How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?
NBC News’ national security reporter and long-time de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian purporting to “independently confirm” a false CNN story, Dec. 8, 2017
By Glenn Greenwald | March 16, 2021
There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.
The New York Times’ May, 2017 announcement of Robert Mueller as special counsel stated explicitly that his task was “to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials” and specifically “investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’”
The related secondary media-created conspiracy theory was that the Kremlin clandestinely controlled U.S. political institutions by virtue of sexual and financial blackmail held over President Trump, which they used to compel him to obediently obey their dictates. “I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially” was the dark innuendo which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her media allies most loved to spout. “Prestige news” outlets created their own Q-Anon-level series of art designed to implant in Americans’ minds a slew of McCarthyite imagery showing the Kremlin (or an iconic Moscow cathedral they mistook for the Kremlin) having fully infiltrated Washington’s key institutions.
Cover story of The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 2017
But that all came crashing down on their heads in April, 2019, when Mueller announced that he was closing his investigation without charging even a single American with the criminal conspiracy that launched the entire spectacle: criminally conspiring with the Russian government to interfere in the election. Again: while Mueller — like so many Washington special counsels before him — ended up snaring some operatives in alleged process crimes committed after the investigation commenced (lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice) or unrelated crimes (Manafort’s financial sleaze), the 18-month aggressive, sprawling investigation resulted in exactly zero criminal charges on the core claim that Trump officials had criminally conspired with Russia.
If that were not sufficient to make every person who drowned the country in this crazed conspiracy theory feel enormous shame (and it should have been), the former FBI Director’s final Report explicitly stated that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election.” In many cases, the Report went even further than this “did not establish” formulation to state that there was no evidence of any kind found for many of the key media conspiracies (“The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation”; the “evidence does not establish that one campaign official’s efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican platform was undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”; “the investigation did not establish that [Carter] Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election”). The Report also barely even dignified let alone confirmed the long-standing, utterly deranged Democratic/media conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had taken over U.S. policy through blackmail.
The Advocate, Mar. 10, 2017
For a few weeks following the issuance of the Mueller report, Democrats and media figures gamely attempted to deny that it obliterated the conspiracy theories to which they had relentlessly subjected the country for the prior four years. How could they do otherwise? They staked their entire reputations and the trust of their audience on having this be true. To avoid their day of reckoning, they would hype ancillary events such as Paul Manafort’s conviction on unrelated financial crimes or Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for a minor and dubious charge (for which even Mueller recommended no prison time) or Roger Stone’s various process charges to insist that there was still a grain of truth to their multifaceted geopolitical fairy tale seemingly lifted straight from a Tom Clancy Cold War thriller about the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
But even they knew this was just a temporary survival strategy and that it was unsustainable for the long term. That the crux of the scandal all along was that key Trump allies if not the President himself would be indicted and imprisoned for having conspired with the Russians was too glaring to make people forget about it.
That was why former CIA Director John Brennan assured the MSNBC audience in March — just weeks before Mueller closed his investigation with no conspiracy crimes alleged — that it was impossible that the investigation could close without first indicting Trump’s children and other key White House aides on what Brennan correctly said was the whole point of the scandal from the start: “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians . . . . whether or not U.S. persons were actively collaborating, colluding, cooperating, involved in a conspiracy with them or not.” Brennan strongly insinuated that among those likely to be indicted for criminally conspiring with the Russians were those “from the Trump family.”
As we all know, literally none of that happened. Not only were Trump family members not indicted by Mueller on charges of “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians,” no Americans were. Brennan believed there was no way that the Mueller investigation could end without that happening because that was the whole point of the scandal from the start. To explain why it had not happened up to that point after eighteen months of investigation by Mueller’s subpoena-armed and very zealous team of prosecutors, Brennan invented a theory that they were waiting to do that as the final act because they knew they would be fired by Trump once it happened. But it never happened because Mueller found no evidence to prove that it did.
In other words, the conspiracy theory that the media pushed on Americans since before Trump’s inauguration — to the point where it drowned out most of U.S. politics and policy for years — proved to have no evidentiary foundation. And that is one reason I say that the sectors of the media pretending to be most distraught at the spread of “disinformation” by anonymous citizens on Facebook and 4Chan are, in fact, the most aggressive, prolific and destructive disseminators of that disinformation by far (nor was it uncredentialed YouTube hosts, Patreon podcasters or Substack writers who convinced Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda but rather the editor-heavy prestige outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, NBC News and The Atlantic).
With the crux of the Russiagate conspiracy theory collapsed, U.S. media outlets began acknowledging — because they had to — that none of it was vindicated by Mueller’s report. To do so, they abruptly nullified a rule that had been in place since Mueller’s appointment: one may not speak ill of the former FBI Director because he is a patriotic man of the highest integrity and to malign him is to undermine the Brave Men and Women of the FBI Who Keep Us Safe. The only self-preservation tactic they could find to salvage their credibility was to turn on Mueller, quite viciously. Overnight, the storyline emerged: the conspiracy theory we pushed on you was correct all along, but Mueller was a coward and failed in his patriotic duty to say so.
While the hypocrisy of watching a media that for months demanded reverence for Mueller turn on a dime to accuse him of being a borderline-senile, unpatriotic coward was quite amazing, it was at least some progress toward acknowledging the undeniable reality that the media had collectively failed. Their dark conspiracies and predictions of doom were pipe dreams. They flooded the country with disinformation for years about all of this. And while they characteristically engaged in exactly zero self-reflection or self-critique — preferring to heap all the blame on Mueller instead for failing to find the evidence that is still out there of their cognitive derangements — it at least consecrated the fact that this scandal ended in humiliation for them.
When I created my top ten list of media Russiagate debacles, choosing the top ten was difficult but choosing the top spot was not. It is worth briefly revisiting that particular journalistic humiliation because of what it reveals about ongoing media behavior.
On the morning of December 8, 2017, CNN went on the air with one of the most cataclysmic and breathless scoops of the entire Russiagate saga. The network hauled out all of its most melodramatic graphics, music and host voice-tones to signify that this was it : the smoking gun, the ultimate bombshell, the final nail in the coffin, inescapable proof for their conspiracy theory. The big huge scoop notably came from its Congressional reporter Manu Raju (one of the favorite dumping grounds for false leaks by leading House Democrat Russiagate fanatics such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell (D-CA)).
