santos, Gemma Lladós, Cristina López, Sergio España-Cueto, Ruth Toledo, Marta Font, Anna Chamorro, Francisco Muñoz-López, Maria Nevot, Nuria Vallejo, Albert Teis, Jordi Puig, Carmina R. Fumaz, José A. Muñoz-Moreno, Anna Prats, Carla Estany-Quera, Roser Coll-Fernández, Cristina Herrero, Patricia Casares, Ana Garcia, Bonaventura Clotet, Roger Paredes, Marta Massanella, Determinants of the onset and prognosis of the post-COVID-19 condition: a 2-year prospective observational cohort study, The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, 2023, 100724, ISSN 2666-7762, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2023.100724. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666776223001436)

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

Approaching 35,000 Incremental Homicides and Traffic Fatalities in 2020-2022 Compared to 2018-19 Baseline Average

BY STEVE SAILER • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 9, 2023

A friend asked how many incremental deaths have there been due to the Floyd Effect? 3,000?

Nah, it’s more like 36,000 according to a simplistic methodology that takes CDC death counts for homicides and motor vehicle accidents for the years 2020-2022 and compares them them to how many there would have been if the average of 2018-19 had been maintained for the first three years of the 2020s. I come up with 2020 to 2022 having seen 36,042 additional Deaths of Exuberance (killings and car crashes) than if the death toll had stayed at the same annual rate as in 2018-2019.

That’s a pretty big number.

These 36,000 incremental deaths are divided pretty equally into extra homicides and extra traffic fatalities. And they are are about equally split into incremental black deaths and incremental all other deaths.

The Floyd Effect
Homicide Deaths
Year Period Total Black White Hispanic Asian
2018 Pre 18,830 9,469 5,460 3,045 263
2019 Pre 19,141 9,951 5,176 3,122 292
2020 Post 24,576 13,493 6,143 3,920 289
2021 Post 26,031 14,313 6,215 4,453 313
2022 Post 24,830 13,225 5,975 4,480 310
Total 2018-19 37,971 19,420 10,636 6,167 555
Total 2020-22 75,437 41,031 18,333 12,853 912
Avg 2018-19 18,986 9,710 5,318 3,084 278
Avg 2020-22 25,146 13,677 6,111 4,284 304
Incr in Avg Deaths / Year 6,160 3,967 793 1,201 27
% Incr in Avg 32% 41% 15% 39% 10%
Incremental Deaths 2020-22 vs. 2018-19 Avg 18,481 11,901 2,379 3,603 80
Share of Incremental 64% 13% 19% 0%

Motor Vehicle Accident Deaths

Year Period Total Black White Hispanic Asian
2018 Pre 39,404 6,140 25,095 6,123 837
2019 Pre 39,107 6,196 24,770 6,165 824
2020 Post 42,339 7,882 25,402 7,059 790
2021 Post 46,980 8,583 27,805 8,143 932
2022 Post 46,009 7,815 27,234 8,422 979
Total 2018-19 78,511 12,336 49,865 12,288 1,661
Total 2020-22 135,328 24,280 80,441 23,624 2,701
Avg 2018-19 39,256 6,168 24,933 6,144 831
Avg 2020-22 45,109 8,093 26,814 7,875 900
Incr in Avg Deaths / Year 5,854 1,925 1,881 1,731 70
% Incr in Avg 15% 31% 8% 28% 8%
Incremental Deaths 2020-22 vs. 2018-19 Avg 17,562 5,776 5,644 5,192 210
Share of Incremental 33% 32% 30% 1%
Homicide + Road Deaths
Year Period Total Black White Hispanic Asian
2018 Pre 58,234 15,609 30,555 9,168 1,100
2019 Pre 58,248 16,147 29,946 9,287 1,116
2020 Post 66,915 21,375 31,545 10,979 1,079
2021 Post 73,011 22,896 34,020 12,596 1,245
2022 Post 70,839 21,040 33,209 12,902 1,289
Total 2018-19 116,482 31,756 60,501 18,455 2,216
Total 2020-22 210,765 65,311 98,774 36,477 3,613
Avg 2018-19 58,241 15,878 30,251 9,228 1,108
Avg 2020-22 70,255 21,770 32,925 12,159 1,204
Incr in Avg Deaths / Year 12,014 5,892 2,674 2,932 96
% Incr in Avg 21% 37% 9% 32% 9%
Incremental Deaths 2020-22 vs. 2018-19 Avg 36,042 17,677 8,023 8,795 289
Share of Incremental 49% 22% 24% 1%

