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Here’s why HRW deliberately only scratched the surface in exploring Ukraine’s use of banned ‘petal’ mines

 PFM-1 anti-personnel land mine found in a field, near the town of Artyomovsk, Donetsk People’s Republic © Viktor Antonyuk / Sputnik
By Eva Bartlett | RT | March 28, 2023

Since Ukraine dropped hundreds of mines on the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in July, 104 people have fallen victim to the internationally-banned PFM-1 ‘petal’ (otherwise known as ‘butterfly’) devices. Nine of them are children. Of which three died.

Among the most recent civilians to be injured, on March 19, were two 60-year-old men. On February 26, a woman in her sixties was wounded in her neighborhood. On February 14, a teenager stepped on a petal mine near a school. These are just a few documented examples from recent weeks.

The first wave of over 40 victims came within the first few weeks after Ukrainian forces deployed the mines over Donetsk en masse in July 2022, and the number has more than doubled since. Since then I, along with other reporters on the ground, have documented their lingering presence and the civilian victims.

NGO reports… selectively

After signing the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty in 1999, Kiev was obligated to destroy its stockpile of 6 million PFM-1s. It denies using them, but abundant evidence incriminates Kiev in this particular war crime. While the West has yet to turn its attention to the victims of the  petal mines in the Donbass, reports of Ukraine using them elsewhere have emerged.

In its January 2023 report on banned landmines, the Human Rights Watch NGO notes, “In 2021, Ukraine reported to the UN secretary-general that 3.3 million stockpiled PFM mines still need to be destroyed.” HRW then advised Ukraine to investigate itself for its use of the prohibited mines.

The report is titled “Ukraine: Banned Landmines Harm Civilians. Ukraine Should Investigate Forces’ Apparent Use; Russian Use Continues,” implying that not only is Russia also deploying the petal mines, but that Russia’s use of them is beyond question, while Kiev’s use is open to debate.

Yet, much like in 2020, when the UN accused Russia of war crimes in Syria based on “we say so” and unnamed sources, you won’t find proof of Russia’s use of petal mines in the HRW report. In fact, buried there is a HRW admission that it “has not verified claims of Russian forces using PFM mines in the armed conflict.” This is a standard media tactic: boldly state one thing in a headline and quietly clarify the opposite in the body of the article, which most people won’t bother reading.

On the other hand, HRW claims it interviewed over 100 people, “including witnesses to landmine use, victims of landmines, first responders, doctors, and Ukrainian de-miners,” regarding Ukraine’s use of the objects in Izium (a city in the Kharkov region, north of Donetsk) while it was briefly under Moscow’s control. The HRW team entered the city after Russian forces withdrew in September. Everyone interviewed, the report noted, “said they had seen mines on the ground, knew someone who was injured by one, or had been warned about their presence during Russia’s occupation of Izium.”

The testimony records that the areas were all, “close to where Russian military forces were positioned at the time, suggesting they were the target,” and that residents in Izium said that rocket attacks, “happened frequently during the Russian occupation.”

The report cited 11 civilian mine-casualties, and noted that HRW had seen “physical evidence of PFM antipersonnel mine use,” including, “unexploded mines, remnants of mines, and the metal cassettes that carry the mines in rockets.”

It has to be noted that HRW has been banned in Russia since April 2022, making it impossible for the organization to gather evidence on the ground in areas controlled by Russian forces. However, lack of access to evidence has not stopped it from using its report to carry accusations against Russia, citing Ukraine’s former prosecutor general Irina Venediktova’s claim that “Russian forces used PFM mines in the Kharkivska region as early as February 26”. In contrast, the numerous credible reports of Kiev’s use of petal mines in Donetsk, available through open sources, are absent from the report.

HRW’s history of targeted condemnations

Human Rights Watch is one of many Western-funded NGOs with a history of whitewashing NATO and its allies’ crimes while pretending to be a neutral observer. Over the years, I’ve pointed out the hypocrisy of Ken Roth, who was the George Soros-funded NGO’s executive director from 1993-2022. In March 2021 he pushed Washington’s propaganda about Russia starving Syria. More glaringly, in 2015, Roth used footage from an eastern Gaza neighbourhood (Shuja’iyya) that had been flattened by Israel, to claim the footage depicted Syria’s Aleppo. He went on to likewise push the 2013 Ghouta “chemical” narrative, which had long been widely-discredited by journalists and by the so-called “rebels” themselves.

If dubious claims from HRW or its representatives aren’t indication enough of their allegiances to Western narratives, then their links to the US government should be. The vice chair of its board of directors, Susan Manilow, according to this 2014 article, describes herself as “a longtime friend to Bill Clinton,” who helped manage his campaign finances. Bruce Rabb, also on the board, lists in his biography that he “served as staff assistant to President Richard Nixon” from 1969-70 – the period in which his administration secretly and illegally carpet-bombed Cambodia and Laos.

The article further notes that the advisory committee for HRW’s Americas Division has even boasted the presence of a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Miguel Díaz. According to his State Department biography, Díaz served as a CIA analyst and also provided “oversight of US intelligence activities in Latin America” for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

So, when HRW recently decided to finally discuss Ukraine’s deployment of the insidious petal mines (tens of thousands of which have been fired into the Donbass by Ukraine over the course of the past year), it is not because the body has suddenly become neutral and impartial, but it is rather a grasp at credibility: reporting what is widely known – that, in violation of international law, Ukraine has been deploying Petal mines – but avoid providing the whole story.

By downplaying and ignoring Kiev’s widespread use of petal mines throughout the DPR, HRW is deliberately downplaying war crimes, much like the entirety of Western corporate media.

Kiev’s Western supporters may even have to deal with its use of the petal mines at their own expense down the line – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recently announced his country would invest $2.2 million into de-mining Ukraine. Of course, no mention was made of the Ottawa Treaty-banned munitions which will have to be cleared.

Kiev’s deadly delivery 

In one incident I witnessed first hand, an attack took place just after 9 pm on July 30, 2022. Ukraine fired rockets, each packed with over 300 mines, onto Donetsk, its suburbs, and other cities, including Yasinovataya, Makeevka and Gorlovka. The rockets exploded in the air to ensure greater distribution of devices on the ground. The attack mirrored previous ‘deliveries’ to the hard-hit Donetsk districts of Kievskiy, Kirovsky and Kuibyshevkiy.

