UK Health Dept pilloried after issuing vague objection to Daily Mail article challenging govt’s Covid-19 narrative
RT | November 22, 2020
A Daily Mail piece that poked holes in the UK government’s approach to coronavirus prompted the country’s Department of Health to cry foul, but the complaint backfired after the government failed to say what the paper got wrong.
Published under the headline ‘Covid: What They Don’t Tell You’, the article took aim at the government’s terrifying estimate in July of 119,000 deaths from Covid-19 if a second wave coincided with winter flu, noting that the prediction has so far been wildly off the mark.
The Mail pointed out that the number of daily deaths being reported in the country is not unusually high for this time of year, adding that 95 percent of Covid-related deaths involved people with serious underlying conditions. The government’s fears of hospitals being overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients were also questioned, with the Mail reporting that only 31 percent of intensive care unit beds are currently occupied by patients that have tested positive for coronavirus.
The analysis caused a sensation on social media, and even caught the attention of the Department of Health and Social Care.
“This article is misleading. This is a global pandemic – national restrictions have been introduced to keep people safe and save lives,” the department’s official Twitter account wrote in a now-deleted reply to the piece. The message urged Britons to “follow the rules and continue to stay at home” so that the country can “get back to normality.”
The comments appear to have had the opposite of their intended effect, however, with journalists, politicians, and countless social media users challenging the Health Department to elaborate on the “misleading” nature of the piece.
“What specifically is misleading about it? It is not (yet) compulsory for the press to follow the government’s propaganda line,” journalist Peter Hitchens fired back at the department.
Radio host Mike Graham was similarly unimpressed by the department’s vague dismissal of the article.
Please address why it is misleading. Are the figures for hospital beds WRONG?Are the figures for death rates WRONG?Are the SAGE predictions not WRONG?Are the infection rates collected WRONG?Please explain #COVID19https://t.co/XCMzE0uMXU
— Mike Graham 🍾 (@Iromg) November 21, 2020
The condemnation was echoed by countless other social media users, who accused the government of desperately trying to control the narrative surrounding the virus, while having even “less credibility than the media.”
The Daily Mail ran its own scathing retort to the department’s tweet, accusing the UK government of using “Twitter as a propaganda tool” in an attempt to undermine the paper’s reporting.
The outlet published comments from several politicians who expressed regret over the government-sanctioned social media post.
Tory MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith said it was simply “good journalism” to “highlight the problems with the [official] figures that are being produced,” and urged the Department of Health to do its job rather than pick fights with news outlets.
Another Conservative MP, Sir Graham Brady, said that “the people tell government what it can do – not the other way round,” and stressed that it is “essential” that there is an open debate about how to best deal with Covid-19.
The UK government has come under increasing scrutiny for its Covid-19 restrictions, with critics arguing that lockdowns and curfews imposed across the country to deal with a second wave of the virus will have devastating economic, social, and health effects that will eclipse any potential benefits from the policies. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is currently isolating at Downing Street after meeting with an MP who tested positive for the illness. He is expected to release a “Covid Winter Plan” next week.
The country has recorded 1,493,383 positive coronavirus tests, linked to 54,626 deaths, since the start of the pandemic. Despite an increase in testing, new cases have been dropping over the past week. Hospitalizations and deaths are still far from the peaks seen at the start of the health crisis in April.
The fascist neo-left and the Trump Factor
By Ghassan Kadi for the Saker Blog | November 21, 2020
Nearly three weeks after the American elections, Americans and the world in general, are still none-the-wiser; not knowing who really won and if the votes have all been legitimate or otherwise.
And the man who is supposedly trying to make America respectable again, yes, Joe Biden, started his ‘tenure’ ironically by presenting his own disrespect by breaking the law and declaring himself as ‘president elect’ and establishing an illegal entity in the name of the ‘Office of President-Elect’.
There are serious accusations that allege that dead people have voted, that boxes of late illegal ballots (all voting for Biden) suddenly appeared from no-where, that the Dominion machines have been deliberately rigged in a manner that favoured Biden, that ballot observers from the Trump camp were not allowed to scrutineer, and much more.