According to this historic CNN revelation, a stunning and incriminating email had been obtained by “congressional investigators,” and “multiple sources” conveyed its contents to CNN. This email proved, said CNN, that Donald Trump Jr. was given advanced access to the archive of DNC and Podesta emails ultimately published by WikiLeaks on September 14, 2016. This earth-shattering email to Trump, Jr. was dated September 4 — ten days before WikiLeaks began publishing — and this, in the minds of CNN, proved somehow that the Trump campaign was in on the plot from the start.
Now, even if Trump had been shown the archive in advance by WikiLeaks or someone else, it would not have remotely proven that the Trump campaign was a participant in the plot, but let us not get detained on that hypothetical. The CNN story was treated by the entire liberal sector of the press as the most devastating and incriminating evidence yet produced to prove the truth of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, with one particularly loyal Democratic partisan-writer using an image of a nuclear explosion to convey its significance:
Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall, Dec. 8, 2017
As it turns out, there was one small problem with the CNN story: it was completely and utterly false. The email to Trump, Jr. on which the entire bombshell was based was sent after WikiLeaks began publishing the archive, not before. And it was sent not by some super-secret inside source with the Kremlin or WikiLeaks, but by a random member of the public who, having read about the WikiLeaks publications in the newspaper, emailed Trump, Jr. to encourage him to take a look.
How “multiple sources” all got the date on the email wrong — mis-reading it as September 4 rather than the real date of the email: September 14 — was never explained by CNN. That is because corporate media outlets believe they owe the public no explanation or accountability for the massive errors they commit.
But what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
All of these media outlets, reading Orwell as if it is an instruction manual, have now scrubbed most of the humiliating videos where they did this from the internet. But one can still watch here as NBC News’ national security reporter and long-time de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian breathlessly tells an MSNBC host, who herself can barely maintain her composure, that he has spoken with “sources” who have provided independent confirmation of the CNN story, thus adding NBC News’ imprimatur to it. Shortly thereafter, CBS News did the same.
All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story. And just as CNN did — repeated what they were told (almost certainly by Democratic Congressional members and/or their staff) without independently investigating it, because they knew any anti-Trump story would please their partisan audience — NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
This episode is so worth recalling not only because it is one of the most stunning and pathetic media humiliations of the Trump era — though it is that — but also because the shoddy tactic that drove it is still in full use by the same media outlets. We just saw proof of that again with a major Washington Post “correction” — which should be called a retraction — of one of the most-discussed news stories of the last six months: the Post’s claims about what Trump said when he called a Georgia election official while he was still contesting the 2020 election results.
On January 9, The Washington Post published a story reporting that an anonymous source claimed that on December 23, Trump spoke by phone with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, and directed her that she must “find the fraud” and promised her she would be “a national hero” if she did so. The paper insisted that those were actual quotes of what Trump said. This time, it was CNN purporting to independently confirm the Post’s reporting, affirming that Trump said these words “according to a source with knowledge of the call.”
But late last week, The Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of that call, and those quotes attributed to Trump do not appear. As a result, The Washington Post — two months after its original story that predictably spread like wildfire throughout the entire media ecosystem — has appended a correction at the top of its original story. Politico’s Alex Thompson correctly pronounced these errors “real bad” because of how widely they spread and were endorsed by other major media outlets.
This is a different species of journalistic malpractice than mere journalistic falsehoods. As I detailed in February and again two weeks ago, the U.S. public was inundated for weeks with an utterly false yet horrifying story — that a barbaric pro-Trump mob had savagely murdered Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick by bashing his skull in with a fire extinguisher. That false tale about the only person said to have been killed at the January 6 riot other than pro-Trump supporters emanated from a New York Times report based on the claims of “two anonymous law enforcement officials.”
As it turns out, Sicknick’s autopsy revealed that he suffered no blunt trauma, and two men arrested this week were charged not with murder but assault and conspiracy to injure an officer: for using an unidentified gas. In reporting those arrests, even The New York Times acknowledged that “prosecutors stopped short of linking the attack to Officer Sicknick’s death the next day” because “both officers and rioters deployed spray, mace and other irritants during the attack” and “it remains unclear whether Officer Sicknick died because of his exposure to the spray.”
Many liberals defenders of these corporate media outlets insist that these major factual errors do not matter because the basic narrative — Trump and his supporters at the Capitol are bad people who did bad things — is still true. But these errors are enormous. That Trump, Jr. received that email from a random member of the public after WikiLeaks began publicly publishing documents transforms the story from smoking gun to irrelevant. That Trump did not utter the extremely incriminating quotes attributed to him in that call at least permits debate about whether he did anything wrong there and what his intent was (encouraging the official to find the fraud he genuinely believed was there or pressuring her to manufacture claims with threats and promises of reward). And there is, manifestly, a fundamental difference in both intent and morality between deliberately murdering someone by repeatedly bashing their skull in with a fire extinguisher and using a non-lethal crowd-control spray frequently used at protests even if it is ultimately proven that the spray is what caused Officer Sicknick’s death (which is why those two acts would carry vastly different punishments under the law).
But all of this highlights the real crisis in journalism, the reason public faith and trust in media institutions is in free fall. With liberal media outlets deliberately embracing a profit model of speaking overwhelmingly to partisan Democrats who use them as their primary source of news, there is zero cost to publishing false claims about people and groups hated by that liberal audience.
That audience does not care if these media outlets publish false stories as long as it is done for the Greater Good of harming their political enemies, and this ethos has contaminated newsrooms as well. Given human fallibility, reporting errors are normal and inevitable, but when they are all geared toward advancing one political agenda or faction and undermining the other, they cease to be errors and become a deliberate strategy or, at best, systemic recklessness.
But whatever else is true, it is vital to understand what news outlets mean when they claim they have “independently verified” the uncorroborated reports of other similar outlets. It means nothing of consequence. In many if not most cases — enough to make this formulation totally unreliable — it signifies nothing more than their willingness to serve as stenographers for the same anonymous political operatives who fed their competitors similar propaganda.