The morning after, I walked the central Donetsk streets extremely carefully, wary of every leaf or piece of cardboard which could be obscuring or covering a Petal mine, so difficult are they to pick out from their surroundings. They cannot seriously damage military vehicles, which means that scattering them over Donetsk only has one purpose – to target and maim civilians. Some models of the petal mines have a self-destruct timer. Others, including those used by Kiev, can stay on the ground for years.

The innocent victims of Donbass

Since reporting the initial bombardment in late July, I have been following up on the methodical destruction of these mines by Russian sappers, as well as on civilians harmed by the illegal munitions. One of the more recent victims was 14 year old Nikita. His foot was blown off when in early November, 2022, he stepped on a mine in a playground while on his way to visit his grandmother.

RT journalist Roman Kosarev recently spoke with another recent teenage victim,  who stepped on a petal mine when getting into a car.

Kosarev also spoke to the Director of the Donetsk Republic’s Trauma Center, Andrey Boryak, who said: “The injury from such a mine is very severe, and immediately leads to a handicap. It’s almost impossible to save the foot and the lower part of the leg.”

HRW has had over 6 months to investigate Ukraine littering the DPR with Petal/PFM-1 mines… but it has not, and will not. It’s once again the case that the lives of Donbass civilians don’t matter when it comes not only to Western media reporting but also to supposedly-neutral human rights bodies. Even worse still is the knowledge that in spite of the valiant efforts of sappers in the DPR, the mines will inevitably claim more innocent civilians as their victims.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

SURPRISE! JORDAN PETERSON’S “ARC” WAS BUILT FOR (AND BY) BILLIONAIRES

Amazing Polly | March 20, 2023

There is a new Global Council fronted by Jordan Peterson that promises to save us all from the Woke Dystopian Future. But who is behind it? Can you support this work? To do so, visit: https://amazingpolly.net/contact-support.php

Thank you!

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Did Boris Johnson fake His Covid-19 illness?

By Niall McCrae | TCW Defending Freedom | March 27, 2023

Of all the theatricals of the last three years, one of the most dramatic was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dice with death by Covid. Having won a landslide in the general election of December 2019, he found his fresh mandate diverted almost immediately by the deadly contagion from China. But was Johnson really blindsided, or was he aware of the coming Covid-19 regime before it spread from Wuhan? And if he knew, this leads to another sensational but serious question.

If you believe, as I do, that Covid-19 was an elaborate hoax, this burdens you with a need to explain how such a massive scam could be conducted so successfully. At what level of the powers-that-be would the truth be known, and who was running the show from the outset? Probably the vast majority of politicians, like scientists, health service managers, doctors and other clinicians simply took the novel coronavirus as fact, but leaders of prominent nations must have known more: in some cases, their contribution went beyond giving daily briefings to press and public to actively performing the pseudopandemic.

A leading character, I suggest, was Boris Johnson. His role was to get himself admitted to hospital, and to nearly die from the terrifying disease. If you deny the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there are two possible explanations for Johnson’s admission to St Thomas’ Hospital in London in April 2020. First, that he succumbed to illness as a result of overwork and stress, although it would be unusual for a man of his age (he was then 55) to be knocking at death’s door with a common respiratory infection. The second is that this episode was a psy-op to escalate fear in society.

Let us recall the sociopolitical context of spring 2020. Johnson, bête-noire of the progressive intelligentsia, not least for promoting Brexit, was as much loathed as loved. The Tory government, in a knee-jerk reaction by media critics and political opponents, was accused of reckless disregard for lives. The portrayal of Johnson was of a buffoon, scientifically and morally inept for the situation. His statement about ‘herd immunity’ was lambasted, but perhaps this was all part of the play.

In the early days, the government and its scientific and medical advisers counselled calm and constraint on Covid-19, implying an overblown threat. My guess is that this was a holding phase, to present a stark contrast between the initial approach and the shocking declaration of an unprecedented mortal hazard.

A week after imposing lockdown in March 2020, Johnson tested positive for Covid-19. At that time, such diagnosis was widely regarded as extremely worrying, with a reported infection fatality rate upwards of 5 per cent, increasing with risk factors such as obesity (Johnson is no sylph). His supporters lamented his cavalier attitude, visiting hospitals without a mask and shaking hands with victims. Soon after, Johnson was admitted to hospital as ‘a precautionary measure’. He rapidly progressed to the intensive care unit (for the official narrative, see here).

Could Johnson be killed by the disease that he failed to take seriously? His haters hoped so. Piers Morgan, disgusted by the trolls, tweeted on April 52020:

He survived, of course, and one week later went on television (on Easter Sunday no less) to declare that ‘the NHS saved my life, no question’.

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He claimed that hospital doctors had been preparing to announce his death. Was he lying? Johnson is still undergoing scrutiny for his account of Partygate over the gatherings he and colleagues attended Downing Street during lockdown. The man is certainly not averse to economies of truth.

Inconsistencies in the hospital story led to Marcus J Bull, founder of the lobby group Stop Lying in Politics, seeking information from the hospital and the Information Commissioner. Bull had previously tried to sue Johnson for a controversial slogan on a ‘Vote Leave’ campaign bus. The highly effective message was that Britain was sending a vast sum of money to the EU which could otherwise be spent on the NHS. Bull failed to take Johnson to court on that occasion, but now he was convinced that he had evidence that Johnson had lied about almost dying. Johnson later retracted, saying that his condition had been relatively mild, and that his doctors were erring on the side of caution. (Watch the video explaining Marcus Ball’s Deathgate accusation: Did Boris Johnson lie about nearly dying of COVID?)

Two years later, on June 6 2022, the hard-left ‘Tories eat your babies’ website Skwawkbox revisited the alleged lies by Johnson about his stay in St Thomas’ Hospital. The article covered Bull’s investigative efforts, and asserted:

‘Skawkbox believes that the evidence has shown since – and strongly suggested at the time – that Johnson’s actions were frankly murderous and his decisions were taken knowing that they would result in a huge death toll.’ 

This quote epitomises the abject failure of the Left (socialist or liberal) to understand what was really going on with the whole Covid-19 emergency. Locked in their political tribalism, they cannot see the wood for the trees. Skwawkbox referred to Johnson saying ‘let the bodies pile high’, as if that was cast-iron truth.

