Russian ambassador to the UN has accused the West of instigating “deep Russophobia” and having a determination to destroy his country, saying that, “We had no choice other than to defend our country — defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future.”
Vassily Nebenzia made the remarks at a meeting of the UN Security Council, saying that Russia had no other choice than war. “We had no choice other than to defend our country — defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future.”
Friday’s meeting in the council — the only international venue where Russia regularly faces Ukraine and its Western supporters — put a spotlight on the deep chasm between the warring parties as the conflict is moving into its second year with no end in sight.
In the meeting, US deputy ambassador, Richard Mills, accused Russia of failing to implement “a single commitment it made” in the Minsk agreements while the other signatories — France, Germany, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — “sought to implement them in good faith.”
France ambassador, De Riviere, claimed his country and Germany have worked “tirelessly” since 2015 to promote dialogue between parties, adding that the “difficulties encountered in implementing these agreements can never serve as justification or mitigating circumstances for Russia’s choice to end the dialogue with violence.”
In response, Nebenzia accused the Western nations, including France and Germany, of “holding back” on implementing the Minsk agreements brokered by the two countries to end the conflict between Ukraine and the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk in the Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial east that flared in April 2014 after Crimea joined Russia.
“You knew very well that the Minsk process for you is just a smoke screen, so as to rearm the Kiev regime and to prepare it for war against Russia in the name of your geopolitical interest,” Nebenzia said.
He further accused the West of “deep Russophobia,” and a “determination to destroy my country, using others if possible.”
The envoy added that the West has no desire to “build a European and Euro-Atlantic security system together with Russia [because] for you such a system can only be aimed against Russia.”
“We have no trust left in you and we are not capable of believing any promises you make – not as regards a non-expansion of NATO in the east, or your desire not to interfere in our internal affairs, or your determination to live in peace,” Nebenzia said.
“You have shown that it’s impossible to negotiate with you,” he said. “You’ve shown how treacherous you are by creating on our borders a neo-Nazi, neo-nationalist beehive and then stirring it up.”
The Minsk agreements were a complex series of measures negotiated by Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine in 2014-2015 in a bid to put an end to the armed conflict between the Kiev authorities and the breakaway region of Donbas.
Moscow repeatedly stated that Kiev was not fulfilling the deal by not granting self-government to the Russian-speaking region of Donbas. In February 2022, Russia began the “military operation” to defend the territory from Ukrainian troops.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted he never intended to implement the Minsk agreements. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel also recently acknowledged that Minsk deal was simply “an attempt to give Ukraine time” so that its army could get stronger.
The revelation was confirmed by former French President Francois Hollande, and Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson who said the Minsk agreement had been nothing but a “diplomatic imitation.”
February 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | France, Germany, NATO, Russia, Ukraine |
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Amid tens of thousands of lawsuits that are pending in state courts all across the U.S., a new report based on evidence discovered in these court cases reveals Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had, for decades, concealed evidence showing that Zantac could cause cancer.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, GSK — then known as Glaxo — had been aware of cancer-causing risks with ranitidine, the drug which was marketed as Zantac, even before it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1983. These warnings came from independent researchers but also from Glaxo scientists.
Within five years, Zantac, used to treat or relieve heartburn, acid indigestion and gastric ulcers, became the world’s best-selling medicine and was one of the first to surpass $1 billion in annual sales, according to Reuters. GSK later sold the drug to Pfizer — and Zantac was then sold to Boehringer Ingelheim and finally Sanofi.
In 2019, an online pharmacy detected high levels of a potent carcinogen, NDMA, in Sanofi and its generic equivalents. This led to recalls, followed by a formal FDA withdrawal of the drug in 2020.
This decision was made based on “research showing the amount of NDMA in the products increases the longer the drug is stored and could potentially become unsafe,” Reuters reported, with Fierce Pharma adding that this problem was identified “even under normal storage conditions.”
According to the Bloomberg Businessweek report, the storage issues came in addition to the known risk that “under certain conditions in the stomach, ranitidine could form a potentially dangerous compound” that could cause cancer.
All four aforementioned pharmaceutical companies are now facing tens of thousands of lawsuits in state courts throughout the U.S. “Plaintiffs said the companies knew, or should have known, that ranitidine posed a cancer risk and that they failed to warn consumers,” reports Reuters.
According to Reuters, “While NDMA is found in low levels in food and water, it is known to cause cancer in larger amounts.” Zantac, accordingly, has been linked “to at least 10 types of cancer” in lawsuits that have been filed, including bladder, esophageal, liver, pancreatic and stomach cancers.
GSK continues to claim that there is “no consistent or reliable evidence” that Zantac caused cancer.
What is NDMA?
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “NDMA, which is short for N-Nitrosodimethylamine, is a yellow liquid that dissolves in water. It doesn’t have an odor or much of a taste.” It is most toxic to the liver, and “was first linked to cancer in 1956.”
It adds that “The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats.”
The same report notes that NDMA is “one of a group of chemicals called nitrosamines, which by the 1970s were considered the most potent carcinogens yet discovered. They caused cancer in every species of animal tested. A single dose of less than a milligram of NDMA can mutate mice cells and stimulate tumors, and 2 grams can kill a person in days.”
According to USA Today, drawing on FDA data, “Nitrosamines are found in water, cured and grilled meats, dairy products and vegetables” and studies have found that they lead to “increased cancer risk if people are exposed to large amounts over long periods of time.”
Stephen Hecht, Ph.D., a professor of cancer prevention at the University of Minnesota, told USA Today that food safety experts have made efforts to reduce nitrosamine levels in foods such as cured meats to far below the levels of the 1970s and 1980s.
Bloomberg Businessweek states that “Every public-health agency, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the FDA to the World Health Organization, says NDMA likely causes cancer in humans.”
The FDA has placed limits on six types of nitrosamines, reports USA Today, equaling “up to one case of cancer per 100,000 people exposed to the contaminant.”
However, the drugs that were recalled and ultimately pulled from the market far exceeded these limits, with estimates of a risk of one cancer case for every 3,000 to 8,000 patients, according to USA Today.
The withdrawal of Zantac and its generic versions resulted in tens of thousands of lawsuits that are still pending — and a process of discovery that has unearthed significant evidence revealing that Glaxo and regulatory bodies were long aware of the presence of NDMA in these medications.
Discovery reveals that Glaxo, regulators continuously ignored NDMA cancer risk
Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed “thousands of pages” of documents, including those arising from the discovery process in the ongoing lawsuits against GSK and other drugmakers, as well as scientific studies, to develop its story, discovering that GSK supported “flawed research” that skewed the narrative away from Zantac’s risks.
As stated in the Bloomberg Businessweek report: “Proving that a particular person’s cancerous cells were mutated by a company’s drug is complicated. Glaxo’s decisions suggest it never wanted to consider that possibility. The clues were there. The documents show that Glaxo preferred not to find them.”
The report continued:
“From ranitidine’s beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public.
“Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn’t share a critical study.
“Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning.”
The report presents evidence indicating that Glaxo — and later GSK — were aware that NDMA could be present in Zantac, both as a result of how it was metabolized in the human stomach and also by naturally occurring even under ordinary storage conditions.
According to the report, ranitidine was first developed by Glaxo scientists in the 1970s, and a U.S. patent for it was granted in 1978. As stated by the report, the process of developing ranitidine and getting it approved was swift.
“They developed ranitidine quickly, and the US Food and Drug Administration reviewed it quickly. Glaxo gave it the brand name Zantac,” said Bloomberg Businessweek. It was soon marketed as being “better and safer” than the leading heartburn drug at the time, Tagamet.
However, the warning signs were already there. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, a U.S. government cancer researcher and biochemist, William Lijinsky, had found in 1969 that nitrosamines could form in the stomach, exacerbated by the presence of nitrites, “a common chemical found in cured and grilled meat and in beer and coffee and vegetables” found to be “common causes of heartburn and acid reflux.”
Lijinsky’s solution to this, presented in published studies and in Congressional testimony in the 1970s, was to limit sodium nitrite levels in food. Already, by the late 1970s, Lijinsky identified roadblocks that were not allowing his warnings to be fully heeded.
“It seems to me that the regulatory agencies have been less than eager to act in the matter of nitrites and nitrosamines,” he testified before Congress in 1977. “There has been ample information available, if they had sought it. There is, of course, immense opposition by the manufacturing companies to any change.”
According to Lijinsky’s wife, Rosalie Lijinsky, herself a genetic toxicologist who recently retired from the FDA, William lost federal funding for his research due to pressure from both the food and pharmaceutical industries.
Nevertheless, the warning signs continued to build up. A 1980 report titled “Glaxo, Ranitidine—Cause for Concern,” found that ranitidine could potentially form a potentially dangerous, and cancerous, compound in the stomach.
Glaxo, which was seeking FDA approval for Zantac, prepared for “defensive action” to protect itself from the report’s findings. The Bloomberg Businessweek story noted that Glaxo’s board never tested ranitidine to see if it might form a nitrosamine compound.
In a 1981 trial in Britain, 11 healthy men who were administered a daily two-dose regimen of ranitidine for four weeks developed more nitrite in their digestive system — meaning that conditions were favorable for the formation of nitrosamines.
These results were deemed inconclusive by Glaxo scientists, who said that “Ranitidine is recommended only for short-term use” — even though most Zantac users took the drug “for months, sometimes years, even decades,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Another 1981 study, published in The Lancet by Italian scientist Silvio De Flora, Ph.D., found that when ranitidine was mixed with nitrite, it led to “toxic and mutagenic effects.” De Flora later suggested that the consumption of Zantac occur long before or after a meal. However, says Bloomberg Businessweek, “instructions for taking Zantac to prevent heartburn would recommend using it close to mealtime.”