When it comes to vaccines, suddenly “from vs with” matters again
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | March 15, 2021
In the last few weeks the media has demonstrated one of the clearest, most concise displays of true-life doublethink I’ve ever seen. It truly is the perfect exemplar.
The dichotomy is in “covid deaths” vs “vaccine related injuries”.
As we all know by now, countries all around the world define “Covid deaths” as “people who die, of any cause, within 30 days of a positive test result” (the number of days changes by country, it’s usually between 28 and 60). This trend was started in Italy last spring, and spread all around the world.
Globally, with a few notable exceptions, a “covid death” is a death “from any cause” following a positive test.
And when they say “any cause”, they mean it. Up to, and including, shooting yourself in the head.
In one blackly hilarious case, a man “died of coronavirus” after being shot by the police, with his 7 gunshot wounds being listed as “complications”.
That’s how loosely defined “covid death” has become, it is more or less meaningless. However, Covid “vaccines”, and possible related injuries or deaths, are a very different matter.
The establishment is going out of its way to make sure everyone understands that anybody who gets ill, or dies, after being vaccinated, is absolutely NOT a “vaccine death”.
What’s hilarious is those same journalists and “experts” preaching against “Covid denial”, are now literally employing our own arguments against us in the name of defending the vaccines.
Check out this article from ABC a few weeks ago, quoting one doctor:
We have to be very careful about causality. There are going to be spurious relationships, especially as the vaccine is targeting elderly or those with chronic conditions. Just because these events happen in proximity to the vaccine does not mean the vaccine caused these events. Nursing home centers and hospices are of particular concern, because they are homes to incredibly frail populations, and you have to look at the background rate of these events within those populations.”
You see, it’s important not take deaths out of context. After all, many of the people who die after being vaccinated are old and frail and already seriously ill. We need to be “careful about causation”, just because event B happened after event A, does not mean A caused B to happen.
In other words: There is a difference between with and from.
Hmmm. Does that argument sound familiar to anyone else?
The article continues:
In fact, an average of 8,000 people die each day in the United States. Some of them may have just received a coronavirus vaccine.
Fascinating. Apparently 8000 people die each and every day in the United States – translating to roughly 3 million people per year – and falsely attributing natural human mortality to a potentially totally unconnected event might cause panic.
I really feel like I might have read a similar sentiment somewhere else, too. Don’t you?
The Reuters “fact check” on vaccine injury says exactly the same thing:
Reports of death following vaccination do not necessarily mean the vaccine caused the death,”
The sheer desperation of the PR in the press is apparent in all the headlines. Such as:
Pfizer Covid vaccine probably didn’t kill woman, 78, who died shortly after having it
Or:
Woman dies from brain haemorrhage in Japan days after vaccine, but link uncertain
Or:
Macomb County man, 90, dies after COVID-19 vaccine — but doctors say shots are safe
Essentially, if you die within two months of testing positive for Sars-Cov-2, you’re a “Covid death”, and if you die within two minutes of getting the vaccine, you’re a coincidence.
Now, that’s not to say the vaccine definitely did kill those unfortunate people, I don’t know the details of the cases. The point is the equivocation. The soft use of language which is totally at odds with the apocalyptic prose discussing “Covid deaths”.
Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the UK right now, following the AstraZeneca situation.
A quick recap, for those who haven’t heard: Recently, the Norwegian government suspended use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, following it being linked to increased risk of blood clots. Several other countries soon followed suit.
This has prompted a UK-wide defence of the AstraZeneca jab. Including this piece from David Spiegelhalter, in the Guardian just today, in which he uses the same exact argument as the ABC article, almost word for word:
It’s human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist
After 12 months of ignoring the conversation on “with” vs “from”, suddenly all the vaccine pushers have rediscovered the difference. None of them seem in any way aware of their self-contradiction.
But this ludicrous double standard doesn’t just apply to death, but also the concept of acceptable risk.
Appearing on Good Morning Britain today, UK Dr Nighat Arif encouraged the continued use of the AstraZeneca shot, by explaining that technically there’s always a small chance you’ll get a blood clot, but you can’t let that stop you doing what needs to be done:
As a GP I see clots a lot, unfortunately our background risk of getting a clot is about 1/1000 people. If you’re on a flight, your risk of clot increases. If women are on the contraceptive pill, their risk of clot increases. People going to hospital for surgery. However, we don’t stop doing any of those things.
The doctor is actually arguing that refusing to live your life based on a 0.1% risk of death is foolish, and that nobody should be expected to do that.
It is, literally, word for word a “Covid sceptic” argument, reproduced in the mainstream, without even the tiniest hint of irony or self-awareness. The very attitude they are taking towards “vaccine injury” is the same one they have condemned in “covid deniers” for over a year. By their hypocrisy they prove their own mendacity.
If they want to define a “Covid death” as dying within 60 days of a positive test, fine. But then anyone who dies within two months of getting vaccinated is a “vaccine death”. And they should have those two big red numbers counting up, right next to each other, on the front page of every news website in the world.
And if they don’t do that – which they obviously won’t – then you have a deliberately employed double standard, and that is a tacit admission of intentional deception.
It really is just that simple.
The AstraZeneca Vaccine Is NOT Safe. None Of Them Are.
By Richie Allen | March 15, 2021
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon have both declared that the AstraZeneca coronavirus jab is “safe” and “working well.” Johnson and Sturgeon are liars. Both of them have blood on their hands.
Speaking this lunchtime, Johnson urged people to “keep coming forward” to have their vaccine despite significant and growing evidence that the AstraZeneca jab is causing serious harm.
Today, Germany joined Ireland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Bulgaria, Norway, Italy, Estonia, Luxembourg and Iceland in suspending the AZ vaccine. Evidence is emerging that it is causing blood clotting and heart failure in recipients.
Bulgarian Health Minister Kostadin Angelov said that a 57 year-old woman died of heart failure less than a day after having the AZ jab.
Italy began a new lockdown today and German ICU doctors are warning that the country needs to return to lockdown because of a rise in cases and hospitalisations.
