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Twitter announces more censorship for sake of ‘public interest’

RT | November 30, 2021

Twitter has updated its policy on personal information to cover videos and photos of private individuals shared without their consent, unless that is done by legacy media, in “public interest,” or other context they approve of.

“Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm. The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities,” Twitter’s Safety division said on Tuesday.

The company has thus decided to add “media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted” to the category of “personal information” not allowed on the platform. Addresses, identity documents, phone numbers, emails, and bank information of private individuals have already been banned under Twitter’s doxing policy.

This policy update “will allow us to take action on media that is shared without any explicit abusive content, provided it’s posted without the consent of the person depicted,” Twitter said.

It does not apply to media featuring public figures, or when media are shared “in the public interest or add value to public discourse,” however. A specific carve-out seems to be sharing images or videos of private individuals “in an effort to help someone involved in a crisis situation, such as in the aftermath of a violent event, or as part of a newsworthy event due to public interest value,” which “might outweigh the safety risks to a person.”

Twitter “will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared,” including whether it is being “covered by mainstream/traditional media” or “adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.”

Reactions to the policy update have been mainly negative. “Twitter Implements New Rule So It Can Selectively Ban Memes, Mockery Of Democrats” is how the conservative-leaning Federalist reported the policy change.

Conservative pundit Dana Loesch said this will allow Twitter to “muzzle” independent journalists, let “corporate press” set narratives, and silence undercover reporting from the likes of Project Veritas. Independent journalist Tim Pool tweeted that “journalism is largely banned on twitter basically.”

The new rule seems “poorly thought out,” tweeted digital rights advocate Evan Greer, asking “how long before cops try to abuse this to get videos of brutality taken down?”

As written, the update is “not only vague, but literally unenforceable,” argued BBC’s ‘disinformation’ reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh. “How do you define a private individual across different jurisdictions? What exactly is a public setting and what is in the public interest? What is traditional media? This is a minefield.”

The policy update comes less than a day after co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO, appointing Parag Agrawal as his successor. Agrawal is best known for a November 2020 interview in which he said Twitter’s role is “not to be bound by the First Amendment.”

“So, we focused way less on what’s true and what’s false. We focus way more on potential for harm as a result of certain content being amplified on the platform without appropriate context,” Agrawal also said at the time.

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

New law allows for warrantless spying on Australians – where next?

By Kit Klarenberg | RT | November 30, 2021

The Australian Signals Directorate, Canberra’s equivalent of Britain’s GCHQ or the US National Security Agency, will be granted sweeping new powers to spy on Australians for the first time since its November 1947 founding.

The move allows the agency to collect signals intelligence on individuals within the country without a warrant, although allegedly only in situations where there is an “imminent risk to life.” Domestic terror suspects are cited as a key target in the Directorate’s crosshairs, and it will also collect intelligence in conjunction with the Australian Defence Force for military operations, with ministerial authorization.

Rules governing the reform and protecting citizens’ privacy will be published on the agency’s website, and subject to review and scrutiny by the Australian parliament’s security and intelligence committee. While framed as sincerely concerned with keeping Australians safe, experts have expressed grave reservations about the development. Among them is John Blaxland, Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies at the Australian National University, himself a military intelligence veteran, who warned the powers were ripe for abuse.

“I’m a former insider… I have a much greater appreciation of the need for checks and balances, because power tends to corrupt,” he cautioned. “My concern is the legislation we put forward is being drafted by insiders, it’s drafted with their own concerns in mind.”

Drafted by insiders, the legislation certainly was – it’s inspired by the findings of an extensive review by Dennis Richardson, former chief of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the country’s FBI, conducted in close consultation with Australia’s assorted intelligence services, in a manner akin to foxes being quizzed on how best to guard a henhouse.

Published in December 2020, his appraisal’s discussion of “authorisations” noted that these agencies can already conduct warrantless intelligence-gathering if they believe it to be “necessary, proportionate, reasonable and justified” in certain circumstances, and “would like the ability” to not only use various investigative techniques without official permission, but also with “protection from criminal liability” when doing so.

Leaked documents exposed by journalist Annika Smethurst in April 2018 showed that high-level plans for untrammeled domestic spying by the Australian Signals Directorate date back even further. They revealed how the respective heads of Australia’s Defence and Home Affairs ministries had discussed allowing the agency to access citizens’ emails, bank records and text messages without approval, or trace. A government source told Smethurst they were “horrified” by the proposals, given “there is no actual national security gap this is aiming to fill.”

Australian Federal Police raided both the alleged leaker of the files and Smethurst the next year. In a perverse irony, the charges against her were dropped in May 2020, as Australian High Court judges unanimously ruled that the warrant secured from a magistrate in relation to the raid was invalid, because it not only “misstated the terms of the offence” but was also ambiguous if not outright absurd.

“[The warrant] lacked the clarity required to fulfil its basic purposes of adequately informing Smethurst why the search was being conducted and providing the executing officer and those assisting in the execution of the warrant with reasonable guidance to decide which things came within the scope of the warrant,” the High Court damningly concluded.

In other words, it was impossible to know from the warrant’s wording what the investigation actually concerned, what evidence or information was sought, and what, if any, crime she may or may not have committed. That this baseless and broad investigative authorization was formally granted at all renders the Directorate’s newfound power to conduct warrantless surveillance all the more disquieting. If such procedural perversion can occur even with putative oversight, what abuses will be engaged-in without any meaningful supervision?

Misuse of these capabilities is almost inevitable. In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled warrants were mandatory for domestic intelligence gathering. Two years later, a Senate investigation found that the NSA and other US intelligence agencies had nonetheless been engaged in unauthorized spying on American citizens, including anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and political dissidents, monitoring all their private communications from telephone conversations to telegrams. This led to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which made it a dedicated criminal offense to eavesdrop on American citizens without judicial oversight.

Yet,it was revealed in late 2005 that the NSA had all along continued illegally intercepting the phone calls and digital communications of US citizens, with the witting help of major telecoms giants, which passed copies of all emails, web browsing and other internet traffic to and from its customers at home and abroad to the agency, and its British counterpart GCHQ. Files disclosed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed this criminal dragnet was truly global in scale, and very much ongoing.

Key components of this international spying network, known as ‘Five Eyes,’ are situated in Australia, at the Pine Gap and Kojarena satellite surveillance bases. According to investigative legend Duncan Campbell, around 80% of the messages intercepted by the latter – which employs US and British staff in key posts – are sent automatically to GCHQ and the NSA. While every Five Eyes member can theoretically veto requests for such material, “when you’re a junior ally” like Canberra, “you never refuse,” Campbell records.

One can’t help but wonder if the Directorate’s new domestic purview is an experiment, gauging levels of backlash and controversy among the Australian public, before similar measures – provably or potentially already in operation – are openly codified across all Five Eyes member states. Ongoing legal battles against mass data collection in various jurisdictions clearly necessitate the practice being legalized and legitimized. If Canberra’s American and/or British friends politely requested they run such a pilot scheme, would or even could they decline?

Reinforcing this interpretation, mere days after the Directorate’s remit was expanded, the Australian government pledged to introduce new laws forcing social media giants to “unmask” anonymous users who post offensive comments, with hefty fines doled out to those companies which are unwilling or unable to do so. The reasons for Canberra’s haste are unclear, although it’s surely no coincidence that London and Washington have battled for many years to end online anonymity for good – it’s only due to intense domestic opposition that these efforts have so far failed.

 Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Northern New England Defies Brandon

el gato malo – bad cattitude – november 30, 2021

the essence of science and scientific credibility is generating a hypothesis, making forward predictions about outcomes, and then testing them to see if you got it right.

it’s really little more than that, but it’s also certainly nothing less.

so let’s take a look at this set of hypotheses and predictions made by the president on august 3rd 2021.

attribution was crystal clear.

so, let’s see how he did on this claim:

maine is 90% 12 and up vaxxed and more than 99% of the over 65’s . yet it has seen has seen record cases, record hospitalizations and near record deaths despite being nowhere near wheat is usually peak season. that won’t be for 4-6 weeks.

compared to this date last year, hospitalizations are 85% higher.

the lion’s share of hospitalizations are in 70+ with many of the rest in 60-69. this is a 99%+ vaccinated demographic.

this is NOT a pandemic of the unvaxxed. 70+ already set new highs at 99% vaxxed vs last year’s peak when 0% were DESPITE more natural immunity as well.

new hampshire looks the same. and it’s similarly 4-6 weeks from peak season. 98% of 12 and over vaxxed. 99%+ of over 65’s.

compared to this date last year, hospitalizations are 133% higher.

maybe vermont is better? nope. 94% of over 12’s vaxxed, 99%+ of over 65’s.

compared to this date last year, hospitalizations are 214% higher.

they have all exploded since biden’s claims (made right at about seasonal nadir) and all have vastly exceeded last year at this time. on cases and hospitalization, all have already exceeded last year’s PEAKS (though cases may be affected by testing rates and i have not run the math).

all are 4-6 weeks from what is usually the seasonal peak and just coming into what was the steep ramp last year.

clearly, brandon was trying to pass off seasonality as vaccine efficacy.

this prediction of a “clear link” between vaccines and lower rates and lower severity looks to have failed utterly.

there is simply no other way to put it.

it was just a cross correlation of vaccine rates and latitude.

seasons shifted, and so did covid expression. and vaccines seem to have done little or nothing to stop it.

just like certain internet felines hypothesized.

bad cattitude
winter is coming, and the vaccine narrative is about to shift
covid is a highly seasonal disease and that seasonality varies by region. this has been obvious for over a year and i and many others have laid out graph upon graph proving it. that’s what makes claims like this so wonderfully disingenuous: she’s just mistaking seasonality for vaccine efficacy…

Read more

2 months ago · 195 likes · 171 comments · el gato malo

meanwhile, covid has dropped to the lowest rates since data collection began in the southern states biden and others were so anxious to pillory.

this has been an utter shambles of misinformation and misleading claims coming from DC. the fact that the white house is still getting this astonishingly wrong when the data is so clear that even internet DOGS much less cats are nailing it is inexcusable.

this is either such rank incompetence or such towering mendacity as to disqualify those promulgating it from any future epidemiological utterances, much less determinations on what constitutes disinformation.

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Ghislaine Maxwell Is Finally on Trial!

Don’t expect much – the cover-up has already begun!

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 30, 2021

Jeffrey Epstein procurer Ghislaine Maxwell is finally in court going through the juror selection process and opening arguments after a 17 month stay at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Given Epstein’s somewhat suspicious departure from this earth in what may have been a murder rather than a suicide, Maxwell has been jailed under a somewhat more intrusive regime, with constant surveillance and only limited ability to do anything but sit on her concrete bunk and contemplate her future. She has complained frequently about her isolation, abuse by jailers and the terrible food. She was undoubtedly correct about the food. Her offer of as much as $28 million in bail money in return for her freedom while awaiting trial was turned down by the judge who observed that Maxwell had more than fifteen separate bank or investment accounts as well as multiple passports. She suggested that Ghislaine might have much more money and other assets squirreled away outside the United States, making her a flight risk, presumably to flee to Israel which has no extradition agreement with the US.

There is significant back story to consider when examining the Ghislaine Maxwell/Jeffrey Epstein saga. The suspicion that Epstein was working for Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad or for its military intelligence counterpart is based on considerable evidence and that he was being “protected” has also seemingly been confirmed through both Israeli and American sources. Indeed, there already exists some evidence that Epstein was granted unusual leniency when he was convicted in Florida of sex crimes in 2008 involving 19 underage girls and received a sentence that was little more than a slap on the wrist. After the fact, the US Attorney for Miami Alexander Acosta, who was involved in the case, reported that the arrest and sentencing were above his pay grade, that he had been told that Epstein “’belonged to intelligence’, and to leave it alone” a comment that apparently was never been pursued by investigators.

Also, a recent book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales written by Ari Ben-Menashe the former Israeli intelligence officer who actually claims to have run the Epstein operation, described inter alia how Epstein was blackmailing prominent politicians on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Epstein had been working directly for the Israeli government since the 1980’s and his operation, which was funded by Israel and also by prominent American Jews, was a classic “honey-trap” which used underage girls as bait to attract well-known politicians from around the world, a list that included Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton. Clinton reportedly flew at least 26 times on Epstein’s private 727 the “Lolita Express” to a mansion estate in Florida as well as to a private island owned by Epstein in the Caribbean. The island was referred to by locals as the “Pedophile Island.” The politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls. Afterwards, they would be approached and asked to do favors for Israel.

Ghislaine Maxwell is in fact the daughter of top Israeli spy Robert Maxwell, who received a state funeral in Israel after his mysterious death in 1991 which was attended by the prime minister as well as by all the former and serving heads of that country’s intelligence services. Ghislaine is presumed to have been an active participant in the Epstein operation acting as a procurer of young girls and on at least one occasion has hinted that she knows where the sex films made by Epstein are hidden. She also has claimed that the tapes featured both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

It doesn’t take much to pull what is already known together and ask the question “Who among the celebrities and top-level politicians that Epstein cultivated were actually Israeli spies?” And, of course, there is a subplot. Assuming that Epstein was in fact involved in recruiting and/or running high level American agents in an “influence operation” that may have involved blackmail it is plausible to come to the conclusion that he was killed in prison and that the suicide story was just a convenient cover-up. The Epstein case remains technically “open” and under investigation though it doesn’t seem that anything is actually happening, the sure sign that someone powerful in the Establishment is making certain that nothing incriminating surfaces. That is sometimes referred to as a government cover-up.

So, given all the drama and possibilities, one might plausibly ask why the media coverage of Maxwell, for all its allure of deviant sex combined with possible espionage, so much less in the media spotlight than were the recent Rittenhouse and Arbery trials? And even less than the ongoing trial of Elizabeth Holmes. Well, the answer is actually quite simple, even ignoring the liberal media’s desire to inflame racial passions whenever possible. We are in an era of government control of information and are witnessing selective management of what Maxwell is being charged with to eliminate any possible damage to senior US politicians or to Israel.

Television courtroom dramas notwithstanding, the fact is that people are only tried in court once they have been charged in advance with specific crimes. And the crimes they are charged with depend on what emerges from the police and other law enforcement investigation. The result then goes to a frequently politically biased district attorney who, if he agrees there is a case, then passes the case on to an elected or politically appointed judge for trial. That means in practice that trials by jury go through a winnowing process before they reach the courtroom and what comes out at the end is often only what the criminal justice system regards as “winnable” or desirable in terms of prevailing political viewpoints.

Or to put it another way apropos of Maxwell and Epstein, in spite of considerable evidence suggesting espionage, there is absolutely no suggestion that either the New York City police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation ever seriously interrogated either party on their relationships with IsraeI and with Israeli intelligence. Nor is there any indication that “celebrities” who might have been targeted like Bill Clinton were ever even questioned. That is no coincidence, as Israel almost always avoids any scrutiny. Indeed, Israel, in spite of its demonstrated and well-documented history of massive spying in the United States is unlikely ever to be confronted in a court of law because there is a bipartisan consensus that such an embarrassment to the world’s greatest friendship between Jerusalem and Washington should never be subjected to any serious examination. That is why Maxwell has only been charged with helping the convicted sexual predator Epstein traffic and sexually abuse four women, three of whom were underage, as well as lying in a civil suit. She has denied the charges and is heavily lawyered-up to make her defense which will likely involve debunking the nature and closeness of her relationship with Epstein. A suitable plea bargain after a few weeks of court room jousting is a likely outcome.

Maxwell’s eight count indictment was issued on March 29th. If her defense fails to convince and she is convicted on all the charges, which relate to sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy, Maxwell could receive as much as an 80-year prison sentence. Epstein likewise was only arrested and charged with sex trafficking and abuse of minors when he died while awaiting trial, not with being involved with a foreign country in engaging in espionage directed against the United States as well as other nations. There are, by the way, laws against such activity, including the Espionage Act of 1918 and the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, the latter of which has recently been enforced against Russian media outlets. If anyone expects the espionage angle to surface even implicitly during the Maxwell trial, they will be terribly disappointed because Alison Nathan, the Obama appointed j udge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and, appropriately enough, a Lesbian, will not allow it, the prosecutor will not seek it, and the defense attorneys will not use it in their arguments.

So do not expect anything dramatic to happen in the New York courtroom. One has to suspect that a tale of Mossad running a major spy ring in the US using a pedophile and young girls might just be too much for some folks in power to tolerate and they have made sure that that aspect of the story will never see the light of day. That is the real story that is being conveniently covered-up. Israel yet again spies and Washington denies.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

Rittenhouse verdict puts “broken” Jury system in the establishment crosshairs

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | November 30, 2021

“If Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t break the law, we should change the law”

This quote, from late-night TV host Stephen Colbert, is one of the more concerning reactions to Kyle Rittenhouse being found not guilty of murder.

What law, precisely, Mr Colbert would see changed is never specified. The vagueness only makes the sentiment more troubling.

Other responses have been just as dishonest, manipulative and foreboding.

Amber Ruffin, another late-night “comedian”, broke down in (very fake looking) tears. Ranting about the “fucked up” jury, “white people getting away with murder” and the “broken system”. Trying to insert racial issues that don’t apply, and telling lies about the facts of the case:

https://twitter.com/ambermruffin/status/1461870102060535813

The “broken system” is all anybody wants to talk about. It’s all over the place.

In Washington, “the Squad” decried the verdict, wailing that “the system is broken”, that it “protects white supremacy”.

Even alternate media aren’t immune. Democracy Now invited the family of Jacob Blake to discuss the verdict, who have no personal ties to the case save the riot was allegedly being carried out in response to Jacob’s shooting. They too wanted to headline the “system is broken”.

But why the misrepresentations and hyperbole? Why race-baiting and manipulation? Why the exploitation of victims’ families?

What exactly do they want to change about the “broken system”?

Is it private prisons?
Is it absurd incarceration rates?
Is it the fact prisoners are used as de fecto slave labour?
Nope. It’s jury trials.

Not just jury trials, however, there are some other areas ripe for “regulation” and “reform” too.

The relentless focus on Rittenhouse “crossing state lines with a firearm” (he didn’t actually, but never mind) would suggest perhaps one potential “fix” is tighter limitations on travel. Covid has highlighted just how much the powers that be really do hate us being able to move around.

Another obvious potential target for these vague reforms is the Second Amendment. The right to bear arms is, ironically, always in the firing line. The USA certainly can’t go full-Australia while guys are allowed to carry rifles around.

Indeed, given how far into the realms of tyranny so many governments are going, all these attacks on the very idea of “self defense” could be a worrying sign.

But, for now, it looks like the first item on the menu of “reform” is definitely trial by jury.

Why do I think that? Well, both Ruffin and Democracy Now make special mention of the jury being “fucked up” and “broken”.

Oh, and this article says so:

After Kyle Rittenhouse trial, Biden still thinks the jury system works. He’s wrong.

Jury trials have been under threat for years, with “educated” middle-class authors writing that, essentially, the law is too important to be put in the hands of ordinary people who are too stupid understand it.

Juries are described as “old fashioned”, “slow” and “expensive”.

Juries are routinely described as racist, too. Before the trial even started, the Rittenhouse jury was criticised for being “too white”.

The Rittenhouse trial is not alone in being used to undermine the jury system, Covid got there first.

In Spring of 2020, the Scottish parliament briefly tried to ban jury trials “as a response to the pandemic”, this was quickly repealed after complaints from the bar association. There’s also talk of removing juries from rape cases to “clear the backlog” and “protect the victim”.

In January this year, Simon Jenkins wrote in the Guardian that Covid has given us an “opportunity” to get rid of Jury trials for good. He would see it replaced with a “trial waiver system”, as much of the US already does.

Trial waiver systems are ripe for corruption, one report describes them as “highly coercive”, and this could easily result in a lot of innocent people pleading guilty to lesser charges because they can’t afford a lawyer or don’t want to risk going to prison. It is not a fair system at all.

Nevertheless, that’s where they want to go – and whether by Covid or Kyle Rittenhouse – they’ll get us there.

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Free homeschool guide to Arctic sea ice ecology

By Susan Crockford | Polar Bear Science | November 28, 2021

I have put together a Arctic Sea Ice Ecosystem Teaching Guide for homeschooling Arctic sea ice ecology at the middle school level (grade 5-8; ages 10-13) meant to complement my two books, Polar Bear Facts & Myths and Walrus Facts & Myths and supplement your local school board curriculum.

You’ll find critical facts about the amazing creatures that inhabit the Arctic sea ice, links to trust-worthy online sites with additional information, suggested exercises, and links to fascinating videos like this one that aren’t filled with doom-mongering about the future.

The printable pdf booklet is free to download here. However, if you find it useful and can afford to do so, please consider a small donation (I suggest $6.00) at the ‘donate’ button).

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | Leave a comment

March of the Vaccine Dead Protest in Italy

By Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | November 29, 2021

This past weekend a group of protesters in Italy that appears to number at least in the hundreds, marched with signs containing pictures of loved ones who had died after receiving a COVID-19 shot.

This is from our Bitchute Channel.

British Cardiologist Confirms AHA Study that COVID-19 Shots Causing Heart Attacks

Last week we published the study that appeared in the American Heart Association publication “Circulation” that linked COVID-19 shots to increased heart attacks. See:

American Heart Association Journal Publishes Data that UK Medical Doctor Claims are “Proof” that COVID-19 Vaccines are “Murder”

Shortly after that study was published, British Cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra was interviewed and asked to comment on the study.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra has been featured multiple times over the years here at Health Impact News because he is one of the few doctors worldwide that is not afraid of exposing the fraud in the pharmaceutical industry, as he has exposed the false lipid theory of heart disease that claims cholesterol causes heart disease which then created a multi-billion dollar cholesterol-lowering drug business led by Pfizer.

Dr. Malhotra confirmed the results of the AHA study and shared that British authorities in the field of Cardiology confirmed to him that this is happening, that the COVID-19 shots are leading to increased heart attacks, but they are afraid to go public because they will lose their research funding from the Drug Companies.

He is calling for an immediate end to vaccine mandates.

This is from our Bitchute channel.

Meanwhile, so many athletes are suddenly collapsing due to heart problems that the corporate media can no longer deny it, but they are calling it a “coincidence.”

Here is a report from Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News.

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Everything Biden touches turns to ash

By Donald Forbes | TCW Defending Freedom | November 30, 2021

FORTUNE has turned against US Democrats, eroding the tyranny of progressives, the ideological minority who control the Biden administration and swathes of the country’s key institutions such as education, justice and corporate management.

Polls say Americans are changing their minds in droves about cashiering President Trump. A CBS/YouGov poll found a 46 per cent approval rating for Biden. None has him above 50 per cent and some put him below 40. It’s mainly Trump’s base who want him back but many are telling pollsters they want a return to his policies which reinvigorated the economy, kept immigration under control and projected an America-first foreign policy.

The very success of progressives – estimated at a mere 8 per cent of the electorate – in capturing so much of the private as well as the public sector has seeded a growing reaction against their excesses and arrogance.

Firstly there is disillusion with Biden. His ten months in office has been the opposite of his promised return to normality after the turbulence of the Trump years. He has even allowed anonymous White House advisers to trash his own vice president in an effort to force her out and appoint someone who can carry the floundering Biden till 2024. The move is unprecedented in modern times and no one knows what effect the humiliation of Kamala Harris would have on the powerful feminist movement which is normally pro-Democrat.

Secondly, parents across America are in open revolt against the education system, the long closure of schools during Covid by the teachers’ unions, who finance Democrats, and the secretive teaching of white self-loathing to their children.

Thirdly, there is anger over crime with murder rates and other violent offences rising fast through a combination of lax progressive prosecutors and the collapse in police manpower as a result of the defunding of police departments. Voters, when they get the chance, veto defunding.

Fourth is a mass withdrawal of belief in what the biased corporate media tell Americans. They spent four years smearing Donald Trump as a Kremlin stooge on the basis of a dossier they knew to be untrue, and now valiantly protect Biden, hiding his failures by refusing to write about them where possible.

Leading journalists, liberals as well as conservatives, who reject the hegemony of progressives in the MSM have been fired or have quit to join influential blogging sites such as Substack, where they have found an audience hungry for honest analysis and reporting.

The attack on Vice President Harris is as much an indictment of Biden as of her own ineptitude. He picked her as a ‘co-president’ in a Biden-Harris administration. Now he wants rid of her after less than a year in office.

Even if it works, her successor will have a Sisyphean task  restoring the credibility of an unpopular administration which has the reverse of the Midas touch: everything Biden touches turns to ash.

A majority of Americans oppose Biden’s opening of the southern border to all-comers and are fearful of the return of inflation running at an annual 6 per cent and rising, which they blame on the Democrats’ spending spree.

Pump prices in the US are low by European standards but cars and trucks guzzle fuel in quantities which equalise driving costs. Voters are blaming Biden’s rush to green the economy for its overall woes which include a supply chain disrupted by the long Covid lockdown.

Biden’s catastrophic flight from Afghanistan embarrassed Americans. But signs of the turn against progressivism really became obvious at the governorship election in pro-Democratic Virginia. Parents attacked school boards for teaching children they were white supremacists. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate, responded: ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they teach.’

Around that single sentence coalesced all the pent-up outrage of Americans against years of being told they needed to atone for their whiteness and guilt over long-dead slavery and to check their privilege. McAuliffe lost.

Progressive racial hysteria suffered another setback when a jury acquitted teenager Kyle Rittenhouse of murdering two white Antifa anarchists whom he shot during a riot in a Wisconsin town. The riot followed the police shooting of a black man which in progressive eyes justified violent protest. Some news outlets even reported that the men Rittenhouse killed were black. Biden himself called the boy a white supremacist. The silent majority saw a self-defence case which they said should never have been brought to court and acquittal as vindication of the traditional justice system.

Democrats won a victory in California when governor Gavin Newsom defeated a recall vote, but otherwise the history of 2021 has been one of constant setbacks for progressives and the leaden Biden administration.

Progressives are still powerful. But their waning influence was demonstrated when Democratic senators refused to vote for a Soviet-educated bank regulator who said the government should control all financial exchange and the bank account of every American as well. Finally, too much is too much.

November 29, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Democracy Demands Transparency

By Robert E. Wright | American Institute for Economic Research | November 29, 2021

Have you noticed that many Democrats today are not particularly democratic? Oh, they want everyone, and then some, to vote, but that is where their conception of democracy seems to end. President Biden wants to tamp down on conspiracy theories, but this more by surveilling the public than making the government transparent and accountable.

The banner of one of the party’s leading newspapers, the Washington Post, has asserted that since 2017 that “democracy dies in darkness.” But another of its rags, the New York Times, delayed a story about the Kenosha riots thought troublesome for Democratic Party candidates until after the 2020 election.

What are they going to write when secessionist movements pick up even more momentum? According to a 2018 Rasmussen study, almost two-in-five Democrats thought civil war was likely within the next five years, i.e., by 2023. That was partly due to hatred/distrust of then-president Donald Trump but also an indication that Democrats are more likely to try to use force to keep a disintegrating nation together. Their paternalistic view of the world compels them to reject federalism in favor of centralized power. You’ll own nothing and accept novel medical treatments and like it, or else.

The key to preventing the further disintegration of our governance is access to information, not voting per se. Some people proudly don “I Voted” stickers and buttons. That’s swell, but why did those folks vote as they did? How can Americans discern who to vote for if they do not know who made which decisions, when they made them, and on what basis? Such information has become extremely difficult to obtain without the help of costly lawsuits, like one in Missouri that recently revealed that lawmakers had unconstitutionally ceded power to unelected government administrators.

Similarly, the Fifth Circuit federal court reviewing the Biden-OSHA workplace Covid vaccination mandate could not be cancelled or shouted down, so it easily demolished all the pretexts for the mandate. If the mandated medical treatment (which can be called a “vaccine” only because of a change in the CDC’s definition of that term) is effective, then the only people at risk are the unvaccinated. If it is ineffective, then on what basis can it be mandated? If an emergency truly exists, why wasn’t the mandate put in place earlier and why did it not include small companies? How dangerous is Covid-19 for working people anyway? OSHA could not answer such questions, revealing the vacuity of the mandate.

Even after the court stayed implementation, however, Biden urged companies to comply anyway. Say what? That is not how the rule of law works. Again, it seems that Americans all need to contact a judge or governor to protect themselves from charges of misprision of felony, if not misprision of treason.

Does the Biden administration have pertinent information that it is not disclosing? Or is it covering something up? We may never know, at least those of us in middle age or older, as the FDA wants 55 years to process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to its Covid policies. That is not a typo! Nobody involved in this colossal Covid cluster wants to take the blame, and the only way to protect themselves from the flood of FOIA that I predicted last year is to stall, hem and haw, and obfuscate. Then stall some more.

How can Americans allow politicians to spend their money with almost no accountability or transparency? Details of the contracts between the government and major Covid “vaccine” manufacturers, unless leaked earlier, will be unavailable for at least five years. (Canadians and other alleged democrats face similar restrictions.) According to private sector auditors, the Pentagon cannot account for trillions of dollars. Americans will never know the details of that fraud because auditors could not finish their work due to the government’s “many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors.”

Similarly, manipulation of the FOIA request system stymies the investigation of past government mistakes at a wide range of bureaucracies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has long been infamous for its arbitrary decision-making processes.

While with help from another business historian I was able to use FOIA to obtain the information necessary to expose the SEC’s role in creating the conditions at the credit rating agencies that made virtually inevitable the global financial crisis of 2007-9, I cannot be certain that we found everything relevant to the SEC’s flawed decision-making process. The FOIA system was so slow and onerous that it appeared deliberately designed to dissuade researchers from investigating the SEC’s past.

Nevertheless, we wanted next to look at changes in the SEC’s so-called Town Hall Rule regarding stockholders’ right to use management proxy materials to submit proposals to fellow stockholders. After reviewing the extant secondary literature, which is thin and repetitive because it is based solely on the same few publicly-available sources, we decided to press on with an in-depth analysis. This time, though, our fee waiver request was denied on nonsense grounds and our information request was subjected to repeated demands for more specific information.

The demand for more specific information, though, presented us with a Catch-22 or chicken and egg problem. The SEC does not provide researchers with a finding aid, a document routinely created by archival staff to guide researchers to potentially relevant documents. (For an example of a simple one that I helped to create, see here.) Without a finding aid, researchers like me have no idea whether the documents they would like to see even exist, much less the details about them that the SEC’s FOIA request officers purport to need to see. See? FOIA reveals the government at its most inefficient, or systematically corrupt.

All extant historical information related to the U.S. federal government should be saved, catalogued, and/or made text searchable via the National Archives and Records Administration so that researchers can assess previous government actions and decisions lest the government, and nation, fall (again) into the trap of repeating past mistakes. Obviously, the subjects of researcher-led probes should not be in charge of the process of determining which documents are saved and/or made available to researchers. One would think government agencies would relish the opportunity of outside review to help burnish their reputations. Their mistakes are mostly those of administration, not (usually anyway) crimes against humanity. Yet, they jealously guard their turf from outside auditors and other researchers.

Given all that, I would like to take transparency and outside review one step further. People truly committed to the substance of democracy, instead of the charade of voting based on labels, or animal mascots, or vague slogans (ever notice how Make America Great Again and Build Back Better can seem to mean the same thing?), should insist on much greater levels of transparency.

Because the capture of FOIA proves that governments can bureaucratize and render ineffective any citizen information request system, it is high time that democrats begin to insist on the instantaneous release of all government information related to all domestic matters: video recordings of meetings, emails, letters, Slack or text messages, and other forms of electronic or personal communication between government officials, elected and bureaucratic, and between said officials and U.S. residents, including candidates for elected office. The federal government surveils millions of American citizens, so why cannot citizens compel the government to surveil itself, or at least make public all but the most sensitive of its own activities?

Advances in data mining aided by artificial intelligence will allow watchdogs to parse through all that data to expose inefficient, corrupt, or just plain dumb governance in real time. (Maybe they will even find specific instances where government programs work well.) Journalists and “fact checkers” will have access to primary sources of verified authenticity that they can link to to (dis)prove claims of “misinformation.” Then Americans can all vote with the aid of a full, impartial, verifiable analysis about who and what they are voting for, or against.

If complete and instantaneous disclosure proves impossible politically, the United States should return to a government with powers so limited that it need not be constantly audited, watched, or dreaded.

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019).

November 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Opposition candidate Xiomara Castro claims election victory in Honduras

Xiomara Castro of the opposition Liberty and Refoundation Party (Libre) and vice presidential candidate Salvador Nasrala after the closing of the general election, November 29, 2021. (Photo: Reuters)
Press TV – November 29, 2021

Leftist opposition candidate, Xiomara Castro, has claimed victory in Honduras’ presidential election, with preliminary results putting her in pole position against the ruling party candidate.

With 38% of the voting tally complete, the Liberty and Refundation Party (LIBRE) candidate is in the lead with over 53 percent votes. Her main rival, Nasry Asfura of the ruling conservative National Party, currently has nearly 34% of the vote, according to the National Electoral Council (CNE).

If Castro holds on to the lead, she would become the first female president of the Central American country, ending the conservative party’s 12-year stint in power.

“We win! We win!” Castro, 62, told cheering party supporters on Sunday evening. “Today the people have made justice. We have reversed authoritarianism.”

In a brief victory address, Castro vowed to form a government of “reconciliation,” and to strengthen direct democracy with referendums, adding that “there will be no more abuse of power in this country.”

“We can’t stay home. This is our moment. This is the moment to kick out the dictatorship,” said Castro, who is making third bid at the presidency. She is the wife of former President Manuel Zelaya, whose government was toppled by a civilian-military alliance in 2009.

The outgoing President, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was accused by a US court of having ties to powerful drug trafficking gangs. However, he has denied the allegations.

Hernandez has faced stiff opposition in Honduras since he claimed a second term in a highly-divisive election at the end of 2017, which sparked widespread protests after both sides declared victory.

Unlike Hernandez, who was a conservative US ally, Castro has said that she would have diplomatic relations with China.

According to the electoral council, the voting saw a historic turnout of more than 68 percent.

The election is the latest political flashpoint in Central America, a major source of growing US-bound migrants fleeing chronic poverty, unemployment and persecution.

The spiraling crisis of hunger and homelessness in Honduras has placed it among the world’s most violent countries.

Alongside the presidency, the country’s 128-member Congress, and officials for some 300 local governments, are also being voted in these elections.

November 29, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Sinister seizing of the unjabbed Aborigines

By Paul Collits | TCW Defending Freedom | November 29, 2021

THE Northern Territory of Australia often produces a vague sense of unease due to its climate, desert landscape, remoteness and isolation. You wouldn’t venture far off the main highways. The Territory is also a focal point for the culture wars in view of its large indigenous population, who generally live in remote communities in often abhorrent circumstances. Despite two centuries of policy failure there has been little evidence of new thinking in the centres of power. And, given the poor health generally– putting it very mildly – of the resident Aborigines, and their seeming caution in taking the Covid jab, it is a powder keg.

Now a story has emerged that links the two issues of Aboriginal affairs and Covid elimination. It is not pretty, and it comes while Europe is awash with Covid developments that are, not to put too fine a point on it, redolent of the Third Reich. Jonathan Sumption has touched on these ‘dangerous precedents’ as the ‘first symptom of totalitarianism’:

‘Across Europe, basic norms of civilised society are giving way to panic. The unvaccinated are being excluded from an ever-wider range of basic rights. Austria has criminalised them. Italy has stopped them doing their jobs. The Dutch police have fired on anti-lockdown demonstrators, seriously injuring some of them. We are witnessing the ultimate folly of frightened politicians who cannot accept that they are impotent in the face of some natural phenomena.

‘If lockdowns, forced closures of businesses and other brutal countermeasures work, then why are these countries on their fifth wave of the pandemic and their third or fourth lockdown? How long must this go on before we recognise that these measures simply push infections into the period after they are lifted?’ 

There is a broad sense that something is about to give. So, not a good week to be caught shipping the unvaccinated off to a Covid camp down under.

This is a story delivered not just by the fringe media but by the Territory’s Chief Minister, Michael Gunner.

After nine new Covid-19 cases were identified in the community of Binjari, it was reported that the Australian army forcibly removed 38 residents said to be ‘close contacts’ to the Howard Springs quarantine camp in Darwin, which I wrote about in TCW Defending Freedom in September (Australia’s Covid concentration camps). Gunner said: ‘Residents of Binjari and [the nearby community of] Rockhole no longer have the five reasons to leave their homes,’ referring to Australia’s five allowable excuses to avoid lockdown (buying food and supplies, exercising for up to two hours, care or caregiving, work or education if it can’t be done from home, and to get vaccinated). He said it was ‘highly likely’ that more residents would be transferred to Howard Springs. 

This is a truly astonishing development, even by bizarre Covid policy standards. Very few cases have occurred on Gunner’s patch since March 2020 and the latest piece of policy overreach is in response merely to ‘close contacts’. We do not yet know whether any of those removed are even sick.

Gunner’s now infamous rant against the anti-vaxxers is world class among elected politicians. His enforced removal of the unvaccinated to a holding camp is a global first, as far as I am aware. Australia continues to break new ground.

As a Labor man, Gunner is a partisan brother of the Premiers of Queensland, Western Australia and of Victoria. Daniel Andrews of Victoria needs little introduction. Not a lot more can be said of the Victorian Covid regime, it would seem, that hasn’t already been said and that could possibly add to the public’s understanding of the raving lunatic down south. Western Australia decided long ago in effect to secede and to impose border closures and lockdowns on less than a whim.

Of Queensland, it has recently been observed that there is no Covid crisis yet there are bizarre plans for imminent vaccine passports to be introduced in high summer (December 17, to be precise), following on from months of inexplicable, hard border closures.

Then there is the recent and chilling development of a contract being awarded to build Queensland’s second dedicated Covid quarantine camp next door to Brisbane Airport. One observer has wondered why this ‘facility’ would require double electric fencing, and whether its purposes might one day include accommodation for the removed-and-unvaccinated as well as for incoming travellers slated for more routine and short-term stays.

Also in the recent news is the descent upon the far north outback Queensland town of Charter Towers by the military police, who are now apparently stopping travellers and locals and demanding their papers. 

The alt-news reports that the Australian Army, with no published explanation, is booking out hotel chains for the summer on the Gold Coast. (This story has no independent corroboration to date.)

It was then of little surprise that the head of the Australian Medical Association in Queensland had this to say: ‘Life will be miserable without being vaccinated. You won’t be able to hide. There will be no employment. We will be tracking you. You won’t be able to go anywhere.’ 

Can anyone see a pattern emerging here?

But back to the Northern Territory and its current travails. Just like the unvaccinated Queenslanders, the First Australians in the Territory have no place to hide, however remote they might be.

There is no confirmation yet of whether any force accompanied the removal of unvaccinated First Australians from the two communities, but a Darwin Aboriginal elder has shared her distress. Judy Mills said on a video that Northern Territory Aborigines are being dragged out of their communities by the army and police, taken to health centres and forcibly inoculated.

She called Michael Gunner a ‘coward who is deceiving and killing our people’ and accused the administration of a genocide of ‘blackfellas’. 

In another video posted on social media, a community member said there were reports of police rounding people up, taking them to a clinic and forcibly vaccinating them; food supplies were being withheld from families and Territory child welfare services were ‘waiting like vultures’ to grab children. She said the government had taken control of communications from these remote communities and it was difficult to confirm information. ‘There’s a state of emergency here. I’m putting out a cry for help to the world,’ she said.

These are incendiary claims. To call this a brazen move by the Northern Territory Government would be to understate considerably the utter gall of the latest push. Messing with Territory Aborigines is normally a no-go area, with every move on the part of politicians needing to be backed by visible community buy-in, painstakingly sought and obtained. That this can be done – with, apparently, not only the knowledge of our perpetually slithering Prime Minister but also with his blessing and, indeed, his resources – is a measure of how far we in Australia have travelled down the road towards totalitarian control.

And totalitarian control that has, by and large, received a pass from the citizenry. There is, now, precious little second-guessing of the political class and its more rampant actions in relation to the virus by that middle go-along-to-get-along group that sits between the rabid Covid class and we-the-non-conforming Covid dissidents and outcasts. This is the group, probably quite substantial, that was unkindly but not inaccurately described by a retired Federal Court Judge as being satisfied so long as they have ‘Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate’. Concern for the rights of fellow Australians, now including indigenous fellow Australians, is not likely to be a priority.

It would be interesting to see the reactions of white Australians, especially those on the Left who are forever championing the interest of remote communities. I say ‘would’ as I am yet to find this story even mentioned in the Australian mainstream media.

Given that indigenous affairs are a core issue in the culture wars and an obsession in the Left-of-centre media, the absence of comment to date is both noteworthy and odd. I am guessing they just don’t know what to think or to say about this. Many, no doubt, would be (quietly) cheering if the Caucasian unvaccinated were marched off for re-education and solitude, a ‘safe’ distance from the vaccinated. No one has quite said it in public, yet.

One might even term this awful affair the Covid Stolen Generation, a term that will have deep resonance for those with an interest in the recent history of the indigenous people of Australia. It all takes us right back to Central Europe and the Auschwitz meme. Lord Sumption is correct. These are, indeed, highly dangerous times.

The writer is in Australia

November 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

The English data on vaccines and mortality, revisited

By Alex Berenson | November 28, 2021

Last Saturday morning I posted a short post with a very simple chart – two lines in all.

One line tracked the number of weekly deaths per 100,000 vaccinated people aged 10-59 in England. The other tracked the number of deaths per 100,000 unvaccinated people in England. The chart showed that vaccinated people in this age group were dying overall at a higher rate than unvaccinated people.

I’m never exactly sure which posts will “land” – gain traction and go viral. This chart landed. Hard. Someone wrote me that it broke the Internet. It didn’t break the Internet, only Kim Kardashian’s ass can break the Internet, but it has rocketed around ever since. It has been seen over 800,000 times on this page alone and many millions more in screenshots and Twitter posts elsewhere.

Clearly, the reason the chart has gained so much attention is that it quickly and simply provides a way for people who are concerned about the vaccines to provide apparent visual proof that they are increasing all-cause mortality – overall death rates.

The chart has also engendered a fierce backlash from the usual fact-checkers and vaccine fanatics who say it is – wait for it – “misinformation.” (To be clear, I didn’t actually create the chart, but I checked the underlying British government report to make sure it accurately represents the report’s figures. It does, as everyone agrees.)

The “fact-checkers” have two primary complaints about the chart.

The first is that the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups are not exactly the same. A smaller percentage of teenagers than fifty-somethings are vaccinated, so the unvaccinated group overall skews somewhat younger than the older group. Since death rates rise with age, that difference may be enough to explain the gap between the two groups.

The second is that overall death rates in people over 60 (who are not covered in the chart) are much higher than those in the 10-59 range and appear to be lower in the vaccinated over the unvaccinated.

Another way to look at the objections: the first is that the chart doesn’t say what it seems to say, because of a hidden flaw in the data. The second is that it would be basically meaningless even if it did, because other more robust datasets contradict it.

—

Part of being on Team Reality is acknowledging reality, and acknowledging when your critics have a factually correct objection. So I want to acknowledge that, like the chart itself, these objections BOTH are valid and factually accurate, viewed individually.

What the fact-checkers and vaccine fanatics appear incapable of understanding is that the two objections effectively cancel each other out – and do nothing to address concerns over the long-term failure of Covid vaccines or their impact on all-cause mortality.

These folks think they are sophisticated thinkers who have blown up apparent evidence that the vaccines are dangerous. In fact, just as they have for the last several months, they are telling themselves what they want to hear instead of listening to what the data are saying – and, increasingly, shouting.

—

They have identified and latched on to ONE complication of using population-level data to judge vaccine effectiveness – the fact that differing rates of uptake by age may make the Covid vaccines seem less effective than they are.

But they – deliberately or out of ignorance – are ignoring another one, one that makes the vaccines seem MORE effective than they are.

The second problem is not a secret to epidemiologists.

It has been quietly discussed for flu vaccines for more than a decade, and I have written about it repeatedly in the last year. The problem is this: the popular belief that sick people are more likely to be vaccinated than healthy people is entirely wrong.

People who receive vaccines are healthier overall than those who do not. They care more about avoiding sickness, and they have the time and energy and money to find their way to a vaccination site. They are not healthier because they get vaccines; they get vaccines because they are healthier.

Older people who receive flu vaccines die – of both the flu and all causes – at much lower rates than unvaccinated people after they receive flu shots. But they also die at much lower rates BEFORE they receive the vaccines. The seminal study demonstrating this relationship is now more than 15 years old; it was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in April 2006.

“The reductions in risk before influenza season indicate preferential receipt of vaccine by relatively healthy seniors,” the authors wrote.

This paradox helps explain why a huge study of flu vaccines in the United Kingdom showed that increasing vaccination levels in older people did not reduce the number of hospitalizations or deaths from the flu.

The researchers took advantage of the fact that Britain prioritizes people 65 and older for vaccinations and that people are much more likely to get a shot when they are 65 or 66 than 64 or 63. Vaccination levels rose sharply as people turned 65, but the health of the people who received the shots did not improve.

(SOURCE: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-3075?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed)

The same pattern is visible in the United States, where a massive increase in the number of flu vaccines in the last generation has made no apparent difference in the number of flu deaths. In fact, in 2005, researchers noted that although vaccinations had risen from 20 percent of elderly people in 1980 to 65 percent in 2001, “unexpectedly, estimates of influenza-related mortality in this age group also increased [emphasis added] during this period.”

(SOURCE: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15710788/)

In other words, influenza vaccines only seem to work. Any observational estimate that compares death rates in people who have gotten shots to those who have not will be inherently untrustworthy, no matter how hard researchers try to correct for the healthy recipient bias.

—

What is true for flu vaccines appears to be even more true for Covid vaccines.

The relentless vaccination push means that in many countries, more than 90 percent of elderly people are vaccinated. The split is even more stark in countries like England, where 2.44 million people 80 and over have been fully vaccinated, compared to 69,000 who are unvaccinated (and 24,000 who have received the first dose but not the second).

Look at those numbers again.

2,440,000 people in England 80 and over vaccinated. Almost 97 percent of the total number of elderly people.

69,000 80 and over unvaccinated. Less than 3 percent.

These two groups cannot remotely be compared.

How do they differ? I can’t find any hard data, but we know that at least a fraction of the elderly unvaccinated are too ill to be vaccinated. Some are in hospice care. Norway recommended against giving people in hospice the Covid vaccine in January following deaths in terminally ill patients.

A paper published online in March in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management noted that “communication from hospice organizations has primarily emphasized the vaccination of hospice staff without the same priority mention for patients” and called for hospices to do more to offer vaccines to patients.

The paper’s title was even starker:

A Shot at Inclusion: Reconsidering Categorical Exclusion of Hospice Patients from COVID Vaccine Allocation.

How many Covid deaths in unvaccinated elderly people are actually “with Covid” deaths in people dying in hospice? Again, we don’t know. But what we know is that even a small number of those deaths will hopelessly bias the relative risk ratio for unvaccinated to vaccinated Covid deaths, because the overall number of unvaccinated people is so small.

As of September, about 30 to 35 unvaccinated English people 80 and over died of or with Covid each week, compared to about 250 fully vaccinated people a week.

So trying to measure vaccine effectiveness by looking at the relative risks of the vaccinated and unvaccinated elderly is impossible. But that is exactly what the health authorities and their servants in the media do when they put out figures that seem to show the risk of death from Covid is much lower in elderly people who have been vaccinated.

They are lying with truthful data, and they (some of them, anyway, though probably not the reporters who are writing the stories) are smart enough to know exactly what they’re doing.

—

Meanwhile, they are ignoring a much more important indicator – trends in both Covid and all-cause mortality are very much going the wrong way in the vaccinated elderly population.

In the last four weeks for which British data are available, roughly coinciding with September, about 1,000 vaccinated English people 80 and over died from Covid and 16,000 from all causes.

Compare those numbers to four weeks in May, when fewer than 70 vaccinated English people 80 and over died from Covid and 13,000 from all causes.

Put another way, overall deaths rose more than 20 percent in the vaccinated elderly from May to September, and Covid deaths 15-fold. And this was not because many more people were vaccinated. The number of vaccinated elderly people rose only about 4 percent from May to September.

Compare that to the mortality trends in unvaccinated English people 80 and over.

About 800 died of all causes in four weeks in May (at the time, there were about 77,000 unvaccinated elderly people, compared to 69,000 in September). Fewer than 20 of those died of Covid.

In September, about 140 unvaccinated elderly people died of Covid – a eight-fold increase compared to the 15-fold increase in the vaccinated.

(All data from the British government:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland

See tables 3 and 4 in downloaded file.)

But that difference isn’t the striking part.

The striking part is that only 700 unvaccinated elderly English people died OF ALL CAUSES in those four weeks in September – FEWER than back in May. (The trend roughly tracked the overall drop in the elderly unvaccinated population. It appears that about 1 percent of those folks die a month, at least in warmer months.)

This trend is stunning for two reasons.

First, the fact that 100 more unvaccinated elderly people (supposedly) died of Covid in September yet 100 fewer of them died overall strongly suggests that many of those reported deaths are actually with and not from Covid.

Second, per capita all-cause mortality – not just Covid mortality, all-cause mortality – rose close to 20 percent in the very large group of the vaccinated elderly. Some of those extra deaths came from Covid. But most did not.

And though death rates are still somewhat higher in the unvaccinated – as they should be, given the fact that vaccine recipients are healthier – but that fact is far less relevant than the notable rise in the vaccinated.

What’s behind the rise in those deaths in the vaccinated elderly? We don’t know. But we’d better find out. Especially since we are now stuffing boosters into their arms.

—

All of this is somewhat complicated, I’ll admit. The data has lots of confounders and continues to evolve. And trying to explain relative changes in all-cause mortality in the context of healthy vaccine recipient bias using papers about flu vaccine – well, it’s not a soundbite.

Which comes back to the chart from last week.

The chart IS a soundbite.

It is a simple and factually accurate way to say:

Something is wrong. The promises that the health authorities have made over the last 12 months about the vaccines are not coming true. Despite near-complete levels of adult vaccination in Europe, many countries are seeing skyrocketing Covid cases and deaths. And worst of all, all-cause non-Covid mortality is running well above normal in country after country.

Not everyone is going to wade through this article. But everyone can read that chart from last week. It’s not perfect, but it uses real data to raise a crucial issue.

That’s why it landed. And that’s why the vaccine fanatics hate it so much.

November 29, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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