Whilst all of the above points are considered allegations from the legal point of view, the Democrat camp should not be concerned at all if it has nothing to hide. If anything, if it is serious about restoring America’s respect in the eyes of the world, it should encourage transparency and investigations that prove without a single speck of doubt that they are all false. But that same camp that refused the legitimate results of a Trump win four years ago and then fabricated stories like Russiagate and others, is now urging the whole world to believe that the alleged Biden win is legitimate and that there was no interference.
Apart from allegations, what each of us knows for fact is that the media, especially social media, especially Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in restricting and censoring posts and comments that favour Trump. At the same time, they implemented a blackout relating to the serious allegations of corruption about Biden and his family. If this is not interference in the election results, then what is?
Given the reach and power of social media, and given that most people are not interested in fact-finding, Facebook and Twitter have been engaged in a deliberate campaign of choosing what they allowed to be published and preventing others based on and only on their political views vis-à-vis the American elections.
Once the dust settles one way or the other, if there is any justice left in this world, social media personnel who have forged and implemented those policies must face trial.
What is most ironic about this whole new world that is everything but brave, is that the filthy rich and corrupt are cloaking themselves with the attire of the Left. There is really nothing left of the original Left in today’s Left.
Many, if not most of today’s ”Lefties” are inclined towards the current version of the political Left without really discerning that much has changed since the days of Castro and Guevara.
Today’s Left does not represent the working class.
Today’s Left is not concerned with achieving social justice.
Today’s Left is not concerned with ending capitalism and feudalism.
Today’s Neo-Left, is the consortium of globalists who own sweat shops in developing countries. They are the war-mongers, the arms dealers, the foot soldiers of thought police and they insist that your six-year-old children and grandchildren must learn about subjects like gender fluidity instead of learning history.
The devolution of the former political Left has been taking place for at least three decades, since the collapse of the USSR perhaps and the emergence of the so-called ‘New World Order’. But the 2016 Trump election has fast-tracked the process. George Soros who has an axe to grind with Communism became overnight the principle benefactor of most post-USSR Left movements. For better or for worse, it was as if he wanted to make sure that he contained the Left in a manner that deviates it from its original ideology. But he is not alone, and he is probably not doing this only because of political conviction. His ‘bigger’ partners, whether he is aware of their presence or not, have got a much bigger fish to fry; the fish of global control.
But is globalism what it appears to mean or is it a new form of hegemony? Let us not get into this herein. This will be the subject of the next article. Enough to say that what seems to surface from the actions and agendas of globalists is that they are adamant about destroying Western values; including democracy.
When my wife and I were in Russia on the 70th Anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany, we were in total awe watching the Eternal Regiment on Nevski Prospect in St. Petersburg. Men and women proudly, silently and dignifiedly marching carrying photos of family members who perished fighting the Nazi malice. What was most amazing was seeing young boys and girls giving flowers to the elderly as a mark of respect. This is because students in Russia study history. The young generations must never take for granted the privileges they have. If they do not understand and respect the sacrifices of their forebears, they will never be able to realize what their own obligations are for today and the future. Many Americans do not know what the 4th of July stands for any more than they know how many States there are in the Union. Children growing up in the West have no idea, no idea at all, how and why they live in affluent countries with public services and government-financed welfare.
And when the million man/woman march was over many hours after it started, we could not see a single empty drink can dumped on the street, not even cigarette butts. And then we remembered that a few days earlier when we were in Moscow admiring among other things, the subway/metro stations, we did not witness any evidence of vandalism or graffiti either on the carriages or in the stations.
A far cry from what we see in the West, because to be proud of who one is has become taboo in the West; courtesy the neo-Left and their henchmen.
Personally, I used to feel concerned of what the armed Right-wing Evangelicals might do if they have it their way. But despite their heavy public display of weapons, I didn’t see any evidence to show that they have taken to the streets for the purpose destroying shops and looting. In saying this, and I am not saying that the pro-Trump militias are incapable of perpetrating organized violence, but recently thus far they haven’t. If anything, with all the BLM-associated violence and the attacks Trump supporters have recently faced, the armed conservatives have thus far displayed a huge degree of self-control and abidance by the rules of the law. They argue that their presence is to protect private and public property, and evidence seems to stack up in their favour.
On the other hand, and despite the bias of mainstream media, videos have emerged showing BLM supporters not only looting, but also terrorizing those who disagree with them and refuse to put their fist up in show of support.