I don’t believe them. I think they are using the threat of more lockdowns to pressurise the public into taking the vaccines. I speculated weeks ago, that governments had already encountered resistance and that uptake was slowing down as the jabs were being offered to younger age groups.
News that the vaccines are killing people will do nothing to convince the doubters. The suits at AZ and Pfizer have told their lackeys in Academia to get on TV and warn of more lockdowns unless uptake is close to 90 per cent.
All of these vaccines have already proven to be potentially deadly. Tens of thousands of injuries have been reported through the UK government’s yellow card reporting system.
VAERS, the US monitoring system for vaccine injuries has been similarly overwhelmed. However, you may not know this, because the media has been told not to breathe a word of it.
Video evidence of ‘massacre’ by UK special forces in Afghanistan mysteriously VANISHES
RT | March 14, 2021
Video allegedly showing a “rogue” SAS unit committing war crimes in Afghanistan has supposedly disappeared, as an investigation into the squad’s alleged “massacres” has been plagued by missing evidence and silence from witnesses.
Saifullah Yar was just 19 when his family were shot dead in an SAS raid on their Afghan village in 2011. When British military investigators flew to Kabul in 2017 to investigate the raid, he told them he was handcuffed and led away from his father, brother and two male cousins. He heard two sustained bursts of gunfire, and when the Brits departed, his relatives were dead, their bodies riddled with bullets.
Video footage of the raid was apparently captured by US air support overhead, but according to a new Sunday Times report, American authorities mysteriously lost the footage, and were unable to provide it to a British court, where Saifullah has brought a judicial review into the fatal raid.
The mysterious disappearance isn’t the first time that key evidence from the raid has gone missing, or been intentionally hidden. The Royal MIlitary Police (RMP) investigators’ 2017 visit to Kabul was one of their last tasks in a three-and-a-half year probe into allegations of war crimes against the SAS unit, during which they found that the British operators doctored mission reports to implicate Afghan special forces in similar killings, dozens of which took place between 2011 and 2013.
The investigators interviewed 42 soldiers who said they were unable to remember the mission. Court documents reported on by the Times stated that a judge termed this a case of “collective amnesia.” The weapons used in the raid on Saifullah’s village were destroyed the same year the RMP opened its investigation.
However, evidence against the SAS troops has piled up. Investigators found that British 5.56mm bullets, rather than the 7.62mm rounds used by the Afghan commandos, were used to kill the victims. Additionally, they examined reports that weapons were planted on the bodies of these victims, in order to justify the killings later.
The reports that followed the 2011 raid on Saifullah’s village stated that his family were killed when they reached for weapons as the SAS searched their property. These reports were met with skepticism by senior commanders, who in a chain of emails seen by the British court, described the raid as “the latest massacre,” and expressed disbelief at the idea of four overpowered prisoners reaching for hidden grenades and rifles during the raid.
“And finally they shot a guy who was hiding in a bush who had a grenade in his hands. You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!,” one senior noncommissioned officer wrote.
The British government closed down the investigation in late 2017 without prosecuting a single case. The same year, another wide-ranging investigation into alleged war crimes, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT), was shut down, also without prosecuting a case.
With the SAS typically exempt from parliamentary oversight, the courts are now Saifullah’s best hope of finding justice. “Our client is seeking a fresh investigation into the deaths of his loved ones and he wants to find out whether their deaths were part of a pattern of unlawful killings of Afghan civilians,” his lawyer, Tessa Gregory, told the Sunday Times.
The Biden-Noem Smackdown: “Imposter” Joe Meets Kristi “The Lionhearted”
By Mike Whitney | Unz Review | March 14, 2021
Did you catch Biden’s speech on Thursday?
I did. I foolishly thought Biden would use the opportunity to address the 90 million-or-so Americans who think the election was stolen and that Biden is not really the president. But, no, the niggling issue of “legitimacy” never even came up, nor did any of the ten other top issues that Americans care about most. Instead, Imposter Joe devoted the entire 22 minutes to fearmongering about a virus that has almost entirely vanished and which is rapidly losing its power to keep people voluntarily locked up in their own homes. That development–which should have been cause for celebration– has Biden worried, which is why his handlers settled on a nationwide speech to rekindle waning public anxiety.
The Biden crew are determined to keep the pandemic restrictions in place in order to curtail the freedom of movement, limit the size of public gatherings, and preserve the autocratic powers of the state governors. The obvious objective is to perpetuate the appearance of a public health crisis that serves as cover for the permanent suspension of personal liberties and the subsequent evisceration of the middle class. At its heart, the Covid scam– much like the BLM protests and spurious claims of “white supremacy”– has always been part of a broader class war aimed at conservative, blue-collar patriots. Here’s Biden:
“Look, we know what we need to do to beat this virus. Tell the truth. Follow the science. Work together. Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the American people. No function is more important. We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We, the people.” (President Biden’s prime-time speech, ABC News)
“Trust the government”, says Biden, and yet, in survey after survey, we see that trust in government is lower now than any time in our 245-year history. And, for good reason: the public health officials, the media, and their Democrat allies in the statehouses have consistently and deliberately misled the public on nearly every aspect of the pandemic, from masks to asymptomatic transmission to fatality rates to the susceptibility to children to lockdowns, and now, to the biggest whopper of them all, the nefarious “variant,” which is the latest chilling hobgoblin designed to sustain the mass-hysteria in order to coerce more people into getting vaccinated. And, make no mistake, vaccination was the real purpose of Biden’s presentation. He doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise. Take a look:
“When I came into office you may recall I set a goal that many of you said was kind of way over the top. I said I intended to get 100 million shots in people’s arms in my first 100 days in office. Tonight, I can say we’re not only going to meet that goal, we’re going to beat that goal. Because we’re actually on track to reach this goal of 100 million shots in arms on my 60th day in office. No other country in the world has done this, none. And I want to talk about the next steps we’re thinking about.
“Tonight, I’m announcing that I will direct all states, tribes, and territories to make all adults, people 18 and over, eligible to be vaccinated no later than May 1. Let me say that again. All adult Americans will be eligible to get a vaccine no later than May 1. That’s much earlier than expected.