A properly critical perspective on Johnson’s admission to St Thomas’ Hospital would be to ask whether he was really there (apart from a photo-shoot on admission). In my cynical view, Johnson didn’t have Covid-19 because the disease, as we’ve come to learn, is a contrivance, and it’s very likely that he must have known the real reason for this particular pantomime. This would be a crime far more malevolent than the ‘too slow to lock down’ argument being posited by the statist Left.

An obvious challenge to the alleged faux maladie is that hospital management and clinicians must have participated in the pretence. This would be anathema to anyone who still believes that the NHS is a wholly ethical operation, despite its dubious Covid-19 policies (which included unnecessary and hazardous use of ventilators, mass discharge of sick elderly patients, stopping cancer screening and surgery, and telling people not to come into hospital unless they were at death’s door). Is it beyond the realms of possibility that with such a credible and compliant (already caught up in a culture of panic) staff of doctors and nurses, some were quite prepared to believe that the PM was critically ill – or agreed (perhaps with sufficient inducement) not to question it and to provide care and treatment to a patient who wasn’t ill, and so conspire to support the lie?

I’ve heard many people say that Johnson seemed a changed man when he returned to duties in Downing Street. Could that be because he had just told the biggest and boldest lie of his life?

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

Deliberately Engineered Confusion

The Hallmark of the Greatest Biopsychosocial Operation in History

NewZealandDoc’s Newsletter | March 27, 2023

Years ago, when I sat on the Board of the American Psychiatric Association as a psychiatrist-in-training, the word ‘biopsychosocial’ was used frequently to describe the range to which the profession of psychiatry aspired in its categorization of and treatment approaches to mental illness. It was meant, in other words, to encompass everything: every aspect of human thought, feeling and behavior. Rather grandiose, I remember thinking, but in keeping with the compulsion in the field to cover every base, as it were.

It strikes me now that the term is especially relevant as a descriptor of the covid agenda because it does, with realistic accuracy, embrace the scope of this uniquely massive operation that has been played out across the globe. Thus covid, the measures adopted by authorities to manage the so-called pandemic, the jabs, the jab passports, mandates, digital identification and, essentially, centralized control over human autonomy – this may be accurately described not merely as a ‘psyops’ but as a ‘biopsychosocial’ operation. An operation designed to influence virtually every aspect of the human condition – biology, psychology and social relations.

The magnitude and breadth of the covid operation render it historically unique, and, as a result of this operation – still ongoing – the world has demonstrably been altered, perhaps irrevocably so.

The iron fist of a coordinated program of control has been revealed and the fingers of this fist have imprinted themselves on every aspect of our lives. The economic impact has been enormous, resulting in an impoverishment of underlings while overlords have been majestically enriched. The ‘normality’ that, after three years, seems now to be reestablishing itself, is tenuous, for we have all seen how swiftly and fiercely the fist may come down, perhaps at the drop of another bat and the emergence of yet another infectious threat. Or perhaps the ever-looming dangers of climate change, another biopsychosocial operation, may necessitate measures of control that were so quickly, easily and successfully employed for covid, measures that included, for the very first time, the wholesale quarantining of the healthy.

Nonetheless, questions running counter to covid propaganda have been making an appearance in the propaganda outlets themselves – mainstream media – and recently some attention has been focused on the origins of covid. Was it an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab, or was it a deliberate release of a Frankenstein pathogen funded by the United States and outsourced to China?

Dr. Mike Yeadon quite flatly states that he does not believe there was ever a covid virus, while Igor Chudov clearly states that Sars-Cov-2 was a deliberately engineered pathogen. Citing the work of Ralph Baric, Chudov concludes that ‘high pathogenicity is not necessary for a perfect bioweapon: instead, what is important is that the bioweapon creates fear.’

Thus we have two widely diverging opinions from two quite respectable and diligent people.

In fact, we also have a plethora of different opinions from other respectable and diligent people about the jab, the jab’s contents, about covid variants and even the very existence of viruses. Was the pandemic a statistical rather than medical phenomenon created by dubious PCR testing, was it merely a mislabeled flu? And on and on.

If you are not confused, you should be, because creating confusion is a hallmark of every successful operation to control the masses, and the perfect biopsychosocial operation will create confusion in spades. It’s not a matter of covering tracks to make an investigation into the origins or other parts of an operation impossible – it’s a matter of deliberately creating many tracks, tracks that run in various directions and lead to questionable conclusions. This is why, for example, batches of the so-called Pfizer vaccine appear to differ. This is why highly dubious PCR testing was employed and why deaths from a variety of causes were attributed by hospitals to covid.

Under such a cloud of confusion the activities of an objective investigator are grievously hampered and the investigators themselves may be consumed by the following of leads and the pursuit of deliberately created false mysteries so as to render them ineffectual.

The ostensibly greatest pandemic in human history derived from an errant bat in a Chinese market, so were we told. I understood this from the outset to be false, knowing that every grand piece of propaganda begins with an extraordinary, hardly believable event that serves as the genesis of a myth.

The complete disappearance of the flu for over two years, coupled with an aggressive suppression of attempts to treat people with covid until the last stages of respiratory illness, suggested that an agenda was in play. This was confirmed when the covid inoculations were announced as the only way out of the ‘pandemic’, particularly when it was clear that the jabs could not have been adequately evaluated for safety during the short time in which they were developed.

From my personal experience of illness I am convinced that a covid pathogen existed, that it was infectious, and, judging from peculiarly strange symptoms, that it was unnatural. I applauded the efforts and work of real doctors such as Vladimir Zelenko who developed successful treatments and helped countless patients.

Not being a virologist skilled in the ways and means of viral detection and sequencing, I really can’t speak much further, though I lean heavily towards the side of a pathogen that was as deliberately engineered as the covid agenda itself. I believe it was a bio-weapon, the first punch in a two-punch combination, the second being the far more lethal and debilitating jab, whose deleterious consequences we have only begun to appreciate.

Is it important to determine the origin of covid? Absolutely. For this reason the official tale needs to be exposed as myth, wherever the ultimate findings may rest.

But while we may expect to be confused about viral specifics, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the glaring subversions of the role of medicine and human rights, the totalitarian governmental control that emerged with hardly a whimper of protest, and the very presence of bio-weapons laboratories and research not only in Wuhan but around the world – in the United States and also in the Ukraine.