De Flora, who told Bloomberg Businessweek that “Pharmaceutical companies do not like this kind of study,” said he was quickly approached by Glaxo executives, who then published a follow-up letter in The Lancet attempting to downplay De Flora’s findings.
A 1982 study, which infamously became known as the “Tanner study,” also found danger. Specifically, this study, conducted by scientist Richard Tanner of rival drugmaker Smith, Kline & French, found that ranitidine when combined with different concentrations of nitrite, formed a cancerous poison that was soon named NDMA.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “back in 1982, court documents show, Glaxo kept the study secret. The associate director of clinical research in the U.S. was never told about the Tanner report. The senior medical adviser for gastrointestinal research was unaware of it. So was the FDA.”
At the same time, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, “Glaxo also knew of another potentially serious problem with ranitidine. It wasn’t always stable. The drug was sensitive to heat and humidity, and when exposed to too much of either could degrade … That creates conditions for NDMA to form in the drug itself.”
However, later in 1982, Glaxo officials did not reveal this knowledge to a panel of FDA officials and independent researchers. “The Glaxo scientists disputed the idea that ranitidine could form a nitrosamine under any normal human conditions,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
By May 1983, the FDA had approved Zantac in a rapid process — and by 1989, it “was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo’s sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies.”
However, problems persisted. In the early 1990s, it was found that the pills were not stable and were changing color while in storage. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “Discoloration is often a sign that tablets are degrading. In some cases, degradation can cause dangerous impurities to form.”
However, Glaxo’s solution was to change the color of the pills. At this time, the company was seeking FDA approval for a less potent over-the-counter version of Zantac. This approval came in the spring of 1996.
Nevertheless, issues with discoloration persisted into the last decade. In 2010, Zantac was “tested for impurities that were known to cause … yellow discoloration.” Although, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, “NDMA used in labs is yellow,” no tests were conducted for this particular substance.
Similarly, when a manufacturing site in China identified problems with “discolored and degraded Zantac tablets” in 2015, GSK sought to downplay the issue, while no testing for NDMA was conducted. Instead, “inappropriate storage” was blamed.
During this period, GSK was fined by regulators in the U.S. and China, but not over Zantac specifically. In 2012, GSK pled guilty and was fined $3 billion “for marketing drugs for inappropriate uses, disregarding safety data and cheating Medicaid,” according to the Bloomberg Businessweek report.
And in 2014, “China fined GSK $500 million and deported a top executive for bribing doctors to prescribe its drugs.”
Issues with Zantac did not come to a head until September 2019, when the FDA received a document from Valisure, an independent laboratory, which, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, “had found extremely high levels of NDMA in Zantac and several generic versions of ranitidine.”
Valisure conducted these tests after NDMA had been found in batches of the blood pressure medication valsartan the previous year. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Valisure “found NDMA in every version of ranitidine it tested and concluded the problem was inherent to the molecule itself.”
Although the FDA issued an alert, it also questioned Valisure’s testing methods and conducted its own tests. “Within a month,” says Bloomberg Businessweek, “at least two dozen countries pulled ranitidine from stores or halted its distribution.” GSK stopped distributing the drug, as did Sanofi.
Ultimately, in April 2020, ranitidine was banned by the FDA. The agency found that “NDMA levels increase in ranitidine even under normal storage conditions … And NDMA has been found to increase significantly in samples stored at higher temperatures, including temperatures the product may be exposed to during distribution and handling by consumers.”
However, says Bloomberg Businessweek, the FDA has not shared specifics in any published paper about what its tests detected. Instead, these findings were revealed “during a monthly lecture series called FDA Grand Rounds,” in October 2021: one tablet of ranitidine contained “almost four times the FDA’s limit in any drug” when initially tested.
Nevertheless, in June 2021, the FDA said there were “no consistent signals” that Zantac increases cancer risk and that such links that were found in outside research papers were not conclusive. Bloomberg Businessweek says this “is now a regular part of Glaxo’s public-relations and, presumably, legal defense.”
A statement provided by GSK to Fierce Pharma in response to the Bloomberg Businessweek article says it “presents an incomplete and biased presentation of the facts surrounding the Zantac (ranitidine) litigation.”
“Patient safety is the highest priority for GSK, and the company categorically refutes any allegation of having covered up data regarding the safety of ranitidine,” the statement adds. “The safety of ranitidine has been thoroughly evaluated over the past 40 years.”
Thousands of Zantac-related lawsuits pending despite setbacks
The Bloomberg Businessweek report states that “More than 70,000 people who took Zantac or generic versions of it are suing the company in U.S. state courts for selling a potentially contaminated and dangerous drug,” with the first of these trials set to begin later this month in the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda.
Other companies that sold Zantac, including Pfizer, Sanofi and generic manufacturers, are also facing lawsuits.
There have been some setbacks for plaintiffs, however. According to the Bloomberg Businessweek report, a December 2022 ruling, by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, “dismissed thousands of federal lawsuits that had been consolidated in her courtroom for pretrial proceedings.”
U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg found there is “no widespread acceptance in the scientific community of an observable, statistically significant association between ranitidine and cancer.” Lawyers for the plaintiffs plan to appeal.
GSK is hanging its hat on this ruling, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. In a statement, Kathleen Quinn, a spokesperson for the company, said, “The court’s view is consistent with the position that GSK and other co-defendants have taken throughout this litigation.”
And in a statement following the Florida federal court ruling, GSK said it was glad that “unreliable and litigation-driven science did not enter the federal courtroom.”
Fierce Pharma reports that following this ruling, not just GSK but “Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim are now able to wash their hands of thousands of Zantac-related lawsuits,” as about 50,000 claims were taken “off the drugmakers’ plates.”
And according to Law360, on Feb. 7, the same Florida judge issued a new ruling which will not allow tens of thousands of Zantac lawsuits to be combined.
This ruling was made on the basis that the lawsuits in question had signed up for “court-created registry of claims in the multidistrict legislation” that was “abandoned” following the December 2022 decision.
In this new ruling, Judge Rosenberg also provided some insights into the appeals that were filed against the December 2022 decision, stating that “claimants in the registry are still now required to file their cases individually in federal court in order for their claims to be considered timely,” according to Law360.
However, as reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, “GSK does still have to fight the tens of thousands of cases waiting in state courts, where judges aren’t bound by the federal court’s ruling,” adding that “GSK could face years of lawsuits in California, Delaware and other states, with the possibility of billions in damages.”
Law360 reported Jan. 26 that despite the December 2022 Florida ruling, “New York’s Litigation Coordinating Panel on Thursday consolidated more than 40” Zantac lawsuits. Attorneys from Napoli Shkolnik PLLC, one of the firms representing plaintiffs in the lawsuits, described this as “a welcome alternative” to the Florida multidistrict litigation.
In the forthcoming Alameda County court case, GSK “is expected to urge” the court “to limit what expert testimony jurors can hear,” reports Reuters.
The plaintiff in that case, James Goetz, says he developed bladder cancer from taking Zantac over a period of many years. According to Bloomberg Businessweek :
“Goetz was 60 in 2017 when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. That in and of itself wasn’t too unusual; 60 is about the age this particular cancer is often diagnosed in men. Smokers get bladder cancer, but Goetz hadn’t smoked since he was 22. His job hadn’t exposed him to any potentially harmful chemicals. It was perplexing, but he had no reason to think his getting cancer was anything other than random.
“When Zantac was recalled, he kept four bottles he’d already purchased. They’re in the freezer in the office of one of his attorneys, Brent Wisner, as are leftover pills from Russell. Tests showed that one of Goetz’s pills is contaminated with 3,000ng of NDMA, Wisner says; one of Russell’s has more than twice as much. Wisner says he’s invited GSK to test the tablets, but the company hasn’t done so.”
Goetz’s cancer has returned in aggressive form, necessitating surgery and dialysis. His bladder and prostate were removed, along with 20 feet of his intestines. He later suffered sepsis, kidney stones and kidney failure. His lawsuits against Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer and Sanofi were settled in December 2022, but his GSK case continues.
Depositions taken during the discovery process, brought to the public eye by Bloomberg Businessweek, have been revealing. A former senior medical adviser to Glaxo, when asked during a June 2021 deposition whether Glaxo had ever tested for the presence of NDMA in Zantac, answered, “Not to my knowledge.”
In a May 2022 deposition, Andrew Whitehead, who had been director of second-generation research and development for the company, testified that “it would have been known in the ‘80s as part of the development” of Zantac that ranitidine would degrade in high temperature conditions.
And a May 2021 deposition, Fred Eshelman, formerly Glaxo’s associate director of clinical research when Zantac was developed, agreed with a lawyer for the plaintiffs that “it is completely unheard of in the industry to go that fast” — referring to the clinical development of ranitidine.
More drugs under scrutiny for potential presence of nitrosamines
As the lawsuits against the former manufacturers of Zantac continue, increased scrutiny of medications for the potential presence of nitrosamines has followed.
USA Today reports that the FDA “has asked drugmakers to evaluate all products for any risk they might contain nitrosamines,” adding that “Companies that identify any such risk must conduct follow-up testing, report changes and take action” by Oct. 1.
“We continue to closely evaluate this type of impurity and will continue to investigate and monitor the marketplace and manufacturing efforts to help ensure the availability of safe, quality products for U.S. consumers,” stated FDA spokesman Jeremy Kahn.
According to USA Today, in recent years, several drugs have been recalled due to the presence of nitrosamines, including diabetes medication metformin, anti-smoking medication Chantix, and blood pressure, heart and kidney medications losartan, quinapril (sold as Accupril) and valsartan.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
February 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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Pfizer enrolled 44,000 people across 270 clinical sites in the phase 3 clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine. The largest of these sites by far was number 1231 in Buenos Aires, under the direction of the pediatric infectious diseases specialist Fernando Polack. The Argentine operation appears to have been plagued by substantial irregularities and is the subject of an ongoing inquiry by the Argentinian parliament.