“And let me be clear. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to have that shot immediately, but it means you’ll be able to get in line beginning May 1. Every adult will be eligible to get their shot. And to do this, we’re going to go from a million shots a day that I promised in December before I was sworn in, to maintaining, beating our current pace of 2 million shots a day, outpacing the rest of the world…”
Why is Biden so determined to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country? Doesn’t that strike you as a bit suspicious? After all, if you’ve already been vaccinated, then you shouldn’t be at risk of contracting the infection from someone else, so what difference does it make?
No difference at all. And here’s another thing: Why was there no mention of health care or immigration or unemployment or the economy or anything else that really matters to the American people? After listening to Biden blabber-on for nearly a half-hour about vaccines, one could easily conclude that the last 12 months of relentless fear-mongering had no other purpose than to scare the American people into getting inoculated en masse. Is that what’s really going on? Are we all being stampeded into vaccination by the dissembling media, the public health establishment and corporate toadies like Joe Biden?
It sure looks like it to me.
Did you know that Covid cases are down roughly 90% since December? Did you know that hospitalizations are down 70% since December?
What does that mean?
It means the virus is on its last legs. It means there is enough immunity in the community that the rate of infection is falling like a stone. Viruses don’t suddenly decide to pack their bags and leave town. No. They run out of susceptible hosts to infect. And the reason they run out of susceptible hosts to infect, is because more people have already had the infection and either survived or died. Either way, the pool of susceptible hosts has shrunk dramatically. This is a long way of saying that ‘At present, there is no reason to get vaccinated.’ There is no reason to inject an experimental and potentially-lethal substance into your bloodstream to counter an infection that is nearly kaput. Capisce?
Biden knows this, his speech writers know this, and the deep-pocket oligarchs who shoehorned his sorry a** into the White House by dumping truckloads of mail-in ballots at voting stations around the country in the wee-hours of the morning; they know it, too.
And, yet, this is their Number 1 priority. Think about that. Why is Biden so insistent that you get inoculated with a vaccine for which there have been no long-term trials, no animal trials, and no regulatory hurdles. (The FDA waved the mRNA vaccines through the process under the Emergency Use Authorization provision.) Does Biden know that the Infection Fatality Rate is a measly 0.23% and that 99.95% of the people who contract Covid, survive?
Of course, he knows it. He knows the whole thing is a fraud, but that won’t stop him from doing what he’s been doing for the last 50 years; carrying water for corporate honchos and billionaire busybodies who see vaccination as an essential steppingstone to their glorious new order. Biden is merely the face-man for this sinister project; a pallid, inconsequential cog that helps to move the machinery of tyranny forward. That’s Biden in a nutshell. Here’s more from the speech:
“I need you, the American people. I need you. I need every American to do their part. I need you to get vaccinated when it’s your turn and when you can find an opportunity. And to help your family, your friends, your neighbors get vaccinated as well. Because here’s the point.
“If we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.”
Get it? In other words, either you get vaccinated or no 4th of July for you! And that’s just the beginning of the penalties because Vaccine passports are already in the hopper as are public transit passes, work permits, even special ID licenses for entering grocery stores, retail shops or gas stations. Anything is possible in this emerging technocratic dictatorship. Anything.
Even so, Biden is going run into a brick wall sometime in the next few months after all the Koolaid drinkers have been inoculated and the low hanging fruit has already been plucked. Here’s why:
Did you know that “49 percent of GOP men say they won’t get vaccinated”? It’s true. According to a recent article in The Hill :
“Nearly half of U.S. men who identify as Republicans said they have no plans to get the coronavirus vaccine, according to a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll released Thursday. The study, which surveyed 1,227 U.S. adults from March 3 to March 8, found that approximately 30 percent of Americans overall said they do not plan on getting vaccinated.
The poll found a higher amount of opposition among Republicans, with 41 percent saying they would not get one of the three federally approved coronavirus vaccines and 49 percent of Republican men saying the same. Fifty percent of GOP men said they would get the vaccine or had already got it. One percent was unsure.
Comparatively, about 87 percent of Democrats included in the survey said they planned on getting the COVID-19 vaccine or had already received it….” (“49 percent of GOP men say they won’t get vaccinated: PBS poll”, The Hill )
This is the obstacle Biden’s going to face sometime in the next few months. In order to persuade the naysayers into getting vaccinated, he’s going to have to impose increasingly coercive measures, which I’m sure he will do without the slightest hesitation. He’ll also have to employ a battery of professional psychologists to manipulate public perceptions in order to bamboozle vaccine opponents into taking the jab. This process is already underway, as this recent article at the American Psychological Association illustrates. Here’s an excerpt:
“Psychologists will play an important role in ensuring vaccine uptake by determining the best way to fight back against misinformation, along with … communicating benefits and risks…
Psychologists and other behavioral scientists are working to inform the communication efforts around the vaccine. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine … calls for drawing on the established research in risk communication to drive outreach… including tailored messaging and framing vaccination as a beneficial…
Personal experience may also be a powerful tool for vaccine communication. Many doctors and nurses—especially doctors and nurses of color—have been sharing their own vaccine experiences on social media…
For those who are strongly opposed to vaccines… the messaging is more difficult—but not impossible. These strong anti-vax, anti-mask attitudes appear driven by a phenomenon called psychological reactance, says Steven Taylor, PhD, a clinical psychologist… which is a motivational state driven by the feeling that someone is trying to curtail one’s freedom…
Natural incentives may also encourage vaccination… (but) Direct monetary incentives are likely to backfire. … The money “conveys that this is a risky thing that you don’t want to do unless we’re paying you,” Chapman says….
Preliminary results from doctors’ offices, currently being prepared for publication, suggest that a variety of messages can boost vaccination, with 21% of messages tested significantly boosting vaccination rates.” (“Social science and the COVID-19 vaccines”, the American Psychological Association)
Do these people have any idea how despicable they are? The government’s job is to provide accurate, well-researched, empirical information on matters of public interest, like vaccines. The government has no right to employ private contractors to persuade, indoctrinate or brainwash the American people in order to promote the cynical and self-serving agenda of power-mad elites and money-grubbing corporations. That is a massive “overreach”.