Of this we can be certain: ‘gain of function’ research is bio-weapons research, and ‘depopulation’ by whatever means and at whatever rate is murder.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.
March 2023

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

US democracy ‘a facade’ – Russian security chief

RT | March 27, 2023

The US is not really a democracy, nor does it seek to promote democracy in its relations with other nations, contrary to Washington’s claims, senior Russian security official Nikolay Patrushev has said. He made the remarks while commenting on the upcoming ‘Summit for Democracy’ hosted by the US government.

Patrushev, who is the secretary of the Russian Security Council, described the US economy as “dependent on corruption and lobbying connections going to the White House and Capitol Hill.”

Corporate interests have hijacked the levers of political power in the US and use the country’s international clout to pursue their own agenda, he said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, to be published in full later today.

Their democracy is a pretty facade for the political system, which serves to hide the neglect of the rights of ordinary Americans.

Washington pursues the same approach in the international arena, where it claims to be the champion of democracy but disregards other nations’ sovereignty, Patrushev said. He believes that this “hypocrisy” will be on display at the Summit for Democracy, which will kick off this week in Washington.

The event will be “a gathering to support a world order in which Washington wants to play the central role forever. Dissenters will be labeled ‘undemocratic states,’” he predicted. The US, which “appointed itself the dictator of the world, will harass the nations whose sovereignties and democracies were undermined,” by Washington.

The reality is that “Washington has long been a leader in violating the sovereignty of other nations, in the number of wars and conflicts it has unleashed,” the security chief said. He called the nations that support this arrangement “vassals” that are constantly “humiliated” in their abusive relationships with the US.

The international event, which is being held for the second time, is meant to promote democracy against what Washington increasingly sees as assertive “authoritarian” states. The US reportedly invited all participants of the first summit, which was held in 2021, including the administration of the self-governed Chinese island of Taiwan. NATO members Hungary and Türkiye were snubbed once again, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Will Pakistan Support A US Mercenary’s Plot To Recruit Afghan Refugees As Fighters For Kiev?

By Andrew Korybko | March 26, 2023

The New York Times’ (NYT) damning report about “Stolen Valor: The U.S. Volunteers in Ukraine Who Lie, Waste and Bicker” contained an intriguing detail that most readers might have missed regarding a US mercenary’s plot to recruit Pakistani-based Afghan refugees as fighters for Kiev. Former construction worker-turned-mercenary Ryan Routh brazenly told them about his plan to purchase passports from that country in order to facilitate this. Here’s the relevant excerpt from their report:

“With Legion growth stalling, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., is seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Mr. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest. ‘We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,’ he said in an interview from Washington.”

The reason why he’s resorting to illegal means for getting those refugees to Kiev is because that former Soviet Republic’s authorities have thus far refused to grant visas to any Afghan fighters. Routh said in a separate interview earlier this month that “Most of the Ukrainian authorities do not want these soldiers. I have had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.”

Pakistan is already suspected of indirectly arming Kiev against Russia at the behest of its American overlord so the precedent is established for suspecting that it could support Routh’s plot. The fascist post-modern coup regime might therefore very well end up doing this despite Ukraine literally being against it if their shared US patron signals its approval, which is why it’s incumbent on Islamabad to issue a statement in response to the NYT’s latest report so as to urgently clarify this scandalous matter.

Remaining silent after one of the world’s leading Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets informed millions of people about this plan comes off as extremely suspicious. While it’s possible that Pakistan can still end up supporting Routh’s proposal even if it publicly denies any interest in doing so, its leadership should at least understand the soft power importance of reacting to this. The very fact that they haven’t suggests that they’re either not monitoring the media or could care less what the rest of the world thinks.

Either way, Pakistan’s silence is worthy of suspicion. Russia should consider raising the issue, whether directly via its diplomats or indirectly through the media, in order to prompt its non-traditional partner to say something about this scenario. If Islamabad goes along with Routh’s plot to let him purchase passports for those Afghan refugees who are interested in fighting for Kiev as mercenaries, then it would represent the latest instance of Pakistan’s “mission creep” in the NATO-Russian proxy war.

March 26, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Guardian Pushes Alarmist Claim That Climate Change Threatens Coffee Production as Yields Soar

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 14, 2023

There is no animal or plant in the natural world that cannot be used to promote climate Armageddon and its collectivist Net Zero political solution. On Sunday, the WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund, started running a series of Wild Isles co-produced propaganda films narrated by Sir David Attenborough on the BBC. These include finely-crafted messages of improbable extinctions culled from computer models.

From the absurd to the ridiculous, we had National Margarita Day recently hijacked by CNN running a story about the ‘climate crisis’ affecting tequila production – a story easily debunked by the news that since 1995, tequila production had increased six-fold, and in four years it had doubled. Now the increasingly unhinged Guardian is giving us its ‘Net Zero, or else the coffee gets it’ story.

According to the newspaper, new research suggests that climate conditions that reduce coffee yields have become more frequent over the past four decades, with rising temperatures from “global heating” likely to lead to ongoing systemic shocks to coffee production globally.

Note the use of the phrase “climate conditions” for what in effect is weather, and the suggestion that it reduces coffee yields. These climate conditions are said to have become more frequent over the last four decades. But one can only read the Guardian for so long. Let us look at actual coffee yields over the last four decades.

Far from declining due to all this weather, yields have shown dramatic improvement since at least 1960. Over this period, particularly between 1980-98, temperatures have risen, but there is no sign of “ongoing systemic shocks” to coffee production globally.

Global coffee yields have been a great agricultural success story, along with actual bean production. Like yields, tonnes produced have soared in the last 40 years.

The key Guardian get-out phrase of course is “new research suggests”. The Guardian story was taken from an academic study led by Dr. Doug Richardson, published in PLOS Climate. He told the newspaper that a shift from cool and wet to hot and dry conditions “we’re pretty confident is a result of climate change”.

In fact if the Richardson paper is read, a more nuanced view on coffee and weather over the last 40 years is discovered.

Our results suggest that ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation] is the primary mode in explaining annual compound event variability, both globally and regionally. El Niño-like sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are associated with decreased precipitation and increased temperatures in most coffee regions, and with spatially compounding warm and dry events. This relationship is reversed for La Niña-like signatures.

