UK Culture Secretary boasts about shadowy “anti-disinformation” unit; “daily we have contact with the online providers”
The unit provides no transparency
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | January 8, 2022
The UK Government’s “disinformation” unit is “working,” the Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said, after she was challenged by the Labour party who said the shadowy unit shut down last year.
In the UK, both the Conservative and Labour governments support more online censorship.
“It’s not the case, it’s not true; it is there, it is working,” Nadine Dorries said in response to a question this week.
“That work takes place daily, and daily we work to remove content online that is harmful and particularly when it comes to Covid-19, daily we have contact with the online providers.”
Ministers in the UK government created a “disinformation unit” to fight the spread of “false” information about COVID-19. The government felt that people were getting misleading information about the virus on social media.
The disinformation unit included civil servants in Whitehall. They were to work with communication experts and collaborate with social media companies.
At the time, then-Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said: “Defending the country from misinformation and digital interference is a top priority. As part of our ongoing work to tackle these threats we have brought together expert teams to make sure we can respond effectively should these threats be identified in relation to the spread of Covid-19.
“This work includes regular engagement with the social media companies, which are well placed to monitor interference and limit the spread of disinformation, and will make sure we are on the front foot to act if required.”
The team was supposed to focus on disinformation, which refers to the deliberate spreading of false information for personal gain or “trolling.”
The misleading information the government was concerned about included recommendations of cures that are ineffective or potentially “dangerous” and “false claims” about the origin of the coronavirus.
Social media companies had already begun flagging Covid-related misinformation and directing users to what they deemed reliable sources.
Instead of FDA’s requested 500 pages per month, court orders FDA to produce Pfizer COVID-19 data at 55,000 pages per month
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | January 6, 2022
On behalf of a client, my firm requested that the FDA produce all the data submitted by Pfizer to license its Covid-19 vaccine. The FDA asked the Court for permission to only be required to produce at a rate of 500 pages per month, which would have taken over 75 years to produce all the documents.
I am pleased to report that a federal judge soundly rejected the FDA’s request and ordered the FDA to produce all the data at a clip of 55,000 pages per month!
This is a great win for transparency and removes one of the strangleholds federal “health” authorities have had on the data needed for independent scientists to offer solutions and address serious issues with the current vaccine program – issues which include waning immunity, variants evading vaccine immunity, and, as the CDC has confirmed, that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.
No person should ever be coerced to engage in an unwanted medical procedure. And while it is bad enough the government violated this basic liberty right by mandating the Covid-19 vaccine, the government also wanted to hide the data by waiting to fully produce what it relied upon to license this product until almost every American alive today is dead. That form of governance is destructive to liberty and antithetical to the openness required in a democratic society.
In ordering the release of the documents in a timely manner, the Judge recognized that the release of this data is of paramount public importance and should be one of the FDA’s highest priorities. He then aptly quoted James Madison as saying a “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy” and John F. Kennedy as explaining that a “nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
The following is the full text of the Judge’s order, a copy of which is also available here.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
PHMPT, Plaintiff v. FDA, Defendant, No. 4:21-cv-1058-P
ORDER
This case involves the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). Specifically, at issue is Plaintiff’s FOIA request seeking “[a]ll data and information for the Pfizer Vaccine enumerated in 21 C.F.R. § 601.51(e) with the exception of publicly available reports on the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System” from the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). See ECF No. 1. As has become standard, the Parties failed to agree to a mutually acceptable production schedule; instead, they submitted dueling production schedules for this Court’s consideration. Accordingly, the Court held a conference with the Parties to determine an appropriate production schedule.[1] See ECF Nos. 21, 34.
“Open government is fundamentally an American issue” – it is neither a Republican nor a Democrat issue.[2] As James Madison wrote, “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”[3] John F. Kennedy likewise recognized that “a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”[4] And, particularly appropriate in this case, John McCain (correctly) noted that “[e]xcessive administrative secrecy . . . feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public’s confidence in the government.”[5]
Echoing these sentiments, “[t]he basic purpose of FOIA is to ensure an informed citizenry, [which is] vital to the functioning of a democratic society.” NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214, 242 (1977). “FOIA was [therefore] enacted to ‘pierce the veil of administrative secrecy and to open agency action to the light of public scrutiny.’” Batton v. Evers, 598 F.3d 169, 175 (5th Cir. 2010) (quoting Dep’t of the Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352, 361 (1976)). And “Congress has long recognized that ‘information is often useful only if it is timely’ and that, therefore ‘excessive delay by the agency in its response is often tantamount to denial.’” Open Soc’y Just. Initiative v. CIA, 399 F. Supp. 3d 161, 165 (S.D.N.Y. 2019) (quoting H.R. REP. NO. 93-876, at 6271 (1974)). When needed, a court “may use its equitable powers to require an agency to process documents according to a court-imposed timeline.” Clemente v. FBI, 71 F. Supp. 3d 262, 269 (D.D.C. 2014).
Here, the Court recognizes the “unduly burdensome” challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA. See generally ECF Nos. 23, 30, 34. But, as expressed at the scheduling conference, there may not be a “more important issue at the Food and Drug Administration . . . than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, [and] making sure that the American public is assured that this was not [] rush[ed] on behalf of the United States . . . .” ECF No. 34 at 46. Accordingly, the Court concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance.
“[S]tale information is of little value.” Payne Enters., Inc. v. United States, 837 F.2d 486, 494 (D.C. Cir. 1988). The Court, agreeing with this truism, therefore concludes that the expeditious completion of Plaintiff’s request is not only practicable, but necessary. See Bloomberg, L.P. v. FDA, 500 F. Supp. 2d 371, 378 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 15, 2007) (“[I]t is the compelling need for such public understanding that drives the urgency of the request.”). To that end, the Court further concludes that the production rate, as detailed below, appropriately balances the need for unprecedented urgency in processing this request with the FDA’s concerns regarding the burdens of production. See Halpern v. FBI, 181 F.3d 279, 284–85 (2nd Cir. 1991) (“[FOIA] emphasizes a preference for the fullest possible agency disclosure of such information consistent with a responsible balancing of competing concerns . . . .”).
Accordingly, having considered the Parties’ arguments, filings in support, and the applicable law, the Court ORDERS that:
1. The FDA shall produce the “more than 12,000 pages” articulated in its own proposal, see ECF No. 29 at 24, on or before January 31, 2022.
2. The FDA shall produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.
3. To the extent the FDA asserts any privilege, exemption, or exclusion as to any responsive record or portion thereof, FDA shall, concurrent with each production required by this Order, produce a redacted version of the record, redacting only those portions as to which privilege, exemption, or exclusion is asserted.
4. The Parties shall submit a Joint Status Report detailing the progress of the rolling production by April 1, 2022, and every 90 days thereafter.[6]
SO ORDERED on this 6th day of January, 2022.
[1] Surprisingly, the FDA did not send an agency representative to the scheduling conference.
[2] 151 CONG. REC. S1521 (daily ed. Feb. 16, 2005) (statement of Sen. John Cornyn).
[3] Letter from James Madison to W.T. Barry (August 4, 1822), in 9 WRITINGS OF JAMES MADISON 103 (S. Hunt ed., 1910).
[4] John F. Kennedy, Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America (Feb. 26, 1962).
[5] America After 9/11: Freedom Preserved or Freedom Lost?: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 108th Cong. 302 (2003).
[6] Although the Court does not decide whether the FDA correctly denied Plaintiff’s request for expedited processing, the issue is not moot. Should the Parties seek to file motions for summary judgment, the Court will take up the issue then.
The Day Jake Tapper Sold His Soul to Pharma
Photo Credit: “Jake Tapper-Caricature” by DonkeyHotey — licensed under CC BY 2.0
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | The Defender | January 6, 2022
Apparently, appalled by robust sales of my bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper — in lieu of critically reviewing the work — used his Twitter feed to unleash a barrage of ad hominem insults against me.
Breaking with the traditional restraints of journalistic neutrality, professional propriety and intellectual rigor, he branded me “dangerous,” a “menace,” a “liar,” a “grifter,” a fraud, “unhinged” and more.
But Tapper’s defamations hang in the atmosphere without substantiation or citation. If I’m a liar, then what was my lie? If I’m a grifter, then what is my personal profit or advantage? If I am a fraud, then where is my inaccurate statement?
I concede that I’m a dangerous menace, but only to the pharmaceutical industry, its captive technocrats and its media toadies.
When I responded to his slander with a respectful tweet inviting him to debate me, Tapper declined, explaining he would not debate a “conspiracy theorist.” Characteristically, he neglected to cite any conspiracy theory he believes I promoted.
And is it credible to dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist unworthy of debate? After all, I am founder and former president of the world’s largest water protection group, and founder and current chairman of one of the largest children’s health advocacy groups.
I’ve won hundreds of successful lawsuits, including milestone victories against Monsanto, DuPont, Exxon, Smithfield Foods and leading polluters from the chemical, carbon, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. (Many of these also initially dismissed me as a “conspiracy theorist.”)
My current book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” may be the most heavily footnoted volume to ever sit atop global best-seller lists for six consecutive weeks. With 500,000 copies sold, it has attracted a whopping 5,500+ five-star reviews (92%).
Despite extreme hostility toward this volume from mainstream media and the medical cartel, no one has yet identified a factual inaccuracy in its 250,000 words.
If my book is baseless conspiracy theories, then shouldn’t Mr. Tapper welcome an opportunity to correct me with facts or arguments that go beyond name-calling?
Allow me, then, to offer my own theory for Mr. Tapper’s apoplexy.
Many people make Faustian bargains during their lives, trading personal integrity for material advantage. Oftentimes the metamorphosis occurs as a gradual erosion of moral fiber. Occasionally it happens in an instant; a man stands at a moral crossroads and chooses the dark side.
I happened to have a front-row seat when Jake Tapper had his moment of moral crisis. I’m guessing his fierce vitriol toward me is a reaction to his embarrassment that I was witness to the instant when Mr. Tapper chose career over character.
In July 2005, Jake Tapper was ABC’s senior producer when the network ordered him to pull a lengthy exposé on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) secret 2000 Simpsonwood conference.
Here is the background:
In 1999, in response to exploding epidemics of autism and other neurological disorders, CDC decided to study its vast Vaccine Safety Datalink — the medical and vaccination record of millions of Americans, archived by the top HMOs — to learn whether the dramatic escalation of the vaccine schedule, beginning in 1989, was a culprit. CDC’s in-house epidemiologist, Thomas Verstraeten, led the effort.
Verstraeten’s initial data run suggested that mercury-containing hepatitis B vaccines — administered during the first month of life — were associated with a wide range of neurological injuries, including a dramatic 1,135% rise in autism risks among vaccinated children.
Verstraeten’s findings propelled CDC into DEFCON 1. The agency’s top vaccine officials summoned 52 pharmaceutical industry leaders, the foremost vaccinologists from academia and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and public health regulators from the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CDC, World Health Organization (WHO) and European Medicines Agency to a secret two-day meeting at the remote Simpsonwood retreat center in Norcross, Georgia, to strategize about how to hide these awful revelations from the public.
In 2005, I obtained the explosive transcripts of this meeting and was about to publish excerpts in Rolling Stone (Deadly Immunity, July 18, 2005). Those recordings, ironically, portrayed these leading kingpins of the vaccine cartel poised at their own moral brink, and chronicled their collapse into corruption over two sickening days of debate.
Most of these individuals were physicians and regulatory officials who had committed their lives to public health out of idealism and deep concern for children. Verstraeten’s data confronted them with the fact that the cumulative mercury levels in all those new vaccines they had recommended had overdosed a generation of American children with mercury concentrations over a hundred times the exposures the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considered safe.
In recommending a vast battery of new vaccines for children, public health regulators had somehow neglected to calculate the cumulative mercury and aluminum loads in all the new jabs.
Dr. Peter Patriarca, the then-director of the FDA Office on Vaccine Research and Review, expressed the general feeling of horror when he asked why no one had calculated the cumulative mercury exposure to children as policymakers added this cascade of new vaccines to the childhood schedule: “Conversion of the percentage thimerosal to actual micrograms of mercury involves ninth-grade algebra. What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?”
In the tense days leading up to the Simpsonwood conclave, children’s health champion Dr. Ruth Etzel of the EPA pleaded with her fellow public health leaders to publicly admit they made a terrible mistake by inadvertently poisoning American children, and to repair the damage.
Dr. Etzel urged AAP and the government regulators to handle the crisis with the same honesty and public remorse that Johnson & Johnson had demonstrated on discovering toxic chemicals in its Tylenol formulations:
“We must follow three basic rules: (1) act quickly to inform pediatricians that the products have more mercury than we realized; (2) be open with consumers about why we didn’t catch this earlier; (3) show contrition. If the public loses faith in the Public Health Services recommendations, then the immunization battle will falter. To keep faith, we must be open and honest and move forward quickly to replace these products.”
Confronted with scientific proof of their role in the chronic disease calamity, the cabal did exactly the opposite. The shocking Simpsonwood transcripts show Dr. Patriarca and the other public health panjandrums warning each other of their reputational liabilities, their vulnerability to litigation by plaintiffs’ lawyers and potential damage to the vaccine program.
Dr. Patriarca cautioned that public disclosure of CDC’s explosive findings would make Americans feel that the FDA, CDC and vaccine policymakers had been “asleep at the switch” for decades in allowing Thimerosal to remain in childhood vaccines.
Over two days of intense discussion, these Big Pharma operatives and government technocrats persuaded each other to transform their disastrous error into villainy — by doubling down and hiding their mistake from the public.
Tapper saw an early draft of my Rolling Stone story and proposed that, in exchange for exclusivity, he would do a companion piece for ABC timed to air on the magazine’s publication day.
Tapper spent several weeks working on the story with me and a team of enthusiastic ABC reporters and technicians. During his frequent conversations with me over that period, he was on fire with indignation over the Simpsonwood revelations. He acted like a journalist hoping to win an Emmy.
The day before the piece was to air, an exasperated Tapper called me to say that ABC’s corporate officials ordered him to pull the story. The network’s pharmaceutical advertisers were threatening to cancel their advertising.
“Corporate told us to shut it down,” Tapper fumed. Tapper told me that it was the first time in his career that ABC officials had ordered him to kill a story.
ABC had advertised the Simpsonwood exposé, and its sudden cancellation disappointed an army of vaccine safety advocates and parents of injured children who deluged the network with a maelstrom of angry emails.
In response, ABC changed tack and publicly promised to air the piece. Instead, following a one-week delay, the network duplicitously aired a hastily assembled puff piece promoting vaccines and assuring listeners that mercury-laden vaccines were safe.
The new “bait and switch” segment precisely followed Pharma’s talking points. “I’m putting my faith in the Institute of Medicine,” ABC’s obsequious medical editor, Dr. Tim Johnson, declared in closing. Two pharmaceutical advertisements bracketed the story.
After that piece aired, I called Jake to complain. He neither answered nor returned my calls.
During the 16 intervening years, Pharma has returned Mr. Tapper’s favor by aggressively promoting his career. Pfizer shamelessly sponsors Tapper’s CNN news show, announcing its ownership of the space — and Mr. Tapper’s indentured servitude — before each episode with the loaded phrase: “Brought to you by Pfizer.”
Under the apparent terms of that sponsorship, CNN and Tapper provide Pfizer a platform to market its products and allow the drug company — a serial felon — to dictate content on CNN.
This arrangement has transformed CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper into a propaganda vehicle for Pharma and effectively reduced Mr. Tapper to the role of a drug rep — shamelessly promoting fear porn, confusion, and germophobia, and ushering his audience toward high-yield patent pharmaceuticals.
Tapper’s main thrust during the pandemic has been to promote levels of public terror sufficient to indemnify all the official lies against critical thinking.
All that Pharma money naturally requires that Mr. Tapper kowtow to Dr. Fauci, and the CNN host’s slavishness has helped make Tapper’s show the go-to pulpit for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director.
It’s a safe place for Dr. Fauci to hit all Jake’s reliable softballs out of the park.
“The bootlicking competition at CNN is pretty nauseating,” observed investigative journalist Celia Farber who has chronicled Dr. Fauci’s mismanagement at NIAID for more than 25 years. “It’s ruinous for both democracy and for public health.”
Another journalist has compared Tapper’s mortifying on-air servility toward Dr. Fauci to the adulation of a loyal and obedient canine. “It’s like a dog watching a chess match,” says former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. “So much intensity and so little understanding.”
Tapper has gone two years without asking Dr. Fauci a single tough question. He has covered up Fauci’s involvement with Wuhan, suppressed news of vaccine injuries, gaslighted the injured, and defended every official orthodoxy on masks, lockdowns, social distancing, vaccines, remdesivir, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
He has never asked about the public health, mental health, and economic costs of lockdown, about the disproportionate burdens of Dr. Fauci’s policies on minorities, the working class and the global poor.
He has never asked Dr. Fauci to explain why countries and states that refused Dr. Fauci’s prescription have consistently experienced dramatically better health outcomes. For example, why are U.S. death rates 1,000x the death rates of African countries like Nigeria and Indian states that widely use hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin? Mr. Tapper simply never allows contrary views on his show.
He continues to extol COVID vaccines as a miracle technology that individuals can take four times and still both get and spread the illness.
“He never calls Dr. Fauci on his vacillating science-free pronouncements,” said Farber. “Dr. Fauci seems to be able to paralyze the curiosity features of Tapper’s brain.”
Tapper has to ask Dr. Fauci why, under his direction, America suffered the world’s highest body count. With 4.2% of the global population, our nation suffered 15% of COVID deaths.
Instead, he functions as high priest of every official orthodoxy, working to deify Dr. Fauci and anoint all his absurd, vacillating and contradictory pronouncements with papal infallibility. The sure way to earn Tapper’s indignation is to criticize Dr. Fauci.
Here are just a few examples of Mr. Tapper’s brazen deceptions:
On Feb. 2, 2021, Tapper “debunked” claims that baseball great Hank Aaron may have died from a COVID shot. The home run king submitted to a CDC-staged press conference 17 days earlier. Tapper assured his audience that the Fulton County coroner had determined Aaron to have died from “natural causes.”
When the Fulton County coroner subsequently denied ever having seen Aaron’s body, much less performed an autopsy, Tapper refused to correct his story.
In August 2021, Tapper gave Dr. Fauci a platform to spread the rumor that deluded Americans were poisoning themselves with a “horse medicine” called ivermectin.
In an Aug. 29, 2021 interview, Dr. Fauci told Tapper, “There’s no evidence whatsoever that that works, and it could potentially have toxicity… with people who have gone to poison control centers because they’ve taken the drug at a ridiculous dose and wind up getting sick. There’s no clinical evidence that indicates that this works.”
Tapper never corrected Dr. Fauci. He never pointed out that there were by then 70 peer-reviewed studies demonstrating ivermectin’s miraculous efficacy against COVID.
He didn’t dispute Dr. Fauci’s characterization of ivermectin as a horse medicine by noting that the drug had won both a Nobel Prize and WHO’s listing as an “essential medicine” for its miraculous efficacy against human illnesses, and that people have consumed billions of doses with no significant safety signals.
Mr. Tapper never thought to ask Dr. Fauci if he was trying to discourage use of a cheap, effective drug that might compete with his experimental vaccines.
Instead, Tapper abjectly parroted Dr. Fauci’s talking points: “Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma, because some Americans are trying to use an anti-parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus.”
It mattered not to Tapper that both Mississippi and Oklahoma officials quickly denied that anyone in their state had been hospitalized for ivermectin poisoning. Tapper never corrected his false story.
On Sept. 14, 2021, Tapper obligingly gave Dr. Fauci a platform to dispute rapper Nicki Minaj’s worry that COVID vaccines may affect fertility. Dr. Fauci simply declared, “The answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no.”
As usual, Tapper did not ask Dr. Fauci to cite a study to support this assertion. He never pointed out to Dr. Fauci that all of the COVID vaccine manufacturers acknowledge that their products are not tested for effects on fertility, or that recent data has shown dramatic upticks in miscarriages and pre-eclampsia in vaccinated women.
Nevertheless, based upon Dr. Fauci’s word alone, CNN rushed on to defame and discredit the rapper and to assure the public that Minaj was wrong. Dr. Fauci, after all, had spoken!
It’s easy to see how two years of such obsequious deference emboldened Dr. Fauci in November 2021 to declare that “I represent science.”
There are too many other examples of Tapper’s uncritical promotion of government and pharma falsehoods to even summarize. These are not harmless lies. Each of them has potentially disastrous consequences for public health.
The term “psychological projection” describes the uncanny precision with which a certain sort of person applies the very pejoratives to others that most accurately depict their own shortcomings.
When Mr. Tapper calls me “unhinged,” a “menace to public health,” a “fraud,” a “liar,” is he falling victim to projection?
The critical functions of journalism in a democracy are to speak truth to power, relentlessly expose official corruption, and to forever maintain a posture of skepticism toward government and corporate power centers.
What Jake Tapper does is the opposite of journalism. Tapper, instead, aligns himself with power, and makes himself a propagandist for official narratives and a servile publicist for powerful elites and government technocrats.
No wonder his fury at those who challenge their narratives.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Republicans blast Jan 6 as possible ‘Fedsurrection’
RT | January 6, 2022
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) theorized on the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot that the federal government may have played an active role in the day’s events.
During a Thursday press conference, the two firebrand Republicans once again rejected Democrats referring to the Capitol riot as an “insurrection,” a specific crime no one jailed for January 6 is currently facing.
“We know January 6 last year wasn’t an insurrection. No one has been charged with insurrection. No one has been charged with treason, but it very well may have been a Fedsurrection,” Gaetz told reporters.
Gaetz made clear he and Greene, who was recently suspended from Twitter, were not there to “celebrate” the events of January 6, but to hopefully “expose the truth.”
The truth, according to the lawmakers, may lead straight back to the FBI. “Director Wray was asked under oath before the Congress about the federal assets and agents that were on the ground on January 6th, and he wouldn’t provide clear answers,” Gaetz said.
Gaetz repeatedly referred to Ray Epps, an ex-Marine that some conservatives have theorized was an FBI plant, filmed goading people into entering the Capitol and crossing police barriers.
A man who resembles Epps could be seen in videos recommending protesters go into the Capitol, though he’s not always met with a warm welcome, with some even referring to him as a “fed” at one point.
Epps has refused to answer questions about his involvement in the Capitol riot or conspiracy theories around his involvement with the FBI, telling Daily Mail last summer when they confronted him at in Arizona to “get off my property.”
Gaetz claims Epps’ potential involvement in instigating the riot can be partly backed up by his name allegedly being removed last year from the FBI’s Capitol Violence Most Wanted list. “Attorney General Garland was asked in the judiciary committee by my colleague Thomas Massie about Ray Epps. He could have cleared up that circumstance and resolved all of these questions, but he declined to do so,” Gaetz said.
In a Thursday interview with journalist Brendan Gutenschwager, Gaetz also mentioned Epps as one of multiple potential “instigators” on January 6.
Greene also referred to Epps when speaking, recalling a recent visit to jailed Capitol rioters in Washington DC.
“When I went through the DC jail, I’ll tell you who I did not see. I did not see Ray Epps,” she said.
Gaetz and Greene also performed a march from the White House to the Capitol to mark the one year anniversary of the Capitol riot. In a Thursday morning interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Gaetz said he and others are not “ashamed” of their efforts on January 6.
Ex-defence minister told to ‘burn’ secret Iraq war memo – reports
RT | January 6, 2022
During Tony Blair’s time in office, Downing Street allegedly ordered former defence secretary Geoff Hoon to burn a secret memo that questioned the legality of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Hoon makes the bombshell claim in a new memoir.
In disclosures that have boosted ongoing attempts to strip the former prime minister of his recently conferred knighthood, Hoon reportedly revealed that Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell had instructed him “in no uncertain terms” to destroy the legal document.
When reports of the allegation first surfaced in 2015, they were dismissed by Blair as “nonsense.” But Hoon has resurrected the claim in a tell-all book, titled ‘See How They Run’, according to the Daily Mail. The paper said Hoon has provided details of a “cover-up” at Downing Street.
The former Labour minister said he was sent a copy of the “very long and very detailed legal opinion,” written by then-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, “under conditions of considerable secrecy” and told he should “not discuss its contents with anyone else.”
Describing it as “not an easy read,” Hoon said he “came to the view” after several readings that the memo was “not exactly the ringing endorsement” of the war effort that the British government and military chiefs had hoped for. Goldsmith had apparently written that the invasion would be lawful only if Blair believed it was in the UK’s national interest.
“When my Principal Private Secretary, Peter Watkins, called Jonathan Powell in Downing St and asked what he should now do with the document, he was told in no uncertain terms that he should ‘burn it.’”
However, Hoon said he and Watkins defied the order and decided to lock the memo in a safe at the Ministry of Defence instead. He noted that the document is “probably still there.”
While Blair has yet to comment, Powell has denied ordering Hoon to burn the memo, telling the Daily Mail that, at Goldsmith’s request, he had asked the former defence secretary to “destroy” a separate “minute” on the legality of the invasion that had been sent months earlier.
The explosive claims come as over 750,000 people have signed an online petition to strip Blair of his knighthood. Anti-war activists have long accused Blair of war crimes for sending British troops into Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are now 4 myocarditis cases at Monte Vista
So it’s likely that 1 in 70 teenage boys are affected. That’s not rare. Why isn’t anyone speaking out about this? Is it fear? Of what?
By Steve Kirsch | January 5, 2022
I’ve written earlier about Monte Vista Christian school.
I just heard that there’s another case of myocarditis at the school, so now there are now 4 cases in 285 vaccinated boys (estimate), bringing the incidence rate to nearly 1 in 70, assuming all the cases are boys (285/4=71.25). This is not rare. This is a disaster.
Furthermore, these are just the cases we know about. There could be other cases that we simply don’t know about because the families decided not to tell anyone. And there could be sub-clinical cases where the damage is being done slowly over time.
Nikki Daniels, MVC’s Head of School, believes it is in the best interest of all parties to keep this information confidential so that nobody outside of the school will know. All the parents agree; they could speak out but choose not to say a word to anyone outside the community.
I disagree with that approach. There is nothing whatsoever to keep them from speaking out. They could save hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide if they spoke out and others followed their lead. It would destroy the credibility of the CDC and break people out of their hypnotic trance doing whatever the CDC says.
Instead, Monte Vista behaves just like every other school: keep your mouth shut and pretend that the kids aren’t being injured by the vaccine. Maybe it will all just go away if we don’t say anything.
This kind of behavior doesn’t save lives. It fuels the false narrative and costs lives.
Monte Vista is setting a horrible role model for students
Students learn that if you see people being injured or killed by your government, the right thing to do is to keep your mouth shut and look the other way.
I guess these are the new Christian values that they are teaching kids today.
Bring Back the Boycott: Say ‘No’ to Big Pharma, Big Banks and Totalitarian Control
The Defender | January 4, 2022
Nearly two years into the phenomenon labeled COVID-19, more and more people recognize that a global coup d’état is underway — a push by central bankers and technocrats for “totalitarian control of your transportation, your bank account, your movement, every aspect of your life,” said Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a speech he delivered in November 2021 in Milan.
Now, a year’s worth of vaccine injury data (however imperfect) is telling “a very frightening story” about the dangers of the experimental COVID shots, and is exposing the immorality of administering them to children.
As Kennedy recently argued, “Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the U.S. government, and perhaps any government.”
Concerned about a rapidly advancing bio-surveillance state that would like to make participation in society dependent on vaccine passports and repeat injections, many people are wondering what they can do to resist.
Kennedy described one action that is obvious, if not necessarily easy: Say no “to buying products from the companies bankrupting and seeking to control us.”
In this instance, saying “no” requires casting a wide net, boycotting not just Big Pharma offenders like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) — whose products fill most Americans’ medicine cabinets — but also felonious big banks angling in the shadows for complete digital control over private resources.
Boycotts are not easy, and market analysts sometimes dispute their effectiveness. On the other hand, argues Catholic writer Dusty Gates, “When we complain about something with our lips, but continue to participate in it with our pocketbooks, our complaint loses its volume and clarity.”
Taking moral responsibility “for our personal exercise of purchasing power” and withdrawing support from entities that “degrade the common good” may not be sufficient to halt tyranny in the short term, but history shows such actions can pay long-term dividends.
Remembering the boycott’s origins
It is uncertain how many people know or remember the boycott’s 19th-century Irish origins, but the 1880 tale — one of resolute determination in desperate times — offers powerful lessons that are far from outdated.
At the time, Irish tenant farmers were in the throes of a severe famine and had hit a wall in attempting to renegotiate rents with English land agent Charles Cunningham Boycott.
When Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell encouraged tenants, laborers and local shopkeepers to cut the intransigent Englishman off “from all economic and social relations with the rest of the population,” the nonviolent effort was so successful — and so devastating to Boycott’s day-to-day existence — that the man ended up fleeing Ireland in disgrace.
In his 2015 essay on “why we need boycotts,” Dusty Gates noted there is a difference between what a boycott “most often is” and what a boycott “ought to be.”
Referring to the 1880 events, Gates emphasized that the reason for the Irish tenant farmers’ actions and for the boycott’s resounding success “was specifically that people were being treated unfairly” and were losing their livelihood.
With so much at stake, the boycott was “for people, not publicity.”
Reasons to boycott Pfizer
From all appearances, few of the Americans who last year accepted novel coronavirus injections paid much attention to the corporations making the jabs, instead naively accepting the companies’ “frontrunner” status as a guarantee of trustworthiness.
But while Americans might be forgiven for knowing little about secretive upstart Moderna, the public’s willingness to overlook the known and published offenses of behemoths like Pfizer and J&J is a bit more surprising.
As law firm Matthews & Associates observed in November 2020, just prior to the rollout of Pfizer’s experimental injection, “it would seem reasonable to share all the information available on a company millions of people are expected to trust with their health, perhaps their very lives.”
The firm then outlined key elements of Pfizer’s checkered history, describing it as “rife with … subterfuge and under-the-table dealing.”
In 2010, in a published paper, Canadian health economist and policy analyst Robert G. Evans summarized Pfizer’s record as one of “persistent criminal behavior.”
In a similar assessment, a Pfizer whistleblower stated, “The whole culture of Pfizer is driven by sales, and if you didn’t sell drugs illegally, you were not seen as a team player.”
A small sampling of Pfizer’s unsavory track record includes:
- A settlement of $2.3 billion for fraudulent marketing practices in 2009 — at the time, “the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice.”
- A lengthy history of dangerous products, including Zantac, Lipitor and many others.
- Additional settlements that reveal alleged patterns of racketeering and hiding important information about drug risks, sometimes for decades.
- An “illegal trial of an unregistered drug” in infants and children in Nigeria that killed 11 children and left others with brain damage and paralysis, ultimately resulting in a $75 million settlement; Pfizer tested the drug on the children without the parents’ informed consent.
- Recurrent problems with contamination and quality control, including disturbing reports from whistleblowers working in the plants manufacturing COVID shots.
Four years ago, Pfizer ranked dead last in a reputational rating of pharmaceutical companies and was considered one of the companies “most associated with arrogance and greed.”
But COVID shots have been very good for business. In 2020, before the Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine, two products (the blood thinner Eliquis and the Prevnar-13 vaccine) accounted for more than one-fourth of the company’s total revenue.
In 2021, not only did Pfizer’s COVID injections become the year’s top-selling drug worldwide, but top executive Albert Bourla snagged CNN’s honorific of CEO of the Year.
Agreeing with Forbes “there is money to be made and influence to be gained by having people think positively of you,” Bourla gleefully told CNN, “we are enjoying high levels of corporate reputation right now. People like us.”
To keep it that way, Pfizer is now leading the charge to block legislation that would strengthen whistleblowers’ ability to expose corporate fraud. Pharmaphorum rates Pfizer as the sixth largest lobbying presence in Washington.
As recounted in The Intercept, if the whistleblower legislation were to pass, it would strengthen anti-retaliation protections “and make it more difficult for companies charged with fraud to dismiss cases on procedural grounds.”
Buttressed by a fleet of high-powered lawyers and lobbyists, Pfizer and other Big Pharma felons such as Merck, AstraZeneca, Amgen and Genentech — all of whom have a history of paying large settlements for healthcare fraud — are working to make sure the bill does not pass.
They may well succeed, given Pfizer stock is one of the most popular holdings of U.S. lawmakers.
Reasons to boycott J&J
By revenue, J&J was, as of 2020, the world’s largest healthcare company. The company’s combined consumer, pharmaceutical and medical devices groups have displayed steady growth since the mid-2000s, with 55% higher annual revenue in 2020 compared to 2006.
J&J, along with Pfizer, is one of U.S. lawmakers’ top stock holdings.
J&J’s growth occurred against the backdrop of an offensive history (outlined on numerous occasions by The Defender ) of civil and criminal fines and settlements related to Risperdal, opioids, surgical mesh products, asbestos-tainted baby powder as well as numerous other scandals that, pre-COVID, had finally begun to make a dent in the company’s brand and reputation.
In October 2021, eager to offload its talc liabilities, J&J created a subsidiary and then promptly filed for its bankruptcy protection. In November, meanwhile, J&J announced plans — billed by Reuters as “the biggest shake-up in the U.S. company’s 135-year history — to spin off its consumer health division to focus on the pharmaceutical and medical device division.
J&J is also betting big on “novel solutions” and technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Back in 2015, J&J announced a partnership with Google to develop AI surgical robots.
Prior to COVID, J&J had virtually no experience developing vaccines, but COVID shots have been just as good for J&J’s bottom line as for Pfizer’s.
Despite the spate of negative publicity about vaccine-related blood clots and other adverse events, which plagued J&J throughout 2021, for the 12 months ending Sep. 30, 2021, the company reported a 13.1% year-over-year increase in revenue as well as a steadily climbing stock value.
The financial outlook for J&J’s COVID shot may change in 2022, however. In mid-December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the public it “preferentially recommends” getting a Pfizer or Moderna injection rather than J&J’s, despite all three jabs carrying similarly worrisome risks of blood-clotting disorders.
CDC continues to endorse J&J’s shot for vulnerable prison and homeless populations (or when the other two are unavailable), but one of CDC’s advisors told the press she “wouldn’t recommend [her] own family take the J&J shot.”
In addition to adverse events, J&J’s COVID shots have attracted attention for “deficiencies” at its Baltimore production plant, where its notoriously subpar contractor “accidentally” mixed up ingredients and ruined doses.
J&J’s manufacturing woes are neither new nor unique to vaccine production, however. Back in 2013, describing “poppy-seed sized bits of plastic” in infant Motrin and injectable medications marred by mold, a reporter criticized J&J’s hypocritical “warm and fuzzy” marketing, concluding that the “out of control” company had “too many subsidiaries and outsourcing of products to third-party manufacturers for responsible oversight.”
Reasons to boycott felonious banks
In CHD.TV’s new weekly series, “Financial Rebellion,’ former investment banker and Solari Inc. President Catherine Austin Fitts explained the importance of reclaiming financial independence from the “monopolizing grip of the central banks and digital currency titans.”
Fitts argued central banks are using the pandemic to engineer an all-digital control system “that will allow them to extract tax without representation” while exerting 24/7 control over our ability to transact.
Fitts explained how members of the public have a powerful tool at their disposal to disrupt the central bankers’ plans: People can stop banking with the juggernauts that are the largest shareowners of the New York Fed — for example, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon (as well as other megabanks such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and State Street) — and instead reward well-managed local banks and credit unions with their business.
The New York Fed is part of the Federal Reserve System, one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks established by Congress under the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
It is the largest of the 12 “in terms of assets and volume of activity” and, unlike the other Reserve Banks, has “unique responsibilities” that include buying and selling U.S. Treasury securities on the open market to regulate the supply of money and intervening in foreign exchange markets.
The New York Fed has exercised “unprecedented powers” since the 2008 financial crisis and has used the cover story of the pandemic to steadily broaden those powers.
The New York Fed’s ringleader bank, JPMorgan Chase, is the largest U.S. bank (when ranked by total assets), owns 62% of all stock derivatives (valued at $3.3 trillion) held at federally-insured U.S. banks and is one of the top 10 stock holdings of U.S. lawmakers.
But, like Pfizer and J&J, JPMorgan Chase is a “criminal recidivist.” The five-count felon bank facilitated “the largest Ponzi scheme in history” (the Madoff scheme) and racked up $42 billion in civil and criminal penalties between 2002 and 2019. Recent whistleblower allegations describe a culture of fraud.
Nor is JPMorgan Chase alone as an admitted felon among New York Fed member banks. In 2015, Citigroup joined JPMorgan Chase in pleading guilty to rigging foreign exchange markets. In 2020, Goldman Sachs was charged with two felony counts.
Every action counts
Academic studies show the impact of boycotts is most significant when the companies in question already have a bad reputation and a history of frequent past scandals.
This suggests that boycotting Big Pharma, which before COVID had a long-standing reputation as “the most loathed industry in the country,” ought to be an easy sell.
Although companies like Pfizer and J&J may be benefiting from a short-lived “vaccine-led reputation boost,” their COVID injections’ nontrivial dangers are becoming so evident that even the complacent may have trouble discounting the risks.
Dr. Peter McCullough described the shots as the “most dangerous biological medicinal product rollout in human history.”
For some members of the public, connecting the dots to private central banks represents a more challenging conceptual leap.
However, it is vital to recognize the unfolding global coup as an effort coordinated across multiple sectors, not least of which is the financial sector. And — as central bankers step out of their financial silos and brazenly lecture the world about getting vaccinated — their role in the engineering of tyranny is becoming ever more obvious.
Ending tyranny will require action from each of us, beginning with saying “no” to the disastrous COVID shots.
Admittedly, it may be harder to have as immediate an impact on today’s mega-corporations and billionaire tyrants as was achieved when laundresses, postal messengers and blacksmiths so effectively shunned Charles Cunningham Boycott in the 19th century.
But severing our financial — and energetic — ties with the pharma and banking entities that are harming us is still a powerful place to begin.
Boycotts, if driven by a strong “moral impetus,” can have clout.
Products and subsidiaries you can boycott
For boycotting purposes, we include below a partial list of products manufactured by Pfizer and J&J, and a selected list of their numerous acquisitions and subsidiaries.
Leading Pfizer brands:
Advil, Bextra, Celebrex, Chantix, Depo-Testosterone, Diflucan, Effexor, Eliquis, EpiPen, Ibrance, Lipitor, Lyrica, Nexium, Norvasc, Prempro, Prevnar 13, Protonix, Viagra, Xanax, Xeljanz, Xtandi, Zithromax, Zoloft
Selected Pfizer acquisitions and subsidiaries:
1968: Quigley Company
2000: Warner-Lambert
2003: Pharmacia & Upjohn
2008: Serenex
2009: ViiV Healthcare (joint venture with GSK), Wyeth
2010: King Pharmaceuticals, Meridian Medical Technologies (sold to Altaris in Nov. 2021)
2014: InnoPharma, Redvax GmbH (controlling interest)
2015: Hospira
2016: Anacor, Medivation, Treerly
2018: GSK Consumer Healthcare (joint venture with GSK)
2019: Array Biopharma, Viatris (merger of Upjohn and Mylan)
2021: Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, Arena Pharmaceuticals, Trillium Therapeutics
Leading Johnson & Johnson brands:
Aveeno, Band-Aids, Concerta, Darzalex, devices for hip and knee replacements, Elmiron, Erleada, Imbruvica, Immodium, Invega, Invokana, Levaquin, Listerine, Opsumit, Pepcid, Remicaid, Reminyl, Risperdal, Stelara, surgical mesh products, Symtuza, Topamax, Tremfya, Tylenol, Uptravi, vision care products, Xarelto, Zyrtec, Zytiga
Selected J&J acquisitions and subsidiaries:
1947: Ethicon
1959: Cilag, McNeil
1961: Janssen Pharmaceuticals
1994: Neutrogena
1996: Cordis
1997: Biosense
1998: DePuy
2006: Animas Corporation, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare
2009: Acclarent
2010: Crucell, Micrus Endovascular
2012: Synthes
2017: Abbott Medical Optics, Actelion, TearScience
2019: Auris Health
2020: Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Verb Surgical
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Theranos founder convicted of fraud & conspiracy
RT | January 4, 2022
The founder and CEO of ‘revolutionary’ blood-testing health technology company Theranos, has been found guilty on four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud investors, but not patients.
Elizabeth Holmes, 37, was found not guilty on four charges revolving around “wire fraud against Theranos paying patients,” and the jury in California also remained deadlocked on three other charges on Monday. But with a partially guilty verdict she could still face up to 20 years in prison for each count, although some observers believe she is unlikely to receive the maximum sentence.
Theranos was once a $9 billion Silicon Valley wonder that promised to revolutionize blood testing. It was founded by Holmes in 2003, after she dropped out of Stanford University at age 19. The company’s board of directors at some point included former senators, future Defense Secretary James Mattis, as well as former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger.
Praised as a self-made billionaire and “future Steve Jobs” of biotechnology, Holmes would appear at events alongside former Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, former President Bill Clinton and even then-Vice President Joe Biden, claiming that her company could offer blood tests for 240 diseases using just a few drops from a fingertip pin-prick instead of a needle or syringe.
The entire enterprise collapsed following a 2015 Wall Street Journal report by John Carreyrou, which exposed the fact that the company’s miracle technology did not actually work. This triggered an inquiry by federal agencies that led to indictments against Holmes and former Theranos COO Ramesh Balwani in 2018. Balwani is set to stand his own trial next month.
Colorado’s Marshall Fire: Has Funding Needs Corrupted Climate Science?
By Jim Steele | Watts Up With That? | January 2, 2022
I was totally shocked to hear the claims by a fire scientist I had once admired and often quoted in my blog posts about wildfire. In a National Public Radio interview Jennifer Balch said, “Climate change has lengthened the state’s fire season”. Then she said “”Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that were burning, they’ve been baked all fall and all winter.”
Having studied fire ecology for 30 years and knowing her published science, I could only believe she had been corrupted by the need to attract large amounts of funding, and these days that comes to those who blame the climate crisis. And here’s why I now hold that opinion so strongly.
Colorado’s Marshall Fire was a grassfire that happened with temperatures hovering around freezing. All fire experts and fire managers know grasses are 1-hour lag fuels. That means in dry conditions grasses can become flammable within hours. Attempting to link CO2 global warming, she and other alarmists were now blaming the Boulder area’s grass flammability on the warm dry conditions from July through November. But dry conditions in the past months are totally irrelevant. Those months could have also been cold and wet, but just one day of dry conditions is all that is needed for grasses to burn.
To minimize recklessly set fire that often occurs as people burn away unwanted dead vegetation, the Nova Scotia government felt the need to counter the Myth that “It’s safe to burn grass as long as there is still some snow on the ground.”
The Fact is: “Within hours of snow melting, dead grass becomes flammable, especially if there have been drying winds. Grass fires burn hot and fast and spread quickly around, and even over, patches of snow.” That’s a fact that Balch and every other fire expert should know!
Apparently, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and the Nature Conservancy and acolyte of climate alarmist Michael Mann and Noah Diffenbaugh, also failed to understand grasses are 1-hour fuel. He stated in an interview for NBC’s article How climate change primed Colorado for a rare December wildfire that “Climate change is clearly making the pre-conditions for wildfires worse across most fire-prone regions of the world,”
But dry grasses are not the pre-condition to be worried about. The pre-conditions that neither Swain nor Balch shared with the public is well known: Boulder County’s invasive grasses increase fire danger. The “main offender is cheatgrass, which was likely introduced to the area alongside agriculture and ranching” and “is increasing fire danger by 29%”
In fact, in 2013 Balch published, Introduced annual grass increases regional fire activity across the arid western USA (1980–2009), writing “Cheatgrass was disproportionately represented in the largest fires, comprising 24% of the land area of the 50 largest fires” and that “multi-date fires that burned across multiple vegetation types were significantly more likely to have started in cheatgrass.”
It was also very disingenuous for Balch to say “Climate change has lengthened the state’s fire season”. It is the very same meme that every climate alarmist regurgitates that climate change has made “a year-long fire season the new normal”. But in 2017 Balch published in Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States that human ignitions “have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal ‘fire niche’ in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires”. Balch’s published graph clearly shows that human ignitions have extended fire season all year long. Based on her own research, a more relevant comment would have mentioned that Louisville, Colorado’s population had jumped 10-fold; from 2,000 in 1950 to about 20,000 today. Does a 10-fold increase in population create a 10-fold increase in fire probability. The Marshall Fire was not naturally started by Lightning.
In 2015, Balch created the Earth Lab program at Colorado University. In 2017 it became part of CIRES, a partnership of NOAA and CU Boulder. Earth Lab, got increasing attention from mass media that’s always seeking click-bait. As Earth Lab’s team began blaming more fires on climate change, it got more attention and Balch got more interviews.
Earth Lab hired Natasha Stavros as Earth Lab’s Analytics Hub Director. In videos posted by the Washington Post, she claimed climate change causes “longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons” reflecting Balch’s conversion to a climate crisis narrative. To get around Balch’s earlier scientific research Stavros deflected, “We are not talking about the ignition source” or the “availability of fuels”, “what we are talking about are the conditions of those fuels”. But in the case of the Marshall Fire, 1-hour grass fuels have nothing to do with climate change. It only takes a few hours to be in highly flammable conditions. That’s weather, not climate!
Although lacking in scientific integrity, pivoting to a climate crisis narrative worked in Balch’s favor. The U.S. Geological Survey has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to host the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCCASC) for the next five years. Balch, as director of CIRES’ Earth Lab, and now NCCASC Director had attracted $4.5 million in funding. Universities around the country similarly create such centers to attract such major funding. Certainly, blaming fires on a climate crisis attracts more funding than if its director sounded like a “denier” blaming invasive grasses and human ignitions.
The politics of funding research requires a major level of group think. Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasi-crystals that are now used in surgical instruments. But when he first announced his observations, he was kicked out of his lab by his colleagues. They saw him as a threat to the lab’s prestige and funding because observing quasi-crystals contradicted the consensus that was enforced by Linus Pauling that quasi-crystal did NOT exist.
Similarly, esteemed atmospheric scientist Dr Cliff Mass was criticized by Washington University administrator’s for detailing how an episode of problematic acidic waters that had been pumped into the state’s oyster’s hatcheries, was due to natural upwelling events, not climate change. But contradicting the climate crisis angle threatened funding to WU’s Ocean Acidification Center. Up until then Mass had been the Seattle Times go-to person for all weather events, but that stopped when his one analysis didn’t support climate crisis groupthink. Dr Peter Ridd was fired for presenting evidence showing his colleague’s claims of coral reef destruction were exaggerated. So, all savvy university professors know you can’t contradict the meme if you want funding, or worse, keep your job.
Climate crisis groupthink, also ignores natural climate change, as did Balch and Swain. But one meteorologist confidently blamed the lack of snow and dryness on a natural La Nina. The science is well established that depending on how colder Pacific surface waters set up during a La Nina, atmospheric currents can carry higher or lower amounts of moisture to different regions. California had record snowfall this December while Colorado snowfall was very low. And if the Marshall Fire had been ignited just 2 days later, there would have been a snowfall to suppress the fire.
However too often, alarmist scientists cherry-pick one-year events. They weaponized this year’s low snowfall while ignoring that last year’s Colorado snowfall was far above normal. In November last year, Fort Collins received more than 15 inches of snow on its way to 80 inches, which is 25 inches more than normal. Again, such variations in snowfall are weather, not climate.
Alarmists also weaponized the dry conditions as solely due to global warming drought. They ignored the drying and warming effects of the Chinook winds that are very common in Colorado. Chinooks are known as “snow eaters” because as the winds pass over the mountains of the western USA they are forced upward and precipitate all their moisture. When those winds descend from the Rockies down to Boulder, temperatures rise adiabatically (due to pressure not added heat) and the warm dry air quickly removes moisture or snow from the surface. Southern California’s Santa Anna winds are similar and drive large fires.
Sometimes Boulder’s winds reach speeds of 100+ mile per hour. NOAA reported The Chinook Wind Events Winter of 1982 during which peak wind gusts more than 100 mph damaged areas around Boulder. Weatherwise journal reported 100+MPH winds over Boulder on January 7, 1969, which snapped power poles and toppled planes as seen in the photographs below. In November 2021 the weather service gave a red flag warming due to the high winds from a Chinook event. But without a coinciding human ignition, there was no rapidly spreading fire.
I would like to believe that Balch’s Earth Lab scientists have been campaigning for the housing developments in Boulder’s suburbs of Louisville and Superior to create a system of firebreaks and defensible space. Those suburbs had built into easily ignited grassland in a region where fires are rapidly spread by the dry Chinooks descending from the Rockies. Such natural fire danger is not always obvious to the public looking for affordable housing. But it is not obvious that was ever done, at least not as obvious as faulty climate change narratives.
Fire experts should have pushed for building codes, requiring adequate spacing between new houses. As a story in Wildfire Today reported today, one common feature of the surviving homes was they were more distant from neighboring homes. Many houses in the devastated subdivisions were only 10 to 20 feet apart. Without adequate fire breaks or defensible space, if just one house allowed the fire to reach it, the heat of that burning house is enough to ignite any house next to it. Similar dynamics were seen in California’s Tubbs and Camp Fires that demolished neighborhoods.
But perhaps local governments were greedy. Eager to build a tax base a growing Louisville population was most important. Politicians had worked hard to present Louisville as one of the top 10 most livable little cities. Putting natural fire danger front and center, might put a damper on the city’s attractiveness. And not surprisingly the Denver Democrats didn’t waste time to capitalize on the Marshall Fire devastation. The released a statement claiming “This fire has also punctuated our climate crisis and made abundantly clear the need for bold action. The science is clear, and the impacts are very real. We will continue to work with our community and legislators to ensure climate change is treated with the urgency and attention it deserves.”
But the science does not show a connection between the Marshall Fire and Climate Change. And due to the greed of the media, politicians, and selfish scientists, only scientific integrity is facing a real crisis.
Finally, it is worth noting that some scientists are acutely aware of the increasing fire danger presented by the build-up of dead vegetation. To remove that hazard prescribed burns are being performed. But sometimes prescribed burns get away and burn down people’s homes. So prescribed burns are carefully planned for times when fires are most easily controlled. So, one must wonder just how unusually dangerous local conditions were if the City of Boulder planned a prescribed burn on Monday, December 13, 2021, just 2 weeks before the Marshall Fire. Had climate change really made conditions so dangerous?
Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.
UK plans to test EVERY school child TWICE this week
… so what happens when you run 7 million lateral flow tests in five days? And are you ready for the “new wave” of “cases” it will likely produce?
OffGuardian | January 3, 2022
New plans, announced before Christmas, will require every secondary school pupil in the UK to take an on-site Covid test when school resumes after the Christmas break.
The government plans, allegedly to “monitor” Covid infection in students, go on to suggest that every child should receive a follow-up test 3-4 days later.
The tests being used are lateral flow tests, which have repeatedly been shown to be completely unreliable, and can test positive using apple juice or coca-cola.
There are roughly 3.5 million school pupils aged 11-16 in the UK and they plan to test them all twice.
If just 2% of them test positive just once, the media will scream about 140,000 new “cases” of Covid in children.
Further, the “recommendations” suggest children should then continue to be tested twice a week, every week, or “more frequently if asked to do so”:
Secondary, college and university students and education staff and early years staff should then continue to test themselves twice a week, and more frequently if they are specifically asked to do so, such as in the event of an outbreak.
At least 7 million lateral flow tests per week, every week.
It’s not hard to see where it goes from there, with the headlines blaring that lack of social distancing over the holidays gave rise to a “fourth wave” (or would it be fifth? I’ve lost count).
I would start preparing for a new lockdown, if I were you.
Clay Shaw, Liar and Perjurer
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 3, 2022
In 1969, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw. In the trial, Garrison rejected the lone-nut theory of the assassination of President Kennedy. He alleged instead that Kennedy was assassinated in a highly sophisticated regime-change operation spearheaded by the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison alleged that Shaw had played a role in that operation.
Although Shaw was quickly acquitted, Garrison’s prosecution later inspired Oliver Stone to come out with his movie JFK, whose theme was the same as Garrison’s — that Kennedy was assassinated by his enemies within the national-security establishment.
At the end of Stone’s movie was a blurb that informed people that official records relating to the assassination would continue to be kept secret until the year 2029. The inference was clear: The secrecy was designed to advance a cover-up of the national-security state’s regime-change operation against Kennedy.
That blurb produced such an outcry among the American people that Congress was effectively forced to enact the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA, release their long-secret assassination-related records to the public. To enforce the law, Congress called into existence the Assassination Records Review Board, which operated from 1994 to 1998.
The ARRB’s enforcement of the JFK Records Act is how we learned that the national-security establishment had conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination. The nature of that fraudulent autopsy was detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.
That fraudulent autopsy is how we know that the national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out one of its patented regime-change operations against Kennedy. As I have repeatedly emphasized over the years, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. Once one concludes that the Kennedy autopsy was fraudulent, there is but one reasonable conclusion that he can reach: The national-security establishment, which conducted the fraudulent autopsy, orchestrated and carried out the assassination.
Thus, if it hadn’t been for Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw in 1969, it is a virtual certainty that we still wouldn’t know today that what occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas was a national-security state regime-change operation. That’s because Garrison’s prosecution led to Oliver Stone’s movie, which, in turn, led to the JFK Records Act and the ARRB, which led to the evidence that established a fraudulent autopsy.
Ever since the Garrison’s prosecution, however, defenders of the lone-nut theory of the Kennedy assassination have portrayed Clay Shaw as an innocent victim of an abusive criminal prosecution. As it turns out however, Shaw wasn’t as sweet and innocent as the lone-nut theorists have long claimed. He actually was a perjurer and a liar.
At his trial, Shaw testified in his own behalf and denied that he had played any role in the Kennedy assassination. During his testimony, which, of course, was under oath, the following transpired:
Q: Mr. Shaw, have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?
A: No, I have not.
After he was acquitted, Shaw was interviewed by Penthouse magazine. In the interview, he stated, “I have never had any connection with the CIA.”
On November 1, 2021, the National Archives released a CIA document that had been kept secret since February 1992. That date was several months before the JFK Records Act was signed into law in October 1992. It was clearly an assassination-related record that should have been disclosed during the term of the ARRB in the 1990s. Instead, it was kept secret under a loophole in the law that entitled the CIA and other federal agencies to continue keeping certain records secret for another 25 years, on grounds that their disclosure would reveal “sources” or “methods” or endanger “national security.”
If you read the document, you will see that there is no possibility that it falls within any of those categories. The CIA simply lied to the ARRB to ensure that the document would continue to remain secret for 25 more years. Then, when that 25-year deadline came due in 2017, the CIA again lied, this time to President Trump, to get even more time for continued secrecy of the document. Trump gave the CIA another five years of secrecy. When that deadline came due in 2021, the CIA persuaded President Biden to grant another extension of time for secrecy, this time to December 2022. For some unknown reason — perhaps even a screw-up — the National Archives released the document in November of 2021.
The document is a memo sent by J. Kenneth McDonald, the Chief of the CIA History Staff, to the Director of the CIA, with copies being sent to other CIA personnel. It pertains to how the CIA should handle the CIA’s records from the reinvestigation of the Kennedy assassination by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s.
In his memo, McDonald states the following: “These records do reveal, however, that Clay Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1965.”
Thus, by the CIA’s own admission, it turns out that Clay Shaw wasn’t the sweet, innocent man that lone-nut theorists in the Kennedy assassination have long portrayed him to be. At the very least, he was a perjurer and a liar, which, of course, taints his entire testimony at his trial.
Do you see why the CIA is loathe to disclose the 14,000 records that it continues to keep secret from the American people that related to the Kennedy assassination and why it continues to demand continued secrecy of such records?
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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
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