And, do you like the idea that your hard-earned tax dollars are being piddled-away on behaviorists and psychologists who are looking for ways to hoodwink you into taking a dangerous vaccine that could cause irreparable physical harm or death? Is that how you want your tax dollars spent? And, do you think that your rejection of these gene-editing time-bombs suggests that you suffer from a mental condition (“psychological reactance”) that requires professional assistance? And how is the conduct of these so-called professionals any different from the psychologists that were used at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib to figure out how much physical pain could be inflicted on some witless jihadi before they lapsed into a pain-induced coma or gave-up-the-ghost altogether? Aren’t both practices equally unethical, immoral and contemptible?
Yes, they are.
Kristi Noem; A throwback to better times
Now, let’s consider the stark contrast between Biden’s presentation and a speech delivered by Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota at the CPAC conference. For those who don’t know, Noem is the one bright star in a year of Orwellian darkness and gloom. She’s a strait-laced, plain-talking, clear-thinking conservative who sticks to her principles like glue. She is a stalwart, red-blooded American girl who believes in God, the Constitution and the United States of America. Here’s an excerpt from her CPAC speech:
“Now everybody knows that almost overnight we went from a roaring economy to a tragic nationwide shutdown. By the beginning of 2020, President Trump had created 7 million new American jobs. We had the lowest unemployment rate in over half a century, and unemployment rates for black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans reached the lowest levels in history. More than 10 million people had been lifted out of poverty and out of welfare. And all of that changed in March.
Now, most governors shut down their states. What followed was record unemployment, businesses closed, most schools were shuttered and communities suffered, and the U.S. Economy came to an immediate halt. Now let me be clear, COVID didn’t crush the economy, government crushed the economy. And then just as quickly, government turned around and held itself out as the savior, and frankly, the Treasury Department can’t print money fast enough to keep up with Congress’s wish list. But not everyone has followed this path. For those of you who don’t know, South Dakota is the only state in America that never ordered a single business or church to close. We never instituted a shelter in place order. We never mandated that people wear masks. We never even defined what an essential business is, because I don’t believe that governors have the authority to tell you that your business isn’t essential.” (“Kristi Noem CPAC 2021 Speech Transcript”, rev.com )
She’s right, isn’t she? No elected official has the right to close a business or a church EVER. Period. We do not bestow those powers on our governors nor are they granted under the Constitution. Neither war nor pandemic nor any other national emergency or crisis should ever be used to strip Americans of the liberties that are guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States. Biden was wrong to say that the “most important function of government is to protect the American people.” That’s just wrong. The most important function of government is to preserve and protect the liberties that are outlined in the Bill of Rights. That’s job#1: Defend Freedom at all cost. Everything else is a footnote. Here’s more from Noem:
“South Dakota schools are no different than schools everywhere else in America, but we approached the pandemic differently. From the earliest days of the pandemic our priority was the students, their wellbeing and their education. When it was time to go back to school in the fall, we put our kids in the classroom. Teachers, administrators, parents and the students themselves were of one mind to make things work for our children, and the best way to do that was in the classroom. Now in South Dakota, I provided all of the information that we had to our people, and then I trusted them to make the best decisions for themselves, for their families, and in turn, their communities. We never focused on the case numbers. Instead, we kept our eye on hospital capacity. Now, Dr. Fauci, he told me that on my worst day I’d have 10,000 patients in the hospital. On our worst day, we had a little over 600. Now, I don’t know if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot.”
Naturally, Noem got a standing ovation when she blasted the duplicitous Lord Fauci, the man, who more than any other, bears responsibility for almost single-handedly plunging the country into an unprecedented crisis. Here’s more:
“Even in a pandemic, public health policy needs to take into account people’s economic and social wellbeing. Daily needs still need to be met. People need to keep a roof over their heads. They need to feed their families. And they still need purpose. They need their dignity. Now my administration resisted the call for virus control at the expense of everything else. We looked at the science, the data and the facts, and then we took a balanced approach. Truthfully, I never thought that the decisions that I was making were going to be unique. I thought that there would be more who would follow basic conservative principles, but I guess I was wrong.”
Yes, she was wrong, but who could have foreseen that every reprobate Democrat governor in the country would simultaneously take advantage of a public health crisis to impose de facto martial law? We never saw that coming, although, we have to assume that there must have been some tacit agreement and coordination among the governors and their paymasters that they would fall-in-line when the time was right. Ahh, but that’s conspiracy talk!
Damn right, it is! Here’s more:
“Many in the media, criticized South Dakota’s approach. They labeled me as ill-informed, that I was reckless, and even a denier. … The media did all of this while simultaneously praising governors who issued lockdowns, who mandated masks and shut down businesses, applauding them as having taken the right steps to mitigate the spread of the virus. At one point, I appeared on George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday Show. He had just wrapped up a segment with New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, where he asked Cuomo to give me some advice on how to deal with COVID.” (Loud Laughter)
In South Dakota, we did things differently. We applied common sense and conservative governing principles. We never exceeded our hospital capacity and our economy is booming. We have the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. We are number one in the nation for keeping jobs, keeping businesses open and keeping money in the pockets of our people. The people of South Dakota kept their hours and their wages at a higher rate than workers anywhere else in the nation. And our schools are open. … Our founding fathers established our National Constitution, and the people of individual states crafted their own constitutions that place specific limits on the role of government. Those limits are essential to preventing government officials from trampling on people’s rights.”
The people themselves are the ones entrusted with expansive freedoms, the free will to exercise their rights to work, worship and to earn a living. No governor should ever dictate to their people which activities are officially approved or not approved. And no governor should ever arrest, ticket or fine people for exercising their freedoms. Governors, and members of Congress and the president have a duty to respect the rights of the people who elected them, but it seems these days that conservatives are the only ones who know what that means. Personal responsibility is considered a God-given gift in South Dakota. Personal responsibility is not a term that conservatives have abandoned..
We should illustrate to the world that people thrive when government is limited, and people’s ingenuity and their creativity is unleashed. We should also remind the world what happens when tyranny and oppression are allowed to thrive. … God bless each and every one of you and may God bless the United States of America.”