As it happens, the last 40 years saw three very powerful El Niños occurring in 1982, 1998 and 2016. These pushed temperatures up around the planet, a natural weather oscillation that had nothing to do with any human-caused increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The current eight-year pause in the satellite temperature record is partly explained by three recent La Niña events.

The vast majority of the world’s coffee is grown with just two species – Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is more sensitive to growing conditions, and requires temperatures around 18-22°C. In the tropics, these are more common in higher elevations. Robusta is less highly prized, has a wider geographical spread and grows between 22°C and 28°C. Richardson claims that human-caused climate change is “expected” to alter the geographical suitability for growing coffee. The area of land suitable for coffee cultivation “may” be reduced by up to 50%.

This is unlikely. For a start, it assumes temperatures will rise significantly, but with global warming running out of steam over the last two decades, this seems unlikely. This is particularly so in the tropics. Historical records show that during periods of global warming, the tropics warm less and temperatures are more stable. In addition, coffee is a versatile crop, and selective breeding has produced varieties that can adapt to lowland conditions with temperatures outside normal growing ranges. If climate should change in any significant way, new coffee farming could switch to more propitious areas.

But where is the fun in explaining all that when Net Zero propagandising is afoot. MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen is fond of noting that the current climate narrative is absurd, but trillions of dollars paid to many, including “grant-dependent” academics, says it is not absurd. This money pays for a constant drip, drip, nudge, nudge wave of climate scaremongering eagerly promoted by controlling elites seeking to take away personal and economic freedoms under cover of saving the planet.

March 26, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Twenty Times the CDC Exaggerated the Threat From Covid With False Data

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 25, 2023

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published inaccurate data about the COVID-19 pandemic and made incorrect claims that exaggerated the threat on at least 20 occasions since January 2021, a new paper has found.

The pre-print (not yet peer-reviwed) by Vinay Prasad, Tracy Beth Hoeg, Kelley Krohnert and Alyson Haslam documents 25 instances when the CDC reported statistical or numerical errors. Twenty (80%) of these instances exaggerated the severity of the COVID-19 situation, three instances (12%) simultaneously exaggerated and downplayed the severity of the situation and one error was neutral. One error exaggerated COVID-19 vaccine risks. The CDC was notified about the errors in 16 instances (64%), and later corrected the errors, at least partially, in 13 instances (52%).

The authors searched for the errors by reviewing CDC publications, press releases, interviews, meetings and Twitter accounts. They also catalogued mortality data from both the National Center for Health Statistics and the CDC Covid Data Tracker and compared reported results.

They concluded that “a basic prerequisite for making informed policy decisions is accurate and reliable statistics, even during times of uncertainty”. They note a need for greater diligence in data collection and reporting. They also recommend that the federal entity responsible for reporting health statistics “should be firewalled from the entity setting policy due to concerns of real or perceived systematic bias in errors” – in this instance, towards exaggerating risk.

Here are the 25 errors they found:

February 26th 2021:

  • MMWR stated that during the study period, the seven-day moving average of cases identified by PCR or antigen testing ranged from 152 to 577 cases.
  • Multiple errors. Reported case rates during the study period were described as a seven-day moving average of cases per 100,000 persons including PCR and antigen cases, but the paper actually reported the raw seven day moving average (without adjusting for population) and for PCR only (not including antigen tests).
  • From: MMWR
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

July 26th 2021:

  • Delta Variant is as contagious as chicken pox.
  • Delta is not as contagious as varicella. The CDC overstated Delta R0 and understated chicken pox R0 (Delta estimate was overlaid directly on a New York Times graphic).
  • From: CDC slide deck
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: All

July 27th 2021:

  • 4% of COVID-19 deaths are in children 0-17.
  • Actual number was 0.04% based on original CDC estimated data. When the estimated data were updated later, the percentages were not updated. The actual percentage based on the updated data was 0.07%.
  • From: COVID-19 website
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

October 15th 2021:

  • “COVID-NET data for the week ending Sept. 25th show that rates of COVID-19-associated hospitalisations in children ages 5-11 years are the highest they’ve been.”
  • COVID-NET hospitalisations were already falling from Sept peak. Rate was 1.1 in week ending Sept. 11th and Sept. 25th. (Now week of Sept. 11th shows 1.2),
  • From: Twitter @CDCgov
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

October 27th 2021:

  • “CDC Director Walensky said “there have been 745 deaths in children less than 18.”
  • As of 27/10/21, NCHS data showed 558 deaths with COVID-19. Final NCHS data shows 679 pediatric deaths with COVID-19 through Oct. 30th, 2021
  • From: White House Press Briefing
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

November 8th 2021:

  • Among ages 0-17, CDC’s reported rate of symptomatic illness was [more] than the total infection rate (asymptomatic + symptomatic –
    an impossible claim), and this error occurred among children (infection rate also fell only for children from May 21st to Sept 21st estimates).
  • Estimated infection rate was 35,490 per 100K, not 29,885 per 100K (symptomatic illness remained at 30,253 per 100K).
  • From: COVID-19 website
  • Risk: Neutral
  • Concerns: All

December 20th 2021:

  • Omicron makes up 73% of new infections in the U.S.
  • Error with Nowcast estimate, a week later they revised to 23% (outside the previous 95% CI).
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: All

February 24th 2022:

  • COVID-19 hospitalisations had a sudden over-1.6-fold increase in Georgia per HHS/CDC data.
  • Very likely a dramatic multi-week increase was due to imputation error on behalf of the reporting state or municipality, yet this was not audited or detected.
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: All

March 15th:

  • Paediatric deaths on the Data Tracker demographics page were overstated while adult deaths were understated.
  • On 15/3/22, CDC removed 416 paediatric deaths from Data Tracker from 1,755 to 1,339 (still overstated) and almost 72,000 adult deaths, blaming an algorithm for classifying deaths as COVID-19 related.
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Mixed
  • Concerns: Both

June 17th 2022:

  • COVID-19 is a top five cause of death in children of all age groups.
  • Pre-print had inaccurate data, and CDC chose the most extreme version of the flawed data. Specifically, for COVID-19 it used cumulative counts (which spanned more than two years), and death was attributed if it was one of any multiple cause of death, whereas for other causes of death, they used only a single year, and attributed it only if it was the single underlying cause of death).
  • From: ACIP Meeting
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

June 23rd 2022:

  • At a White House COVID-19 briefing, CDC Director Walensky cited the claim that COVID-19 is a “top five cause of death” in children
  • Flawed pre-print, authors already acknowledged that fact, and COVID-19 was not a top five cause of death.
  • From: White House Press Briefing
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

June 27th 2022:

  • ACIP website includes the “top five cause of death” claim
  • Flawed pre-print, authors already acknowledged that fact, and COVID-19 was not a top five cause of death.
  • From: ACIP website
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

August 9th 2022:

  • COVID-19 has killed 1,500 children ages 17 and younger.
  • As of 10/8/22, NCHS data showed 1,201 deaths with COVID-19. As of 5/2/23, NCHS data shows 1,323 paediatric deaths with COVID-19 through August 6th 2022.
  • From: Twitter @CDCgov
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

August 12th 2022:

  • “COVID-19 hospitalisations for children and teens are increasing again in the U.S.”
  • CDC hospitalisation data showed hospitalisations had peaked two weeks prior, on 29/7/22.
  • From: Twitter @CDCgov
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

August 20th 2022:

  • CDC Excess Mortality Dashboard overstated recent deaths in North Carolina and Connecticut.
  • Model for weighting due to death reporting lag was poorly adjusted.
  • From: CDC Excess Mortality Dashboard
  • Risk: Exaggerated risk of all-cause mortality
  • Concerns: All

August 22nd 2022:

  • Alabama paediatric hospitalisations had a dramatic single week increase from under 10 per day to over 50 per day.
  • Very likely a dramatic single week increase was due to imputation error on behalf of the reporting state or municipality, yet this was not audited or detected.
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

August 26th 2022:

  • CDC Data Tracker made a single week jump of 186 paediatric deaths and 1,679 adult deaths, which is unusually high for children and unusually low for adults.
  • Incorrect death data. CDC corrected this days later, removing 173 paediatric deaths and adding 2,484 adult deaths
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Mixed
  • Concerns: All

September 1st 2022:

  • ACIP Chair Grace Lee repeated the “top five cause of death” claim in ACIP meeting to approve bivalent booster.
  • Flawed pre-print was corrected two months prior. Unknown if ACIP committee informed.
  • From: ACIP meeting
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

November 9th 2022:

  • Florida paediatric hospitalisations had a dramatic single week increase from seven to 112 (seven-day new admissions).
  • Very likely a dramatic single week increase was due to imputation error on behalf of the reporting state or municipality, yet this was not audited or detected.
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

December 30th 2022:

  • XBB.1.5 variant reported at 41% of new infections in the US.
  • A week later they revised to 18% (outside the original 95% CI).
  • From: COVID-19 website
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: All

December 31st 2022:

  • North Carolina paediatric hospitalisations had a dramatic single week increase from two to 19 (seven-day new admissions).
  • Very likely a dramatic single week increase was due to imputation error on behalf of the reporting state or municipality, yet this was not audited or detected
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

January 13th 2023:

  • Table 2 listed 62 events for children needing medical care as 13.9%.
  • It should be 1.9%. It is correct in the text, but not the table.
  • From: MMWR
  • Risk: Exaggerated risk of vaccine
  • Concerns: Children

February 9th 2023:

  • Dr. Walensky testified before Congress that there had been “2,000 paediatric deaths from COVID-19”.
  • This number comes from the flawed Data Tracker. Actual number is 1,400-1,500
  • From: Data Tracker/ testimony
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

February 23rd 2023:

  • ACIP slide claimed 1,489 paediatric deaths in ages six months-17 years.
  • They did not remove 305 deaths in infants under-six months. Actual number should have been 1,184 using the NCHS data source cited on the slide
  • From: ACIP meeting
  • Risk: Exaggerated
  • Concerns: Children

Through March 3rd 2023:

  • Data Tracker continues to report too many paediatric deaths and too few adult deaths.
  • Inaccurate mortality data by age group are updated weekly on the CDC Data Tracker Demographics page.
  • From: Data Tracker
  • Risk: Mixed
  • Concerns: All

Read the full paper here.

March 25, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Hospital admissions double – and it’s got to be down to the vaccines

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | March 24, 2023

Data from the New Zealand Ministry of Health has revealed a massive 103 per cent increase in hospitalisations among 12 disease categories measured in 2021 following the mRNA rollout. This calls into serious question the safety of medical interventions such as mRNA vaccines which penetrate the cell wall and re-program activity in the cell cytoplasm.

NZ had very few cases of Covid in 2021 due to draconian restrictions. Therefore the only reasonable cause of the disease increase is mRNA vaccination.

There were 38,178 extra hospitalisations in 2021 across the 12 categories compared with 2019 figures. The Ministry of Health tracks 37 disease categories, and figures for the remaining 25, including cancer, have not yet been released. These figures alone mean that New Zealanders had greater than a 1 in 90 chance of hospitalisation within one year of Covid vaccination. You can read a longer discussion of the figures here.

Similar disastrous figures have surfaced in official data from Western Australia (greater than 1 in 100 chance of serious injury).

Last week in the UK, MP Andrew Bridgen again attempted to capture the attention of the House of Commons about severe injury and death following Covid vaccination, but almost all MPs walked out before he had even started his speech. Undeterred, he gave a brilliant, succinct summary of the dangers and huge costs of Covid vaccination as revealed by the UK Government’s own statistics. In essence he explained how Covid vaccines make roughly a thousand people ill enough to send them to hospital in order to prevent one hospitalisation from Covid. In passing he revealed that the members of the committee approving vaccines in the UK own a billion pounds’ worth of vaccine company shares between them. (Please watch him speak here and share).

YouTube kicked off by deleting the video, but public outrage ensured they had to back down. This underlined the fact that we are not engaged in a rational or fair argument. Hundreds of concerned scientists around the world are analysing data and raising questions about Covid vaccine safety, but like Andrew Bridgen we are all speaking to an empty room.

In contrast, vaccine proponents are still speaking freely to a full house, courtesy of a compliant and well-funded media, who seem not only incapable of sorting truth from falsehood, but woefully ignorant about the fundamentals of genetics.

On Sunday we were subjected to a long piece on NZ’s 1News entitled The Gene Genie. The presenter misinformed the nation that right now we are ending disease in New Zealand with a little snip to our DNA. No doubt this news wowed the audience, but the impression it gave was entirely false and misleading.

The programme did not cover the ending of all disease as the presenter appeared to imply. The real story turned out to be a phase one trial of a novel form of RNA gene therapy designed to tackle amyloidosis, a deadly disease that affects some members of families who inherit a single faulty gene (possibly up to around 60 people in NZ). The trial aims to identify whether a novel approach to amyloidosis gene therapy is safe and effective. It will take years to complete.

Just how monumentally ignorant and naive the programme’s producers were was revealed when the interviewer asked the study’s supervisor, Auckland liver specialist Dr Ed Gane, ‘Should we be able to select for height or intelligence when we do gene editing?’ The interviewer was parroting a false idea, planted in the public imagination by commercial hype, that genetic manipulation could cure all diseases and develop desirable looks and abilities. In fact, more than 300,000 genes play a role in a person’s height, not one, and the idea that there are a few specific genes which could increase intelligence is just fantasy.

To understand just how misleading these ideas are, we need to consider some basic concepts of cellular biology. This will enable us to assess just how much and in how many ways vaccine injury might ultimately affect us.

In 1953, when Watson and Crick unravelled the double helical structure of DNA, the world was dazzled by the discovery. Not only did this promise to solve the mysteries of heredity but it was also heralded as the key to understanding the origin of life itself. The whole focus of biology underwent a seismic shift. Henceforth, work on DNA, its code and its functions, would come to dominate biological research and ultimately medicine. Genetic essentialism had been born – the imaginative idea that just about everything concerning life could be reduced to the operation of genes.

Gradually over the last few years, research on epigenetics began to eat away at the edges of the edifice of genetic essentialism. Traits acquired by parents during their lifetime can be inherited by their offspring. Cellular and physiological factors directly influence how DNA expresses itself. In other words, the wider environment of DNA is intimately involved in its operation.

Genetic code is a part of a cellular system. DNA is not the sole source of life. The popular rush to regard DNA as an almost stand-alone reference point for life misses the established scientific reality.

Cells form the building blocks of life: DNA does not function on its own. By implication the whole cell is the source of heredity, not solely DNA.

Human cells are enormously complex; each contains approximately 100trillion atoms which make up more than 42million proteins.

Cellular functions are protected by a cell wall or membrane. Cells are connected to form a single conscious identity. The mRNA vaccines are designed to pierce the protective cell membrane and co-opt functions in order to redirect cellular activity. As such they are in fact parasitic and ultimately damage the functions of the host cell. They disrupt the whole cell and therefore disrupt multiple characteristics of human life, including physiological stability, adaptability, immunity, and possibly even our mental acuity.

Interventions carrying novel genetic instructions which cross the cell membrane put health and consciousness, body and mind at risk of degradation.

Hospitalisation rates have doubled, all-cause deaths are at record levels, and there is an unexplained total disregard on the part of governments.

The full extent of how much mRNA vaccines will ultimately influence mental and physical health remains unknown.

GLOBE is promoting a campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation.

The writer is in New Zealand.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Senate Committee Handles Bancel with Kid Gloves

Theater with Moderna Billionaire CEO Stephane Bancel Fails to Ask Key Questions

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | March 24, 2023

In 2006, Stephane Bancel was a sales director then head of Belgium operations for Eli Lilly, a mid to high level big pharma sales executive. In 2007 he catapulted to become CEO of French diagnostics company BioMérieux and began work with the Chinese to build the biosecurity annex level 4 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His company trained the Chinese lab technicians. Bancel then joined startup Moderna in 2011. Moderna has three patents that claim priority to applications filed between 2011 and 2016 covering its foundational intellectual property on mRNA, code to SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, and related functions. In April 2020, Moderna’s sales and stock price skyrocketed on the promise of a COVID-19 vaccine that was planned for years. Bancel’s stake of the company is about 9% and net worth estimated to be ~$6 billion.

While the countenance Senator Rand Paul was stern and his questions on the surface appeared intimidating, he and the committee failed to drill Bancel on issues that would reveal corruption, racketeering, fraud, conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism, public harm, or mass negligent homicide.

Here are five question sets the Senators either didn’t have the foundational understanding, perceptiveness, or courage to ask:

  1. What was Bancel’s involvement with the Chinese in the construction of the lab annex? Was it intended for bioterrorism? How many times did Bancel visit the lab between 2007 and 2020?
  2. Did Moderna collaborate with or rely upon Dr. Ralph Baric’s NIH work on chimeric SARS-CoV-2 as published in 2015 in Nature Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science? Is the patented genetic code for Moderna mRNA derived from Baric’s chimeric virus or another one originating from the WIV BSL-4?
  3. Did Bancel know ahead of time his product would cause myocarditis, neurologic injury, blood clotting, and immunologic syndromes (VITT, MIS)?
  4. How many deaths and serious adverse events did Moderna record in its 90 day obligatory post-release safety data? Why has this dossier not been released to the public? When will it be? Assuming Moderna’s dossier has similar numbers of fatalities to Pfizer, why did Moderna fail to pull their product off the market early in 2021 due to excess risk of death?
  5. Has Moderna or FDA or any third party at any time inspected its mRNA1273 vaccine for quality, purity, and concentration as it is being produced by biodefense contractor National Resilience or other supplier? How does Moderna assure the quantity of mRNA in the final fill and finish of the vials before they are shipped to pharmacies and vaccine centers?

In conclusion, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions needs to step up its game if America wants to get to the bottom of what is going on with the COVID-19 vaccine debacle. I suggest they call in some doctors with courage, expertise, and clear vision to advise them on questioning. Wednesday March 22, 2023 fell short by a Kentucky mile and Bancel must be skipping away in relief.

Leake JS, McCullough PA. Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospital Deaths While Battling the Biopharmaceutical Complex

Menachery VD, Yount BL Jr, Debbink K, Agnihothram S, Gralinski LE, Plante JA, Graham RL, Scobey T, Ge XY, Donaldson EF, Randell SH, Lanzavecchia A, Marasco WA, Shi ZL, Baric RS. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nat Med. 2015 Dec;21(12):1508-13. doi: 10.1038/nm.3985. Epub 2015 Nov 9. Erratum in: Nat Med. 2016 Apr;22(4):446. Erratum in: Nat Med. 2020 Jul;26(7):1146. PMID: 26552008; PMCID: PMC4797993.