Yesterday, Welt reporter Elke Bodderas published a report shedding further light on what appear to be systematic efforts to cover up or reclassify adverse events among trial participants.
The centrepiece of their reporting is patient number 12312982, a 36 year-old Buenos Aires resident named Augusto Roux, who participated in the vaccine arm of the trial and experienced significant adverse reactions following both doses of the vaccine. His most severe symptoms followed the second jab; they included shortness of breath, nausea, fever and darkened urine, and required hospitalisation. Throughout both sets of reactions, he tested negative for Covid. A trial doctor judged his symptoms very likely to be an adverse reaction to vaccination, and there are compelling reasons to think he suffered pericarditis. Roux promptly dropped out of the trial, and his lawyers succeeded in gaining access to internal Pfizer records his case. These reveal that Buenos Aires researchers recorded Roux as testing positive for Covid following dose 1, despite multiple negative PCR tests. To cover for his September hospitalisation, meanwhile, they listed him as suffering from a “severe anxiety attack.”
Welt finds other irregularities in data from the the Argentine clinical site as well. Following the first dose at the end of August, they removed 53 trial participants; internal documents give nothing but vague, contradictory excuses for the purge. Following the second dose, Buenos Aires researchers removed a further 200 participants – two-thirds of all removals across the entire trial.
Irregularities appear to extend beyond the shady Buenos Aires operation. As a friend notes on Twitter, the fact that there were more deaths in the vaccine than the placebo arm of the Pfizer trial has always been considered an awkward coincidence by the fact checkers. Upon closer examination, though, it begins to look like deaths from severe vaccine injuries were actually what put the vaccine arm over the top:
[Pharmacology expert and head of the “Data Based Medicine” network and the vaccine injury support organisation React-19] David Healy has … questions about the trial beyond the Augusto Roux case and other events at Buenos Aires. He wonders about a total of 21 vaccine group deaths that are said to be “not due to vaccination.” In at least two of these deaths, this conclusion doesn’t seem to be fully justified. WELT has documents showing that patient No. 11621327 was found dead in his home three days after the second dose, apparently a stroke. Patient No. 11521497 died 20 days after vaccination, diagnosed with cardiac arrest. “According to the current understandings, these two cases would be attributed to vaccination,” says Berlin-based pharmaceutical specialist Susanne Wagner, “especially since the US health authority CDC is currently investigating strokes in vaccinated people and it is known that blood clots can trigger sudden deaths following vaccination.”
In response to Welt inquiries, Pfizer responded that “Regulatory authorities around the world have approved our Covid-19 vaccine. These approvals are based on a robust and independent assessment of the scientific data on quality, safety, and efficacy, including the phase 3 clinical trial.” Thomas Mertens, head of the German vaccine regulator STIKO, demanded clarification from Pfizer, while the Berlin Charité immunologist Andreas Radbruch suggested the pharmaceutical should be sanctioned to preserve faith in vaccination and trust in regulators.
I doubt very much that will happen.
February 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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CBS joins the chorus of mainstream media outlets promoting the false narrative that covid is the cause of a sharp increase in excess heart failure deaths around the world. The concept of “covid heart” has been thoroughly debunked by multiple studies, yet the lie continues to persist because of media disinformation.
An early report that set in motion fears of a Covid-heart disease connection was published in JAMA Cardiology on July 27, 2020. German researchers claimed that 78% of recently recovered Covid-19 patients had “abnormal” signs on their cardiac magnetic resonance scans and 60% showed signs of inflamed heart muscle, a condition known as myocarditis. Those astonishing numbers were covered in nearly 400 news outlets. The report has so far been viewed more than 900,000 times — a rarity for academic papers.
Soon after its publication, however, the paper was criticized for statistical and methodologic errors. It eventually underwent a long but much quieter correction that indicated that many of the abnormalities were only marginally more common among those recovering from Covid-19 than among similar control individuals who had not had Covid-19.
The assertion of the existence of covid heart serves a useful purpose, however, as it conveniently helps to distract from the very real threat of myocarditis caused by mRNA vaccines. Studies show a direct connection between covid vaccination, boosters, and risk of heart failure, specifically in younger people. The corporate media continues to ignore these studies in favor of the covid heart claim.
The CBS report presents a correlation as proof of causation: The explosion in heart failure happened in parallel with the pandemic, therefore, they say it “must be covid” that is causing the damage. But there was one other event that also happened in parallel with the heart failure spike – The introduction of experimental mRNA vaccines which have never been used before.
In reality, there is no evidence of a significant increase in risk of heart problems from contraction of covid, and there are no studies yet that use unvaccinated people as a control group to determine if vaccines help or hurt a patient’s chances. Medical officials simply assume that the deaths of younger people are due to them being “less likely” to have been vaccinated. The complete absence of objective scientific analysis has contributed to a lack of understanding surrounding covid risks versus vaccine risks. Mainstream outlets have consistently proven they are only interested in repeating establishment positions and protecting the status quo.
Why don’t medical authorities use unvaccinated people as a control group for their observations? Why do they continue to promote assumptions rather than definitive evidence? One can only theorize, but this behavior suggests a desire to hide certain findings and mislead the public rather than uncover the facts.
February 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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In his excellent exposé of the recent decision by the Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) to advocate journalism that goes beyond objectivity, and in light of the report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) confirming that RussiaGate was fabricated nonsense, genuinely independent researcher, writer and filmmaker James Corbett made a number of very salient points.
As Corbett points out:
As a moment’s sober reflection will immediately reveal, the mouthpiece mockingbirds of the controlled establishment media have never been objective and they have no credibility to damage.
But there is far more to this particular psyop than merely covering up the inconvenient history of media. The new narrative, sold to us in this instance by both KCNL and the CJR, is laying the foundations for a transformation of the media landscape.
The establishment wants us to believe that our “trust” in journalism is a vital component of our democracy—and, moreover, that the state can determine which news media organisation is deserving of our “trust.”
In truth, if democratic principles really matter to us, it is essential that we never trust any “news reports” from any journalist or news provider. Democracy places a duty upon us to be fierce critical thinkers. We should never unquestioningly accept anything we are told.
Journalism Is Story Telling
Every mainstream media (MSM) and “alternative media” outlet presents narratives. They are in the business of telling stories, not simply presenting “objective” facts.
Good journalism expresses an opinion and then cites the evidence that informs it. Well written journalism does this within the engaging and intriguing narratives it weaves. But no journalism is free from the journalist’s own conformation bias, and the tenor of the story is often directed by the editorial policy and allegiances of the publisher.
Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, in which he exposes the likelihood that the US government was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, is only available via independent outlets and on his own Substack. Despite this apparently being a story of enormous magnitude, the MSM seems extremely reluctant to bring it to wider attention. You can read about it only in the so-called “alternative media.”
While some MSM outlets report the official denial of Hersh’s piece, none have lent it much credibility, and many have been quick to cast aspersions on Hersh himself. Yes, the old game of attacking the messenger while avoiding the content of the message.
It is fair to say, based on the Hersh article alone, that no one can really verify his revelations in specific regard to Nord Stream II. He presents no evidence other than anecdotal accounts from unnamed sources. But nowhere in the MSM does there appear to be any interest in pursuing the needed investigation that Hersh’s piece demands.
Thus, it remains a piece of fantastic journalism, most notably because the very specific references it makes to orders given and operations undertaken during the BALTOPS22 exercise can be investigated. Detailed questions can be asked of officials. The blanket denials of Hersh’s story and his precise allegations are nowhere near enough to discredit it.
Given all the circumstantial evidence that also points towards US and NATO aligned culpability, his journalism—a great story—adds real fuel to the fire. This is real investigative journalism. That the story he presents in part reflects his own perspective is irrelevant.
The MSM Was Never Objective
One of the MSM’s main criticisms of the so-called “alternative media” is that it can often be described as activist journalism. This allegation implies that the perspective of the alternative news journalist biases their reporting. But such a criticism is itself a deception, because all journalism reports from a perspective.
There are basic commercial reasons why objectivity doesn’t suit journalism. Consumers of “news” don’t want to simply know what the facts are. They also want a steer on the broader implications of those facts. If that reaffirms their existing world view, all the better for sales. We all want to believe we are right and not be constantly reminded that we are probably wrong.
This is why very few Guardian readers also read the Daily Telegraph or Sun readers the Mirror, even when the presented “facts” are essentially the same. We pay for the perspective we agree with, not simply an objective reporting of the facts.
It is science, not journalism, that strives to achieve absolute objectivity in its pursuit of empirical facts. But the problem with scientific objectivity, beyond its corruption, is that it tends to introduce immense complexity and can be extremely boring to read. It doesn’t lend itself well to stirring up emotions or selling media content.
Other than a few obsessive researchers and the scientists themselves, few of us actually want to read highly technical and sterile scientific papers. We rely upon the journals and the MSM to tell us what the science says, wrongly assuming that their reporting of it is “objective.”
Our faith in the MSM places us in a vulnerable position, especially when it comes to the reporting of hard facts, such as those supposedly revealed by science. If those same alleged “facts” then become the basis for justifying government policy and/or our own decisions, then we had better be damn sure that our belief in the veracity of the story is well-placed.
The evidence that the MSM doesn’t even report the facts accurately is overwhelming. The CJR has exposed RussiaGate as the politically motivated nonsense it was. But this rubbish was relentlessly spewed out on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a year—alongside the equally baseless Skripal yarn—by a majority of MSM outlets. The obvious propaganda was designed to illegitimately demonise the Russian government.
Video link
The CJR report demonstrates that today’s Western MSM is a mass purveyor of mis- and disinformation. We are presently regaled with highly spurious Ukraine war propaganda. This is the culmination of the Russophobic Western MSM agenda that has been building for many years.
The scene has seemingly been set, and we have all been psychologically prepared for the current conflict. This makes it easier for us to imagine that the Russians are our enemy.
State propaganda partnerships with the MSM are nothing new. Three examples quickly come to mind:
— British military intelligence were feeding senior broadsheet correspondents “stories” for decades, long before the MSM made up tales about WMD in Iraq to convince the public to accept a fake casus belli for the Iraq War.
— The Church Committee formally exposed the “Operation Mockingbird” network in the US in 1975. The CIA had been manipulating the reporting of the US MSM for many years, feeding selected operative journalists intel that they then reported as “objective journalism.”
— The Mockingbird Operation PBSuccess employed public relations guru Edward Bernays to use the media to overthrow the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company in 1954.
While proven MSM disinformation operations and campaigns, such as these, have purportedly been assigned to the annals of history, disinfo activity is manifestly ongoing. If anything, state control of the MSM narrative for propaganda purposes has reached heights that even Bernays couldn’t have imagined.
State propaganda has been privatised. Governments channel taxpayers’ money to their global corporate partners, which in turn pay the MSM to produce the desired disinformation. During the pseudopandemic we saw whole teams of behavioural scientists at the World Health Organisation global governance level and in various nations states “use” the MSM to unethically deploy applied psychology and disinformation to tackle what the establishment and its MSM hypocritically called “the infodemic.”
When Spi-B—the team of behavioural change experts within the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—recommended that the UK government should “use the media” to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” to convince British people that they were living through a pandemic, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, the MSM dutifully obliged. They launched numerous corporate backed terror campaigns upon an unsuspecting public.
We are constantly told by the political class that “press freedom” is an essential part of our democracy. If the MSM really were a pluralistic and free media, it wouldn’t be possible to “use” it for propaganda. There would be too many dissenting articles by investigative MSM journalists to maintain a single, uniform narrative across all outlets simultaneously. But it isn’t a pluralistic and free media and never was, so it is entirely possible for the MSM to be co-opted. What does this say about our alleged democracy?
The so-called “infodemic,” identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers. The MSM attacked all dissent—literally without question—on the behalf of governments and intergovernmental authorities and their corporate partners.
The infodemic, according to the establishment, was prompted by the public’s questions about government policy, about “science” as reported by the MSM, and about data that revealed statistical manipulation. The infodemic was also prompted by the MSM looking askance at sceptical scientific papers shared by people who dared question the reported “science” as well as at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by the MSM or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist.”
There was nothing remotely “objective” about any of this mainstream “news coverage.” Rather, in total obedience to the state, the Western MSM attacked informed opinion, ridiculed all questions and demonised individuals who did not comply. Not because there was any justification for doing so, but because that is the role of the MSM. Objectivity is nowhere in sight, nor has it ever been.
The MSM Has Never Questioned Power
The Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) objective is to create a “set of standards for trustworthy news.” Indeed, maintaining the public’s “trust” is the overwhelming fixation of the MSM and its government partners. We are urged to place our faith in those who evidently lie to us and suppress facts all the time.
At one point the KCNL noted:
As early as the turbulent 1960s, some younger journalists, especially investigative reporters, began to question what objectivity really meant if it did not challenge power, privilege and inequality.
Similarly, the CJR report on RussiaGate states that “primary missions” of journalism include “informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable.”
We are told that “holding power to account,” or watchdog journalism, is the core principle of journalism. Yet nowhere in the International Federation of Journalists Charter of Ethics or in the UK National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct is there any mention of this alleged principle.
The American Press Association’s (APA) Principles of Journalism does say that journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power. But this “principle” speaks more about defending journalists’ alleged “rights” than it does about exposing any wrongdoing:
Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.
The APA’s watchdog principle is supposedly protected by the government and its courts. Yet it is not a “right,” but rather a permit bestowed upon American journalists by the establishment. This permit can be rescinded. The extent to which journalists in the US can question “power” is based solely on the protection that legacy journalism receives from the institutions it allegedly questions.
Demeaning something as frivolous is precisely what the MSM does when it labels people as conspiracy theorists, as science deniers or as COVID deniers. These attacks are rarely, if ever, based upon any exploration of the evidence. In fact, the labelling system itself is used to omit, obscure or “deny” the evidence.
All the APA’s principles mean is that certain subjects and certain kinds of evidence, characterised as “frivolous,” must not be reported by its members. What is or is not considered “frivolous” is entirely subjective. Given journalism’s legislative “protections,” it seems pretty clear what will be considered “frivolous.” A high degree of subjectivity, not objectivity, is the full extent of the APA members’ ethical commitment to “watchdog” journalism.
We only need look at the history we’ve discussed to understand that the news media barely and rarely holds power to account. Instead, the MSM is more frequently an extension of state and corporate power and is used to control the people through disinformation, omission and misdirection rather than to inform them and question power on their behalf.
This is not to say that good MSM journalism doesn’t exist. But, on those few occasions when MSM journalists do expose state crimes, they pay a terrible price for doing so. Julian Assange is among the small band of journalists who have dared to question power. He currently languishes in a British high-security prison precisely because he did so.
The MSM doesn’t question power when it deceives the public about chemical weapon attacks on behalf of the state. It isn’t holding power to account with its refusal to investigate, or even report, evidence of malfeasance in office. Its ignoring of state crimes can in no way be considered “watchdog freedom.” And it certainly does not act as any kind of watchdog when it simply reports whatever it is ordered to report by a centrally controlled global propaganda network.
We Are the Problem and the Solution
Social media has been lambasted for corralling its users into self-affirming information silos. While this is somewhat concerning, it isn’t anything new. The technological capability of social media to control opinion is an added dimension, to be sure, but the MSM has been doing exactly the same thing for more than a century.
Unfortunately, the MSM is able to propagandise us with relative ease. It does this partly by exploiting our own misconceptions. While we all seem to agree that the Russian and Chinese MSM are state propaganda, we Westerners, for some unknown reason, apparently imagine that our own mainstream media isn’t.
There is, however, a caveat with regard to this apparent gullibility. Research statistics show that there is a remarkable lack of trust in the MSM in the West. Notably, in the US “trust” in the news is as low as 26%. The UK fares little better, at just 34%. “Trust” in the news is higher in Scandinavian countries.
We only need have brief conversations with friends and family to realise that the propaganda does, in fact, work. But what explains this disconnect between our lack of trust in the MSM with our continuing willingness to believe what it tells us?
The answer lies in the greatest achievement of the Western MSM and the parasite class it serves: They have convinced us that our media is free and is pluralistic—this despite it never being true.
Consequently, it seems that while we are wary of spin and propaganda, we refuse to contemplate the likelihood that the MSM is out-and-out lying to us. Perhaps that is because we perceive the MSM as basically serving the public interest—even if we admit to ourselves that it bends the truth a little. In other words, our scepticism does not extend as far as disbelief.
We therefore remain unable to reconcile our credulous acceptance of MSM claims about itself with the reality that we are being misled en masse by that same institution. Cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable psychological sensation we experience when we hold two or more contradictory thoughts at the same time—may account for our irreconcilable beliefs.
In other words, we are caught between not “trusting” the MSM, on the one hand, and, on the other, our inability to accept the fact that virtually nothing the MSM tells us is true. The implications of this dichotomy are beyond anything we want to contemplate. As a result, we still believe that “the news” is our window on the world.
If you think about it, the idea that all the important global events of the day can be condensed into a single “newspaper” or a 30-minute “evening news” broadcast is quite ridiculous. Even if it were composed of honest, unbiased reports, which it seldom is, “the news” cannot provide us with anything approaching a reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.
Therefore, if we genuinely want to know what’s happening, we have to actively seek information and critically evaluate it ourselves. As James Corbett wrote:
Granted, the realization that all media is constructed for us by someone with an interest in making us believe something is not a happy one for most people. Instead, it is a deeply unpopular realization, because it means we can’t just switch on the evening news, switch off our brain, and expect some totally neutral journalistic saviour to come along and hand us “the news” from on high.
Like it or not, it is our responsibility to think critically about all information, no matter who relays it. This responsibility applies equally to the stories we are fed by the “alternative media.” This article should be read critically! It is, after all, just information that’s being passed along to you.
The Knight-Cronkite News Lab suggests that journalists should give their “readers, viewers, listeners and users valuable information that helps them make better decisions and lead better lives.”
Here, the new breed of MSM journalists, no more nor less objective than their predecessors, has been given the task of reporting “the news” from a value-driven perspective. The aim is to change us by making us “better” people. So what are the values the new breed of journalists are being taught to advocate?
KCNL tell us:
There is broad consensus today about the reality of climate change and the threats that it poses. That may well inform how many resources a newsroom devotes to reporting on the issue as well as any point of view its stories reflect. The same might go for opposition to systemic racism, say, or support for LGBTQ rights. [. . .] One value we believe is worth stating out loud is support for democratic institutions, which are under attack on multiple fronts. Trustworthy news is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy.
Herein lies the problem. Every one of these “values” serves global political agendas and dovetails neatly with government policy and, perhaps most notably, with global governance policy. That is to say, the MSM’s new values are exactly the same as their old values. Their “new” objective, just like the old objective, is to advocate for power, not question it.
Contrary to the KCNL’s claims, democracy is not founded upon our acceptance of whatever we are told by government “institutions.” Rather, it is predicated upon our ability not just to question the state but to limit it. Thus, KCNL’s contention that a “healthy democracy” is one where “democratic institutions” assert sovereignty over us is entirely false.
To point out that these institutions have no authority over us whatsoever is not to attack “democracy.” On the contrary, doing so defends “democracy.” But you will never hear that from the MSM. The MSM’s continuing mission is to maintain the lies that ensure we never realise this “truth.”
It is ironic that the MSM attacks their alternative counterparts for advocacy journalism and yet the MSM’s own apparent solution to the trust issue that preoccupies it is to itself emulate advocacy journalism. The difference? The alternative media is far more likely to advocate the questioning of power, while the MSM looks set to continue advocating for power.
Seeing as how the concept of “news” is, in and of itself, absurd, the suggestion that news should be “trusted” simply adds another layer of misdirection to this new MSM advocacy journalism. So, if our “faith” in the stories we are told is part of the problem, a solution is self-evident. We should abandon any notion of “trust.” We should invest our efforts in being “better” critical thinkers.
The “alternative” media outlet UK Column sums up this point nicely. It asks:
Why should I trust the UK Column ? Put simply, you shouldn’t. The question of whether or not to trust a news organisation is a false choice. Making such a choice is promoted by government, the old media, and two new organisation types: the fact checker and the trust provider.
It disenfranchises readers, viewers and listeners. It is based on the principle that if you trust the media organisation you are visiting, there is no need for you to check the information they present. So we ask you not to trust us. Instead, view everything published here with a critical eye. Where possible, primary source material is made available for everything we publish: check it; make up your own mind.
In his previously referenced article, James Corbett provides a list of questions we should all ask ourselves whenever we encounter information offered by any source. We don’t need government or any other “democratic institution” to control information for us, nor we do need to be told what to think about it. We just need to think critically and answer these simple questions to our own satisfaction:
- Why is this media outlet showing us this report?
- What interest do they have in making us think a particular way about the issue presented?
- Can the information in the report be independently confirmed or triangulated from other sources?
- Whose viewpoint is being shown, and how is that viewpoint portrayed? Whose viewpoint is being excluded? Why?
- What language is being used to frame the issue?
- What does the report make us believe about the world?
- Are we in agreement with the report? Why or why not?
Ultimately, as ever, the choice is yours. You can gather information from any source you wish. If you want to know what the state wants you to believe and what behaviour it expects of you, then go to the MSM. If you want to explore broader criticism of government and its policies, then the more independent “alternative media” provides richer pickings.
Treat these two impostors just the same. There is honest, high-quality journalism in both. There is also propaganda to be found in both. Fortunately, if you answer James Corbett’s suggested questions, you’ll be able to spot the difference more often than not.
February 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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In the Christian faith, God comes in the form of three persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Together, these three beings form the Trinity.
In a recent interview with the German writer Fabian Scheidler, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh discussed his bombshell article that appeared in his inaugural posting on Substack, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline”.
When Scheidler thanked Hersh for his courageous reporting, the veteran reporter shot back, “What’s so courageous about telling the truth? We’re supposed to tell the truth!”
I’ve known Sy Hersh for coming on a quarter century. While I was too young to experience first-hand the impact of his reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, I had a front row seat to the masterful job he did in bringing to light the horrible facts about what the United States was doing in the Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq.
Legendary status isn’t given—it is earned. And Sy Hersh has earned the absolute right to be called the GOAT when it comes to investigative journalism. He is, simply put, the best.
I’ve read nearly everything Sy Hersh has written, and am able to put his considerable journalistic output in its proper historical perspective. It is therefore that I feel very comfortable in concluding that, in terms of its potential for bringing about tectonic geopolitical change, Sy’s Nord Stream reporting is his most important work ever.
The GOAT has produced what I call the Trinity of Truth.
Truth One: The President of the United States, Joe Biden, by conspiring with members of his national security team to deliberately bypass constitutionally-mandated reporting requirements to Congress regarding acts of war undertaken by the United States, has committed an impeachable offense unmatched by any other president in the history of the United States.
Truth Two: The blow-back that will occur inside Germany to the revelations put forward by Seymour Hersh that the United States carried out an economic Pearl Harbor by destroying energy infrastructure critical to the well-being of the German nation has the potential of breaking up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), upending more than eighty years of post-war European security and stability, and resulting in the diminishment of the United States on the world stage as it becomes isolated from long-time European allies that served as the foundation of the global acceptance of the so-called “rules based international order” that has served as the means by which the United States exerted global hegemony.
Truth Three: The decision to attack the Nord Stream pipeline puts a lie to the US contention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked act of aggression, instead underscoring the harsh truth that the United States had a strategic plan which hinged on provoking a conflict with Russia in Ukraine to provide the geopolitical cover for ending Europe’s reliance upon cheap Russian natural gas by demonstrating that every time Russia sought a negotiated end to the crisis, whether before the invasion through implementation of the Minsk Accords, or after in the Istanbul round of talks scheduled for April 1, the United States sabotaged the effort, keeping the conflict alive long enough to implement its major objective—the destruction of Nord Stream.
In short, Sy Hersh, through his reporting, has exposed truths which have the potential of bringing down a presidency, destroying NATO, and proving Russia right in the eyes of the world.
Name one other piece of journalism in the past half-century that packs such a punch.
You can’t.
Sy Hersh is a national—no, an international—treasure, something this Trinity of Truth underscores.
Be sure to treat him as such.
February 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia, War Crimes | European Union, Germany, NATO, Russia, United States |
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Title says it all. And this liar is apparently gonna replace Fauci in NIH!
Isn’t elemental evil so obvious – I mean WOW!
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February 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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As the world holds its breath and gasps at the news that Germany has been egregiously used as America’s pawn in a sick power game which is filling the coffers of U.S. companies and making Joe Biden’s buddies in the military industry billionaires, many will reflect on the judgement of Olaf Scholz and ask whether he is fit to be the German chancellor. He may have known about Biden’s plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines which would guarantee that Germany would not only throw itself into the war against Russia, but stay at it in the long run, which is bad enough. Or he may not have known and was as shocked as anyone when it happened in June of last year during a NATO exercise.
In either case, Scholz’s judgement will be examined now for a very long time and a process of opprobrium has in fact already started in the same building where he announced that he would throw the lever on a 200 billion euro spending spree to ‘rearm’ the German army: the German parliament.
While the German press follows its lead from their masters in the coalition government which Scholz presides over by pretending that the Hersh piece doesn’t exist, MPs like Sevim Dağdelen regale the government in a bold speech. “Stop defaming the journalist & his sources! The German government must disclose its findings on the #terrorist attacks on #NordStream , considering that revelations by #SeymourHersh point to the responsibility of the #USA & #Norway” she summarizes in a tweet.
Scholz is of course in a quandary. Whichever way he turns he sees his career shot to shreds so the best course is to hope that the media will serve him admirably and help him with the ruse of simply closing one’s eyes and hoping the commotion will die down.
But the debate is actually gaining momentum in some strange places and this will only serve the purpose once again for social media to ask the critical questions for the incumbent journalists to write up, like stenographers.
In the UK, it is Boris Johnson who, despite no longer being PM, is still making the news for being an inept buffoon who can’t help getting entangled in sleaze and corruption scandals – some about him or others simply about bent MPs who he goes to some length to protect.
This time it is the appointment of the BBC chief, who, it turns out is a crony of Johnson’s who he owed a huge favour to. Richard Price, according to a parliamentary report, arranged for Bojo to have 800,000 pounds ‘loan’ from a Canadian businessman. After arranging such a kind gesture Price, who was an advisor of Johnson in Downing Street, made it be known that he wanted the top job. And he got it.
It’s this kind of ‘jobs for the boys’ corruption stories which most Brits wouldn’t be too bothered about as, apart from only expecting this from Johnson whose entire tenure in government is a trail of havoc of lies, deceit and sleaze, the UK public is getting used to the idea that Whitehall and Parliament are now fully-fledged US style centres of corruption.
The remarkable thing about the Richard Price story though is that it was not the fourth estate who broke it. Given the tawdry, unhealthy relationship between big media in the UK and the establishment most investigative journalists have taken up other professions as ‘graft’ as a subject isn’t an easy commodity to flog to those in the media who themselves are tacitly as corrupt as the elite they serve. Such journalists are in dwindling numbers in the UK.
And so it was Nicholas Wilson, an anti-corruption sleuth, who dug the dirt up and joined up the dots creating this latest sleaze story about a bent BBC boss, who, while a Johnson advisor managed to get 600,000 pounds from the government for one of his companies. This is how UK governments work these days. A little bit more sophisticated than brown envelopes or insider trading. But not much. Make yourself useful to a corrupt leader who has the morals of a sewer rat and then name your price in the form of a top job as payment.
But judgement is also an issue here. If Johnson was happy to harangue close friends for money and put it out that he was looking for a large cash donation, then surely any third-rate hack would ask “what about the Ukraine war?”. Does Johnson have a financial stake in this war? Recently he was in Kiev and then Washington doing his bit for lobbying. Given this new role and the fact that he was the first western leader to send ammo to Ukraine, is it not fair to ask “Is he on the Zelensky payroll these days?”. Was he also in the loop on the pipeline bombing plan? All reasonable questions that UK journalists would no doubt like to examine. Be patient. They’re no doubt waiting for an out of work activist to get onto Twitter and do their jobs for them.
February 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Germany, UK, United States |
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The US State Department funds UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organization that partners with platforms to flag misinformation and disinformation. The organization has been accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation.
In September 2021, the State Department awarded ISD a grant to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK and Europe after it won the US-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that has been accused of demonetizing conservative news websites by putting them on a blacklist used by advertisers, the Daily Caller reported.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded the ISD to research Russian disinformation tactics on Wikipedia. However, the department insisted that it does not engage in content moderation on social media.
ISD has several partnerships with social media platforms on content moderation decisions. The organization is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on how to respond to misinformation.
ISD is also part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, whose members are tasked with improving the platform’s enforcement of its guidelines and can flag more content than other users. Google said that it “prioritizes flags from Trusted Flaggers.”
The organization also has partnerships with Google to counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe. It also partners with Amazon’s Audible, Facebook, and Microsoft.
ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism. However, it has also been targeting what it deems misinformation and hate.
February 16, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | Facebook, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Spotify, United States, YouTube |
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I don’t normally watch TVNZ’s Seven Sharp, but on 5th October 2021 we were told that an immunologist would be on the programme to debunk certain ‘Covid myths’.
One such ‘myth’ was the belief that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity. In response, clinical immunologist Dr. Maia Brewerton said that natural immunity to Covid-19 is not as good as the vaccine.
No evidence was given. Just an assertion.
As an ex-science teacher, I found Dr Brewerton’s statement to be unsatisfactory, for the following simple reason: the vaccine can only generate antibodies to a single viral antigen (the ‘spike’ protein), whereas the whole virus particle reportedly contains 29 proteins, which can therefore evoke the production of a correspondingly greater diversity of antibodies.
So, if the part of the viral RNA that codes for the spike protein RNA undergoes a mutation, the vaccine-induced antibody may be unable to bind to the mutant antigen, but with natural immunity there will a range of ‘back-up’ antibodies that can bind to the other proteins of the virus.
I wrote to Dr. Brewerton to make this point, asking her if she could provide evidence for her Seven Sharp statement.
I received no reply.
This was particularly disappointing because we had repeatedly been urged by the authorities to ‘accept the science’.
One might think that such a single experience may not be particularly significant; Dr. Brewerton might be snowed under with work. But soon after Dr. Brewerton’s appearance, Stuff invited readers to submit questions on Covid, so I sent a similar question to the one I had asked of Dr. Brewerton.
Again, I received no reply.
I was beginning to sense that the authorities might not be too keen to take their own advice to ‘go with the science’, since the very essence of science is examination and questioning of evidence.
This feeling was solidified in August 2022, when I came across a paper co-authored by Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago, who has been one of chief advocates for the wearing of masks during Covid-19. The paper was titled “The Covid-19 experience in Aotearoa New Zealand and other comparable high-income jurisdictions and implications for managing the next pandemic phase”.
In the article I could find no evidence supporting the efficacy of masks in the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’, so I wrote to Prof. Baker, saying that I had looked for, but had failed to find, any research evidence supporting the efficacy of mask wearing and hoped that he might be able to provide it.
Again, I received no reply.
An essential element in science is the challenging of established ideas in robust, untrammelled debate, in an environment that encourages questioning. Without such openness, science can be misused by powerful interests as a means of disguising misinformation as information.
In the complete absence of evidence-based debate in the media, I was forced to go elsewhere to find out what’s going on. One such source is Ian Miller’s “Unmasked: The Global Failure of Mask Mandates”. Using data from North America, Europe, and parts of South America, and county level in the U.S., Miller presents a compelling case that masks have failed their most significant test – to significantly reduce transmission of Covid. Indeed, it’s clear that masks have no health utility at all, but are an emblem of obedience to power.
In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. Government’s chief medical expert was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and he unequivocally expressed his opinion on masks:
There’s no reason to be walking around with masks.. . . . .when you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Until his recent retirement, Dr. Fauci has spent his half-century-career as the US Government’s chief medical expert, whose calm, avuncular charm inspired confidence in millions, so his word on the airwaves carried a lot of weight.
Though his was the most familiar voice, organisations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) prior to Covid, had expressed similar reservations on the utility of masks.
In February 2020, the CDC issued a document called “Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza – United States, 2017”. It drew on the findings of nearly 200 research articles published over the years 1990 and 2006, and was specifically concerned with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s) by which people could protect themselves in the event of an epidemic.
The NPI’s the CDC document described for influenza pandemics included voluntary home quarantine of exposed household members and use of face masks in community settings when ill (emphasis added). There was no recommendation that masks should be used by healthy people in the general population.
The CDC was not the only prominent public health body to update its pandemic planning. In 2019 the WHO produced a document “Non-pharmaceutical Public Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza”. The first comment on the available evidence was hardly justification for subsequent compulsory masking in public places [emphasis added]:
The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions. There have been a number of high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission …”
And in the United Kingdom’s Department of Health issued a guidebook titled “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011” which, in point 4.15, said [emphasis added]:
Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting. Facemasks must be worn correctly, changed frequently, removed properly, disposed of safely and used in combination with good respiratory, hand, and home hygiene behaviour in order for them to achieve the intended benefit. Research also shows that compliance with these recommended behaviours when wearing facemasks for prolonged periods reduces over time.”
It’s clear, then, that pre-Covid, public health authorities were unconvinced of the utility of mask-wearing by the general public. So, one is entitled to wonder why, soon after the WHO announced that Covid-19 had pandemic status, governments in North America, Europe, and Australasia began to ‘encourage’ people to wear masks in indoor public places. This was achieved by a combination of legislation and publicly expressed statements by ‘experts’.
In some cases the language was hyperbolic, verging on blood-curdling. In an interview on Newshub in July 2022 Prof. Michael Baker said:
“If you go out when you have this infection and infect your friends and family…you are going to kill some people – just like drinking and driving. We need a massive shift in thinking,”
In my e-mail to Prof. Baker, I had mentioned that I had been unable to find any evidence to support enforced wearing of masks in indoor public places. Since then I have come across two research papers, the most recent showing an investigation into the effects of masking by Beny Spira, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of São Paulo in the Journal Cureus, Journal of Medical Science.
The research, titled Correlation Between Mask Compliance and COVID-19 Outcomes in Europe, and published April 19, 2022, analysed the correlation between mask usage against morbidity and mortality rates in the 2020-2021 winter in Europe.
Data from 35 European countries on morbidity, mortality, and mask usage during a six-month period were analysed. They found that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage. On the contrary, there was a positive (though not strong) correlation between mask usage and mortality, suggesting that mask use was associated with slightly greater risk of death.
Of course, correlation does not prove causation, but these results are, or should be, cause for reflection by the authorities. But it seems not.
Whereas the Beny Spira study was retrospective, studying possible effects of mask-wearing in whole populations, a prospective study follows the fate of samples of volunteers, some of whom wore masks and others who did not.
A particularly important study by scientists at the University of Copenhagen during April and May 2020 was published in the academic journal Annals of Internal Medicine. It cast doubt on policies that force healthy individuals to wear face coverings in hopes of limiting the spread of COVID-19. The New York Times reported that…
“Researchers in Denmark reported on Wednesday that surgical masks did not protect the wearers against infection with the coronavirus in a large randomized clinical trial.”
The experiment involved over 6,000 participants who had tested negative for Covid-19 immediately prior to the experiment. Half the participants were given surgical masks and asked to wear them at all times in public places; the other, control half, were instructed to not wear masks. After a month, participants were tested for Covid-19 and for antibodies against the virus.
The Times reported that of the 4,860 participants who finished the experiment, 42 people in the mask group, or 1.8 percent, got infected, compared with 53 in the unmasked group, or 2.1 percent. The difference was not statistically significant.
Dr. Henning Bundgaard, lead author of the experiment and a physician at the University of Copenhagen, told the Times the results of his research were clear.
“Our study gives an indication of how much you gain from wearing a mask,” Bundgaard said. “Not a lot.”
Surprisingly, or perhaps (in view of what follows) unsurprisingly, the most elite medical journals – The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association – all refused to publish the paper.
Though the study’s researchers have been reticent about their results, some have hinted that it was their conclusions rather than their methodology that lay behind the rejections. Christian Torp-Pedersen, professor and chief physician at the research department at North Zealand Hospital, told Denmark’s Berlingske Daily:
We can’t start discussing what they are dissatisfied with. For if so, we must also explain what the study showed. And we do not want to discuss this until it has been published.”
When asked when the study would be published, one of its researchers, Thomas Benfield, Professor of infectious disease at the University of Copenhagen replied:
As soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.”
In their paper, the Danish scientists described their findings as ‘inconclusive’, yet it seemed that their failure to produce evidence to support the official narrative was enough for the most élite journals to refuse to publish it.
Anyone who was cynical enough to suspect that discouragement of open debate was not confined to these journals would have found support for this ‘conspiratorial’ view from two leading Oxford University academics, Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine, and Dr Tom Jefferson, a Clinical epidemiologist and Senior Associate Tutor, when they published an article in the Spectator magazine on Nov 19, 2020. The article was titled: ‘Landmark Danish study shows face masks have no significant effect.’
In quoting the Danish findings, Heneghan and Jefferson added: “As a result, it seems that any effect masks have on preventing the spread of the disease in the community is small.”
But then Facebook warned that the article was ‘false information’ claiming that it had been ‘checked by independent fact-checkers’
An angry Prof Heneghan told 70,000 followers on Twitter: ‘I’m aware of this happening to others – what has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech? There is nothing in this article that is false.’
Such attempts to shut down views contrary to the official narrative should come as no surprise, especially in light of recent revelations about what amounts to ‘public-private censorship’ of free speech.
The revelations began soon after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, in which he pledged to release internal documents that would reveal how the previous owners of Twitter had suppressed free speech. The files were released for examination by two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. In an interview on Fox News, Taibbi said:
I think the major revelation of the Twitter files so far is that we’ve discovered an elaborate bureaucracy of what you might call public-private censorship. Basically, companies like Twitter have a system by which they receive ten tens of thousands of requests for action on various accounts, typically through the DHS [Department of Home Security] and FBI, but these requests were coming from basically every agency in the government. We’ve seen them from the HHS, from the Treasury, from the DOD [Department of Defence], even from the CIA, and they will send basically long lists of accounts in Excel spreadsheet files and ask for action on those accounts. And in many cases, Twitter is complying.”
So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that governments have been using Twitter to stifle public dissent over masks.
And it’s not just censorship that’s been the only tool in the box; even more has been the deliberate stoking up of fear, as Laura Dodsworth explains in an introduction to her book A State of Fear. In an introductory article to her book she gives some examples of things to be afraid of. A small sample:
- Being tall: “People over 6ft have double the risk of coronavirus, study suggests” (DailyTelegraph 28 July 2020)
- Being bald: “Bad news for baldies as new US study finds they’re 40% more at risk of coronavirus. New research has found a strange link between male baldness and the severity of the virus showing men without hair are more likely to end up in hospital.” (Daily Star, July 23, 2020).
- Owning a dog and taking home supermarket deliveries: “Dog-owners face 78% higher risk of catching Covid-19 – and home grocery deliveries DOUBLE the risk, study finds.” (Mailonline 17 November 2020).
- Being male: “Is testicle pain potentially a sign of Covid? 49-year-old Turkish man who had no other symptoms is diagnosed with the virus” (Mailonline 18 November 2020) and
- Erectile dysfunction: “COVID-19 could cause erectile dysfunction in patients who have recovered from the virus, doctor warns” (Daily Mail, Dec 6, 2020)
- Your toes: “Coronavirus: People who contract COVID may develop red and swollen toes which turn purple, say scientists” (Sky News UK 29 October, 2020
Taken individually, these might be amusing, but together, they are part of “a panoply of doom-mongering headlines”.
No doubt some will say that Dodsworth is a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but her allegations are confirmed by UK Government publications. On 22nd March 2020, SPI-B, the behavioural science sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), published a document titled “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, advocating the use of applied psychology to influence social behaviour. Though the focus of the document was on social distancing rather than masks, the intention to use fear is clear:
“The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”
Moreover, Option 2 of Appendix B recommends using the media “to increase sense of personal threat” [emphasis added].
The cynical use of behavioural psychology to manipulate the attitudes and behaviour of populations has not been restricted to the U.K.; it’s been international. Here in New Zealand, in the early days of the pandemic, Jacinda Ardern’s use of the phrase ‘team of 5 million’ was a masterstroke.
But while this might have worked with a fearful, apathetic, naïve, and gullible public, masks and lockdown rules were flouted by some of our leaders in New Zealand, who didn’t see the need for such petty restrictions.
Chief among these was Siouxsie Wiles, the 2021 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year, and a key adviser to Jacinda Ardern. On Sept 18, 2021 Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon interviewed her.
“Now that we know Covid-19 is airborne, stay away from people who aren’t in your bubble. With new knowledge that Covid-19 is airborne, that’s no longer something safe to do. Please don’t go out and chat with a friend while you are out. Don’t hang around and have a chat, connect in other ways. We’ve got phones, we’ve got Skype, we’ve got Zoom…we need to physically disconnect for a little while,” she said.
“Stay away from people.”
The trouble is, Wiles wasn’t following her own advice. On September 3, 2021, while Auckland was still in Level Four lockdown, she was observed “hanging around and having a chat” with a journalist at Judges Bay, Parnell.
Even more damning, the whole episode was recorded on video, in which Wiles was shown sitting in close proximity to the journalist, and neither was wearing a mask, in clear breach of her own and the government’s advice and mandates.
And on 7 September 2021, RNZ, Wiles said that wearing a mask at Level Two is advisable:
It depends on where the wind is blowing you could have a gust of wind that if someone infected blows it to you or if you were infected blows it to someone else… For the good of everybody, wearing a mask when you’re out of your home is a good idea.”
As independent journalist Cameron Slater pointed out: “If her advice is to wear a mask at Level Two, presumably it would apply doubly at Level Four.” And
“Siouxsie Wiles lives in Freemans Bay, and in order to get to Judges Bay would require a trip in excess of 5km one way and 5km back again. This is in contravention of Level Four regulations that require you to ‘stay local’”.
Slater reported that when the Prime Minister was approached for comment about why it was acceptable for one of her key science advisers to be seen breaking lockdown rules, while Police are busy harassing shoppers, no reply had been received.
In a healthy democracy, the media would be speaking truth to power, so why were the media silent on Wiles’ flouting of the rules? Slater explained why the BFD made it public:
The simple reason is that we are not part of the Prime Minister’s Team of $55 million [a reference to the NZ government fund to rescue “grassroots public interest journalism”, which many see as a form of government control]. This story was given to 1News journalist Benedict Collins. After sitting on the story for five days he informed my source that they had spiked the story. The reason given was that it wasn’t a politician so there was no public interest in the story. Make no mistake, this story was suppressed by an editor at 1News.”
The Wiles case is one of many. The one garnering the most international odium was the 2021 G7 Summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, U.K. Among the leaders attending were President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photographs taken of the President and First Lady, the Queen, President Trudeau and Prince Charles show them clearly in breach of the ‘two metre’ social distancing rule, and neither is any of them wearing masks, and some show them with arms on each other’s shoulders.
Cynical comments referred to their ‘hypocrisy’ – ‘do as I say, not as I do’, and so on, but their behaviour goes deeper than that.
For one thing, the elite clearly didn’t believe there was any medical need for such social measures, implying that the real purpose was the enforcement of obedience.
Moreover, in making no attempt to conceal their flouting of their own rules, they were showing ostentatious contempt for us, the proles.
In the greater scheme of things, Covid-19 is but one ‘dot’ of many in the picture. While many can cope with the individual ‘dots’, joining them together to see the whole picture is, for some, just too much.
One thing that can make it easier is the fact that it’s nothing new. Over 2300 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato dealt with the problem of how hierarchical societies ensure that people did not think ‘incorrectly’ using his Allegory of the Cave, described in his Republic. The allegory takes the form of an imaginary conversation between Socrates and his pupil, Glaucon.
Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine people living in a huge cave that is only open to the outside world with difficulty. Most of the people in the cave are prisoners since early childhood. They are chained to the wall, facing the back of the cave, unable to move so they cannot turn their heads to see a fire behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire is a low wall, behind which is a path along which non-prisoners carry puppets and other objects that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The shadows playing on the wall are all the prisoners can see; unable to see the fire, the prisoners believe the shadows to be real.
The central message of Plato’s allegory is that the human-created shadows are the political doctrine of a nation state. Although that was over two millennia ago, the cave allegory is more relevant than ever today. Industrial society is living in a state of deep ignorance, in which ‘reality’ is created by powerful agencies and their ‘puppeteer’ stenographers, the media.
Nearly a century ago, Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, implied that we are being manipulated by the clever use of psychology. Bernays is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of public relations, the polite term for the manipulation of public opinion. In his 1928 book Propaganda he wrote:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. This is merely a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised.
38 years later, Harvard history professor Carroll Quigley published an extraordinary 1300-page book Tragedy and Hope, and in 2016 Joseph Plummer published a condensed 200 page version, Tragedy and Hope 101.
Quigley reveals that real political power operates in secret, over which ‘democratic’ elections have little or no influence. He shows that secret, powerful networks of individuals are behind world events, and that “representative government” is a fraud.
Plummer summarises the situation:
- Real power is unelected. Politicians change, but the power structure does not. The Network operates behind the scenes, for its own benefit, without ever consulting those who are affected by its decisions.
- The Network is composed of individuals who prefer anonymity. They are “satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power.” This approach of secretly exercising power is common throughout history because it protects the conspirators from the consequences of their actions.
- A primary tactic for directing public opinion and ‘government’ policy is to place willing servants in leadership positions of trusted institutions (media, universities, government, foundations, etc.). If there is ever a major backlash against a given policy, the servant can be replaced. This leaves both the institution and the individuals who actually direct its power unharmed.
- Historically, those who establish sophisticated systems of domination are not only highly intelligent; they are supremely deceptive and ruthless. They completely ignore the ethical barriers that govern a normal human being’s behavior. They do not believe that the moral and legislative laws, which others are expected to abide by, apply to them. This gives them an enormous advantage over the masses that cannot easily imagine their mind-set.
- Advances in technology have enabled modern rulers to dominate larger and larger areas of the globe. As a result, the substance of national sovereignty has already been destroyed, and whatever remains of its shell is being dismantled as quickly as possible. The new system they’re building (which they themselves refer to as a New World Order), will trade the existing illusion of democratically directed government for their long-sought, “expert-directed,” authoritarian technocracy.
This disturbing reality contradicts everything our governments, education and media instil in us from cradle to grave, so it is inevitable that such ideas will be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy ‘conspiracy theorist’.
The trouble is, far from being a conspiracy nutter, Quigley was a distinguished member of the Ivy League; a pre-eminent historian who taught at Princeton and Harvard universities and an adviser to the American Defense Department and US Navy.
So how did Quigley arrive at this ‘secret knowledge’? Plummer explains:
Carroll Quigley was a well-connected and well-credentialed member of Ivy League society. Based on his own words, and his training as a historian, it appears that he was chosen by members of a secret network to write the real history of their rise to power. However, as Quigley later realized, these individuals did not expect or intend for him to publish their secrets for the rest of the world to see. Shortly after publishing Tragedy and Hope in 1966, “the Network” apparently made its displeasure known to Quigley’s publisher, and the book he’d spent twenty years writing was pulled from the market.”
Much of the above will be very disturbing to neophytes, so much so that many will throw up their hands and reject it out of hand. To such doubters, I would ask them to explain the facts I’ve presented in any other way.
Martin Hanson is a retired biology teacher living on New Zealand’s South Island. He was born and educated in the UK, where he received a degree in zoology from the University of Manchester.
February 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, North Zealand |
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At the time of the Iraq war, I was a senior UN official yet publicly critical of the drive to war before and during the war, including in the pages of the esteemed International Herald Tribune. (The demise of that paper was a sad loss to the world of high quality international journalism.)
The resort to emotional blackmail by the warmongers, where critics of the impending war were tarred for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Butcher of Baghdad, was instructive. Of course, very soon “We, the critics” were amply vindicated.
The whole episode left me with two conclusions. First, the resort to emotional arguments and moral blackmail generally implies that they have little reasoned argument and evidence to support their case and are deflecting to bluster instead. Second, whenever we are presented with excitable exclamation marks (Saddam Hussein already has weapons of mass destruction (WMD)! He can hit us with WMD in just 45 minutes! Coronavirus could be more cataclysmic than the Spanish flu! The sky is falling!), it is a very good idea to substitute sceptical question marks instead:
- Why would Saddam do that?
- Where is your evidence?
- What is your end goal?
- Are the proposed means proportionate to that goal?
- What will be the human and economic cost?
- How long will this take?
- Will you recognize success?
- What is your exit strategy?
- What are the checks against mission creep?
Instead of such healthy scepticism to force a dose of reality and calm down the agitated excitement, the coronavirus panic has also shown a remarkable triumph of the Henny Penny (or Chicken Little) tunnel vision. Thinking back to that as the coronavirus madness took hold of the world in 2020, I was surprised at how close the fit was to the Iraq war analogy once I thought the whole thing through. The lockdown, mask and vaccine mandates in particular revealed seven disturbing echoes of the 2003 Iraq War syndrome.
The first parallel is with respect to threat inflation. In the “Foreword” to the “dodgy dossier” of September 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: Saddam Hussein’s “military planning allows for some of the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” This turned out to be disinformation that was vital to rally the party, Parliament and the nation behind the decision to go to war.
British intelligence services had informed Blair in April 2002 (a year before the war) that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons and any other WMD would be “very, very small.” The Chilcot Inquiry was told a decade later that Blair accepted this but converted to George W. Bush’s way of thinking after a subsequent visit to the US president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Similarly, to gain public backing for the degree of state intrusion into peoples’ private lives and control over nations’ economic activities without precedent even in wartime, the immediacy, gravity and magnitude of the coronavirus threat had to be made apocalyptic.
SARS-CoV-2 is not remotely as lethal as the Spanish flu of 1918–19 that killed the fit and young as virulently as the elderly and infirm. It infected 500 million people (one third of the world’s population) and killed 50 million, equivalent to around 250 million dead today. Our health systems are infinitely better than a century ago. Yet authorities did not close down whole societies and economies in 1918. In other deadly pandemic episodes also we suffered but endured.
To overcome these hesitations of history and experience, the threat from SARS-CoV-2 had to be inflated beyond all previous calamities in order to panic countries into drastic action. This was successfully done by Neil Ferguson’s catastrophist Imperial College London model of 16 March 2020 that is by now widely discredited. It deserves to acquire a notoriety equivalent to Iraq’s dodgy dossier and Ferguson’s mortality estimates should be judged to be the equivalent of Blair’s 45 minutes to Saddam’s WMD.
The second echo comes from the thinness of evidence. The infamous Downing Street Memorandum of 23 July 2002 made it clear that the US administration was determined to go to war and military action was inevitable. For their part, however, British officials did not believe there was sufficient legal justification: there was no recent evidence of Iraqi complicity with international terrorism, Saddam’s WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran, and he was not a threat to his neighbours. It was necessary to create the conditions that would make an invasion legal, hence “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” and the US “had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.”
With Covid-19, similarly, instead of evidence-based policy, many governments resorted to policy-based evidence to justify lockdowns, masks and vaccines.
The third similarity is in the denigration of critics who had the temerity to query the evidence. Those who questioned the lack of evidence to invade Iraq were demonized as apologists for the Butcher of Baghdad. Those who asked for evidence to justify the biggest expansion of state power in Western political history were shamed as wanting to kill granny. Most recently we learnt of how a unit of British intelligence kept tabs on the writings of journalists like Toby Young and Peter Hitchens because of their critical stance on government policies.
The fourth parallel is in the dismissal of collateral harm as exaggerated, speculative, without evidence, motivated, etc. Yet evidence continues to mount on the many different pathways through which the Grim Reaper claims his growing mass of victims from the panicked responses to Covid.
The fifth echo is in the lack of a clear exit strategy. Instead of a quick victory in Iraq followed by consolidated democratic regimes in a stable region and an orderly withdrawal, the US found itself stuck in a quagmire and eventually went back home an exhausted and vanquished conqueror. Almost all lockdown governments are now struggling with public justifications to declare victory and lift the lockdown. Modellers still want none of it and the apocalyptic warnings keep coming back, despite mounting evidence of a policy-invariant gradual decline in the spike in cases and deaths around the world. Covid is now endemic. The cognitive dissonance in Covid policy has been starkly evident in the continuation of the travel ban on unvaccinated visitors to the US well after authorities had been compelled to concede vaccines had no appreciable impact on infection and transmission.
Another resemblance is mission creep. One big reason for the self-created exit trap is that the original mission of flattening the curve so the health system could cope with a slowed spread of the virus, steadily morphed into the more ambitious but impossible mission of eliminating the virus. Or, to change metaphors, the goalposts didn’t just keep shifting. They were dug out and replanted in an entirely new paddock in an altogether different location.
Seventh and finally, like the US media in 2003, most mainstream media commentators across the democratic West abandoned critical inquisitiveness in 2020 to become cheerleaders for the “war on corona.” Except the censorship and suppression of dissenting voices seems to have been far, far worse in the last three years than was the case in 2003, with possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech.
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
February 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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It’s been a week since Seymour Hersh released his Substack exclusive about How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. The mainstream German press have responded with uniform scepticism. Most reports followed the example of the wire services, in leading with the blanket denials of American officials and noting that the story was well-received in Moscow. A few operations, like the state media outlet Tagesschau, attempted a more comprehensive debunking, in this case by asking experts to pick holes in the details of Hersh’s story – with less than impressive results. The other major tactic has been to attack Hersh’s credibility, along similar lines as the American press. The latest headline here is that Bob Woodward thinks Hersh’s story is bunk, and because Woodward is also a famous American journalist, that means checkmate for Hersh, or something.
The biggest development is an interview that Hersh gave to the Berliner Zeitung. It was published yesterday and contains many new details. For example, Hersh tells his interviewer that the plan was to detonate “eight bombs … near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic sea,” of which only “six…went off.” This is the first confirmation we’ve had anywhere of an obvious point, namely that the operation wasn’t fully successful, and that this is the only reason that Pipe B of Nord Stream 2 escaped intact. He’s also more explicit on the involvement of Denmark and Sweden, saying “I was told that they did what they did [to facilitate the planting of explosives] and they knew what they were doing and they understood what was going on, but maybe nobody ever said ‘yes.’”
Hersh also provides more operational detail:
[T]there was a decompression chamber, and we used a Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines. One problem was how to deal with Baltic Sea surveillance. The Baltic is monitored very thoroughly, there’s a lot of freely available data, so we took care of that, there were three or four different people for that. And what was done then is very simple. For 21 years, our Sixth Fleet … has been conducting [BALTOPS] … [F]or the first time in history, the NATO exercise in the Baltic had a new programme. It was to be a twelve-day exercise to drop and detect mines. A number of nations sent out mine teams, one group dropped a mine and another mine team went out to find it and blow it up.
So there was this period of time when things were exploding, and during that time the deep-sea divers could operate and attach the mines to the pipelines. The two pipelines run about a mile apart, they’re a little buried under the silt on the seabed, but they’re not difficult to get to, and the divers had practised it. It only took a couple of hours to place the bombs …
[T]hey did it towards the end of the exercise. But at the last minute, the White House got nervous. The president said he was afraid to go ahead. He changed his mind and gave new orders, so they had the ability to detonate the bombs remotely at any time. You do it with normal sonar, a Raytheon product by the way, you fly over the spot and drop a cylinder. It sends a low-frequency signal, you could say it sounds like a flute, you can set different frequencies.
The fear, however, was that the bombs wouldn’t work if they stayed in the water too long. This is actually what happened with two of the bombs. So there was concern within the group about finding the right way, and we actually had to turn to other intelligence agencies, which I’ve deliberately not written about.
There were still active explosives on the sea bed as the pipes were leaking their gas, which explains why partially complicit Denmark and Sweden closed the whole area and denied all access, until they themselves had removed everything.
Hersh also clarifies further the chronology of Biden’s order, and appears to suggest that at least some of those involved believed they were planting explosives only as part of a negotiating tactic, and that they’d never be used. (How this is to be harmonised with Hersh’s insistence that the sonar trigger was a last-minute plan, I can’t imagine):
Joe Biden decided not to blow them up back in June, it was five months into the war. But in September he ordered it done. The operational staff, the people who do “kinetic” things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon he could use in negotiations. But at some point, after the Russians invaded and then when the operation was completed, the whole thing became increasingly repugnant to the people who were doing it. These were people who worked in top positions in the intelligence services and were well trained. They turned against the project, they thought it was crazy.
Shortly after the attack, after they had done what they were ordered to do, there was a lot of anger about the operation and repudiation among those involved. That’s one of the reasons I learned so much. And I’ll tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened. I’ll tell you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines all know the story. I didn’t get the story from them, but I quickly learned that they know.
Elsewhere, Hersh says that the discontent with Biden’s attack is specifically within the CIA, where participants in the operation are “appalled that Biden decided to expose Europe to the cold in order to further a war he will not win.”
As I said before, it seems obvious that what happened to Nord Stream is an open secret in security and government circles, and that the truth simply can’t be acknowledged, because nobody in the German government wants to live with the political consequences. The only really interesting detail that all the debunkings have in common, is their refusal to address what I see as the central problem with Hersh’s story. As I said before, he says divers planted explosives at a point where the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines run just one mile apart from each other. This only describes the location of the second cluster of explosions on 26 September. The first explosion hit Pipe A of Nord Stream 2 well to the south, at a point where the two pipelines are perhaps 15 km apart.
This detail appears particularly important, in light of flight data which seems to confirm Hersh’s account that a Norwegian P8 dropped a sonar buoy into the Baltic northeast of Bornholm sometime around 4am on the morning of 26 September. Crucially, this data has the P8 arriving too late to trigger the first Nord Stream 2 explosion, which happened at 2:03 am local time. It looks for all the world like somebody organised two totally separate operations, involving two separately triggered pipeline attacks, and that Hersh’s source only knows about one of them.
February 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, United States |
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