By now, we should all realize that the greatest threat to personal freedom is always and everywhere the State; that is the main lesson of this unfortunate Covid fiasco. The Democrat governors usurped powers and issued edicts for which they had no authority and for which they should be held to account. They should be impeached and prosecuted. They were undoubtedly acting on behalf of criminal elites who fill their campaign coffers in return for assistance in advancing their own self-centered interests.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, we are in the fight of our lives with “do goodie” billionaire climate alarmists who have inserted themselves into the political process and who have the power to shut down the economy with the flip of the switch. These same buttinskis have gone to great lengths to create the global health infrastructure along with significant control of the mainstream media, that allows them to grossly inflate an aggressive but thoroughly-manageable viral infection and transform it into the Black Plague. This, in turn, creates the pretext for preventing people from running their businesses or attending school or gathering with friends or family or traveling at will or doing any of the things that people in a free country are at liberty to do. There is no way to reason with people who think that the only way they can achieve their own malicious objectives, is by enslaving, incarcerating or liquidating the millions of people who stand in the way of their grand design. We must defend ourselves from these hostile elites by recommitting ourselves to the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded. These are the same principles that Kristi Noem has not only articulated so well in her speech, but also put into practice in her home state of South Dakota.
We should never accept the oppressively dark and dystopian vision of Joe Biden. That’s not for us. We should aspire to Noem’s “shining city on a hill”, a place where people can work when and where they please, travel when and where they please, and meet with friends and family when and where they please. It’s not selfish for us to want these things for ourselves and our families. Freedom is a basic human necessity like eating, drinking or breathing. We need freedom, just like we need leaders who believe as we do and who are unshakable in their convictions. We need leaders like Kristi Noem who was as steadfast as Gibraltar when everyone else went weak-in-the-knees. The woman is a real American hero and a patriot.
Booyah, Kristi Noem!
Feds Indict Own Informant As Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Case Unravels
By Eric Striker | National Justice | March 11, 2021
Federal prosecutors are charging a key informant in the case against a group of Michigan militia members who the FBI claims were plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer last fall.
Stephen J. Robeson, a 58-year-old man from Wisconsin, was indicted on March 3rd by a grand jury for being a felon in possession of a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Robeson is known in political circles for his over the top violent rhetoric. He was recently exposed in court as a paid FBI asset that shows up to First and Second Amendment themed protests in the trademark “Boogaloo” Hawaiian shirt.
According to a report by Detroit News, Robeson was one of the main instigators behind the entrapment of members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia in a whimsical scheme to abduct Whitmer. The timing of the arrest was perceived in some circles to be a dirty political trick by federal agents wanting to create bad publicity for Donald Trump right before the 2020 election.
Court documents show that Robeson infiltrated the militia on orders of the FBI during a meeting of Second Amendment enthusiasts in Dublin, Ohio. It was at the Ohio meetup that, with heavy input from Robeson, more than a dozen men allegedly led by a mentally ill homeless man named Adam Fox began concocting their plan. Robeson then attended a subsequent tactical training camp in Northern Michigan that prosecutors say was in preparation for snatching Whitmer from her nearby vacation home.
Multiple informants and undercover agents were involved in pushing the defendants in the case to take part in the conspiracy as well as furthering it along. Robeson was singled out by Josh Blanchard, the defense attorney of Barry Croft, for using his material resources and heavy peer pressure to try and get the men to talk about storming Whitmer’s home and abducting her.
Generally speaking, FBI informants are given carte blanche to engage in crimes and dangerous activities. Most FBI informants are career criminals introduced into law-abiding political organizations in order to cause strife and gin up phony terror plots. Federal prosecutors are burning Robeson likely out of fear that he will burden their case at trial. While it may be a bit trickier, defense attorney’s can still call Robeson to the stand to undermine the Feds’ case even if they do not plan to use his testimony.
Last January, prosecutors were able to compel 25-year-old Ty Garbin to become a cooperating witness in exchange for a plea. This may be their best hope for salvaging the case.
Washington’s thirst for white terrorists has compelled the FBI and DoJ to lower their professional standards to an almost untenable degree. Representative Jamie Raskin, who is a Jewish activist, is ordering FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide a briefing on “white supremacists” in the police and military by this Tuesday, suggesting that government persecution of patriotic militia groups is about to intensify even further.
The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 12th.
Michigan health department hit with lawsuit over refusal to share nursing home data comparable to Cuomo’s cover-up
RT | March 11, 2021
A local reporter is suing Michigan’s health department after it denied repeat requests for its nursing home data amid the Covid-19 outbreak, piling pressure on the government as lawmakers demand a probe into its pandemic response.
Journalist Charlie LeDuff launched a Freedom of Information suit against the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, accusing the agency of withholding data linked to coronavirus deaths in nursing homes without legal basis.
“Not only does the public have the right to know this information, we have the need to know,” said LeDuff, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting for the New York Times in 2001 and later returned to local coverage in Detroit. “If we’re going to fix end-of-life care moving forward, it’s going to require a hard look at how the state’s policies treated our most vulnerable population.”
Represented by the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, LeDuff says numerous FOIA requests to the state government have been denied without justification. The first inquiry, submitted in late January, was rejected only an hour after it was submitted on grounds that it would divulge sensitive health records – an argument the journalist rejects.
While LeDuff said the state had previously published “certain statistical information” related to Covid-19 deaths, he argued it is lacking in transparency. He drew parallels to the New York state government, which has also come under fire for unwillingness to share its nursing home statistics.
“The need for transparency in this particular area has already been established, in another state, thanks to recent revelations that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration had intentionally withheld data from disclosure due to concerns about the resulting political fallout,” LeDuff’s complaint said, noting that he saw “significant similarities” between Cuomo’s policies and those of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Whitmer has also faced fierce criticism over her pandemic response, namely a directive early on in the outbreak that incentivized nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients, despite the risk they posed to the facilities’ aging residents. Cuomo and several other Democratic governors imposed similar policies, which critics say contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths in elderly populations most vulnerable to the virus.
Among the most vocal of Whitmer’s detractors is county prosecutor and former GOP state Senator Peter Lucido, who suggested on Monday that the governor could be slapped with criminal charges over her handling of nursing homes and “willful neglect of office.”
Whitmer later responded, castigating the prosecutor for “shameful political attacks based in neither fact nor reality” while insisting her administration “carefully tracked CDC guidance on nursing homes, and we prioritized testing of nursing home residents and staff to save lives.”
GOP lawmakers also called on Michigan AG Dana Nessel last week to investigate Whitmer’s nursing home policies in a formal letter to the state Department of Justice. Nessel, however, has signaled unwillingness to launch a probe, saying “bad policy” does not equate to “violations of the law.”
“I think oftentimes it is appropriate for the office to investigate. But not just when you say, ‘We don’t like what this policy is,’” she said of the request.
Whitmer’s administration was previously taken to court by Republicans alleging her “temporary” emergency pandemic powers had been extended indefinitely without approval from the legislature. While the state Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the governor, she simply sidestepped the decision by having her health director extend the orders instead, citing a legal loophole stemming from the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.
COVID: To Governors who are re-opening your States—how to defeat the attacks against you
By Jon Rappoport | NoMoreFakeNews | March 10, 2021
Governors:
Talk to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He understands the game.
In December, his office issued an order to all state labs processing COVID PCR tests. They must now report “the number of cycles” they deploy in every test they perform. [1] [1a]
Roughly speaking, a cycle is a quantum leap which increases the sensitivity of the test. As readily asserted by Anthony Fauci, any test using more than 35 cycles is meaningless. [2] [2a]
—Not only meaningless, but laden with false-positive results. The patient is falsely claimed to be “infected.”
However, the FDA and the CDC, since the launch of the COVID PCR test, have been recommending using 40 cycles; and therefore labs have been following this advice. [3] [3a] [3b]
The outcome, in terms of falsely inflated case numbers, has been a disaster.
Furthermore, as reported by the New York Times, testing labs never tell the patient or the doctor how many cycles they use in running the PCR. [4]
Governor DeSantis understood the massive testing problem. That’s why his office, and his state department of health, ordered the labs to report “numbers of cycles.”
Armed with this background, you governors can meet and overcome challenges as you re-open your states. Why do I say this? Because the attacks coming your way will be based on three statistics:
The number of COVID cases in your state; the number of COVID deaths; and the number of COVID hospitalizations.
“Well, these numbers are rising. The governors must lock down again. Otherwise, they are contributing to disease and death.”
But you see, all three statistical categories depend on a positive PCR test. And since the test, improperly run, has resulted in huge numbers of false-positives, you can restore sanity and more accurate data by following Governor DeSantis’ lead.
Once your state labs report how many cycles they are using for each PCR test they run, you can reject any test that deploys over 35 cycles. You can eliminate vast numbers of false-positives, and when you DO…
The number of COVID cases, COVID deaths, and COVID hospitalizations in your state will decline, as they should.
And those who would attack you, based on those numbers, will have no ability to make their case.
In a nutshell, a vast fraud has been perpetrated on The People, and you can stop it.
You can restore sanity, re-open your states, and make the stranglehold of COVID restrictions a thing of the past.
Readers of this article: you can perform a valuable service by forwarding the article to the governor’s office in your state.
SOURCES:
[1] https://www.flhealthsource.gov/files/Laboratory-Reporting-CT-Values-12032020.pdf
[1a] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/08/florida-forces-labs-to-report-number-of-pcr-test-cycles/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE (starting at 3m50s)
[3] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download (page 37 (pdf page 38))
[3a] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 06, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 12/01/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210102171026/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
[3b] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 05, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 07/13/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20200715004004/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
[4] nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
Distorting the Levelized Cost of Electricity
By Don Dears | February 16, 2021
The levelized cost of electricity was, for decades, an honest method for comparing the cost of electricity generated by different methods.
With the advent of wind and solar generation, there has been a continuing effort to demonstrate they are competitive with coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants.
Because the cost of electricity, based on LCOE calculations, for wind and solar were always higher than the cost of electricity from coal, natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) and nuclear power plants, efforts were made to adjust the LCOEs so that wind and solar would seem to be competitive.
It should be noted that the media would seize and promote any LCOE number, no matter how contrived, purporting to show that wind and solar were competitive with traditional methods for generating electricity.
An early attempt at “adjusting” LCOEs was done by Lazard.
A previous PowerForUSA article, Misleading Costs for Wind and Solar, showed how Lazard used contrived capacity factors (CF) to calculate LCOEs favorable to wind and solar.
The media, even the Wall Street Journal, fixated on these manufactured LCOEs to report that wind and solar were competitive with traditional methods for generating electricity.
Few, if any, reporters looked into how these LCOEs were calculated.
We now have history repeating itself.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) published a joint report on December 9, 2020, showing that LCOEs for wind and solar were competitive with traditional methods for generating electricity.
In its conclusion, the report said:
“Renewable energy costs have continued to decrease in recent years and their costs are now competitive, in LCOE terms, with dispatchable fossil fuel-based electricity generation in many countries.”
But the truth is buried in the report, where it said:
“With the assumed moderate emission costs of USD 30/tCO2, their costs are now competitive…”
In other words, wind and solar are competitive if fossil fuel power plants are penalized by using a $30 per ton charge for CO2 emissions.
The IEA and NEA report is misleading in at least two respects.
- First, its stated conclusion omits the fact that fossil fuel power plants are penalized by including a charge of $30/ton of CO2 in the LCOE calculation.
- Second, the tables in the report omit references that LCOEs for NGCC and coal-fired power plants include a $30 charge for CO2 emissions.
The end result is that reporters, and the media in general, can report that wind and solar are competitive with fossil fuel power plants … which is patently misleading.
Even so, none of the purported lower cost calculations ever account for the fact that wind and solar require backup or storage, which adds to their costs. These real costs are never included in LCOE calculations.
It could be concluded that the IEA and NEA are intentionally misleading the public by burying the facts deep in their report, and omitting them from the report’s conclusion.
The truth remains: Wind and solar are more expensive than coal-fired and natural gas power plants for generating electricity.
They are also unreliable and can’t provide electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. Freezing temperatures and snow can result in blackouts.
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The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
Blog Roll
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