UK government hires ad agency to convince the public they don’t need privacy
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 17, 2022
The UK is stepping up its “war on encryption,” reports are saying, and like in any good old war, propaganda comes first to “prepare the ground.” And a new campaign is expected to launch as early as this month.
In this case, they call it publicity, with the Home Office being behind the effort whose goal is to sway public opinion in favor of undermining the privacy of the very members of that public – using their own money from public funds, to the tune of over half a million pounds.
Meanwhile the “hired gun” is ad agency M&C Saatchi. The Rolling Stone said it had a chance to review documents thanks to a Freedom of Information request, and that what it discovered were “some shockingly manipulative tactics.”
The main target seems to be Facebook’s Messenger app, specifically, the giant company’s move to better encrypt communications of its users. The government’s narrative is old – “think of the children” – the way many politicians try to push through policies of deeper and broader restrictions that eventually end up hurting everybody.
But the UK government appears to want to wrap that “classic” message in some new advertising glitz – as it launches what the Rolling Stone calls “a publicity blitz” to undermine privacy of people’s chats.
“We have engaged M&C Saatchi to bring together the many organizations who share our concerns about the impact end-to-end encryption would have on our ability to keep children safe,” said a statement from the Home Office.
The advertising agency has reportedly gone with visualizing end-to-end encryption – which safeguards people’s security and privacy online and keeps bad actors out – as something sinister and dark. The report says that this is done by putting two actors, an adult and a child, both appearing to be on their phones, in a glass box installed in a public space, which gradually becomes black.
The idea here is that allowing law enforcement near unfettered access to people’s communications would represent the clear glass, while encryption dims it until the goings on inside the box become invisible.
The documents, a presentation to get non-profits on side, also contains a slide saying that since “most of the public” is ignorant about end-to-end encryption they can be easily swayed, while the recommendation is not to allow the campaign to turn into “a privacy vs safety debate.”
But that’s exactly what it is, advocates suggest.
“The Home Office’s scaremongering campaign is as disingenuous as it is dangerous. Without strong encryption, children are more vulnerable online than ever. Encryption protects personal safety and national security… what the government is proposing puts everyone at risk,” said Robin Wilton, a director with the Internet Society.
What did they know and when did they know it?
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 17, 2022
WHEN the public awakens to the great betrayal of both health and science surrounding the handling of Covid, it will be important not to let anger run riot. After all, the mistakes have taken place on a global scale, even leading a nation such as Australia, which we previously thought of as civilised and sensible, to behave like a despotic banana republic both towards its own citizens and in ill-treating unvaccinated tennis players wanting to enter the country.
But that doesn’t mean we should hold back in our efforts to understand and deal with this disastrous aberration in human consciousness, whose dire consequences have been spelled out comprehensively by public health specialist Dr Alan Mordue.
One root of the global nature of the crisis, now more and more coming to light, is the extraordinary power wielded by a tiny group of scientists to dictate World Health Organisation (WHO) policy, from which the rest of the world took its lead.
Email disclosures show not only a deliberate plot to hide the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, making it out to have jumped naturally from bats into humans, but how a WHO inquiry was rigged to reach the same conclusion.
This issue has immense implications. If the virus really did make a random ‘jump’ across species, we could be at risk of similar future events. Pleas to provide billions in public funds for research and development of more drugs and vaccines could be justified to help prepare for such threats to global health security.
Uncertainty arising from such a freak of nature would also justifiably have been used to argue for at least temporary measures of draconian control, to protect health services until the true threat could be assessed.
If on the other hand the virus was a laboratory escapee resulting from ‘gain-of function’ research by American and Chinese scientists – now as good as proven – would governments and the public have been so ready to trust the scientists with even more money and power? Or ‘trust the science’, as the Prime Minister kept telling us?
Jeremy Farrar, boss of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, wrote to US health chiefs Francis Collins and Tony Fauci on February 5, 2020 – almost two years ago, just after WHO had declared Covid a global health emergency – to explain how the WHO inquiry would be staffed to support the animal origin theory.
A few days earlier, Farrar had emailed Fauci and Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, copying in six others including Paul Schreier, Wellcome’s chief operating officer, about a teleconference called to discuss the virus’s provenance. His email said: ‘Information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps.’
That followed a late-night warning by immunologist Kristian Anderson of the Scripps research Institute in California that the virus had features which might make it look as if it had been genetically engineered in a laboratory. Anderson sent that email to Fauci on the evening of January 31, the day WHO announced an emergency, copying in only one other person – Jeremy Farrar.
As I reported last week, despite knowing a laboratory origin was likely, the group was anxious not to weaken confidence in science by allowing that possibility to reach the public. Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health at the time, told Farrar: ‘I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voicers of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’
So to protect the good name of science, the group chose a strategy that was the opposite of scientific, in that it suppressed rather than encouraged open investigation and rational discussion of evidence.
But did the motives run deeper than that?
Robert Kennedy Jr, an American lawyer and environmental activist, made the case in a recent book that a web of corruption has been polluting medical science internationally for decades, fuelled by massive misuse of public funds. As director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci dispenses more than $6billion a year in taxpayer funds for research, and Kennedy says he uses this to ruin, advance or reward the careers and institutions of thousands of doctors and scientists.
As part of what Kennedy calls a ‘vaccines cartel’, Fauci also partners Bill Gates, who uses tax-deductible dollars to fund research from which the investment arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gains massively – including a big stake in Pfizer.
Gates has huge influence over WHO as its second-biggest funder after the US administration. That influence also extends into the heart of the British medical and scientific establishment. It includes working closely with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British pharmaceutical giant, for which Vallance was previously a top executive.
The Gates foundation has also given more than $250million to media companies around the world, most of whom have given unquestioning support to the Covid vaccine rollout and discriminatory, fear-inducing policies aimed at encouraging its take-up, despite its experimental nature.
Media beneficiaries in the UK include the BBC, Guardian and Financial Times. Incredibly, the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which approved the Covid jabs – even for children – has also received several million pounds.
A similar strategy to Gates’s has enriched and empowered Farrar’s Wellcome Trust, which distributes £1billion annually for global health research. It has an investment portfolio of nearly £30billion, growing at about 12 per cent per annum over the past decade.
Farrar was a senior member of Sage, the UK Government’s advisory body on Covid, until last October, and is a founding member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which gave $1billion to help Covid vaccine development.
The Wellcome Trust’s website claims to offer ‘a collection of quick and simple resources on how Covid-19 vaccines work, how we know they’re safe, and how they can be distributed to everyone around the world’.
In March last year, the British Medical Journal reported that the trust stood to gain financially from the pandemic through its investments, raising questions about transparency and accountability. A trust spokesman disputed this, saying they ‘would never make decisions or advise others about the pandemic response for a reason other than public health’.
But according to Mordue, a retired consultant in public health medicine, the public’s health has suffered immensely from the policies the UK pursued. He mourns the lack of relevant expertise among government and media spokesmen; the ‘inadequate and inaccurate’ case definition; the false ‘worst-case’ scenarios produced by modellers; the failure to protect the most vulnerable; the lack of cost-benefit analysis that would have kept society, the education system and the economy functioning while protecting the most vulnerable; and the failure to follow the principle ‘first do no harm’ in the mass rollout of an experimental vaccine. He also deplores the way a Sage sub-group deliberately sought to heighten fear and alarm as a means of driving compliance with Covid measures.
‘What has happened amounts to a betrayal of the specialty of public health and all the principles and values it used to stand for, and a betrayal of the health of the population,’ he writes.
‘What mystifies me is why my former colleagues and the UK professional body charged with developing and maintaining standards in the public health specialty, namely the Faculty of Public Health, have been so quiet through the whole of this pandemic.’
Vallance’s involvement in those crucial early decisions on how SARS-CoV-2 was to be handled, with their subsequent impact on public health decisions globally, raises questions about his fitness to continue in such a vital role as chief scientific officer for the UK.
He was revealed by the Telegraph back in in 2020 to have a £600,000 shareholding in GSK, having already cashed in more than £5million worth of shares received during his tenure at GSK as president of research and development. Claims of a conflict of interest, because of GSK’s own Covid drug and vaccine research and development, were denied by Matt Hancock, Health Secretary at the time.
Leaving aside his financial interest and affiliation to Big Pharma, it was his duty to offer rigorously objective scientific advice to the Government at a time of such crisis. Did that happen? That’s a central question that the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic, announced last month, will need to answer.
Vaccine judge whose mind ‘was already made up’
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | January 17, 2022
PARENTS of children in the 12-17 age group want government officials to release real-time safety data for Covid vaccines. One mother is so concerned about the possibility that her three children could suffer serious adverse events that she asked the High Court on their behalf to force full public disclosure.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admit they hold the figures but have not revealed them publicly, so last Thursday parent EF, who cannot be named for legal reasons, put her concerns to Mr Justice Jonathan Swift and asked him to direct the ONS to release the data. Her request was denied.
She said: ‘I’m not surprised. I feel as though the judge had already made up his mind.’
To those of us in court, it certainly felt as though he had and that no one dared question Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s decisions.
Television and radio presenter Beverley Turner, who helped raise over £100,000 to fund the action and who has been vilified for asking questions about the vaccine’s safety, was also there. She said: ‘It felt that the judge had already decided the outcome. He was hostile to the plaintiffs and convivial to the defendants.
‘All we’re doing is fighting for transparency and for that, we got a hostile response.’
It is known that Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccines can cause the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis, mostly in young males, while the Oxford/AstraZeneca can cause blood clots and strokes. We do not know to what extent, and whether children have died or been permanently disabled as the result of a Covid vaccination.
EF’s children AB and CD applied to the courts last September to halt the vaccine rollout for 12-17-year-olds and asked for a judicial review. They say they need the ONS figures to support an appeal as the application was denied.
Their mother, who is their ‘litigation friend’ EF said: ‘The court was told that only two children without diagnosed underlying conditions have died of Covid so far. Clearly Covid is not a problem for young people but the vaccine may be. All we want is honest disclosure of the figures so that parents can make an informed decision. None of us are anti-vaccine but we are concerned by the lack of safety data for Covid jabs.
‘We know the mRNA vaccines are experimental and that they are being offered under emergency use. We also know that the trials do not officially finish until 2023.
‘Many parents do not want their children to be guinea pigs.’
After reviewing the evidence, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended against vaccinating 12-15-year-olds, but were overridden by the UK’s four chief medical officers.
Up to December 22, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who assess the safety of new drugs, had received 2,546 reports of adverse events, likely to be 10 per cent of the true total, for under 18s via their Yellow Card self-reporting scheme, but give details only about heart inflammation.
A statement said: ‘As of November 17, 2021, there have been 432 reports of myocarditis and 332 reports of pericarditis following the use of the Pfizer vaccine. There have been 101 reports of myocarditis and 57 reports of pericarditis following the use of the Moderna vaccine. This is a recognised potential risk with the Covid-19 Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine and Covid-19 Vaccine Moderna and the MHRA is closely monitoring these events.’
We know that 2.9million children have received first doses of Pfizer and 20,550 have had first doses of Moderna, while 11,600 children have received first doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca’s vaccine (though it is no longer recommended for the under 40s because that age group is more susceptible to potentially fatal blood clots). Nearly a million under 18s have received second shots.
The action was brought by solicitor Stephen Jackson of the firm Jackson Osborne and argued by barrister Francis Hoar, who endured constant interruption from Mr Justic Swift. He presented evidence to the court from consultant pathologist Dr Clare Craig.
Dr Craig said that available ONS figures relating to the number of deaths in the 15-19-year-old age group showed ‘a trend of excess non-Covid deaths in boys of that age which exceeded deaths for previous years.’
From May 1 2021 to December 30 2021, 402 male deaths were recorded, 34.6 per cent above the five-year average between 2015 and 2019. The number for females for the same period was 163, a decrease compared with the five-year average of 175.
Barrister Heather Emmerson, representing the ONS, who did not incur the wrath of Mr Justice Swift, said: ‘We do not accept a significant increase in deaths of boys compared with previous years. This is because it is statistically difficult to calculate a mean mortality rate.’
She did however accept ‘that there is a marginal increase in mortality for that period, but the figures should be treated with caution. The differences are sufficiently small that they could be caused by a delay in the registration of the death.’
Health statistician for the ONS Dr Vahé Nafilyan said in a statement that they had only 62 per cent of the data requested as 38 per cent of deaths had yet to be registered. Potentially, the mortality margin could increase by as much as 38 per cent or decrease by the same amount or somewhere in between.
An inquest is required when a coroner believes a death was due to something other than natural causes. The death cannot be registered until the coroner has reviewed the post-mortem and other evidence and has decided the cause. There is a 12-month delay for inquests currently.
Ms Emmerson said she was not confident that if the ONS released the available data the recipients would interpret it correctly – a statement the plaintiffs found patronising. ‘We have to be extremely careful about this data and the conclusions that may be drawn,’ she told the court.
She was also concerned that although data would be anonymous with no names, dates of birth or regions released, the children’s identities could be discovered, citing newspaper reports of sudden child deaths which could be linked to the data.
Mr Justice Swift said: ‘Correlation does not equal causation and the ONS information is not necessary to decide that claim.’
None of this helps parents who are also concerned that by asking reasonable questions they are being labelled as antivax. Mother of three Bev Turner said: ‘I’d never heard the term before 2021.
‘All parents want is the latest safety data that is simply not available so we do not know if the vaccines could cause neurological problems, fertility issues or other physiological problems.’
Parent EF, who has two girls aged 13 and 16 eligible for vaccination, and a son aged seven, currently too young to receive the jab, says that because of this uncertainty her children are anxious about receiving it.
‘None of them want to take the vaccine,’ she said, ‘and one of them has a friend who fainted immediately after receiving the vaccine and was then off school for two weeks. We don’t know any details other than that, but she was clearly unwell otherwise she would have been at school.
‘We have no information. They can’t tell us if the jabs cause cancer or blindness and until we know, how can we make a properly informed decision?’
Only a third of the signatures of the Joe Rogan censorship demand letter were doctors
By Jordan Schachtel | The Dossier | January 16, 2022
Are you seeing all of those blaring corporate press headlines targeting Joe Rogan this weekend, reporting on a letter from “270 doctors,” which described the famous podcaster as a “menace to public health”? Well, it turns out that the real arbiters of misinformation are the individuals behind the letter itself, and they are being helped along by a corrupt corporate media that is misreporting the credentials of its signatories.
It was first reported by Rolling Stone, with a story titled, “Doctors Demand Spotify Puts an End to Covid Lies on ‘Joe Rogan Experience’”
Yes, the media and Big Tech want to create the image of a hundreds-strong coalition of medical doctors who are genuinely concerned about Joe Rogan’s conversations on his massive platform.
Twitter even got in on the propaganda campaign against Rogan, adding this “medical experts” letter to their curated headlines section.
Well, I reviewed this open letter, and it turns out that only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees. And a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine.
Yet part of the letter reads:
“As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
Paradoxically, the disseminators of this petition are guilty of the very misinformation label that they’ve attached to Rogan. In fact, neither of the two reported co authors of the letter — Jessica Rivera and Ben Rein — possess medical degrees. Rivera holds a master’s degree and Rein is a PhD academic who researches psychiatry.
The letter denouncing Joe Rogan and pressuring Spotify to censor his speech has all kinds of random signatories. By my count, the letter is signed by over 50 PhD academics, around 60 college professors, 29 nurses, 10 students, 4 medical residents, and even a handful of… science podcasters.
The letter, which uses the word misinformation nine times in five paragraphs, concludes with a call for Spotify to censor Rogan as part of a policy to “moderate misinformation on the platform.”
Notably, there is no information on who or what group is behind the creation and circulation of the open letter. Rivera, the reported lead author of the letter, is associated with the far-left Rockefeller Foundation and The Atlantic, and she is a CNN contributor.
‘Ministry of Truth’ vs Nutritional Medicine
By Damien Downing, MBBS, MRSB | Orthomolecular Medicine News Service | January 6, 2022
Just outside the local primary school here in north London, somebody has sprayed these words on a phone or cable junction box, highly visible to the mums and tots:
COVID 1984
I often cycle past there, and have always thought “Mmm, a bit extreme”, but now I’m starting to wonder.
In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, which administers Newspeak, deciding what the “truth” is, propagating it, and rewriting history when necessary. Newspeak is “characterized by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning” according to our old friends Wikipedia. The purpose is thought control; you know the saying “The French have a word for it”? If you don’t have a word for it you struggle to think it. So words like “anti-vaxxer” polarize opinions and prevent any subtlety of thinking about viruses and vaccinations.
For two years, we at the OMNS have been stating one simple message: Nutritional therapy works on Covid, as it does on all viruses.
On January 26, 2020 the OMNS Editor in Chief, Andrew W. Saul, wrote a news release: “Vitamin C Protects Against Coronavirus.” [1] It also made recommendations for vitamin D3, magnesium, zinc and selenium, which strengthen the immune system. We have continued to repeat and expand the message again and again. And have been suspended by Facebook again and again.
Others, including highly respected front-line physicians such as Paul Marik, have also figured out the importance of these nutrients. [2] In fact we have known about the anti-infective potential of vitamin C for over 50 years, since it was reported by Frederick Klenner. [3,4] He described traditional sources such as acerola cherries, which are very rich sources of C. That puts the knowledge back way before we named it “vitamin C.”
And it makes nonsense of the narrative that there is only one solution to Covid: vaccinate, again and again.
Two years ago I failed to persuade mainstream colleagues of the utility of this. “It’s not evidence-based,” they said. Now two review papers have shown the evidence, and it’s pretty solid.
The first, in the journal Life, is called “Vitamin C Intervention for Critical COVID-19: A Pragmatic Review of the Current Level of Evidence.” [5,6] It shows clearly that “this simple vitamin saves lives when given in the right dose.” In fact, vitamin C saves about 80% of the lives of critically ill Covid patients.
With a roll-call of experts saying vitamin C can save lives, what has been the response of the authorities, the powers-that-be?
The UK’s National Health service responded back in 2020 by promising a trial of intravenous vitamin C. Until that evidence becomes available, they have continued to say that there is no good evidence that vitamin C works. Scientists including the authors of the above paper sent them studies and they still said that. Finally a freedom of information (FOI) request established that the NHS had received the papers and had ignored them, for at least a year.
But the promised international multi-center trial would fix this, right? The only problem is, apparently, that the NHS had already signed an exclusive contract with a single company to supply the vitamin C, and that company was and still is unable to provide any. So the trial still has not started. Even for a piece of fiction, you couldn’t make it up! I could lend them some tomorrow.
The second review is by my colleague, independent researcher Rachel Nicoll: “COVID-19: Presenting the case for vitamin D: A cheap, effective measure overlooked by most governments.” [7]
As always with Rachel’s writings this is very information-rich. Here’s just one sentence;
A meta-analysis of 23 studies containing 11,901 participants found that in patients with vitamin D deficiency, the risk of being infected with COVID was 3.3 times higher and the risk of developing severe COVID was around 5 times higher compared to those with more healthy vitamin D levels.
Our knowledge of vitamin D and its importance for immunity has progressed by leaps and bounds in this pandemic, but a lot of this too we have known for ages. I wrote a book about it back in 1988; there’s a team in San Diego that has been studying sunlight and health for decades. [8]
Just as modern agriculture has been depriving us of many essential nutrients, [9] modern lifestyles have been depriving us of sunlight and therefore vitamin D. Lucky you if you live somewhere sunny like San Diego, because here in London nearly everybody is vitamin D deficient. Not that things are perfect in San Diego; we all shun the sun these days, often due to scare tactics about skin cancer.
That’s a story for another time, but here’s a take-home thought about vitamin D levels. It has been shown that a population needs a vitamin D blood level above about 75 nmol/L (30 ng/ml) to stop deaths from Covid, [10] but precious few of us manage it. So what should our blood level be? Where’s the benchmark when nearly everybody is deficient? If you take our nearest evolutionary relatives, non-human primates, they have around twice that level, 125 to 200 nmol/L (50-80 ng/ml). [11,12] We’re not just falling behind them, we’re missing it by a mile. You need at least 10,000 IU per day long-term to achieve that.
Guess what comes next? When the “experts,” at least in the UK, are asked about the safety and toxicity of vitamin D, they say we should not take more than 2000 IU per day. But this is based on the UK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) 2016 report. SACN cited a 2006 paper by Vieth as showing toxic effects above this level. However, the Vieth paper actually states that toxicity may occur at 25(OH)D concentrations beyond 500 nmol/L (200 ng/ml), levels which could not be achieved unless an individual was taking extremely high doses for a prolonged period of time (such as 30,000 IU/day for three months). [13] This warning has been misunderstood and misquoted and has given rise to a lot of pointless restriction of vitamin D intake. So even though the error about vitamin D safety was pointed out 15 years ago, and repeatedly since then, it is still being perpetuated by supposed experts.
Two years down the line, then, we at the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service are still saying the same simple message that nutrition works. And the bureaucrats at the ‘Ministry of Truth’ are still deleting it.
References
1. Saul AW (2020) Vitamin C Protects Against Coronavirus. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n04.shtml
2. Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance: Prevention & Treatment Protocols for COVID-19. (2022) https://covid19criticalcare.com
3. Klenner FR. (1949) The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. South Med J, 111:209-214. https://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/194x/klenner-fr-southern_med_surg-1949-v111-n7-p209.htm
4. Klenner FR. (1951) Massive Doses of Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases. Presented in the Fifty-second Annual Meeting of the Tri-State Medical Association of the Carolinas and Virginia, held at Columbia, February 19th and 20th, 1951. https://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/195x/klenner-fr-southern_med_surg-1951-v103-n4-p101.htm
5. Holford P, Carr AC, Zawari M, Vizcaychipi MP (2021) Vitamin C Intervention for Critical COVID-19: A Pragmatic Review of the Current Level of Evidence. Life, 11:1166. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/11/1166
6. Holford P (2021) Twelve intervention trials conclude that vitamin C works for Covid. So why are hospitals being prohibited from using it? Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v17n27.shtml
7. Health Advisory and Recovery Team (2021) COVID-19: the case for supporting the human immune system with vitamin D: Why is this simple vitamin not promoted more? https://www.hartgroup.org/briefing-covid-19-the-case-for-supporting-the-human-immune-system-with-vitamin-d
8. Mohr SB, Gorham ED, Garland CF, et al. (2021) San Diego group studying positive effects of sunlight. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Mohr+SB+Gorham+ED+Garland+CF
9. Lowther M (2020) Why are there fewer nutrients in our food? Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n54.shtml
10. Downing D (2020) How we can fix this pandemic in a month. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n49.shtml
11. Power ML, Oftedal OT, Savage A, et al. (1997) Assessing vitamin D status of callitrichids: Baseline data from wild cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) in Colombia. Zoo Biol 16:39-46. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2361(1997)16:1<39::AID-ZOO6>3.0.CO;2-C
12. Power ML, Dittus, WPJ (2017) Vitamin D status in wild toque macaques (Macaca sinica) in Sri Lanka. Am J Primatol. 79:e22655. http://www.primates.lk/health-vitamin-d-in-wild-monkeys-and-you
13. Vieth R (2006) Critique of the considerations for establishing the tolerable upper intake level for vitamin D: critical need for revision upwards. J Nutr, 136:1117-1122. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16549491
Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org
Featured Video
Iran Blockade Complications
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Left in Disbelief: Israel in Panic over Hezbollah FPV Drone Nightmare
- Trump Taps Israel Lobbyist From Mossad Cutout FDD To Join Iran Negotiations
- Trump’s Blockade Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
- Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of the Strait of Hormuz
- Mali: a new front in the Western war on multipolarism
- CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’
- COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment
- Iran Blockade Complications /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Nima Alkhorshid
- Pirates of Mediterranean: Israel does as it pleases in the Sea of Three Continents
- Minab children massacre not ‘unfortunate situation’ but ‘heinous war crime’: Tehran
- If Americans Knew
- Israel’s New Ambassador to the ‘Christian World’ Served as Envoy to Azerbaijan During the Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- Israeli Strikes Kill at Least 32 Across S Lebanon, Including Children – Amid “Ceasefire”
- Israel to pour $730m into propaganda arm amid reputational crisis
- Real Cost of Iran War Likely Double the $25 Billion Figure the Pentagon Gave to Congress
- Israel conducts farthest-ever strike in long history of attacks on Gaza humanitarian aid flotillas
- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
- 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
- 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 