Yes, it would have been simpler to just compare 2020-22 to the three years 2017-19, but the CDC made a methodological change between 2017 and 2018 in going from four races to six races (splitting Pacific Islanders out from Asians and adding “multiracial). So I just used the CDC’s data from 2018 onward to make an apples to apples comparison of 2020-22 to 2018-19.

Second, I didn’t bother adjusting for the modest population change during these years.

Third, the Floyd Effect didn’t begin on January 1, 2020, like I assume, but on May 25, 2020. Motor vehicle accident deaths weren’t up much in 2020 compared to previous years before Floyd Day. But black homicide deaths, after falling quite a bit in 2018 with the end of the Ferguson Effect under the Sessions Justice Department, began to creep upward again partway through 2019 and were rising in early 2020 before covid and also during early covid, before exploding in the last week of May during the first of the Mostly Peaceful Protests.

But graphing weekly data of black deaths, there’s no doubt that the Floyd Effect is closely linked to the demise of George Floyd and the subsequent cultural revolution. As you may recall, the “racial reckoning” was in all the papers at the time.

So, the fairest estimate of incremental deaths due to the Floyd Effect in 2020-2022 might be “approaching 35,000.” The Floyd Effect is no doubt continuing to pile up more incremental deaths in 2023, although homicides appear to be dropping (but are still well above the 2018-2019 rate).

Approaching 35,000 is quite a few deaths, especially among fairly young people with a lot of life expectancy left. It’s very similar to American deaths in the Korean War of 36,516, and more than five times the total deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars combined.

[Note: In CDC data, “homicides” refer to homicide victimizations not homicide perpetrations.]

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

Breast Cancer in Women Under 50 on the Rise — Could Cellphones Play a Role?

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 6, 2023

Early-onset breast cancer is on the rise in younger women in the U.S., according to two new peer-reviewed studies, leading some experts to wonder if cellphone use could be at least partially to blame.

The authors of an Aug. 16 study in JAMA Network Open looked at the health data from 2010 to 2019 of more than half a million people in the U.S. under 50 who reported having some kind of early-onset cancer.

They concluded breast cancer in 2019 had the highest incidence rate, with 12,649 new cases reported that year.

Meanwhile, the authors of a study published Sept. 5 in BMJ Oncology looked at worldwide cancer trends from 1990-2019. Breast cancer was responsible for the largest number of cases and associated deaths among younger people, with rates of 13.7 cases and 3.5 deaths per 100,000 people, they said.

Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH, a toxicologist and epidemiologist who for more than 40 years has studied trends in cancer and who published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, said she found the reports “very troubling.”

Davis is the president of Environmental Health Trust (EHT), a scientific research and education nonprofit, and founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences.

She told The Defender, “A trend in cancer cannot prove what is causing it. The trend is simply a fact. So the fact is that cancer among younger Americans, particularly women, is on the rise.”

Indeed, the American Cancer Society in 2022 estimated there were 47,550 cases of breast cancer in U.S. women younger than 50.

“But,” Davis added, “there’s clear compelling evidence that electromagnetic fields [EMFs] accelerate the growth of breast cancer cells.”

EMFs can accelerate growth of breast cancer cells

“We have known for nearly 30 years that EMFs can accelerate the growth of MCF-7 breast cancer cells,” Davis said. “There’s no debate about that.”

According to Davis, MCF-7 is an estrogen receptor-positive cancer cell that has been cultured for many years and is used as a standard assay in the laboratory.

Davis said prior research showed radiofrequency (RF) radiation emitted by cellphones moves easily through fat and fluid — “and the breast is nothing but fat and fluid,” she said.

Additionally, a 2020 peer-reviewed study found that excessive smartphone use “significantly increased” the risk of breast cancer, with those using cellphones for more than 4.5 minutes before bedtime having a 5.27-fold increased risk of breast cancer compared to those using a smartphone for less time.

The study authors said:

“To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to find that excessive smartphone use significantly increased the risk of breast cancer, particularly for participants with a smartphone addiction, who maintained a close distance between the breasts and smartphone, and who had the habit of smartphone use before bedtime.”

Staring at a cellphone screen before bedtime can also suppress the natural release of melatonin, a hormone that plays a role in sleep.

Melatonin appears to protect against breast cancer, Davis said. “We know this most especially from studies of blind women because blind women naturally have very high levels of melatonin and they have half the rate of breast cancer of sighted women,” she said.

Some research, however, suggests more thorough studies must be done before the link between melatonin and decreased risk of breast cancer can be proven.

Davis and several co-authors in February 2023 published a review of the latest science on pediatric health, EMFs and RF radiation in which they noted that RF radiation can act like an endocrine disruptor:

“It appears that non-ionizing RFR has all the classic hallmarks of endocrine disruptors that affect reproduction, development of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis (HPG) and alter normal male and female reproductive endpoints.”

According to Davis, endocrine disruptors can cause “a host of biological consequences, including breast cancer.”

EHT in 2020 collaborated with the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition to create an educational module for K-12 schools on the health impacts of daily RF radiation exposure and ways to reduce one’s exposure, Davis said.

‘We’re going to see a whole cluster of young people with breast cancer’

According to Davis, there have been at least five case reports of women developing breast cancer tumors where they routinely kept their cellphones in their bras.

One of the case report’s authors, Dr. John West, is a former breast surgeon who more than a decade ago predicted there would be an uptick in breast cancer cases.

West told CBS News in Nov. 2012, “If there is a risk and we don’t find out about it for five or ten years from now, we’re going to see a whole cluster of young people with breast cancer.”

West and his co-authors in 2013 published their case report of four women who carried their smartphones in their bras for up to 10 hours a day for several years, and who “developed tumors in areas of their breasts immediately underlying the phones.”

“These cases,” West and his co-authors said, “raise awareness of the lack of safety data of prolonged direct contact with cellular phones.”

In 2016, West wrote a book about breast cancer prevention, “Prevent, Survive, Thrive: Every Woman’s Guide to Optimal Breast Care,” with a chapter entitled, “Your Bra: A No-Phone Zone.”

That same year, Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the ACS’ former chief medical officer, highlighted the potential link between cellphone radiation and cancer in a May 27, 2016, press release citing the National Toxicology Program (NTP) multi-year $30 million study showing “clear evidence” that RF radiation is associated with cancer and DNA damage. He said:

“For years, the understanding of the potential risk of radiation from cell phones has been hampered by a lack of good science. This report from the National Toxicology Program (NTP) is good science.”

Brawley said the NTP’s report “marks a paradigm shift in our understanding of radiation and cancer risk.”

But the “paradigm shift” Brawley referenced never took hold after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 dismissed the NTP study.

According to Davis, the FDA’s rejection of the NTP study was “deeply flawed” and “deeply hypocritical.”

The FDA in 1999 requested the NTP study cellphone radiation, she said. FDA officials were intimately involved in reviewing the study design plans.

“Then when the results came out and some people didn’t like it, the FDA began to trash talk their own study,” Davis said.

To this date, the FDA still claims there is not enough scientific evidence to link cellphone use to health problems, including cancer.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer worldwide, excluding non-melanoma skin cancer, with 2.26 million cases in 2020 noted by the World Health Organization.


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.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

California passes law on ‘affirmation’ of children

RT | September 9, 2023

The California State Assembly on Friday approved a bill redefining the health, safety, and well-being of children to include “gender identity or gender expression.” Critics say it will enable the state to seize children who “transitioned” without the approval of their parents.

Assembly Bill 957 was adopted with a vote of 57-16 and sent to Governor Gavin Newsom for signature. It amends Section 3011 of the Family Code to “include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child.”

Family courts use the health and well-being standard to make decisions as to which parent gets custody of children in divorce disputes, or in cases in which parents have their children taken away by the state due to abuse or neglect.

“That is our duty as parents, to affirm our children,” State Representative Lori Wilson, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a speech on the Assembly floor.

State Senator Scott Wiener, a fellow San Francisco Democrat, co-sponsored the bill. He was behind the 2022 ‘trans refuge bill’ which gave immunity from other states’ laws to minors seeking ‘gender affirming care’ in California.

Republicans have criticized the proposal, arguing that family court judges already have the discretion to make that determination. With only 18 seats in the 80-member chamber, however, there was little they could do to stop it.

Last month, a school district in the Bay Area paid $100,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a parent whose child was “secretly transitioned” without her knowledge or consent. Jessica Konen alleged that the Spreckels Union School District and three of its employees “secretly convinced” her daughter of being bisexual and transgender, referred to her as a boy, instructed her on binding her breasts, and allowed her to use the faculty bathroom.

Teachers allegedly encouraged Konen’s daughter to use a boy’s name, wear clothing for boys, read articles about gender transition, and “not to tell her mother about her new gender identity or new name, saying that her mother might not be supportive of her and that she couldn’t trust her mother.”

When the school eventually informed Konen, she claimed that she went along with it out of fear that the state might take the child away. The girl “began to return to her original self” after March 2020, when California switched to online lessons due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

New Study: Up To 87% Of Modern Warming Can Be Explained By Variations In Solar Activity

By Kenneth Richard | No Tricks Zone | September 4, 2023

Nearly all of the alleged anthropogenic link to climate change can be removed simply by exchanging and/or replacing biased temperature and solar activity data sets.

new study authored by 37 scientists in the journal Climate finds using rural-only Northern Hemisphere temperature data (i.e., removing artificial, non-climatic urban heat effects) reduces the post-1850 warming trend from 0.89°C per century to 0.55°C per century.

Further, using a total solar irradiance (TSI) dataset neglected by the IPCC (Hoyt and Schatten, 1993, updated to present) allows TSI to explain up to 87% of modern warming.

Variations in cloud cover, albedo, and natural ocean circulations may also be factors arising from internal climate variability that could explain modern climate changes.

In summary, then, much of modern global warming’s alleged link to human activity may have been formulated by selecting data that align with the hypothesis, and neglecting or dismissing data which do not.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Wind isn’t working

Dismal UK CFD auction results may be a landmark moment

Net Zero Watch | September 8, 2023

The Government has today announced the results of the fifth auction of Contracts for Difference subsidies for renewable electricity generation. Its has been a failure, and may represent a landmark moment for renewables policy.

Only 3.7GW of new capacity has bid successfully, mostly through small projects, as compared to nearly 12GW last year. There were no bids for offshore wind, the UK’s flagship renewable generator.

Participants in the auction bid for guaranteed prices, below a cap set by ministers in advance of the auction. The cap for offshore wind was set at £44/MWh (in 2012 prices, equivalent to around £70/MWh today). This is higher than successful bids in the past, yet no wind farm developers felt able to bid at this price. Wind industry claims that this is due to rising prices are implausible – CfD contracts are index-linked.

While offshore wind’s failure to bid may be surprising to some, perhaps even to the Government, it will come as no shock to those familiar with the long-term capital and operating cost trends for wind power, as revealed in audited financial statements. Costs have not been falling dramatically as the industry claimed. All around the world the wind industry is in trouble for the same reasons; costs remain high, and high levels of subsidy are needed to reward investors.

In addition, the latest auction round closes down the loophole that allowed windfarms to reap huge windfall profits by failing to activate their contracts so that they could benefit from higher prices in the open market.

The fact is that wind power, wherever, is an expensive way of generating energy. That isn’t surprising either; wind is a physically low-quality fuel and the cost of turning it into electricity is intrinsically high.

The previously successful low bids for offshore wind were unrealistic, a point we made at the time. Even when built, wind farms delayed taking up their contracts so they could operate on a merchant basis, taking advantage of temporarily high wholesale prices.

Importantly, the cap for onshore wind bids in this round of the CFD auction was higher than that for offshore, at £53/MWh (2012 prices). There were a substantial number of successful bids at this price, though they are all located in Scotland, where land rents are lower and where the developers can expect to make extra income through the infamous “constraint payments”, where a wind farm is paid to reduce output. (Demand in Scotland is low and the grid links to England are congested, limiting exports.) Even so, we doubt that these successful onshore bids are strongly economic.

Andrew Montford, director of Net Zero Watch, said:

Government seems to have believed the spin about falling offshore wind costs, and set a low cap on bids for new contracts, thus calling the wind industry’s bluff by accident. Doubtless, the industry will now beg for new and higher subsidies, blaming inflation and supply chain problems. Government should not believe this spin. As global experience shows, wind power is extremely and intrinsically expensive.”

Dr John Constable, energy editor of Net Zero Watch, said:

The CfD auction results are symptomatic of a wider failure of wind power around the world. The industry is in a crisis from which it is unlikely to recover, because its costs are simply too high to be sustainable. The time has come for Government to admit that renewables have failed, and to start looking at realistic energy policies.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

World is ‘laughing at’ the US – Alaska governor

 ©  AFP / Mandel Ngan
RT | September 9, 2023

The US government’s decision to cancel oil and gas drilling licenses and forbid further drilling will “hobble” the country’s economy and makes no sense except to advance the green agenda, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy has declared.

President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday canceled seven ten-year oil and gas drilling licenses granted to the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) by former President Donald Trump. Biden’s Department of the Interior followed up this decision by issuing a proposal to forbid future leases on more than 40% of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

Biden said that these two measures “will help preserve our Arctic lands and wildlife,” adding on Saturday that he would “continue to take bold action to meet the urgency of the climate crisis and to protect our lands and waters for generations to come.”

Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Dunleavy said that “this makes absolutely no sense from any perspective unless your goal is to drive up the cost of oil and gas so much that it makes certain renewables cheaper.”

Dunleavy, a Republican, claimed that Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are “laughing” at Biden’s energy policy.

“They’re laughing together at the United States of America,” the governor said. “I can’t find anywhere in, really the history of nation-states or empires, where they worked at hobbling themselves to such a degree that’s happening currently with this administration. So 2024 can’t come soon enough for most of us.”

Gasoline prices have soared under Biden, reaching a record average high of just over $5 per gallon last June, up from around $2 when the president took office.

Prices began to rise when Biden signed an executive order in January 2021 banning new oil and gas licenses on federal land, and spiked as the conflict in Ukraine rocked global energy markets. Ahead of last year’s midterm elections, Biden attempted to stabilize gasoline prices by draining the US’ strategic petroleum reserve, and by unsuccessfully lobbying the Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting States to cut production.

The AIDEA argues that Biden has no legal right to rescind existing drilling licenses and told Fox News that it intends to challenge the decision in court.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | Leave a comment

Austria refuses to deport draft-eligible men to Ukraine

BY GRZEGORZ ADAMCZYK | DORZECZY.PL | SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

With Ukraine increasingly desperate for men to send to the front, it is pushing for countries in the area to send draft-eligible Ukrainians who fled at the beginning of the war. However, some countries are balking at the demand, including Austria. The country’s Internal Ministry said it will not extradite draft-age Ukrainian men back to Ukraine.

Ukraine expects that all Western European countries that have taken in Ukrainian refugees will send back men of conscription age to their homeland so that they can be drafted into the military and sent to the frontlines, which was announced by the leader of the parliamentary faction of the Servant of the People party, Davyd Arakhamia.

“Actually, in every country in the world, except for Russia, our law enforcement agencies can file a request for the extradition of such persons and bring them back to Ukraine,” said Arakhamia.

Meanwhile, some conscription officers are making small fortunes by looking the other way as Ukraine’s youth does all it can to avoid being sent to the frontline

Meanwhile, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior has stated that the possibility of deporting Ukrainian men back to Ukraine with the prospect of sending them to the frontlines “is absolutely not being considered.”

“Even if a written request from the Ukrainian government is received in Vienna, it will be ignored. Austria will not allow anyone to dictate terms,” said a spokesperson for the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quoted by the Austrian news outlet Exxpress.

According to the press report, currently around 14,000 men aged between 18 and 54 who have left Ukraine due to the war are residing in Austria. The government in Vienna has provided assistance to a total of 101,629 refugees: men, women, children and the elderly.

As of June 2023, 5.6 to 6.7 million citizens have fled from Ukraine before the war. Authorities in Kyiv estimate that 63 percent plan to return to their homeland. Other countries, such as Poland, have taken a different approach than Austria, with the government considering deporting back potentially tens of thousands of fighting-age Ukrainian men.

The official casualty figures for the Ukrainian army since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022 are not known. Authorities in Kyiv are keeping these figures a secret, just like Moscow.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Over 200,000 Ukrainian men at risk of conscription have fled to Germany since start of war

By Thomas Brooke | Remix News | September 08, 2023

More than 200,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age have fled their country to Germany since the beginning of the war with Russia, according to the federal government’s written response to a question posed by the Alternative for Germany’s foreign policy spokesperson Petr Bystron.

Despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration banning men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, a total of 203,640 male Ukrainian citizens facing conscription have arrived in Germany since February last year.

The German federal government stated that 176,474 Ukrainian conscripts were still residing in Germany at the end of June this year.

“The numbers show clearly: Ukrainians want peace,” said Bystron in response, reiterating the AfD’s call for “immediate peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia under OSCE mediation.”

He claimed that hundreds of thousands of “Ukrainians of military age have fled to Germany to escape senseless death” and that “according to media reports, another 650,000 are in the EU, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.”

The AfD parliamentary group submitted a peace initiative motion to the Bundestag in January this year, calling on the federal government to advocate the deployment of an international peace delegation led by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine.

“No one can win this war, and only if we finally accept that and work for a peaceful solution will peace have a chance,” said Alexander Gauland, the founder and honorary chairman of the AfD.

Bystron himself visited Belarus in November last year to lobby for such an outcome, telling the German newspaper Bild his mission was to explore whether Belarus could help to push for peace between the two nations and also improve bilateral relations between Germany and Belarus.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Britain sends warplanes to ‘deter Russian strikes’

RT | September 9, 2023

Britain has dispatched military planes to protect grain ships coming from Ukraine as the future of the UN-backed deal to provide a safe passage for the exports of agricultural produce remains uncertain after its suspension by Russia.

“We will use our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to monitor Russian activity in the Black Sea, call out Russia if we see warning signs that they are preparing attacks on civilian shipping or infrastructure,” the UK government said in a statement on Friday.

“As part of these surveillance operations, RAF aircraft are conducting flights over the area to deter Russia from carrying out illegal strikes against civilian vessels transporting grain,” the statement read.

The Russian Defense Ministry warned earlier that all vessels entering Ukrainian ports would be “treated as potential deliveries of military cargo.”

Moscow suspended the grain deal in July, arguing that Western countries had failed to hold up their end of the bargain by not removing obstacles to the shipment of Russian agricultural produce and fertilizers. Although Western sanctions do not target such exports directly, Russian officials said restrictions on their country’s banking sphere and logistics effectively hamper the deliveries of Russian goods.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said after a meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Monday that Moscow would immediately return to the deal once its demands are met. Erdogan told reporters that consultations with the UN were underway in hope of reviving the arrangement.

Reuters reported on Friday that Rosselkhozbank, Russia’s main agricultural lender, might be allowed to gain access to the SWIFT international banking system in the near future. Russian top banks were removed from SWIFT last year as part of sanctions placed on Moscow over its military operation in Ukraine.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment