The Illusion of Scandal: How Washington is Attempting to Dismiss $20 Million as an Illusion
By Jonathan Turley | August 10, 2023
I previously wrote a column marveling at the success of the Bidens in pulling off one of the neatest tricks in political history. I analogized it to how Houdini used to make his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear on a stage in front of a live audience. The media and political establishment is now striving to top that performance by declaring $20 million in payments to Biden family members as an “illusion” of influence. At the heart of this scandal is the BFF, the Biden Family Fund.
Here is the column:
This week, President Joe Biden responded to calls for greater access to the media with a blockbuster interview with . . . the Weather Channel.
The interview immediately prompted critics to speculate that the president wanted to continue to talk about the weather — the same claim made after the disclosure of his participation in various dinners with his son’s foreign associates.
As the number of these dinners, meetings and outings increase, Joe Biden appears to have covered more meteorological subjects than Al Roker.
The problem is that conditions are worsening in Washington.
This week, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer released a third report on the ongoing investigations into the Biden corruption scandal.
The latest bank records indicate the Biden family has received more than $20 million, including from corrupt Kazakh figures.
Some of this money provided Hunter Biden with extravagant toys. On April 22, 2014, Kazakh oligarch Kenes Rakishev wired $142,300 to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai bank account.
That account then shows the exact same amount being wired to a New Jersey car dealership for a Fisker sports car for Hunter. Finding the Fisker unsuitable, Hunter traded it in for a Porsche.
Notably, these payments often coincided with dinners and meetings with Joe Biden.
Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, the widow of Moscow ex-Mayor Yury Luzhkov, wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton Feb. 14, 2014.
She later attended a dinner with Joe and Hunter Biden at Washington, DC, hotspot Café Milano.
For weeks, Joe Biden’s prior claims have been collapsing as his allies in the media and Congress struggle for an alternative spin on these new disclosures.
The president’s denials of any knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings finally have been exposed as a lie.
Even the Washington Post has acknowledged Biden lied when he insisted that Hunter never made any money in China.
It was always a boldfaced falsehood (and a confusing claim from a man who insisted that he had no knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings).
But the testimony of associate Devon Archer and new bank records forced the paper and others to recognize the falsehood.
There is also the confirmation that Biden’s long denials that he attended key dinners with Hunter’s business associates were false.
Most notably, the media are grudgingly admitting that Hunter was openly selling influence peddling and access to his father as part of what Archer called “selling the brand.”
The final line of defense is now that Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe Biden but it was an “illusion.” The reason, they claim, is there is no evidence of direct payments to Joe and Jill Biden.
There is, of course, nothing “illusionary” about tens of millions moving to Hunter and other family members.
But political spins are often built on illusions. The latest is that Joe Biden only benefits from these payments if they were directly deposited in his accounts.
For a family that Hunter explained was “the best” at this type of dealing, it is absurd to expect a deposit slip from a corrupt Ukrainian official to the account of Joe and Jill Biden, one of the most vulnerable accounts in the world to review and monitoring.
These claims, moreover, ignore emails discussing Hunter’s and his father’s use of joint accounts to pay for expenses, including how one account was used to pay Joe’s taxes. There is also Hunter’s complaint that he was using half of his earnings to support his father. Indeed, one trusted FBI informant said that, in planning a bribe, one foreign figure was told to avoid direct payments to Joe Biden. Today, that is as amateurish as an envelope of cash and the Bidens have been in the business of influence peddling for decades.
Responding to the new evidence, Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump led the charge in asking: Where’s the bribe?
In other words, as long as Hunter got the luxury car, Joe didn’t benefit or receive a bribe.
(Notably, Bump did not have the same high standards when he pushed the false claim over a photo op in Lafayette Park and later refused to concede with the rest of the media on the lack of Russian collusion with Donald Trump.)
Not even millions to Biden children and grandchildren would seem to satisfy Bump as an inducement for the then-vice president.
Yet the greatest illusion is the claim Joe Biden would only be motivated by a direct payment to one of his accounts.
Biden clearly benefited from millions going to the Biden Family Fund (BFF). Even grandchildren received some of the transfers funneled through a labyrinth of accounts.
Joe Biden is 80 years old. Despite holding only government jobs in his career, he is worth an estimated $8 million.
Forbes reported he earned $17.3 million over the four years he was out of office. He will never spend his fortune. Any additional money would have to pass to his descendants.
For most wealthy people in their final years, the challenge is not raising more money but getting that money to your children without heavy taxes or delays.
This money was going to his BFF. That is a benefit and probably of greater value to a man of Joe Biden’s age and wealth.
None of this has stopped politicians, press and pundits from insisting that absent a direct payment to the president’s account, there is no corruption or crime.
After all, $20 million going to a president’s family is like complaining about the weather in Washington.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
‘So Many Pitfalls’: Feds Push School-Based Health Centers as Critics Sound Alarm Over Lack of Parental Consent
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 9, 2023
The recent push by the U.S. federal government to rapidly expand the use of school-based health centers (SBHCs) across the country has some critics concerned children will receive, or be pressured into receiving, unnecessary or unwanted medical interventions — including vaccines — without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Georgia attorney Nicole Johnson, co-director of Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice and a consultant to the Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) legal team, told The Defender :
“It’s scary because these health centers sound really good. In some of the rural and poor communities especially, this is going to seem like a really good way for children to get this care.
“And while there may be some conveniences, there are so many concerns with allowing medical exams and treatments at school. Parents need to be involved in all medical decisions and I fear they are being left out of the equation.”
SBHCs are intended to provide high-quality healthcare to kids by offering “primary care, mental health care, and other health services in schools,” particularly in underserved communities.
This includes services “to prevent disease, disability, and other health conditions or their progression” such as “immunizations” and “well-child care.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Community Preventive Services Task Force, SBHCs can improve educational and health outcomes.
The CDC also considers SBHCs as integral to its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model because they provide health services and mental health counseling.
But critics like Johnson worry that though there may be benefits to SBHCs, there are also downsides — including lack of regulation of the centers and the fact that parents may not be aware of the broad range of medical and behavioral services being provided in their children’s schools.
SBHCs have been linked to higher human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates, according to a 2022 report by Harvard University’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and the University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The report — written expressly to “address vaccine hesitancy” — concluded: “These results suggest SBHCs create a considerable opportunity … to implement successful school based HPV vaccination programs.”
Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, is one of the funders of the School-Based Health Alliance, a large networking organization that “works on policy, standards, data, and training issues” regarding SBHCs.
Federal, state authorities pour taxpayer money into school-based health centers
The idea of running full-service health centers in public schools has been around for more than two decades, but events in 2022 caused SBHCs to catch on like wildfire.
Congress and President Joe Biden in June 2022 passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which allowed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award $50 million in grants to states “for the purpose of implementing, enhancing, or expanding the provision” of healthcare assistance through SBHCs using Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
The legislation charged the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with expanding access to Medicaid healthcare services — including behavioral health services — in schools, and reducing the administrative burden for states and schools.
A CMS spokesperson told The Defender that Medicaid and CHIP now can provide reimbursement for services given in SBHCs for children and youth who are covered by those programs.
Additionally, in May 2022 HHS awarded $25 million in grants to 125 SBHCs “to improve and strengthen access to school-based health services in communities across the country.”
State public officials also are dedicating funds to expand SBHCs. For instance, the governor of Georgia in fall 2022 announced an investment of $125 million to expand school-based health services to rural communities in Georgia.
Pediatricians can ‘partner’ with schools
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports SBHCs and said in a policy statement that pediatricians may act as “sponsors” by partnering with a school to establish the SBHC as an extension of their practice or by supervising the care given at a SBHC.
“Sponsors also include local hospitals that can provide prearranged after-hours and school vacation coverage and financial support for SBHCs,” the AAP said.
The Defender reached out to the AAP statement’s lead authors for comments on how parental consent is handled in SBHCs, but they did not respond by our publication deadline.
SBHCs also have the support of the School-Based Health Alliance. In addition to funding from Merck, the alliance receives financial support from HHS’ Health Resources & Services Administration.
Documents obtained in June by CHD revealed that the HHS gave $4.7 million to research headed by a Merck consultant that focused on developing “The Announcement Approach Training,” where providers simply “announce” a child will be receiving the HPV vaccine as part of a routine office visit, instead of discussing it with the family first.
The government-funded research also is testing whether financial incentives and peer pressure can “nudge” doctors to change how they talk to their patients in order to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
Meanwhile, a fierce battle is taking place in multiple states where some lawmakers are pushing legislation that would allow minors to receive treatments to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — including Merck’s HPV vaccine — without parental knowledge or consent.
‘So many pitfalls … so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions’
Justine Tanguay, an attorney with nearly 20 years of experience advocating for children in various areas of the law, told The Defender :
“Don’t be fooled! This year many schools will be sending home blanket consent-to-treat forms for parents to sign.
“Parents need to be aware that these forms are not the traditional authorization requests for the school nurse to give first-aid or to treat minor illnesses.”
Tanguay, CHD’s director of campaign and research, explained that the forms may give those who run the SBHC the legal authorization to provide “comprehensive healthcare.”
This could include — but may not be limited to — “the ability to provide preventative treatment, behavioral and mental health services, reproductive counseling, lab and prescription services, various medical screenings, immunizations and disease management,” Tanguay said.
Moreover, SBHC staff will have “direct access” to a minor child, Tanguay said, “as well as the ability to encourage a minor child to make personal healthcare decisions without the need to consult with and seek approval from a parent.”
“The opportunity to circumvent both parental rights and informed consent is ripe for abuse,” Tanguay warned.
Johnson agreed, saying, “There are just so many pitfalls here, so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions.”
Johnson shared with The Defender a consent form currently used in a school district north of Atlanta, Georgia.
The form says nothing about parents being notified before, during or after treatment. It reads:
“I hereby voluntarily give my consent for [my child] to receive health services with Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cumming Elementary School.
“I further authorize any health care provider and professional staff working for the clinic to provide such medical tests, diagnoses, procedures, and treatments as are reasonably necessary or advisable for the medical evaluation and management of my child’s health care.”
The form does not clarify who determines what services are “reasonably necessary or advisable” and does not explain how parents will be involved in that process. It states:
“I understand that my signing this consent allows the health care provider and professional clinic staff of Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cummings Elementary Schools to provide comprehensive health services which includes physical and behavioral health services.”
Again, the form does not clarify what specifically falls into the category of “physical and behavioral health services” or how parents will be involved in the determination for what services their child may need.
“I think about my own kids when they were in school,” Johnson said, “how easily they could have been swayed to get a vaccine or a medical treatment just because an adult told them that they should.”
“It’s really dangerous to have all of these things offered to them without the parents even being aware,” she said. “A lot of kids — most kids — are compliant. They want to do what the adults are telling them to do.”
According to the CDC, a key component of its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, which includes SBHCs, is “family engagement.”
However, the agency’s 37-page document about family engagement mentions parental permission only once and does not discuss parental consent for medical treatment beyond the application of sunscreen during recess.
According to a CMS spokesperson, SBHCs “follow the same practices as any other medical center or Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provider … including parental consent requirements.”
The spokesperson did not go into detail on whether consent would be requested generally or for each specific medical treatment.
Where’s the regulatory oversight?
Tanguay pointed out that SBHCs exist without proper regulatory oversight.
According to Stand for Health Freedom, a nonprofit “dedicated to protecting informed consent in medical care,” SBHCs are “completely unregulated.”
For instance, it is presently unclear how HIPAA law (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and FERPA law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) will be applied to SBHCs and students’ health information.
Stand for Health Freedom also pointed out that although in-school clinics may relieve busy parents of the burden of taking their children to the doctor, “medical ethics do not allow physicians to treat minors without a parent or guardian present, which is why parents cannot simply drop their child off at the doctor’s office and come back later to collect them.”
Stand for Health Freedom said:
“Parents must engage politically and work with state health freedom leaders to ask lawmakers to either ban SBHCs in favor of the existing limited school-nurse model, or place guardrails on SBHCs to protect parental consent and involvement in their minor children’s medical care.”
Meanwhile, proponents of SBHCs, such as the School-Based Health Alliance, argue that SBHCs are a “powerful tool for achieving health equity among children and adolescents who unjustly experience disparities in outcomes simply because of their race, ethnicity, or family income.”
Johnson said she disliked being “so skeptical of something that may potentially benefit some people” but added, “as a parent, it is your job and your right to be a part of the decisions that affect the health and well-being of your child.”
Johnson said parents who experienced or witnessed vaccine injury would be particularly skeptical of putting medical decisions in the hands of government agencies, including schools.
“And the COVID response created even more skeptics,” she said, adding:
“It’s unfortunate that we have to approach this [SBHCs] with the thought, ‘How could this be abused?’ But that’s where we are.”
The Defender on Aug. 3 reached out to the School-Based Health Alliance to ask how parental consent in SBHCs is handled and what they’d like parents who may feel distrustful of the U.S. medical system to know about SBHCs. The alliance did not respond by our publication deadline.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Winter Cold, Darkness Kill, While Summer Heat And Sun Save Lives Data Clearly Show
Cold and stupid policies are the real killers, not heat
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | August 11, 2023
German data from Bestattungen.de (Funerals.de) show that far more people die from cold winter weather than they do from hot summer weather.
Lately in Germany there’s been a coordinated disinformation campaign by policymakers and the media. all aimed at getting people to believe that summer heat is the real killer. And so, during heat waves, governments should declare states of emergency and usher restrictions, which could entail cancelling large outdoor events like festivals and sports matches, driving bans and lockdowns.
It’s all about saving thousands of lives and ensuring your safety, they (falsely) claim! And never mind that the mean summer temperature in Germany is under a comparatively cool 20°C.
All the focus on the dangers of summertime warmth seems odd, especially when most of us look forward to this season the most and dread the horrible long winters, a time when people are forced to spend so much time confined inside.
Winter kills, summer saves lives
Today I came across a report from Bestattungen.de (Funerals.de), a site that of course would be familiar with the business and statistics of dying. Clearly cold winter temperatures are far more dangerous than warm summer temperatures, according to their data:
Image: Besttatungen.de (translated in the English).
As the chart shows, mortality is 9.7% above the mean in the dead of winter, February, and is 7.1% below the mean right after Germans have been exposed to 3 summer months of now “deadly heat”. In fact, all the mortal suffering begins to end only once the temperatures finally warm up in April. Of course the report isn’t so recent, but we can rest assured that the mortality behavior hasn’t changed that much.
The data also suggest how crucial Vitamin D is.
The data also suggests the power of vitamin D. Fully tanked up on this crucial nutrient, people are much more resistant to infections and disease well into the fall. By mid winter, once vitamin D levels become depleted, far more become prone to disease, many experts say. This is why so many advised taking vitamin D during the COVID “pandemic”.
The following table shows the ranking, from the most deadly month to the least deadly month:
Source: Bestattungen.de
Summer saves lives
Again, the bitter cold months of January and February are the real killers, while the summer months are the real life savers. It’s absolutely idiotic of policymakers to be focused and obsessed on summer heat plans. The only heat plan people need is: Get outside, take off your clothes and enjoy the hot weather! Shade and cold water is all you need to cool off.
According to Bestattungen.de:
The German Weather Service sees weather-related factors as the main reasons for the variance in mortality risk. Damp, cold air increases the risk of aggravating existing illnesses. Respiratory diseases in particular can become more severe in the winter months. Heart attacks can also be triggered by the weather.”
Other factors also include psychological aspects and the lack of daylight and its associated “winter depression” increased melatonin and reduced serotonin.
We need a “stupid-policy-protection plan”
We really need to ask ourselves and policymakers: Why is heating fuel being made so expensive when we know that it would save a lot more lives? Stupid government policy is what’s killing people, and not the life-saving German summers.
Wikipedia Suppresses Basketball Player’s Post-Vaccine Blood Clot Troubles
BY ROBERT KOGON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 10, 2023
In spring 2021, the American basketball player Brandon Goodwin, then of the Atlanta Hawks, developed severe fatigue and back pain, which would force him to miss that year’s NBA playoffs. Several months later, in September, Goodwin revealed in a Twitch stream that he had been diagnosed with blood clots and that his problems began in the immediate aftermath of being vaccinated against COVID-19.
“I was fine… until I took the vaccine,” Goodwin said. “I was fine… Yes, the vaccine ended my season, one thousand percent.”
Astonishingly, however, Brandon Goodwin’s post-vaccine troubles with blood clots have been entirely purged from his Wikipedia entry. The current version of his Wikipedia entry simply reads “Goodwin missed the 2021 NBA playoffs due to a respiratory condition”, without any source being given.
It was in fact his employer, the Atlanta Hawks, that had announced in May that Goodwin would miss the playoffs due to a “minor” respiratory condition, as reported by the Associated Press. In his September 29th Twitch stream, however, Goodwin revealed not only that he had in fact been suffering from post-vaccine blood clots, but also that a Hawks official called him while in the hospital and told him, “Don’t say anything about it, don’t tell nobody”.
For an account of the episode, see Megan Redshaw’s article at Children’s Health Defence. The Twitch stream is no longer available, but relevant excerpts have been preserved by the Daily Caller.
Despite back-and-forth among Wikipedia editors about whether blood clots should be described as a ‘known’, ‘rare’ or ‘common’ side effect of COVID-19 vaccines, as of February 26th 2022, Goodwin’s Wikipedia entry still included the following passage:
On October 3rd 2021, with his season having ended early, Goodwin reported severe fatigue coupled with extreme back pain, and a formal diagnosis of blood clots followed. Blood clots is a common side-effect connected to COVID-19 vaccination. Goodwin has made public he had received a vaccination shot just prior to his blood clot diagnosis.
By two days later, there was no longer any mention of his blood clots or the vaccine.
A Wikipedia editor attempted to justify an earlier deletion of reference to Goodwin’s post-vaccine blood clots by noting that Goodwin had “recanted” his claims. The term is well chosen.
By the time of his Twitch stream, Goodwin had been let go by the Atlanta Hawks. In an apparent attempt to get back in the good graces of the NBA, on October 14th – the very day he signed a non-guaranteed contract with the New York Knicks and just before the start of the NBA season – Goodwin posted an exculpatory tweet insisting:
I don’t have a story. That wasn’t something I wanted to get out there. I got sick. Maybe it was the vaccine maybe it was Covid [I don’t know] I’m not a expert. But I’m fine, and I’m healthy and about to play.
It was presumably also around this time that Goodwin made his Twitch stream private. He is presently out of the league.
Have other NBA players likewise been put under pressure to cover up adverse reactions to a COVID-19 vaccine? Well, on the same day that Brandon Goodwin posted his exculpatory tweet, Brooklyn Nets centre Nic Claxton revealed after a pre-season game that he was feeling unwell with what the New York Post would later call a “mystery illness“. Claxton would not play again for the next month-and-a-half.
News reports described symptoms of fatigue reminiscent of the problems Goodwin was having earlier in the year. On October 31st, the Brooklyn Nets announced that Claxton was suffering from an otherwise unspecified “non-Covid-related illness”.
“Nic is going to be out a little bit,” then Net coach Steve Nash explained:
He’s not feeling well. Nothing to be concerned with but I don’t think he’s going to be back in the next week or 10 days. Just an illness, but it’s nothing major or nothing we’re overly concerned with. It’s just a little more severe illness than we thought initially and I think he’ll miss a little more time.
Mysterious indeed. “Don’t say anything about it, don’t tell nobody”?
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter.
FBI Memo Linking Catholic Faith to ‘Extremists’ Drafted by Several Offices – GOP Lawmakers
By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 10.08.2023
House GOP lawmakers have blasted the FBI director for “inconsistencies” in his testimony after he claimed that a report from the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office identifying “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” as a potential source of “violent extremism” was an isolated incident. They say that new evidence suggests otherwise.
In a Wednesday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray that was published by US media, US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), who chairs the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, requested a slew of bureau documents related to communications between FBI field offices in Richmond, Virginia; Portland, Oregon; and Los Angeles, California.
“From information recently produced to the Committee, we now know that the FBI relied on information from around the country – including a liaison contact in the FBI’s Portland Field Office and reporting from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office – to develop its assessment,” they wrote.
“This new information suggests that the FBI’s use of its law enforcement capabilities to intrude on American’s First Amendment rights is more widespread than initially suspected and reveals inconsistencies with your previous testimony before the Committee,” they lawmakers said. “Given this startling new information, we write to request additional information to advance our oversight.”
They noted that in his testimony before the committee last month, Wray claimed that a January 2023 memo on the potential of right-wing activists motivated by “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” to pose a violent threat to certain minority groups had been the sole product of the field office in Richmond, the Virginia state capital.
The memo, which was leaked to the press in February, said the office had received a tip from a local informant leading them to believe in an “increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology.” This, they said, was especially associated with the sect of Catholics who rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and with “white supremacist ideology.”
This threat, they said, “presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development.”
Notably, the unredacted parts of the document do not contain the words “potential terrorists,” as reported in some parts of the American press.
In response to the lawmakers’ letter, the FBI gave a statement to US media on Wednesday doubling down on Wray’s testimony, saying the lawmakers had become confused by similar terminologies used by multiple FBI field offices.
“Director Wray’s testimony on this matter has been accurate and consistent. While the document referred to information from other field office investigations of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist (RMVE) subjects, that does not change the fact the product was produced by a single office,” the statement said.
“To be clear, the document was a domain perspective which is an intelligence product designed to address potential threats in a particular area – in this case, the Richmond Field Office’s area of responsibility,” the bureau continued. “Because the product failed to meet FBI standards, it was quickly removed from all FBI systems and a review was launched to determine how it was produced in the first place.”
The situation has revived anger at the FBI for its wiretapping activities and profiling of religious groups, for which the bureau became notorious after spying on American Muslims in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
However, conservatives especially have accused the FBI of political bias for years, pointing to its investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the months preceding the 2016 presidential election and its August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to serve a search and seizure warrant for hundreds of classified files Trump did not return to the National Archives after leaving office. The former president is facing dozens of criminal charges related to alleged mishandling of the secret files.
Claims that ‘Global Boiling’ Led to “Shocking” Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet are Nonsense
The Ice Sheet is Currently Bigger Than Normal
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 8, 2023
The new era of ‘global boiling’ has brought a return of the much loved climate scare story featuring the imminent demise of the Greenland ice sheet. The Daily Mail recently ran a headline noting the ‘Impact of Global Boiling‘, saying it has “shocking” photos showing how much the ice sheet has melted during the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth”. Snow melt is said to be higher than the 1981-2010 average.
But, alas, those who strive for accuracy in these matters are likely to quibble. The Earth is not “boiling” – that is the unhinged raving of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – the claim about July comes from a computer model, while “ever” refers to data of varying quality going back barely 150 years. Furthermore, the surface balance of ice on the Greenland ice sheet is higher than the 1981-2010 average, and could improve on last’s year performance, when there was little or no loss of the surface mass after the brief summer melting season.
If the Mail is “shocked” by how much the Greenland ice sheet has melted this year, it probably didn’t consult the polar portal site run by Danish meteorologists, which updates an accurate record on a daily basis. Both graphs above show the effect of a cold June where the ice loss was considerably lower than the previous year. Warmer weather arrived from the south in late June in time for the peak summer melt season.
As the second graph shows, the accumulation of surface ice on Greenland is more than the 1981-2010 average, and a big improvement on a decade ago. But as the Daily Sceptic noted recently, the current improvement can be seen in an even better light. A number of scientific institutions still use a decadal 1981-2010 average for comparison purposes, despite data to 2020 being available. The cynical might note that the ice sheet lost just 51 gigatonnes a year in the 1980s, compared to an annual loss of 244 gts in the 2010s. Updating the average figure would greatly amplify the recent, and continuing, recovery in the surface ice mass.
The ”shocking” before and after photos revealing how snow melts in the summer, even in Greenland, were taken by NASA satellites over the Frederikshab Glacier running down to the warmer south-west coast. The information and photos came from a NASA blog aimed at educators headed ‘Wasting Away (Again) in Greenland‘. More than halfway through the 2023 melting season, reports NASA, “Greenland has seen a substantial transformation of its snow cover”. This line – if it’s summer in Greenland, the snow melts – is readily taken up by the Mail. “According to scientists, snow falls on the Greenland ice sheet every winter… but experts say hotter summer temperatures are reducing the amount of snow cover.” The NASA blog is heavily quoted: “More than halfway through the 2023 melting season, Greenland has seen a substantial transformation of its snow cover. … Changes are the result of the increasing warmth of summer weather that took hold across the region in late June.”
Hold the front page – snow melts during the summer in Greenland, not many dead.
It is not difficult to find areas of rock in Greenland, especially in the south-west where most of the population of 55,000 live. The climate in this area is characterised as ‘low Arctic’ and temperatures are well above freezing in the warmest months. Ice in the Arctic waxes and wanes on a cyclical basis, while the long-term Greenland temperature is fairly stable. At a time when the planet has seen a gentle period of warming over the last 100 years, Greenland even held back slightly on the general trend. The five-year moving average of -18.57°C in 1929 compares with a measurement in 2021 of –17.96°C. The largest boost, as with other areas of the world, occurred in a short period in the 1980s and 90s, as the World Bank graph below shows. Since that time, as elsewhere, the rate of warming has considerably declined.
The Greenland ice sheet is the alarmist scare story that keeps on giving because water flowing off the land can increase sea levels. The Mail notes that scientists have already warned this year that the Greenland ice sheet is the “hottest it has ever been” and will cause global sea levels to rise by 20 inches by 2100 if it keeps warming at the same pace. In fact this information is linked to an earlier article that referenced a science paper quoting temperatures between 2000-2011. The next paragraph of the current story reports a rise of four feet or 1.2 metres by 2300, “even if we meet the 2015 Paris climate goals, scientists have warned”. Scientists might “warn”, but all these opinions of greatly increased sea level rises are produced by climate models, often assuming outlandish future scenarios.
Again, as we have noted in numerous articles, sea level rises are notoriously difficult to calculate since land rises as huge weights are lifted from it. Many areas in the northern hemisphere show falls in coastal sea levels, and this process is ongoing since the Earth is currently in an interglacial phase. In fact, current rises of 2mm a year are tiny compared with the huge boosts between 12,000 to 4,000 years ago.
Again, hold that front page – shock 2mm annual rise will lead to civilisation being inundated in the next century by a catastrophic seven inch increase in sea levels. Not many expected to die.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Biden family received money from Russia – Congress
RT | August 9, 2023
The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday published receipts showing Hunter Biden, the son of current US President Joe Biden, receiving money from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan by trading on the family name.
The committee says it has identified $20 million in payments from foreign sources to Hunter Biden’s company, which they describe as a front to sell access to the “Biden network” while his father was Barack Obama’s vice-president (2009-2017).
“During Joe Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden sold him as ‘the brand’ to reap millions from oligarchs in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. It appears no real services were provided other than access to the Biden network, including Joe Biden himself. And Hunter Biden seems to have delivered,” said committee chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican.
The third bank memo Comer has published so far shows a February 14, 2014 wire transfer from “Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina” to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a shell company run by Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer. Of the $3.5 million wired by Baturina, $1 million was transferred directly to Archer, while the rest was used to start up Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a new account used to receive more funding from abroad, the committee said.
Another memo shows that Biden and Archer were both appointed to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company run by Mykola Zlochevsky, for $1 million each per year. Burisma had previously paid Biden as counsel, but invited him and Archer to the board after a meeting hosted by Zlochevsky and Burisma corporate secretary Vadim Pozharsky in the spring of 2014 at Lake Como in Italy.
“Then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine soon after their first payments,” the committee noted, and Hunter claimed that the visit showed “value” that he provided to the company.
The third notable transaction took place in April 2014, when “Kazakhstani oligarch” Kenes Rakishev wired $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca Bohai. The very next day, the company paid Hunter Biden the same exact amount for a sports car. Hunter had met Rakishev at a Washington, DC hotel in February.
“Hunter Biden received millions of dollars in payments from Yelena Baturina, Burisma, and Kenes Rakishev. Vice President Biden had dinner with them in the spring of 2014 and 2015 in Washington, DC,” the committee pointed out.
Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man for Ukraine policy after the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, and famously bragged at a 2018 DC event about getting a prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold loan guarantees. The prosecutor in question had been investigating Burisma. When then-president Donald Trump brought the incident up in 2019 talks with Kiev, the House Democrats impeached him, claiming this somehow violated US laws.
Dr Jonathan Engler Dismantles The Covid Pandemic & mRNA “Vaccine” Narratives
Doc Malik | July 30, 2023
Dr Jonathan Engler is qualified in both medicine and law. During a varied career he has worked as a doctor, medical adviser within the pharmaceutical industry, entrepreneur and barrister. He has 4 adult children and 2 grandsons, and lives near Manchester in the North of England.
Jonathan co-chairs the Hart Group with Dr Clair Craig and is on the exec of Panda, for both of which he regularly writes and reviews articles.
In this conversation, Jonathan dismantles both the official Covid and mRNA “vaccine” narratives.
Enjoy and as ever love to you all x
Websites –
Twitter –
Please support the show so that I can continue to speak up by choosing one or all of the following options –
Buy me a coffee if you want to make a one off donation.
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/docmalik
Join my Substack to access free and paid additional content.
https://docmalik.substack.com/subscribe
Support the show and have access to exclusive contents and perks.
https://docmalik.com/support
To sponsor the Doc Malik Podcast contact us at hello@docmalik.com
The Infuriating Climate Alarm
By Iain Davis | OffGuardian | August 8, 2023
In the UK, we all know that this summer has been rubbish. We had a few weeks of glorious sunshine in June and since then it’s been bloody miserable. It’s been cold, wet and the dog has got trench-foot. Which isn’t great because he stinks at the best of times—bless him.
Yet, according to the UN Secretary General and blithering buffoon, António Guterres, we’ve entered the “era of global boiling.” Though not in the UK—or anywhere else for that matter
Just as we were during the pseudopandemic, we are once again invited to reject the evidence of our own senses and “trust” whatever we are told by the “experts,” although Guterres is not a meteorologist. Mind you, Bill Gates isn’t an epidemiologist and everyone “trusted” his “expert” opinion during the pseudopandemic, so who cares?
I know! I know! Weather isn’t climate change. While climate constantly changes, the process can only be understood through the accumulation of evidence revealing a highly complex system that is subject to radiative forcing.
It is safe to say that no one who seriously questions “climate change” alarm, denies that climate changes. What they question are the claims made by organisations like the UK Met Office:
The evidence is clear: the main cause of climate change is burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. When burnt, fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the air, causing the planet to heat up.
There isn’t one, published scientific paper, anywhere on Earth, that empirically proves that increased atmospheric CO2 precedes and causes global warming. The evidence is far from “clear.”
Climate change alarmists offer all kinds of convoluted arguments, usually by applying highly questionable statistical models, in their attempt to prove causality. Yet this very basic, empirical scientific proof is notable only for its absence.
But let’s not let scientific facts get in the way of a good story. The planet is boiling I tells ye!
If CO2 is the problem then the solution seems pretty simple, not to mention quite pleasant: plant as many trees as we can, wherever we can, and don’t cut them down to burn in biomass power plants that emit more CO2 than brown-coal fired power stations. But that is not a “solution” that anyone in power is interested in.
If CO2 is the problem then the solution seems pretty simple, not to mention quite pleasant: plant as many trees as we can, wherever we can, and don’t cut them down to burn in biomass power plants that emit more CO2 than brown-coal fired power stations. But that is not a “solution” that anyone in power is interested in.
No, the proposed solution to supposed planetary vaporisation is Sustainable Development debt slavery. Which all raises a few questions about, for example, UK Met Office gibberish. It’s almost as if there’s some sort of agenda at play. Which, of course, there is.
But we’re not going rehash arguments about the climate change woo-woo Science™. There’s no point anyway. Climate change alarm is a death cult, not an exercise in intellectual honesty.
Instead, let’s look at just a few examples of obvious climate alarm tripe. As we do, we’ll also ponder why, if anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is so sound, so-called “climate scientists” and the mainstream media—legacy media—feel the need to perpetually lie about its alleged effects.
In 2009, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, which provides much of the HadCRUT data underpinning the IPCC’s climate change models, was caught fiddling the climate data in order to “prove” AGW theory.
Scientific fraud was evident and key “climate scientists” involved were subsequently unable to provide any data to support their misleading conclusions. Something that was later proven in court. Yet still the legacy media (LM), in this instance represented by the appalling propagandists at the Guardian, manage to deny the blatant scam.
This is all irrelevant because, irrespective of the fake science, all scientists agree that the planet is being cooked like a hard boiled egg. Except the Nobel laureate physicists who don’t. Oh, and all the other scientists who don’t either.
They are not “real” scientists and therefore must be cancelled and definitely barred from explaining to the IMF that the IPCC’s modelled predictions are drivel. Global financial institutions are set to profit from “da climate Science™” and are not interested in having their plans undermined by pesky, Nobel prize winning scientists.
Gutteres’ boiling planet yarn is based upon the recent LM alarm about the Cerberus and Charon heatwaves that supposedly plagued central and southern Europe. The LM used scary colours on their maps to make sure everyone soiled themselves. As if naming the summer after mythical devil-dogs and boatmen for the dead wasn’t enough.
Reuters said ambulances had been put on standby to rescue people from the sunshine; Sky warned that the fingerprints of climate change were forcing people to “shelter from the heat;” CNN reported that the heat was at “unbearable levels” and the constantly petrified Guardian, alleging that “human-caused climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather around the world,” added:
The European Space Agency (ESA) said the next week could bring the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.
While the Guardian mentioned the ESA, they neglected to report its subsequent data clarification. The ESA made it clear that they were providing satellite readings of “land surface temperatures” not the “air temperatures” that are commonly given in weather reports.
On a hot day, land surface temperatures tend to be considerably higher than air temperatures. The degree of difference varies, depending on numerous factors such as the heat absorption and radiation properties of the surface material and so on. As pointed out by the pro-climate alarm website SkepticalScience :
[. . .] on a sunny day in a heatwave, many land surfaces become hotter than the air – that’s how tarmac can melt in a sunny spot.
Contradicting themselves, and ignoring the ESA clarification completely, SkepticalScience then said that the reported air temperature high of 48.8°C on July 17th “did happen.” However, as pointed out by the genuinely sceptical What’s-Up-With-That (WUWT), this claim presents us with a major conundrum.
The LM consistently reported “air temperatures” that were the same as the ESA’s reported “land surface temperature.” The air temperature should have been notably lower, but wasn’t reported to be so.
Quite simply, that just can not be true. It is all very odd, because the actual recorded air temperatures were lower than those reported by the LM, such as the Guardian and the BBC.
This is not to say that it wasn’t very hot in southern and some parts of central Europe and the US. But the ridiculous, exaggerated LM claims that July was the hottest month in 125,000 years were unmitigated claptrap. As Kit Knightly, writing for the OffGuardian, rightly observed, there is simply no way to know this.
The University of Alabama and Hunstsville (UAH) Global Temperature Record is also a key data set for the IPCC. The UAH measures temperature anomalies and, using this measure—which is not the same as a consistent average—confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest July and the hottest single month since 1979, when satellite records began. Given, for example, that an “air temperature” anomaly of 50°C was recorded in Paris in August 1930—before satellite records began—the “hottest ever” claims don’t remotely stack up, even from an anomaly perspective, and certainly don’t constitute any evidence of the “ravages” of CO2 driven climate change.
Reports from European holiday makers that they had to avoid the midday sun, as they mingled with the crowds enjoying the lovely weather, is hardly a sign of the end-times. Noel Coward wrote the song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” advising people to avoid sweltering midday temperatures, in 1931. It went down well because it was funny and something people could relate to. Probably because the 1930s was the hottest decade of the 20th century.
SkepticalScience is among the climate alarm pushers who assert that the heatwave was obviously caused by climate change. As noted by James Corbett and James Even Pilato, that notion is speculative to say the least.
Both NASA and the ESA reported that the Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano eruption in January 2022 increased the amount of stratospheric water vapour by a minimum of 10%, possibly up to 30%. So vast was this expulsion of H2O that it is likely to increase average global temperatures for several years to come.
If you are looking for LM reports on the staggering global climate impact of this event, don’t bother. There aren’t any.
Instead, the BBC, for example, published an article on July 14th 2023 which spoke about the amazing expulsion of lava and ash and the spectacular associated volcanic lightening. They even linked to the NASA report which said the additional volume of atmospheric water vapour was enough to “fill the equivalent of 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.” But the BBC propagandists couldn’t bring themselves to report the rest of the quoted NASA statement, which read:
The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.
Just eleven days later—July 25th—BBC amnesiacs told the world that the European and US heatwaves would have been “near impossible” without climate change. Despite previously citing the NASA and ESA findings which clearly show this claim is totally groundless.
The BBC offered a ludicrous report from World Weather Attribution (WWA)—deceptively calling it a “study”—to supposedly “confirm” that “climate change” had increased the heatwaves by 2.5°C. Based upon nothing but LM reports and speculative computer models, the WWA report was scientifically illiterate dross that presented absolutely no evidence at all to support any of its wacky conclusions.
The Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption and the ESA spawned media “confusion,” over the difference between surface and air temperatures, was entirely ignored by the BBC as it pumped out its climate change propaganda. Rounding off its disinformation, the BBC wrote:
[. . .] increased temperatures from burning fossil fuels was the main driver in the more intense heatwaves.
A conclusion, it is worth reiterating, for which there is no evidence. The BBC’s role is to make you imagine that the evidence exists.
SkepticalScience, which isn’t sceptical enough to explore atmospheric science or check what its scientific sources really said, didn’t deem it necessary to mention any of this either. But it did ram home that anyone who questions climate alarm is a “climate denier”:
People who create and/or circulate such myths are denying plain reality. That reality is that it got extremely hot across southern Europe for a prolonged period in July 2023. Such prolonged heat is a serious health-hazard, never mind the appalling wildfires.
Aah, the wildfires!
Presumably ignited by the 40+°C heat. Or so the LM would have us believe.
Reporting the “end of the world,” the BBC were certain that the “heatwave spreading across Europe is fuelling wildfires in Portugal.” Someone should tell the Portuguese the end of the world is nigh, because comments from people in Portugal during the “catastrophic heatwave” don’t give rise to any cause for alarm.
This is all reminiscent of the climate alarm that spewed out of the LM during the Canadian wildfires in June that sent a pall of smoke across the US eastern seaboard. The New York Times said this provide us with a “grim climate lesson;” CBS said that the fires were started by lightening caused by dry hot weather as “climate change continues to warm the planet” and the always unreliable BBC wrote “climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.”
But the prize for most outstanding baloney must go to the Guardian for its unhinged piece, “Canada’s Wildfires are Part of a New Climate Reality.” Claiming that the fires were the “harbinger of our climate future” and that climate change could “double the acreage burned by wildfires each year,” the Guardian exposed itself when it revealed that its headline “new climate reality” was “sourced” from a tweet by US politician Bernie Sanders. Probably after he read a New York Times or other LM article that told him what to think.
None of these wildly inaccurate LM affirmations were remotely plausible. In a fully referenced article, weather forecaster Chris Martz, outlined the many reasons why there is no foundation for the claims that the Canadian boreal forest wildfires were, in any sense, attributable to CO2 caused “climate change:”
Headlines and armchair experts articulated with boastful confidence that the primary cause of the Canadian fires [. . .] was climate change. Despite the fact these claims are neither supported by the greater body of peer-reviewed work nor the observational record.
The actual reasons for the Canadian wildfires were the encroachment of human settlements into woodland areas—increasing the human ignition risk, decades of poor forestry management and inclement weather conditions that produced the lightening strikes which appeared to simultaneously ignite some of the fires.
Prior to the heat driven thunderstorms, Canada had been experiencing average or below average temperatures for the time of year. As Martz accurately observed:
This justifies the case that the fire weather conditions were a transient response to ongoing weather conditions which primed the environment, not a long-term pattern that could be altered by the climatic base state.
Martz reported the Canadian government’s forest burn area records from 1959 to date. Contrary to all the claims spewed out by LM disinformation agents, the records clearly show that total burn areas and fires peaked in the late 1980s. They have steadily decreased ever since. There is, once again, no correlation with increased CO2 levels nor any evidence linking the boreal wildfires to “climate change.”
Like most people who question climate alarm, Martz is concerned about the environment and recognises that the obsession with CO2 reduction does nothing to address the real environmental problems. He wrote:
Sitting on our hands and blaming climate change for every abnormal environmental event is a waste of time when our efforts would be better spent on addressing how to manage risk and mitigate vulnerabilities.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme yesterday morning, some numpty—sorry, I didn’t catch her name—claimed that the seas were boiling. Because climate change … Duh! I’m sure she is a learned numpty, but seemingly clueless nonetheless.
This followed on from the usual BBC climate bunk highlighting that Florida seawater surface temperatures had achieved 37.8°C. This, we were authoritatively informed, was all caused by climate change. The Guardian piled in to ramp up the terror. That being said, Guardian columnists also think we should end farming to save the planet, so perhaps taking the Guardian’s word for anything isn’t the wisest course.
Both the BBC and the Guardian had simply parroted a story fed to them by the newswires. There was no more “journalism” than that. They investigated nothing, didn’t verify anything and just published whatever they were told to publish.
The high water temperature reading was taken from just one censor buoy in Manatee Bay, near Key Largo. Writing for WUWT, Jim Steele pointed out that the temperature reading of the same buoy had dropped to 29°C within a day. Other measurement buoys in the surrounding waters were consistently reporting much lower water temperatures. This was due to the fact that the Manatee Bay buoy floats in a sheltered, coastal “solar pond,” largely protected from cold water flows.
If CO2 propelled climate change caused the buoy reading to climb to 37.8°C, then it must have caused it to cool down again the next day. Equally, “climate change” must also be responsible for the much cooler waters surrounding Manatee Bay. This is, of course, an absurd contention. As Steele highlighted:
Clearly those water temperatures were being driven by dynamics other than rising CO2.
Clearly! So why couldn’t the LM figure that out? Are they all irretrievably stupid or is there something else going on?
As we noted earlier, weather is not climate change. Except when it’s really hot.
While it was scorching in Europe and the US, the LM regaled us with an slew of climate change fairy tales. However, as soon as the weather in the same European and US regions returned to at or below average temperatures they fell stony silent. According to LM propagandists like the Guardian, “climate change” always reverts back to weather when it is chuffin’ freezing.
Wherever we look, those who are pushing the idea that climate change threatens some sort of cataclysm just can’t stop misleading, manipulating, deceiving and propagandising. The question is why. If we accept that climate change is a concern, why do they feel the need to constantly lie about its alleged impacts?
It is never ending. Frankly, it has become infuriating. Maybe that’s the point.
Every nonsensical climate alarm story we have discussed deploys applied behavioural psychology to convince you to believe evident insanity. You are supposed to unquestioningly accept that the planet is “literally” on fire. Or, as the the UN Secretary General insists for no apparent reason, that the era of “global boiling” is upon us.
We are very close to climate lockdowns to “save the planet.” None of this has anything to do with climate change.
The only thing that is “literally” true is that the net-zero, sustainable development solution is “literal” population control. The mind-bending propaganda can only succeed if you ignore the view from your own window, which invariably reveals that it is actually pissing down.
When the farcical climate lockdowns arrive, may I suggest you dress for the weather, grab a bottle of water, and go out and enjoy yourself. What are they going to do? Lock us up in our own homes again?
I’ll see you out there.
US lying about Russia’s position on Ukraine peace talks – Moscow
RT | August 8, 2023
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova lashed out at Washington over claims that Moscow has rejected peace negotiations with Kiev.
On Monday, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press briefing that “There are no peace negotiations going on with Russia right now, because Russia has refused to engage in meaningful peace negotiations.”
Later that day, Zakharova wrote on Telegram: “They know perfectly well that they told [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky to withdraw from peace talks in April 2022, they caused Kiev’s ban on talks with Russia, adopted in September 2022, they have been declaring all year that it’s not the right time for talks, but they still blame Russia anyway.”
Zakharova also advised Miller to read an interview of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he gave in April. She was apparently referring to comments Blinken gave to the Funke Media Group, in which he said he did not support the idea of beginning negotiations, while hailing Kiev’s counteroffensive.
Last week, senior officials from more than 40 countries took part in a summit in Saudi Arabia regarding the situation in Ukraine. Russia was not invited to attend, and called any negotiations without its participation “pointless.”
After the talks, Kiev said it had rejected all points of compromise and had not given up on its ‘peace formula’ – a set of ten demands amounting to unconditional surrender on the part of Russia, which Moscow sees as “a useless ultimatum” that only serves to prolong the conflict.
The Russian Defense Ministry estimated that during June and July, Ukraine sustained losses of more than 43,000 troops in its counteroffensive against Russian positions. According to the ministry’s data, over 4,900 pieces of heavy weaponry were destroyed during this period of time.
Everything you need to know about Covid’s “Eris” Variant
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | August 7, 2023
The big news the last couple of days is that “Covid” is back… again. This time it’s the “Eris” variant, named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, it supposedly is causing a spike in cases for the first time in… who cares how long.
The bulk of reporting on it is detailing how it’s supposedly related to Omicron or Arcturus or all the other names they flash in the headlines.
That, or the symptoms.
They are a runny nose and a sore throat and…well, you know. The only noteworthy thing to mention here is that the “loss of taste of smell” – so long sold as Covid’s calling card – is no longer considered a common symptom.
Yahoo even reported – without a shred of irony – that the alleged up-tick in “cases” was due to people spending more time indoors:
Bad weather encouraging people to spend more time indoors and waning immunity have been blamed for the rise
… a peculiar position to take, considering lockdown is meant to have helped, last time.
Anyway, without further ado, here is everything you really need to know about the Eris variant:
It’s bullshit.
Just like all the others.
Nothing else really needs to be said, does it?
Sure the media are setting up softballs for us to hammer over the fence, talking about the “symptoms” and “infection” rate again as if the past three years haven’t rendered all those words meaningless. But we are – or should be – well past that point of arguing against the mainstream.
We know everything we need to know about the symptoms – they are “generally mild” and “flu-like”, because Covid is nothing but re-branded endemic respiratory diseases. We know the death statistics are made up and the tests don’t work except to manufacture cases.
We know all this, even this repeating of it is unnecessary, to be honest.
The only aspect of Eris worth discussing is why it’s in the papers, and even that answer is briefer than usual.
Eris exists because the “Cerberus” heatwave is over, and July was unseasonably cold and damp in the UK. Because Autumn will be setting in soon enough and there are no more major sporting events for Just Stop Oil to disrupt for a while.
In short, Eris is what happens when people refuse to panic about climate change.
In fact, we can probably expect headlines linking Eris to the climate in the next few days.
The trouble with that is, just like climate change, people can only be scared by words for so long. The media repeated “global warming” so much the words lost their meaning, and filled the papers with so many apocalyptic predictions that never came to pass that people got numbed to it, they filter it out now even if they don’t realise they do.
The same will happen with covid; the more they bring it back for a jump scare, the less people will jump.
That’s probably why they’re laying the groundwork “the next pandemic” of “disease X”.
How the current version of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty (aka Bureau Text) encourages rather than prevents pandemics
BY MERYL NASS | AUGUST 5, 2023
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chem Bio
Traditionally, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were Chemical, Biological, Radiologic and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—they are cheap ways to kill and maim lots of people at once. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (sometimes) and use. First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, so we believed we were not bound by it.
The US used chemical weapons subsequently. The US probably used biological weapons in the Korean War, and perhaps in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and possibly other chemical weapons led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968, a young Seymour Hersh wrote a book about the US chemical and biological warfare program. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy wrote the book “Ultimate Folly” about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand, ” has sprayed anti-plant chemi-
cals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over
10 per cent of it cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with
the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become
a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in
order to facilitate our aerial reconnaisance. Our use of “super tear
gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally
announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the
full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs
to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame
weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough
to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many
nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion
that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view
shared by M cCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, in November 1969 President Nixon announced to the world we were going to end the US biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). In February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons (snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations, etc.). Furthermore, Nixon said the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did: the 1972 Convention on the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons and on their destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
The BWC established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the Convention. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations did not comply with the treaty. However, the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone knows that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. A clear BWC violation. US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
In 1997 a Chemical Weapons Convention came into force. It took over 20 years, but all official stocks of chemical weapons have been destroyed by the USA and by Russia and the other 193 member nation signatories.
Pandemics or Biological Warfare?
So here we are. It is 2023 and the WHO Director General has declared 2 pandemics (the current terminology is ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’) over the past 3 and a half years: COVID-19 and monkeypox, which was renamed MPOX to “avoid stigma.” I am sure the monkeys were relieved by the name change.
I have previously (in my substack) described why I believe both SARS-CoV-2 and MPOX were bioengineered pathogens that came from labs. I do not know if they leaked or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward deliberately released for both of them, based on where they appeared, how they spread, and in particular the official responses to each—neither of which was explained accurately to the public, and yet we never changed course, even when the lack of efficacy with masks, social distancing, EUA drugs and vaccines had become clear.
Vaccines: the Chicken or the Egg?
Both the monkeypox vaccines (there are two, Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do the two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial in Australia. I have written about all this previously on substack.
How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. We do not know the number for Jynneos, but there was some degree of elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10% and 18% of recipients in two small prelicensure studies. My guess for the mRNA vaccines is that they are somewhere in this range. I don’t know about Novavax’ vaccine.
Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work — Jynneos didn’t on the monkeys in whom it was tested. And CDC has clammed up about the 2,000 Congolese healthcare workers on whom CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. (I have detailed this too in earlier substacks.)
The health authorities could have just been ignorant—that could explain the first 8 months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did they still push it on low risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect?
Once this is acknowledged, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. I’m not sure. But I’m suspicious. And the fact that multiple countries contracted for 10 doses per person makes me even more suspicious—for vaccines whose safety and efficacy had not been established. WHY would you want ten doses apiece? Three maybe. But ten?
Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport aka digital ID aka justification to convert to all-electronic money unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the pathway to getting our vaccinations, health records, official documents and financial transactions all online—as Ukraine has already done?
A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to you by the same people who mismanaged the past 3 years, to save us from themselves?
The same US government and western governments that imposed draconian measures on their citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs and withheld the good drugs, decided in 2021 we needed a pandemic treaty to prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer as we did with the COVID pandemic.
Except COVID was a disaster due to its mismanagement (or should I say dismanagement or malmanagement?) by our nations’ rulers, their bosses and the WHO. Hundreds of millions of our fellow human being were slammed into extreme poverty—by nations following guidelines issued by the WHO, whose main job it was to protect exactly those people. Tens of millions died from starvation as a result. Yet the WHO blathers on about equity, diversity and solidarity—having itself caused the worst (manmade) food crisis in our lifetimes. Have you heard any apology or explanation?
How can anyone with a brain believe the public health officials who messed up COVID so badly want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster, after they imposed the last one on us? And the fact that no governments or health officials will admit their mistakes — especially how they made it nearly impossible to obtain the cheap and safe drugs that effectively treat COVID — why would we let them plan anything, let alone an international treaty that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates? How thoughtful of these officials to want to spend a king’s ransom of our money to prevent the next government-caused disaster.
We are fed up with secret vaccine contracts, waivers of liability for junk medical products, and spikes in sudden deaths and chronic disabilities. No more secret negotiations. Please shove your pandemic planning where the sun…
The Gain of Function farce
Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding “Gain of Function”* research, and get rid of what has already been funded and created. Let all the nations make big bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.
But the WHO in its Bureau Text of the draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s world, which almost all nations’ rulers have bought into, all the governments will share any and all viruses and bacteria they come up with that have “pandemic potential” — share them with all the other governments. They are supposed to sequence them and then put the sequence online. No kidding. Then the WHO and all the Faucis of the world would gain access to every Frankenstein virus, at once. Presumably a bunch of hackers would also gain access to the sequences. Does this make you feel more secure?
The WHO Treaty draft incentivizes Gain Of Function research
At least this plan makes clear whose side everyone is on. Fauci, Tedros and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to even more biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.
This crazy plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. But it is their plan. Governments will all share the weapons. And they are to put a lot more money into biolabs, and especially into genomic sequencing. Presumably so they can make even better weapons, and maybe they will even get around to cures or antidotes. But who will get the cures? It wasn’t us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is where you can read the current Treaty draft:
https://apps.who.int/gb/inb/pdf_files/inb5/A_INB5_6-en.pdf
Pages 10 and 11:
What else is in the Treaty? Gain of Function research (designed to make pathogens more transmissible or more virulent) is explicitly incentivized. Administrative hurdles to it must be minimized, while unintended consequences (pandemics) should be prevented: (page 14)
Vaccines will be rolled out speedily under future testing protocols
Just in case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out, the WHO has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way Africa, for example?). And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.” (page 14)
Manufacturer and government liability will be “managed”
Nations are supposed to use existing models as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal. The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated 4 (yes, FOUR) people as of July 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines fall into this program (monoclonal antibodies, early remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines). There have been nearly 12,000 claims made to the CICP related to a COVID product. Slightly over 1,000 have been adjudicated while 10,886 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and are waiting to see whether they can collect. A total of 983 people, or 98% had their claims denied. About 90% of all claimants filed for a vaccine injury.
The treaty draft also demands weakening the regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies under the rubric of Regulatory Strengthening. As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25)
Why would any developed country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?
The WHO did sweeten the pot, however. Remember how the need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” was removed in the WHO’s draft IHR Amendments that are being negotiated? Well, WHO apparently did not like us pointing that out—so the old human rights language that was removed from the International Health Regulations draft has been added to this newest version of the Treaty.
There is much more I could say about problems with this draft of the Treaty, but I will save them for another time.
Please share this brief analysis of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. We must EXIT the WHO.
*Gain of Function is a euphemism for biological warfare reserch or germ warfare research. It is so foolhardy that it was banned in the US for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses from 2014-2017 due to public outcry by scientists. Then in 2017 Fauci and Collins lifted the moratorium, claimed they were putting safeguards in place, which were just a handwaving exercise, and off we were to the races: creating new bioweapons. Fauci and Collins had the nerve to publish their opinion that the risk was ‘worth it.’
Featured Video
Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- They Compared the Spice to the Drug. The Spice Won — Again. (Part 2)
- Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
- Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 Heat Deaths Are a Computer-Model Estimate, Not a Real Body Count
- Questioning Your Doctor Is Now Considered A Psychological Problem (Seriously)
- London tourism expo promotes Israeli agency linked to theft of Palestinian land
- Dockworkers launch global strike against Israeli and US military shipments
- Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief
- Ukraine continues recruiting people with disabilities
- Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
- Beyond Netanyahu: what Israel’s election means for Palestinians
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