Menachery VD, Yount BL Jr, Sims AC, Debbink K, Agnihothram SS, Gralinski LE, Graham RL, Scobey T, Plante JA, Royal SR, Swanstrom J, Sheahan TP, Pickles RJ, Corti D, Randell SH, Lanzavecchia A, Marasco WA, Baric RS. SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Mar 15;113(11):3048-53. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517719113. Epub 2016 Mar 14. PMID: 26976607; PMCID: PMC4801244.

Aquino-Jarquin G. The patent dispute over the breakthrough mRNA technology. Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2022 Nov 3;10:1049873. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2022.1049873. PMID: 36406223; PMCID: PMC9669595.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Covid, imaginary pandemic of the brainwashed

By James Delingpole | TCW Defending Freedom | March 24, 2023

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus . . .

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the ‘pandemic’, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the ‘pandemic’ became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this ‘pandemic’ remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis’.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this ‘pandemic’ really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since ‘Spanish Flu’ a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, ‘Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.’ But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

And it all made perfect sense because it accorded with everything else we knew about the ‘pandemic’: that it was planned, orchestrated and manipulated at a high level by some of the most devious and evil people on the planet. Also, lots of our fellow sceptics and anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine crusaders in the fields of vaccinology and epidemiology confirmed that this was so, with all manner of abstruse technical detail which we absorbed and became almost-expert on. We learned such terms as ‘gain of function’, ‘cytokine storm’, ‘spike protein’, ‘viral load’ and ‘shedding’. Why, we almost became virologists ourselves!

So why do I no longer believe in lab leak theory? Why do I now share the suspicions of Mike Yeadon that there never was a Covid virus? Well, for me the most obvious clue is that the lab-leak theory is currently being pushed heavily by the very same mainstream media which has been lying to us relentlessly about mask efficacy, vaccine safety, Net Zero, climate change, Ukraine, CBDCs, 15 Minute Cities and the now very obvious threat posed by the New World Order. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that they might suddenly have alighted on a topic where they are not going to push the nefarious agenda of their sinister paymasters. But if they did it would be a first.

Like Patrick Henningsen – more details on our recent podcast – I take the view that if lab-leak is now the officially endorsed conspiracy theory of the US government then we should all be suspicious that there is an underlying agenda. Promoting lab-leak serves a number of purposes: it distracts from the more pressing issue of vaccine injury; it promotes the notion that the world is potentially swarming with rogue, bio-engineered viruses which require urgent defensive measures by supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisation, including compulsory vaccination against new viral strains; it fingers China as an even bigger enemy than it really is, justifying higher defence spending, escalated economic warfare and potential military action, and it creates further division within the sceptical community.

I notice plenty of evidence of the latter in the comments section below Mike Yeadon’s latest piece at TCW, headlined ‘Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus’. Commenters who were previously united in the – correct – view that the ‘pandemic’ was a massive scam and that the ‘vaccines’ are a monstrous and unnecessary assault on public health are now bickering furiously over whether or not they believe in the Covid virus or in viruses generally.

Most of those defending the existence of the Covid virus do so on the basis of the personal health experiences I invoked at the beginning. I’m not disputing that they may have felt all the exotic and unpleasant symptoms they describe, nor even that these were quite unlike any they had had before. What I am questioning is the logical leap which leads them all to infer that these were definitely the result of a novel virus. How could they possibly know? There are any number of other potential causes for these symptoms: radiation or chemical poisoning; the effects of 5G; a fairly routine brand of flu rebadged as Covid – and escalated in their imagination through groupthink into something much worse; terrain theory . . .

I remain open-minded on the cause of those symptoms, as I do on ‘virus theory’ versus ‘terrain theory’, or whether maybe it’s a mixture of both. But it seems evident to me that certain facts about the supposed pandemic of 2020 are now beyond dispute: it was a ‘pandemic’ only because the WHO changed its definition of the word; mortality rates were not above normal; the PCR tests were fraudulent; SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated; the pandemic was wargamed in 2019 at Event 201, and heavily promoted by vested interests (most funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in the media, academe, the bio-medical establishment and client governments. Given the scale of the dishonesty surrounding this fake crisis, it would hardly constitute an extravagant leap to infer that the ‘virus’, like everything else, was just another fabricated part of the psyop.

And you don’t need to plump fully for terrain theory for this to be the case. Nor are you required to believe that China is a force for integrity and goodness, nor that Fauci and Daszak are stand-up guys, nor that there aren’t lots of black-budget-funded labs experimenting with pathogens. All you need to do is accept that the weight of evidence thus far shows that Mike Yeadon, and brave souls like him, are justified in their scepticism about the existence of a novel, possibly man-made virus called SARS-CoV-2. And the fact that in 2020 you had a nasty dose of flu-like symptoms is really neither here nor there.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)

Iranian TV Fills the “Blank Spots” in Our National History

BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 19, 2023

I recently read Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1993 account of the decay and political collapse of the Soviet Union, and one of the crucial points he emphasized was that Soviet history contained many important “Blank Spots,” deeply suppressed facts or incidents central to the true history of that unfortunate country.

Just as information suppressed by the Soviet authorities had once circulated freely in the West, topics totally banned from today’s Western media are openly discussed in other societies, which possess entirely different taboos.

A few months ago I was contacted by a host for Iranian broadcast television who had decided to feature interviews with a number of Western dissident thinkers, individuals whose controversial views had excluded them from American media outlets. Channel Four of the Iran Broadcasting Corporation is one of that country’s largest, having a potential audience of ten million, and I gladly spent four hours discussing a variety of my topics, while also suggesting a number of other figures who were also interviewed as well.

Thirty-odd segments featuring about a dozen different guests were ultimately recorded, and as they have been aired, they are also being released on a streaming website. About half are now available, including most of my own and those featuring E. Michael Jones, Nick Kollerstrom, Kevin Barrett, and Laurent Guyénot. For more convenient Western access, I had them video-captured and uploaded to a Rumble channel, realizing that many of the taboo topics would immediately trigger a purge on Youtube.

Those of my interviews already broadcast included discussions of the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and the Holocaust, and I was reasonably pleased with how they came out. I’m embedding these video segments below, followed in each case by some of the main articles I had previously published on those particular topics.

Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Part #1, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)

Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Part #2, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)

March 23, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment