Ukraine fires top official behind claims of Russian war crimes
Samizdat | May 31, 2022
Ukrainian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to remove the nation’s human rights commissioner, Lyudmila Denisova, from her post. The official has been accused of failing to perform duties and in particular of spreading unverified information about atrocities supposedly committed by Russian troops in Ukraine. Such actions only tarnished Ukraine’s image, MPs have argued.
A no-confidence resolution has been supported by 234 lawmakers out of 450 or 52% of the MPs in Verkhovnaya Rada, said Yaroslav Zheleznyak, a member of the Golos (‘Voice’) faction in the Ukrainian parliament. Denisova had previously been criticized, both by lawmakers and the Ukrainian media, over a purported failure to execute her duties, particularly amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The ombudsperson had “hardly exercised her powers to organize humanitarian corridors” or prisoner exchanges, a Ukrainian MP, Pavlo Frolov, wrote in a Facebook post ahead of Tuesday’s vote. The human rights commissioner had barely shown “human rights activism” at all, he said, adding that Denisova’s duties eventually fell to Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk, who repeatedly sought to organize humanitarian corridors.
According to Frolov, the ombudswoman’s “inexplicable focus” on supposed sex crimes and “rape of minors in the occupied territories, which she could not substantiate with evidence” only harmed Ukraine. The MP has also accused Denisova of spending most of her time abroad as the conflict unfolded.
Instead of traveling to Russia specifically to negotiate prisoner exchanges, Denisova spent her time in the “warm and calm” cities of Europe, such as Davos, Vienna or Warsaw, Frolov said.
Earlier, a group of journalists, human rights activists and psychologists slammed Denisova over what they called breach of ethics, and accused her of turning the reports on the alleged sexual crimes committed by Russian troops into a “scandalous newsreel”-style publication.
Denisova herself, who served as Ukraine’s ombudsperson since 2018, said on Monday that she could face a vote of no confidence in the parliament, accusing the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky of being behind the move. She has also claimed at that time that the procedure for her removal would violate Ukraine’s constitution. The human rights commissioner took up her post under Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, who served as Ukraine’s president until May 2019.
In March, Russian ombudsperson Tatyana Moskalkova called on Denisova to stop the torture of Russian soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces. The Russian official cited reports on “cases of cruel and inhuman treatment of Russian soldiers in captivity in Ukraine” at that time. According to Moskalkova, Denisova told her that there could be “no agreements on that matter.”
On Tuesday, the head of the Russian presidential human rights council, Valery Fadeev, called on Denisova to be put on trial. “You cannot prove anything to a person whose profession is to lie,” he said, referring to the Ukrainian human rights commissioner.
Kremlin Responds to Claims Putin is Terminally Ill
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 31, 2022
Russia has responded to claims that keep appearing in western media outlets, including those made by ‘peegate’ dossier author Christopher Steele, that Vladimir Putin is dying of a terminal illness.
Lurid assertions about Putin’s health appear to be part of a black propaganda campaign to deflate the ‘masculine’ image Putin tries to portray, given that they appear to be backed by no actual evidence whatsoever.
Indeed, the much vaunted ‘fact-checkers’ seem to be AWOL on this one.
The claims, which are almost always made by anonymous intelligence officials, include;
– Putin has Parkinson’s disease.
– Putin has dementia.
– Putin has blood cancer.
– Putin is suffering from “chemo brain”, a cognitive impairment caused by cancer treatment.
– Putin recently underwent major surgery.
– Putin is taking steroids to hide his symptoms.
– Putin is “constantly” being followed around by doctors.
– Putin is fooling the word by using “pre-recorded appearances.”
– Putin is using “body doubles” and “actors” to fulfil his public appearances.
– Putin’s health woes have weakened his grip on power, which is now tenuous.
– Putin may even be dead already but that it won’t be admitted for “months” to avoid a Kremlin coup.
Of course, no one knows the true state of Putin’s health because NATO-aligned spies and corporate media outlets will always seek to play up the most dire speculation in an effort to undermine the Russian president.
One insight into the veracity of such reports is that the claims are being amplified by British spy Christopher Steele, who infamously authored the dubious Trump dossier which has been roundly debunked.
The report, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to get dirt on Trump, ludicrously claimed that Trump had visited Moscow to have women urinate on him.
“It was later revealed that Trump did not go to Russia when Steele claimed he did, and that Steele’s primary source for the document was based in the United States, not Russia. That source later personally debunked the “pee tape” allegation while speaking to the FBI,” writes Tom Pappert.
Even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that Steele’s work has been “discredited,” so his claims on Putin’s health should be taken with a grain of salt.
Russia has now officially responded to the claims in the form of a statement made by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who stressed that Putin makes daily appearances in public.
“You can see him on TV screens, read, and listen to his speeches. I don’t think that a sane person can suspect any signs of an illness or ailment in this man,” said Lavrov.
“I’ll leave it on the conscience of those who disseminate such rumors despite daily opportunities for everyone to see how he and others look like,” he added.
Was the Maidan Massacre a False Flag?
By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | May 30, 2022
To understand the war in Ukraine, you have understand the events that led up to it. And no preceding event is more important than the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in February of 2014.
Officially known as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, it was denounced by Vladimir Putin as an “unconstitutional coup”. And while most Western media stick to the official nomenclature, some prominent voices dissent. John Mearsheimer has referred to “the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president”, while George Friedman has described what happened as “the most blatant coup in history”.
A recap of the basic facts is in order.
In November of 2013, Yanukovych’s government suspended plans for signing an Association Agreement with the EU, and decided to renew talks with Russia. This decision sparked protests in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. By December, the number of protestors had reached the tens of thousands, and a permanent encampment had been established on Maidan square. Although most of the protesters were ordinary Ukrainians, far-right groups were also present.
Beginning in December, there were violent clashes between protesters and the police. On 23rd January, protestors succeeded in occupying various buildings around Maidan square. The situation came to a head on 18–20th February when protestors were fired upon by snipers, leaving scores dead and hundreds wounded. A dozen police offers were also killed in the clashes. From November 2013 to February 2014, 112 protestors and 18 police officers lost their lives; though most of the killings happened on 20th February.
On 21st February, Yanukovych signed an agreement with the parliamentary opposition calling for reforms and new elections. But the next day, he was impeached by the Ukrainian parliament. This impeachment process was in several respects unconstitutional, and Yanukovych declared he was still “the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state elected in a free vote by Ukrainian citizens”. However, he subsequently fled to Russia and a new government was formed.
The ‘Revolution of Dignity’ led immediately to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the outbreak of civil war in Donbas – so its geopolitical importance can hardly be overstated. Yet despite huge international attention, one question remains shrouded in mystery: who ordered snipers to fire at protestors on 18–20th February?
The ‘official’ narrative is that the snipers were from the Berkut – a special police unit loyal to Yanukovych. On the other hand, Russia has long maintained they were deployed by the Ukrainian far-right as part of a false flag operation to bring down Yanukovych’s government.
What is true is that more than eight years after the massacre – which took place amid a giant demonstration at the centre of Ukraine’s capital in front of dozens of television cameras – not a single person has been convicted. The perpetrators of one of the deadliest mass shootings in European history remain at large.
Why don’t we have an answer? Well, perhaps we do.
Away from the limelight, one Canadian academic has been poring over the evidence for the last eight years. And he’s convinced the ‘official’ narrative is wrong. Ivan Katchanovski (a political scientist at the University of Ottawa) believes the Maidan massacre was a false flag operation carried out by the Ukrainian far-right.
Professor Katchanovski cannot be dismissed as some fringe commenter or stooge of the Kremlin. He has published his arguments in scholarly books and journals, and has presented them at academic conferences. His latest article, which can be accessed for free, reviews all the evidence he’s collected to date – including witness testimonies, weapon ballistics and medical forensics. It’s based on hundreds of hours of footage of the Maidan massacre trials, as well as synchronised video segments of the massacre itself.
As Katchanovski explains, the ‘false flag theory’ first gained credence in March of 2014, when a phone call between two European officials was leaked online. During the call, the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet tells the EU’s Catherine Ashton about a conversation he’d had with someone called Olga:
What was quite disturbing, the same Olga told, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides among policemen and then people from the streets – that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides. She also showed me some photos. She said that as medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it is the same handwriting, same type of bullets. And it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych but it was somebody from the new coalition.
‘Olga’ was later identified as Olga Bohomolets, a doctor who had treated wounded protestors on Maidan square. When quizzed by the press, she said she had not told Paet that somebody from the new coalition was behind the snipers. Likewise, the Estonian Foreign Ministry said, “We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence” (though they acknowledged the recording was authentic). It is still unclear why Paet would divulge such shocking revelations if he did not believe they had some basis in fact.
Aside from TV recordings and media reports, much of Katchanovski’s evidence comes from the trials of five Berkut police officers, who were charged with the murder of protestors on 20th February, 2014. Various other state actors, including Yanukovych himself, were also charged, but they were not brought to trial as they had already fled the country. (Recall that none of those put on trial were convicted.)
What, then, is Katchanovski’s evidence?
The majority of wounded protestors who testified at the trail said they were shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings. Remarkably, even many witnesses for the prosecution said this. Their testimony is consistent with video footage of journalists and protestors pointing to snipers in buildings like the Hotel Ukraine, which were under Maidan control at the time.
Police snipers testified that they had been ordered to locate and neutralise snipers firing from Maidan-controlled buildings. And Yanukovych himself, who appeared at the trial via video-link, testified that he had received reports of snipers firing from those buildings.
Several Georgian ex-military personnel who testified at the trail actually confessed they were among the snipers, and had been given orders by specific Maidan leaders to fire upon the protestors. They also testified that they had witnessed other snipers shooting from Maidan-controlled buildings. By contrast, no police officers or other state actors confessed to having fired upon protestors.
In the majority of cases where wounded protestors testified that they had been shot by snipers from police-controlled areas, other evidence contradicted their testimony. For example, synchronized video segments showed the exact times they were hit did not coincide with the exact times police officers were discharging their weapons. Other videos showed that several protesters were killed before police officers had even taken up their positions.
Forensic examinations by government experts revealed that the majority of protestors were shot from the side or back, and from top to bottom, strongly suggesting they had been hit by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings. Only one protestor had a horizontal entry wound. Experts also determined that several protestors were killed by bullets that did not match those used by the police.
An American architecture company created a 3D model of the killing of three protestors, which was used as evidence that those protestors were in fact killed by the police. (This 3D model was covered in a 2018 New York Times article.) However, the wound locations in the model did not match the wound locations from forensic medical examinations.
A screenshot from the video appendix to Katchanovski’s latest paper.
Aside from what Katchanovski calls “overwhelming evidence” that protestors were shot from Maidan-controlled buildings, he believes there was a cover-up by the post-Maidan authorities.
On 21st February, the Ukrainian parliament passed an amnesty law granting blanket immunity to Maidan protestors for serious crimes that had taken place during the protests. This law also prohibited investigation of the protestors for such crimes, and ordered that existing evidence be destroyed.
Two of the Berkut police officers who had been charged with murdering protestors were released by trial judges due to lack of evidence, suggesting the charges against them were trumped up. And all remaining defendants were released in a prisoner exchange within several months of the expected verdict.
Public statements made by various Maidan participants concerning the far-right’s involvement in the massacre were never investigated. One politician said she saw Maidan leaders bringing snipers into a building and then saw snipers firing from that building. Several activists said they witnessed snipers being evacuated by Maidan leaders. And another politician said that Maidan leaders had “arranged” the massacre.
There were unexplained reversals of testimony on the part of wounded Maidan protestors. Key pieces of evidence went missing or were destroyed. Several trees with bullet holes in them were cut down; all helmets and shields used by those who were shot disappeared, as did security camera footage from Maidan-controlled buildings.
Finally, two far-right politicians stated in separate interviews that a Western government official told them killings of a few protestors would not be enough for Western governments to stop recognising Yanukovych, and for that to happen the number of victims would need to be 100. The protesters who lost their lives subsequently became known as the “Heavenly Hundred”, even though some of those ‘hundred’ were not killed in the massacre itself (and in fact simply died of illness.)
On the basis of all the evidence he’s gathered, Katchanovski concludes that the Maidan massacre was “a false flag operation” which involved “elements of the Maidan leadership”.
If true, the implications are immense. It would mean the event that marked the turning point of Euromaidan – that set in motion Yanukovych’s removal from power – was in fact orchestrated by his political opponents. And aside from implicating those individuals in a brutal act of mass murder, it would remove any doubt that the that the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ was illegitimate.
Is it true?
I have been unable to track down any serious criticism of Katchanovski’s work, and when I reached out to him, he told me “there is no other scholarly study” that disputes his findings. What’s more, the political scientist Gordon Hahn reached similar conclusions in his book Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the “New Cold War”.
So why haven’t Western governments shown more interest in investigating the massacre? I put this question to Katchanovski. He said that such an investigation would be “politically inconvenient” because it would “upend the narrative that the Western backed overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 by the pro-Western Maidan opposition was peaceful and democratic”. He added that a definitive answer could be obtained by consulting relevant documents once they are declassified.
As I mentioned above, Katchanovski has published his arguments concerning the ‘false flag theory’ in scholarly books and journals, and has presented them at academic conferences. All the germane papers are available for free online. You might therefore expect for his work to have received significant media attention – particularly in the last few months.
Yet with the exception of a few ‘non-mainstream’ outlets, it hasn’t. Major Western media have ignored his studies “for political reasons”, he told me. This is despite the fact that Katchanovski’s other work on Ukraine (unrelated to the massacre) has received ample media attention, including from the Associated Press, Reuters and the Washington Post.
Katchanovski knows that certain media outlets are aware of his work because he’s brought it to their attention. Following the New York Times article on the 3D model of killings at Maidan, he sent a letter to the editor pointing out they had “misrepresented the wound locations”. But his letter wasn’t published. In another case, “Open Democracy accepted a popular version of my Maidan massacre study, but then did not publish it.” Katchanovski said he gave “long interviews concerning the Maidan massacre to several major TV and Radio networks” but “none of them were broadcast”. In every single case “there was no reason given”.
The only time Katchanovski’s work on the massacre has been put under the spotlight was in Oliver Stone’s 2019 documentary Revealing Ukraine. This film is available on Rumble, and the relevant segment begins at 20:00.
What about everything that’s happened since? In our email exchange, Katchanovski clarified that the Maidan massacre “does not justify the Russian invasion and other actions in Ukraine”. Equally, however, Russia’s invasion does not justify ignoring – in his words – “overwhelming and undeniable evidence” of Maidan snipers.
If others believe that Katchanovski is mistaken, they must come forward and present their arguments. In the meantime, I would strongly recommend reading his papers: they make a compelling case that what’s been labelled a “conspiracy theory” is, in fact, true.
Data shenanigans as Sweden misleads its public over vaccination-related mortality data
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | May 29, 2022
In December 2021 Norman Fenton, Martin Neil, Clare Craig, Josh Geutzkow, Joel Smalley, Scott McLachlan and Jonathan Engler published an article casting doubt on the vaccine efficacy implied by the UK’s official mortality statistics as they related to vaccination status, raising miscategorisation of vaccinated deaths soon after injection as unvaccinated as a possible significant factor.
The authors — as expected — were unable to publish this article in any mainstream journal, as anything which counters the government’s official position on anything related to the pandemic, especially vaccinations, has effectively been suppressed or censored throughout the last 2 years.
Despite repeated FOI requests by several parties, no UK government agency has ever released sufficiently granular data broken down into the necessary categories to permit any meaningful analysis of the extent (if any) of this miscategorisation issue.
Now, however, it appears that an FOI request to the Swedish Public Health Agency by 29 doctors and scientists has been successful in obtaining such data (for Sweden). They have written an article about it (in English) here.
The data is revelatory. It essentially shows that individuals dying within 2 weeks of vaccination have been classed and counted as unvaccinated. Incredibly, this applies to the 14 day period after the second as well as the first dose. The numbers involved are certainly non-trivial. In a substack blog, Jessica Rose has re-run the implied vaccine efficacy statistics in light of the new data categorizations.
In conclusion, the correct categorization turns the vaccine efficacy calculation totally on its head, suggesting a significantly increased risk of death in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated, rather than the vice-versa conclusion the authorities had originally touted. Whilst there is no age-breakdown, the magnitude of the reversal in the conclusions is nonetheless stark enough to conclude that there has been very serious and likely deliberate misrepresentation of what the mortality statistics truly imply about the efficacy of the vaccines against mortality.
One wonders how many other countries have played similar tricks with their data?
Post-script:
A further – anonymous – author has published an article claiming to build on Jessica Rose’s piece by calculating the mortality rates in the vaccinated and unvaccinated and comparing them to flu.
The author acknowledges the possible effect of age-confounding in the text, but in referring to it as having only a “slight” effect this understates its potential to interfere with his analysis; to draw the conclusions he /she does would in fact require a proper age breakdown of deaths month-by-month. However, if the analysis might lead to a misinterpretation of vaccine effectiveness because of the age bias then it is up to those with access to the data by age to refute the analysis.
The main take-away from the episode around this FOI is not that the vaccines are or are not efficacious (vs death), but rather that there has been a systematic miscategorization error which (1) seems likely to have been deliberate and (2) resulted in an extremely misleading picture of what the data suggests.
Such incidents – which now appear all too common in many countries – are likely to shatter the public’s trust in the institutions upon which we are supposed to rely.
MIT Weighs In On Energy Storage
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 26, 2022
As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage. How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods? Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem.
And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.” MIT — that’s America’s premier university for matters of science and technology. The Report is 378 pages long, full of lots of detail, charts and graphs, mathematical equations, and technical jargon. It lists as authors some 18 members of the MIT faculty. Surely, if anyone can address this “net zero” energy storage problem competently, these will be the people.
Sorry. This is a product of modern American academia. MIT is as extreme left as any of them.
Having now spent about a week trying to wade through this morass, I am not impressed. The Report is an exercise by genius would-be central planners concocting enormously complex models that just happen to come to the results that the authors are hoping for, while at the same time they avoid ever directly addressing the critical question, namely what is the plan to get through that worst case sun/wind drought. Implicit in every page of the Report is that it is an advocacy document for the proposition that the U.S. should embark full speed ahead on crash “net zero” plans for our multi-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars economy without ever doing any kind of demonstration project to show it can work on any scale no matter how small.
You start to get an idea where this is going at the very beginning, when you come on page romanette v to a list of members of an “Advisory Committee” that appears to have given direction to the project. Members include John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, someone from the Environmental Defense Fund, an “Alternative Energy Research” guy from the Bank of America, an ex-World Bank guy (the World Bank being an organization dedicated to keeping poor countries from having access to energy that works), an environmental bureaucrat from the Massachusetts state government, several people from other alternative energy investors and environmental advocacy groups, and so forth. Clearly, this Report had to come to a pre-determined conclusion that energy storage issues do not pose any major impediment to net zero ambitions.
This being a product of left-wing academia, you can expect the usual touching faith in the ability of the federal government to solve all problems, no matter how intractable, by the magic of spending money out of the infinite federal pile. Thus, early in the Executive Summary, we find a recognition that the only battery storage technology currently being deployed in large amounts in commercial applications — namely Lithium Ion — cannot provide backup for periods longer than about 12 hours:
Li-ion batteries will continue to be a leading technology for EVs and for short-duration storage, but their storage capacity costs are unlikely to fall low enough to enable widespread adoption for long-duration (> 12 hours) electricity system applications.
OK then, what is the technology that will step up for the periods of a week or two that may need to be covered in a world without fossil fuels. From page xv:
To enable economical long-duration energy storage (> 12 hours), the DOE should support research, development, and demonstration to advance alternative electrochemical storage technologies that rely on earth-abundant materials. Cost, lifetime, and manufacturing scale requirements for long-duration energy storage favor the exploration of novel electro-chemical technologies, such as redox-flow and metal-air batteries that use inexpensive charge-storage materials and battery designs that are better suited for long-duration applications. (Emphasis in original).
The feds will “support research” into “novel technologies,” of course using the infinite money pile, and the technology will magically appear. And what exactly is the technology that will then emerge to rescue us? They have no idea:
While several novel electrochemical technologies have shown promise, remaining knowledge gaps with respect to key scientific, engineering, and manufacturing challenges suggest high value for concerted government support. Innovation in these technologies is being actively pursued in other countries, notably China.
You’ve got to hate those “knowledge gaps,” but clearly all that is needed to fill them is enough federal funding. And you can’t let those Chinese beat us!
Well, how about just using that ubiquitous element hydrogen, easily available through the electrolysis of water? They discuss that too:
[H]ydrogen produced via electrolysis can serve as a low-carbon fuel for industry as well as for electricity generation during periods when VRE [variable renewable energy] generation is low. . . . We support the effort that the DOE is leading to create a national strategy that addresses hydrogen production, transportation, and storage. In particular, the ability of existing natural gas transmission pipelines to carry hydrogen without suffering embrittlement, either at reduced pressures or if hydrogen is blended with natural gas or other compounds, remains an open question that deserves government-supported study by the DOE and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Funny that private investors aren’t putting any real money into this “hydrogen economy” thing. That’s because to get hydrogen out of water is extremely costly, and once you have it, it is inferior to natural gas in every way as a source of energy for the people. It’s less dense, more dangerous, and more difficult to transport and store. But again, throw in some of the infinite pile of federal money and it will all magically work.
Many of the charts and graphs are very complicated and technical, but if you spend some time with them, you start to realize that they are an insult to your intelligence. I’ll give you just one of my favorites, this one from page 191. Here we are considering what the electricity generation system will look like for two regions, the Northeast (New York and New England) and Texas, in various low and no-carbon scenarios. The cutoffs of 0g, 5g, 10g and No Limit at the left refer to how much carbon emissions are allowed per kWh of electricity generated.
Thus at the top right we see what a zero-carbon scenario will look like for Texas. Supposedly, with about a 3 to 4 times overbuild of a system having only wind and solar generation, then we will only need battery storage for about 50% of capacity and about 11 hours duration. Really? Does anybody remember February 2021? Texas’s wind and solar generators produced at less than 10% capacity for days on end. Can a three times overbuild of wind capacity and 12 hours of battery storage solve that? The answer is no. Not even close. And you could get a wind/solar drought of a full week. If you have no fossil fuel backup, you had better have enough storage to cover that.
And if you take some time to study this chart (not saying that I would recommend that) you can find multiple other equally implausible assertions.
Bottom line: I’m not trusting anybody’s so-called “model” to prove that this gigantic energy transformation is going to work. Show me the demonstration project that actually works.
They won’t. Indeed, there is not even an attempt to put such a thing together, even as we hurtle down the road to “net zero” without any idea how it is going to work.
CDC study purporting to find substantial protective effects for school mask mandates fails to replicate
eugyppius – May 29, 2022
Last year, the CDC published a paper comparing Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements. The authors looked at data from 520 United States counties, concluding that “Counties without school mask requirements experienced larger increases in … case rates … compared with counties that had school mask requirements.” Corona astrologers and face diaper fetishists everywhere have used the findings to argue for forcing healthy children who are at no risk to wear fasks masks for multiple hours each school day.
More county-level data on American infection rates and mask mandates has since become available, and two Toronto scientists have taken the opportunity to replicate the study, looking now at 1,832 counties. In a turn of events that will surprise nobody, they find that the larger dataset shows that mask mandates actually do zero, and that prior findings were almost surely an illusion.
Here are masked vs. unmasked case rates, using a smaller data pool similar to that from the CDC study:
Week 0 is the week of school reopening after the summer holidays.
Yes, the maskless counties seem to do worse! Yet the Toronto authors point out that the original CDC study only considered infection rates through the second week after schools reopened, which turned out to be “exactly the peak of school case numbers for [their] sample of counties.” This obscured the fact “that cases quickly declined in later weeks and did so faster in counties without mask mandates.” Even the smaller sample used by the CDC study, in other words, showed no difference in masked vs. unmasked counties by the six-week mark.
The replication, with a much bigger dataset, meanwhile, showed that maskless counties never led infections at all:
Note that, in the larger sample, the maskless start out with lower rates of infections and catch up; in the smaller sample, they started out with higher rates which collapsed more quickly.
The authors note that the CDC study, by ending their analysis on 4 September 2021, effectively excluded counties with a school-start date after 14 August, which entailed an oversampling of southern states. I’ll fill in the blanks here: Counties in the American south tend to have fewer school mask requirements, and also to experience late summer infection spikes related to high temperatures and extensive reliance on climatisation.
Although masks have become the most clearly discredited measure deployed against SARS-2 (which is saying something), they just won’t go away. Even in places that have lifted all Corona restrictions, a great many people continue to mask in public, and it seems likely that many countries – Germany among them – will retain vestigial mask requirements indefinitely, probably for years. Masking is a totally unsupported superstitious practice that does nothing against viral infection, and yet for precisely this reason, no amount of evidence will ever convince the maskers to stop.
Ex-Louvre director charged in Egyptian artifacts trafficking case
Press TV – May 28, 2022
The former president of the Louvre museum in Paris has been charged with fraud in acquisition of archaeological treasures that may have been taken out of Egypt during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Jean-Luc Martinez who ran the Paris Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, from 2013-21 was charged this week after he was taken in by police for questioning, a French judicial source told Agence France-Presse.
Martinez, who now serves as an ambassador for international cooperation in the field of heritage, stepped down as the Louvre’s president last year.
He was charged with fraud and “concealing the origin of criminally obtained works by false endorsement,” according to a French judicial source.
Martinez, who has denied any wrongdoing, is also accused of neglecting fake certificates of origin for the pieces.
The case, which threatens to embarrass the French culture ministry and ministry for foreign affairs, was opened in July 2018, two years after the Louvre Abu Dhabi bought a rare pink granite stele depicting the pharaoh Tutankhamun and four other ancient works for €8m (£6.8m).
French investigators suspect that hundreds of artifacts were pillaged during the public uprising in Middle-East that engulfed several Middle Eastern countries in the early 2010s.
These were then believed to have been sold to galleries and museums that did not ask too many questions about previous ownership, nor look closely enough at potential incoherence in the works’ certificates of origin.
Several countries are thought to have been affected by artifacts being pillaged, including Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria.
Another prized Egyptian work, the gilded coffin of the priest Nedjemankh, which was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017, was at the center of a separate inquiry by New York prosecutors.
The Met, however, said it had been the victim of false statements and fake documentation, and that the coffin would be returned to Egypt.
“Deaths Have Increased Cumulatively”: BBC Producer Defends False Extreme Weather Claim
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | May 25, 2022
Fresh insights into the techniques used by the BBC to catastrophise climate change are revealed in an exchange of letters with the producer of Justin Rowlatt’s “Wild Weather” Panorama and a former producer of Top Gear. Justifying the Rowlatt suggestion that global weather is getting warmer and more unpredictable and the death toll is rising, the programme’s producer Leo Telling said the latter figure was “cumulative”. In reply, Ken Pollock called the explanation “asinine”, and suggested Telling recognised that: “The death toll in the U.K. is cumulative. It is difficult to imagine it not increasing, if you quote cumulative figures,” he explained.
The “Wild Weather” programme, broadcast in December 2020, was an emotion-charged rant that tried to show that human-caused climate change was behind a series of recent bad weather events. It led to two internal complaints being upheld against Rowlatt. On the death toll claim, the BBC accepted that deaths from natural disasters have actually been falling for many years.
Telling then went on to argue that heatwaves will lead to excess deaths in vulnerable groups with a lower tolerance to extreme temperatures. In addition, he stated that the heatwaves will lead to avoidable deaths through wildfires.
“How can you write with a straight face that heatwaves will kill more and more people,” replied Pollock, “without also accepting that cold kills 10 times as many people every year and extra heat may save far more people?”
How do you reconcile the fact that Singapore and Helsinki have average temperatures differing by 22°C, and yet you accept that a further 1°C could spell disaster, he went on to ask.
Pollock then wondered what the Panorama producer really meant by the suggestion that avoidable wildfire deaths would increase. “You surely know that most of the Australian wildfires and those in the West of the USA were started by arson. Surely you know that the recent wildfires were nowhere near as bad as those in the West of the USA in the 30s and 40s and in Australia in the 80s, when I filmed them for the BBC, and in earlier decades,” he wrote.
In Pollock’s view, much of what Telling produced was drawn from the World Health Organisation and “highly questionable” IPCC predictions. One might expect you to challenge some of them, or at least refer to the source and the speculative nature of the predictions, he contended. Pollock concluded by noting that in his 22 years as a BBC producer, he became alarmed at the inadequate use of statistics by the Corporation in current affairs and elsewhere: “Many BBC people repeated statistics without understanding them”.
On the BBC climate desk, repeating, seemingly without question, the catastrophe claims from third party sources is a normal method of operation. In February 2019, the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin reported the view of Left wing think tank IPPR that “human impacts had reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy”. No attempt was made to examine these extravagant opinions. It later transpired that the report, which contained numerous false extreme weather claims, was part written by a young woman whose previous employment had been working as a volunteer for an Edinburgh ‘equality’ charity. Meanwhile, Matt McGrath, the first winner of the BBVA Foundation €100,000 award for climate journalism, wrote an article in July 2019 titled “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. Accepting his award from BBVA, a Spanish bank with large green investments, McGrath defended the primacy of specialist journalism “that draws on sound scientific sources” in an era of fake news.
Barely a week goes by without the Net Zero-inspired fantasies of climate Armageddon being publicised from the work of academics, think tanks, meteorological operations like the Met Office and the IPCC. This latter body, heavily dependent on climate models and their to-date wildly inaccurate forecasts, is held in particularly high esteem. Writing in July last year, Harrabin looked forward to a new edition by stating, “computing will underpin the new climate science ‘Bible’ from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) next month”.
It might be suggested that an editorial emergency is awaiting the BBC in the near future. Most of its climate reporting seems to be little more than repeating bad (“extreme”) weather events, and claiming the climate is, somehow, breaking down. In reality, global warming has run out of steam with pauses and dips common in the record over the last two decades. The accurate temperature news from satellites is largely ignored, and there is little appetite for investigating how the major global surface datasets have quietly adjusted their records to add an extra 30% of heating over the last 20 years. Most of the bad weather claims are easily debunked, and are unlikely to be so well tolerated by the wider public if Net Zero leads to substantial reductions in personal freedoms, income and diet.
Writing an excoriating report on the “Wild Weather” programme, Ross Clark noted recently in the Daily Mail that there was a time when the BBC was committed to presenting both sides of the argument. He noted a 2018 instruction sent by the former BBC director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, demanding that “interviewees who were sceptical about man-made climate change were no longer to be invited regularly”. He concluded: “Unsworth’s instructions had clearly become the status quo.”
Last September, Insulate Britain activist Zoe Cohen told the BBC that climate change would lead to “the loss of all we cherish, our society, our way of life, law and order”. Ross noted that it was a hysterical claim that had no foundation in science, yet she remained unchallenged. Some at the BBC, he went on to suggest, were losing patience with their climate editor. “The Justin Rowlatt stuff is grim,” an unnamed BBC source is reported to have told another newspaper. “These are not mistakes; he’s a campaigner.”
Matt McGrath is another who might care to look into some of the sources that feed his doomsday copy. Around the time of receiving his BBVA present, he published a story claiming that over 11,000 scientists were predicting “untold suffering” from the forthcoming climate emergency. Among those signatories promoting a “clear and unequivocal emergency” were Professor Mickey Mouse and Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
The perfect BBC climate breakdown story. Making it up, in a world of make believe.
Is the pandemic treaty a step towards World Government?
By Dr Deborah Ancell | TCW Defending Freedom | May 25, 2022
Dear Prime Minister,
It’s the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) season and conspiracies about World Government abound. I have a new one for you.
You might recall my letter concerning the opaqueness of the first international tax, the United Nations Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA)
CORSIA offsets aircraft carbon dioxide emissions and it’s hidden in the environmental provisions of the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation. CORSIA empowered the UN to raise taxes – something which appears to have escaped notice in signatory sovereign nations.
My concerns were that firstly, CO2 is not a pollutant and secondly, CORSIA is a Trojan horse for similar UN taxes on other industries such as shipping and information technology.
Taxation is the tool of national governments. When nations surrender tax powers to an international body, they undermine their sovereignty. CORSIA enables independent, non-political, commercial funding of UN development projects in developing nations and reduces their reliance on UN member-government funding.
CORSIA also provides developing world reparations, since it offsets (unevidenced) claims that underdevelopment results from historical emissions incurred during developed world industrialisation. As the first international tax, it’s an example of UN overreach which undermines national sovereignty.
Now another UN arm – the World Health Organisation – might also be attempting overreach. WHO is proposing a new ‘pandemic treaty’ to encourage more information-sharing in the event of another global health crisis.
The treaty would apparently give WHO ‘unprecedented, undemocratic jurisdiction over its 194 member nations, including the UK’. There would be almost unlimited authority to ‘order mandatory vaccines, digital health IDs, lockdowns, isolation, testing regimes, no-jab-no-job rules, or anything else it decided as policy, irrespective of dissenting voices’.
The treaty will not be voted on until the World Health Assembly in 2023. If the UK agreed to this, health sovereignty could also be undermined.
Combine these two sovereignty concessions and you have the beginnings of an independently-funded and legislating World Government. This prospect was promoted by now-deceased luminaries as diverse as discredited socialist millionaire Maurice Strong and capitalist banker David Rockefeller.
Strong, a promoter of CO2 as a cause of environmental harm, profoundly believed that the UN had the potential to be the World Government. Any such World Government would undermine democracies.
Similarly, Rockefeller founded and led the Trilateral Commission with its aim of a ‘New World Order’ to control population and resources. He is reported as stating that ‘the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination (democracy) practised in past centuries.’ Scary!
Conspiracy theorists believe that today’s WEF, with its agenda to counter natural and anthropogenic climate change and its call for a Great (economic) Reset has a similar, shadowy agenda to these precursor pursuits.
As conspiracy theories go, this one is far-fetched – but can you assure me I’m wrong? Do you think that World Government is on the agenda at Davos today?
Yours sincerely,
Deborah Ancell
What it means that Hillary Clinton did it
By David Zukerman | American Thinker | May 22, 2022
The Wall Street Journal ran a scathing editorial on May 20, called “Hillary Clinton Did It“.
This editorial began: “The Russia-Trump collusion narrative of 2016 was a dirty trick for the ages — and now we know it came from the top — candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.” The editorial quickly explained: “That was the testimony Friday by 2016 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook in federal court [in Washington, D.C.], and while this news is hardly a surprise, it’s still bracing to find her fingertips on the political weapon.” (Also not surprisingly, The May 20 print edition of The New York Times did not include a story on Mook’s testimony.)
Mook’s testimony was heard at the trial of attorney Michael Sussman, charged with lying to the FBI in calling to their attention a story that Donald J. Trump, by means of connections with Russia’s Alfa Bank, was colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The lie at issue was not the false claim about a Trump-Alfa connection, but the charge that Sussman brought this matter to the FBI as a good citizen, and not as a representative of the Clinton campaign.
As the Journal editorial noted: “Prosecutors say [Sussman] was working for the Clinton campaign.” The editorial pointed out, “Mr. Mook said Mrs. Clinton was asked about the plan [to call attention to the Trump-Alfa ties] and approved it. A story on the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations thus appeared in Slate, a left-leaning online publication.”
After that, the Journal explained how the Clinton campaign used the self-generated news of the investigation and the initial Slate article that came of it, both of which they had planted, as the basis for making tweet after tweet to the press about the Slate report to churn up mass coverage about it in the press and convince the public that the investigation was about something serious.
The concluding paragraphs of the editorial are worth quoting in full:
In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news. The campaign also delivered the claims to the FBI, giving journalists another excuse to portray the accusations as serious and perhaps true.
Most of the press will ignore this news, but the Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country. It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere. Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.
The harm done to the United States by the perfidy of the Clintonistas cannot be overemphasized. That “three-year investigation to nowhere” represented the Clinton-Obama attempted takeover of the government. (Call it the COAT campaign.) With congressional Republicans unwilling to prevent the COAT campaign, the Trump administration was blocked from putting U.S.-Russia relations on a rational, mutually beneficial footing, to the point that, under the present Senate leadership, the specter of war with Russia is no longer an unthinkable thought. The COAT campaign succeeded in keeping the Ukraine pot boiling, with the water first heated by Obama’s stirring up of anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine, leading to the Maidan revolution that ousted the legitimately elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.
Biden Says Record-High Gas Prices Part of ‘Incredible Transition’ US Going Through
Samizdat | May 24, 2022
Following the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine on 24 February, the US and several of its allies cut off all imports of Russian oil and gas, which added greatly to soaring gas prices for Americans.
President Joe Biden has argued that the current record-high gas prices in his country are part of America’s major transition from fossil fuels.
“Here’s the situation. And when it comes to gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” he said during a joint press conference with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday.
POTUS then insisted that his administration’s actions helped “keep it [the gas prices] from getting worse — and it’s bad”.
“The price of gas at the pump is something that I told you — you heard me say before — it would be a matter of great discussion at my kitchen table when I was a kid growing up,” Biden said before admitting, “It’s affecting a lot of families.”
House Republican Steve Scalise was quick to respond by telling reporters that Biden is “saying the quiet part out loud now.” In an apparent nod to the Biden administration, Scalise added that “they’re causing you pain at the pump because it’s all part of their radical agenda.”
He spoke as the national average for a gallon of regular gas in the US stood at $4.56 as of Monday, which is more than $0.40 higher than it was just a month ago.
In some US states such as California, the average price for a gallon of regular gas has meanwhile already reached $6.06.
While Biden previously tried to cast the price increases as the fault of Russian President Vladimir Putin, labelling high gas prices “Putin’s price hike”, the recent polls show that Americans aren’t buying it.
A survey conducted by conservative pollster Rasmussen found that beliefs about the importance of rising gas prices were essentially unchanged since November 2021, but that a majority (51%) of American voters surveyed held POTUS responsible for higher fuel prices. Another 26% blamed oil companies for the price hike, while just 15% blamed Putin.
Featured Video
Larry Johnson: U.S. Desperation Grows as Iran Is Winning
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech
- Larry Johnson: U.S. Desperation Grows as Iran Is Winning
- Why don’t UK media mention the Israel lobby?
- New US shipment of 6,500 tons of military aid arrives in Israel
- Military aid to Ukraine vital for ‘US hegemony’ – Republican senator
- Zelensky’s favorite drone company at center of Ukrainian corruption alert
- The Broken Contract
- US CENTCOM’s Request for Dark Eagle Missiles Shows Shortage of Weapons and Limited Options
- Iran consolidates Strait of Hormuz control in post-war power shift, leaving US in dark
- A pause, not a ceasefire: Washington stalls, Tehran recalibrates
- If Americans Knew
- US ships 6,500 tons of munitions, equipment to Israel in 24 hours
- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- Nun assaulted in Jerusalem amid ‘pattern’ of anti-Christian attacks by Israelis
- Former Tik Tok official describes massive pressure from Israel lobby
- Amid ceasefire violations and genocide, Israel commits piracy – Daily Update
- Five Laws and Standards That Require the US Cut Off Weapons to Israel
- Israel’s diabolical killing machine and how it targets journalists.
- The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza — A cry at sea to the world’s dormant conscience
- Politico’s powerful parent company tells Politico they must support Israeli narrative
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
Aletho News 