Today’s Neo-Left activists are the ones using Nazi tactics; not the other way around. They are the controlled opposition and the foot soldiers of the thought-police; and these are undeniable facts. If anything, the Trump factor has enhanced their exposure.
And if you resurrect Guevara and catapult him into today’s political world without giving him a crash refresher course, he would not know which side of the political divide is which. If anything, he may think that it is the other way around.
In the event of a Biden win that Trump’s supporters may see as unfair, they may be driven to become violent, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have seen serious and concerning rowdy violent behaviour from the Left that makes me now feel that I am more fearful of organizations such as Extinction Rebellion than I am from the armed Evangelicals.
When the late and great Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech, he did not dream of a day when angry mobs would use the excuse of human rights in order to loot and pillage, gang attack supporters of their political opponents, and break the law and Constitution.
And when John Lennon sang ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’, he was hoping that one day political leaders would take heed and start putting their hearts before what they can achieve militarily.
Among other things, the thing with Trump is that he is/was not a politician. What drove him from being a profiteering tycoon to a man who wants to end American wars in the world is not something I can explain or understand. Clearly though, even if he is merely running America as a corporation, he must realize that it is not in America’s interests to be constantly engaged in expensive wars that do not have any benefit for America itself. If this is pragmatism from a profit-and-loss business perspective, then I don’t have any problems with this. I want to see American troops pulling out of conflict regions in the world. They have no business in Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and my beloved Syria to name a few places.
The thing about Trump is that he is not even a typical die-hard Republican. The archetypal Republicans are not a bunch of ‘nice guys’ either. How can anyone forget the legacy of the GOP? How can we forget George W Bush’s war on Iraq and his lies about the alleged Iraqi WMD’s? And what about his gang of infamous neo-cons; Perle, and Wolfowitz; not to forget Cheney, McCain, and many more from the gung-ho Republican Right that invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, killed at least a million civilians and only ended up creating more problems than the ones they claimed they needed to resolve?
Whether Trump wins or loses the legal battle against what looks like a huge body of evidence of electoral fraud at different levels, between now and January the 20th 2021, unlike what the social media brainwashers want people to think and believe, he is not a ‘presidential candidate’, he remains to be the President of the United States of America and he remains to be the Commander in Chief.
To this effect, in as much as the POTUS is domestically building up a huge legal case against the alleged win of Biden, he equally seems to be preparing for the worst-case scenario on international matters. He is working on the contingencies of losing by seemingly making serious efforts into ending wars and the presence of American troops overseas. May he be successful doing this if he is true to his word.
But Mr. President, if you really want to clean up the slate as much as possible in case you lose the legal battle against the corrupt who serve the Deep State, you must then remember that partial withdrawals do not end wars. A drawdown is not a withdrawal. Stand by your promise and let history festoon you as the man who ended all of America’s wars overseas. For even if you leave one soldier, yes Mr. President, one single American soldier on the soil of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or any other place on earth where his presence is not legitimately requested by the people of that land, then you will be remembered in history as the man who faked withdrawals of American troops; and you despise fake actions Mr. President, don’t you?
Last but not least Mr. President, you must at least stop the oil theft from Syria, repeal the Caesar Act, and pardon Assange.
Assange, Mr. President, is the victim of your enemies. His ‘crime’ was to expose the dirty works of Hillary. How can you not drop all charges against him?
And Mr. President, should you win the legal battle and prove that your opponents have cheated the public, you MUST then clean up the swamp with an iron fist and a high pressure hose. Zuckerberg, the Clintons, the Bidens, CNN, as well as officials that helped fabricate stories about you. The whole gamut of filthy lying manipulators must face justice and the next four years will be a case of now or never.
The electoral issues are something for the American legal system to decide; provided that the system continues to have the power to reach a decision that is lawful and not dictated by the party machine of the Democrats, their cohorts and henchmen with Facebook, Twitter and Google being on the top of the list.
Martin Luther King Jr. would now be saying I’m having a nightmare, I am having a nightmare because in the name of social justice, in my name, protestors are attacked, shops are looted and elections are getting rigged.
The failings of the Neo-Left do not mean that the neo-Right, Trumpism, is always or even necessarily sometimes right by default. What is pertinent is that the choice between the former and traditional Right and Left has now morphed into a choice of discerning right from wrong, and it is the Neo-Left activists who are behaving like Fascists, courtesy the Trump factor.
The Blizzard of Bogus Journalism on Covid
BY Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | November 20, 2020
This game of hunt-and-kill Covid cases has reached peak absurdity, especially in media culture.
Take a look at Supermarkets are the most common place to catch Covid, new data reveals. It’s a story on a “study” assembled by Public Health England (PHE) from the NHS Test and Trace App. Here is the conclusion. In the six days of November studied, “of those who tested positive, it was found that 18.3 per cent had visited a supermarket.”
Now, if the alarm bells don’t go off with that one, you didn’t pay attention to 7th grade science. If the app had also included showering, eating, and breathing, it might have found a 100% correlation. Yes, the people who tested positive probably did shop, as do most people. That doesn’t mean that shopping gives you Covid and it certainly doesn’t mean that shopping kills you.
Even if shopping is a way to get Covid, this is a very widespread and mostly mild virus for 99.8% percent of the population with an infection fatality rate as low as 0.05% for those under 70. Competent infectious disease experts have said multiple times that test, track, and isolate strategies are nearly useless for controlling viruses such as this.
This story/study was so poor and so absurd that it was too much even for Isabel Oliver, Director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England. She sent out the following note:
Thank you. One down, a thousand to go.
The New York Times pulled a mighty fast one with this piece: “States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks.” This would be huge news if true because it would imply not only that lockdowns save lives (which no serious study has thus far been able to document) but also that granting people basic freedoms are the reason for bad health outcomes, an astonishing claim on its own.
The piece, put together by two graphic artists and seemingly very science-like, speaks of “outbreaks,” which vaguely sounds terrible: packed with mortality. It’s odd because anyone can look at the data and see that New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut lead the way with deaths per million, mostly owing to the fatalities in long-term care facilities. These were the states that locked down the hardest and longest. Indeed they are locking down again! Deaths per million in states like South Dakota are still low on the list.
How in the world can the NYT claim that states that did not lock down have the worst outbreaks? The claim hinges entirely on a trivial discovery. Some clever someone discovered that if you reflow data by cases per million instead of deaths per million, you get an opposite result. The reasons: 1) when the Northeast experienced the height of the pandemic, there was very little testing going on, so the “outbreak” was not documented even as deaths grew and grew, 2) by the time the virus reached the Midwest, tests were widely available, 3) the testing mania grew and grew to the point that the non-vulnerable are being tested like crazy, generating high positives in small-population areas.
By focusing on the word “outbreak,” the Times can cleverly obscure the difference between a positive PCR result (including many false positive and perhaps half or more asymptomatic cases) and a severe outcome from catching the virus. In other words, the Times has documented an “outbreak” of mostly non-sick people in low-population areas.
There are hundreds of ways to look at Covid-19 data. The Times picked the one metric – the least valuable one for actually discerning whether and to what extent people are sick – in order to generate the result that they wanted, namely that open states look as bad as possible. The result is a chart that massively misrepresents any existing reality. It makes the worst states look great and the best ones look terrible. The visual alone is constructed to make it looks as if open states are bleeding uncontrollably.
How many readers will even know this? Very few, I suspect. What’s more amazing is that the Times itself already debunked the entire “casedemic” back in September:
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.
Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time….
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
All of which makes one wonder what precisely is going on in this relationship between cases and severe outcomes. The Covid Tracking Project generates the following chart. Cases are in blue while deaths are in red.
Despite this story and these data, the graphic artists at the Times got to work generating a highly misleading presentation that leads to one conclusion: more lockdowns.
(My colleague Phil Magness has noted further methodological problems even within the framework that the Times uses but I will let him write about that later.)
Let’s finally deal with Salon’s attack on Great Barrington Declaration co-creator Jayanta Bhattacharya. Here is a piece that made the following claim of the infection fatality rate: “the accepted figure of 2-3 percent or higher.” That’s an astonishing number, and basically nuts: 10 million people will die in the US alone.
Here is what the CDC says concerning the wildly disparate risk factors based on age:
These data are not inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s suggestion that the infection fatality rate for people under 70 years of age is closer to 0.05%.
The article further claims that “herd immunity may not even be possible for COVID-19 given that infection appears to only confer transient immunity.” And yet, the New York Times just wrote that:
How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.
Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
How is it possible for people to make rational decisions with this kind of journalism going on? Truly, sometimes it seems like the world has been driven insane by an astonishing blizzard of false information. Just last week, an entire state in Australia shut down completely – putting all its citizens under house arrest – due to a false report of a case in a pizza restaurant. One person lied and the whole world fell apart.
Meanwhile, serious science is appearing daily showing that there is no relationship at all, and never has been, between lockdowns and lives saved. This study looks at all factors related to Covid death and finds plenty of relationship between age and health but absolutely none with lockdown stringency. “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate,” says the study, echoing a conclusion of dozens of other studies since as early as March.
It’s all become too much. The world is being seriously misled by major media organs. The politicians are continuing to panic and impose draconian controls, fully nine months into this, despite mountains of evidence of the real harm the lockdowns are causing everyone. If you haven’t lost faith in politicians and major media at this point, you have paid no attention to what they have been doing for the better part of this catastrophic year.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Canada’s Trudeau calls Great Reset a CONSPIRACY THEORY after video of him promoting the globalist initiative went viral
RT | November 21, 2020
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who brought an avalanche of attention to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ when a video of him talking about the plan surfaced earlier this week, now says it’s a “conspiracy theory.”
Asked at a press conference Friday about concerns raised by conservative lawmakers about his use of the term ‘Great Reset’, Trudeau said, “We’re in a time of anxiety, where people are looking for reasons for things that are happening to him, the difficult moments we’re in. It’s nice to be able to find someone to blame, something to point to, something to get mad at.
“We’re seeing a lot of people fall prey to disinformation. If conservative MPs and others want to start talking about conspiracy theories, well, that’s their choice. I’m going to stay focused on helping Canadians get through this, on learning lessons from this pandemic, and making sure that the world we leave to our kids is even better than the world we inherited from our parents.”
The statement came just six days after a video of Trudeau addressing the United Nations remotely in September came to light, triggering a surge in Google searches for ‘Great Reset’ and sparking viral social media reaction to his comments.
“This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset,” Trudeau said. “This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.”
Opposition-party lawmakers, such as Pierre Poilievre, called attention to the video and posted a petition to stop the Great Reset. “Canadians must fight back against global elites preying on the fears and desperation of people to impose their power grab,” Poilievre said.
It’s easy to see how observers would infer that Trudeau’s comments reflect an international effort to capitalize on the Covid-19 pandemic to impose globalist economic policies. The World Economic Forum has openly promoted the Great Reset and championed using it to avert an economic collapse resulting from the pandemic.
Trudeau also referred in his UN address to “building back better,” echoing Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign slogan. “Building back better means giving the support to the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 agenda of Sustainable Development and the SDGs,” he said.
Mainstream media outlets put their spin on reaction to Trudeau’s comments, such as AFP saying the video was being used to justify a “baseless conspiracy theory” about global elites using the Covid-19 crisis to bypass democracy.” The Toronto Star also referred to “baseless conspiracy theories.”
Trudeau’s comments on Friday provided another opportunity to try to stamp out concerns that the prime minister meant what he said when he called the pandemic “a chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems.” The Huffington Post used a straw man to paint the reactions as absurd, saying, “No, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not engineer the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Royal Canadian Air Force veteran Rex Glacer tweeted that the media was trying to “cover up” for Trudeau. “Seeing things that aren’t there? Like Trudeau on video talking about the Great Reset the entire world has now seen?”
Former National Hockey League star Theo Fleury reacted to Trudeau appearing to directly contradict his own comments, saying, “He’s full of s***.” Other observers agreed, calling Trudeau’s latest comments “gaslighting.” One Twitter user quipped, “He now calls it the ‘Great Turn it Off and Turn it Back On.’”
Snopes: ‘Misleading’ to Correctly Point Out Biden’s Cancer Charity Spent Millions On Salaries, Zero On Research
By Chris Menahan | InformationLiberation | November 18, 2020
The Biden Cancer Initiative spent the majority of the millions it brought in on salaries and zero on research but pointing that out is “misleading,” according to Snopes.
The New York Post exposed Biden’s shady “charity” in an article last week titled, “Tax filings reveal Biden cancer charity spent millions on salaries, zero on research”:
The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.
The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019). https://t.co/bukDnvSGU8
— Corey R. Lewandowski (@CLewandowski_) November 15, 2020
The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.
Simon, a former Pfizer executive and longtime health care lobbyist who headed up the White House’s cancer task force in the Obama administration, saw his salary nearly double from the $224,539 he made in fiscal 2017, tax filings show.
“Sometimes disinformation states the facts correctly but frames them misleadingly,” Snopes’ Bethania Palma said in a “fact-checking” article on Monday.
“Although the charity spent no money on cancer research grants, this fact is misleadingly framed in that the Biden Cancer Initiative wasn’t a grant-giving organization,” Snopes said.
Though Snopes acknowledged the “charity” spent over $3 million on salaries, they failed to mention that was the majority of the $4,809,619 total they took in. They also failed to mention that Simon was a longtime health care lobbyist.
Snopes reported that Simon told them the organization was dedicated to “creating collaborations among companies, universities, nonprofits, patient groups, researchers, and the government” and their mission “was to work with patients from the bottom up to make things change.”
Sounds legit!
Joe Biden: I Do Not Want a National Shutdown; I Just Want a National Shutdown.
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | November 20, 2020
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden declared that he would be ready and willing as president to follow the recommendation of scientists to shut down the country in the name of countering coronavirus. Then, on Thursday, Biden insisted he would not, as president, impose a national shutdown.
But, it turns out Biden, in his Thursday comments, was just playing a word game. He defined “shutdown” such that it describes something no government has undertaken in the name of countering coronavirus and something very different from what most people understand the term “shutdown” to mean in this context. Then Biden proceeded to describe the actions he wants to take that fall right in line with shutdowns governments have imposed and with what people generally understand as a coronavirus-related shutdown.
On Thursday, when a reporter had just begun asking a question by restating Biden’s earlier declaration about shutting down the country, Biden interrupted, insisting that his previous declaration was just a hypothetical. He then stated:
I am not gonna shut down the economy, period. I am gonna shut down the virus. That’s what I’m gonna shut down. I’ll say it again: No national shutdown; no national shutdown.
That sounds like a rather emphatic 360 reversal from Biden, except that talk of “gonna shut down the virus” instead of shutting down the economy sounds like the use of a euphemism to paper over an actual national shutdown. Think of it like America’s “war on drugs.” The war is really on people who are surveilled, searched, arrested, imprisoned, and otherwise acted upon harshly by government. Yet, politicians can claim the war is on drugs, not people.
Biden then proceeded, in his comments interrupting the reporter’s question, to discuss his plan for a national shutdown, all the while stating that it would not be a national shutdown:
[E]very region, every area, every community can be different and so there’s no circumstance which I can see that would require total national shutdown. I think that would be counterproductive. But, there are constraints in which the degree to which businesses can be open. For example, it’s one thing to say that you can have, in a state where the infection rate is not as high, you can have a gymnasium open. It’s another thing to say it can only be open four hours a day with X number of people. The church I go to — my Catholic church — they don’t allow more than 40 percent of the people to come into the church. Those are rational decisions. It’s not shutting down everything. It’s calibrating based on what the threat is.
Biden declares he opposes a “total” shutdown where the government shuts down “everything.” The fact is that no local, state, or national government in the world has imposed such a shutdown. While shutdowns in America and across the world have imposed major restraints on economic activities and people’s freedom of movement, they have never shut down everything. For example, people have not been required to starve to death in their homes. Grocery stores have remained open. Also remaining open, in many cases, were restaurants for drive through, take out, and delivery. In shutdowns, restrictions were placed on these and other businesses deemed “essential” by government, but they were not shut down. Similarly, shutdowns across the world have imposed extreme mandates on what people do and where people may go, but such restrictions have never been “total.”
Shutdowns in the name of countering coronavirus have been largely defined by governments taking it upon themselves to determine what businesses can be open and to dictate how businesses allowed to remain open can operate. Shutdowns also tend to come with various other government rules including prohibiting the assembling of more than a certain number of people, mandating mask wearing, and imposing limitations on people’s activities outside of home.
Biden on Thursday just said he does not intend to impose a “straw man” national shutdown — a type of action nobody is talking about and that has not been imposed by any governments — and then proceeded to describe how he desires to implement exactly what in common parlance would be called a national shutdown. When Biden says he or the United States government should decide, based on looking at coronavirus information, whether any particular gym in America may be open and, if it is decided the gym is allowed to be open, how many hours a day the gym is allowed to operate and how many people are allowed to be in it, he is saying he supports a national shutdown.
In shutdowns, some stores are closed entirely. Others have mandates placed on them, such as occupancy and hours limits. These are exactly the kind of restraints on businesses that Biden says he wants to impose while claiming he opposes a national shutdown. To us Biden’s language, though he denies it, Biden is in fact supporting a national shutdown, “period.”
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
No, Climate Change Is Not Eliminating Thanksgiving Cranberry Sauce
By James Taylor | ClimateRealism | November 19, 2020
The Washington Post published an article yesterday claiming climate change is devastating Massachusetts cranberry production and threatening to eliminate America’s Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. In related news, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting a record 2020 Massachusetts cranberry crop.
The Washington Post article is titled, “How Climate Change Is Complicating a Thanksgiving Staple.” The subtitle is, “Heatwave, drought, lack of winter ice are taking a toll on a quintessential Massachusetts crop.” In the article, the Post quotes Bay Staters voicing their subjective feelings that climate change is making cranberry farming harder. The article is littered with subheads like, “The fight to save a small fruit.” The article, however, presents no objective data to support the claims. That struck us at Climate Realism as odd, considering objective cranberry data is available for Massachusetts and America as a whole.
Let’s take a look at objective cranberry facts:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agriculture Statistics Service estimates record Massachusetts cranberry production in 2020. This directly contradicts the message of the Washington Post article, which likely explains why the Washington Post chose not to include any data in its article. USDA also estimates strong cranberry production in Wisconsin this year. Wisconsin and Massachusetts are the two leading states for cranberry production.
Cranberry production in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and the rest of the United States has been so strong in recent years that, according to the Wisconsin State Farmer news site, “Facing a continued glut of cranberries and depressed prices, in 2017 the cranberry industry asked federal officials in 2017 to take unusual steps aimed at reducing production.”
“The industry’s U.S. Cranberry Marketing Committee asked the USDA to cap the amount of cranberries grown in 2018 at 75% of the normal crop. The committee also has asked the USDA to have cranberry companies withhold 15% of the 2017 crop from the marketplace,” the State Farmer reported.
The chart below, published by National Geographic, documents and illustrates the consistent, long-term growth in cranberry production. The chart ends with the year 2018, but that trend will continue with the estimated 2020 record crop production.
Ultimately, yesterday’s Washington Post article is merely the latest example of a nefarious strategy executed by climate activists and their corporate media allies. Their dishonest tactic is to identify an upcoming holiday or something that people really love, and then claim that global warming is destroying it, whether or not there is any evidence, truth, or basis for the alarmist claim.
New footage reveals Netflix faked walrus climate deaths
By Susan Crockford | Polar Bear Science | November 19, 2020
Netflix faked ‘Our Planet’ walrus deaths in order to blame them on climate change – polar bears actually were the cause of walrus falling to their deaths from a Siberian cliff, independent video evidence from Russia shows.
A new video published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation on this new evidence.
Press release 16 November 2020 from the Global Warming Policy Foundation:
London, 19 November: In a GWPF video released today, Dr. Susan Crockford, a Canadian wildlife expert, provides new evidence that the 2019 Netflix documentary film series, ‘Our Planet’, withheld facts behind the controversial walrus story it promoted as evidence of climate change.
If there was ever any doubt that polar bears, not climate change, were the cause of walrus falling to their deaths from a rocky cliff in Siberia a few years ago, new evidence presented here seals the deal: a Russian photographer has released independent video of the event that clearly shows polar bears driving walrus over the cliff to their deaths.
In 2019, a sequence in the Netflix documentary ‘Our Planet’ showed a highly disturbing piece of footage of several walrus bouncing off sharp rocks as they fell from a high cliff to their deaths. It transpired this event happened in late September 2017 at a well-known walrus haulout at Cape Schmidt on the Chukchi Sea.
Narrator Sir David Attenborough blamed the tragedy on climate change, insisting that lack of summer sea ice due to climate change was to blame for the walrus falling to their deaths without provocation. A few months later, however, using some of the same walrus footage, Attenborough’s BBC series called ‘Seven Worlds, One Planet’ featured a number of polar bears driving walrus off the very same cliff. It was damning evidence that the ‘Our Planet’ account of walrus deaths had been a false narrative constructed to elicit an emotional response from the public.
New independent video footage of the same event shot by Russian photographer Yevgeny Basov corroborates the BBC evidence that polar bears drove the walrus over the cliff. Basov is a friend of Netflix ‘science advisor’ Anatoly Kochnev and was apparently invited to observe the commercial filming.
Like the original Netflix footage, this scene is not for the faint of heart. It captures a raw but natural encounter between predator and prey. Walrus hauling out on land during the summer are natural events that happen even when sea ice is available. Polar bears are known to stalk such herds until they stampede, leaving the weak or unwary crushed in their wake. Cliffs are not essential to this polar bear hunting strategy but are especially efficient.
This brutal film footage of nature in action is not evidence of climate change or species on the brink of extinction. It does prove, however, that the walrus narrative promoted by Sir David Attenborough in the Netflix documentary ‘Our Planet’ is a manipulative sham with no resemblance to reality.
My video below published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
Although the location is not specified in the original Russian video, by Russian photographer Yevgeny Basov, entitled simply ‘Walruses and polar bears of Chukotka’ (posted 17 May 2020, see below), it is clear that the location shown early in the film footage (up to the 4:00 mark) is of the cliff and walrus haulout at Cape Schmidt, which the author described in a photo essay published in November 2017 here.
See also:
The truth about Attenborough’s falling walruses (below):
Falling Walrus: Attenborough Tacitly Admits Netflix Deception (below)
In Shocking Reversal, Wayne County Election Board Republicans Rescind Certifications; Claim Family Threatened
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/19/2020
In a stunning development out of Wayne County, Michigan – two GOP members of the Board of Canvassers have rescinded their certifications of the Nov. 3 vote, claiming they were bullied into approving the election results in the state’s most populous county, which includes Detroit and surrounding areas.
Their initial refusal to vote placed the Board in a 2-2 deadlock, putting in jeopardy the state’s ability to certify Joe Biden’s win. Hours later, the two flip-flopped and agreed to certify. Now, they’re taking it back.
“I rescind my prior vote to certify Wayne County elections,” wrote Monica Palmer in a sworn affidavit, who along with fellow GOP board member William C. Hartmann refused to certify the election on Tuesday. The two fell under intense pressure from the left – with Palmer claiming that her family was threatened (via Just The News ). The two were also doxxed over social media.
“The comments made accusations of racism and threatened me and members of my family,” continues Palmer’s affidavit, adding: “The Wayne County election had serious process flaws which deserve investigation. I continue to ask for information to assure Wayne County voters that these elections were conducted fairly and accurately. Despite repeated requests I have not received the requisite information and believe an additional 10 days of canvas by the State Board of canvassers will help provide the information necessary.”
Hartmann, in a similar affidavit, wrote “I voted not to certify, and I still believe this vote should not be certified.” He added that he and Palmer “were berated and ridiculed by members of the public and other Board members.”
“The public ostracism continued for hours…” he continued – next describing how he was told by Wayne County attorney, Janet Anderson-Davis, that “discrepancies [in the vote] were not a reason to reject the certification,“ and that he only voted to certify “based on her explicit legal guidance.”
“Later that evening, I was enticed to agree to certify based on a promise that a full and independent audit would take place,” he said – only to learn on Wednesday that state officials had reneged or would otherwise not honor the audit.
Affidavit of William Hartmann – interesting question on pg4 about ‘private monies directing local officials’ https://t.co/Z24g9jRNMd pic.twitter.com/cqDNj2XDEw
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 19, 2020
As JustTheNews’ John Solomon notes, “It was not immediately clear whether the Tuesday night compromise was binding or could be changed, or whether the two members’ decision to announce their rescinded votes would stop Michigan state officials from proceeding to name electors.”
US security agency accused of spying on European private companies
By Lucas Leiroz | November 18, 2020
A new cyber espionage scandal involving American intelligence agencies is being revealed – this time in Europe. Government ministries and Danish private companies were targets of US espionage, according to a recent report by an anonymous informer. The US National Security Agency (NSA) appears to have used top-secret schemes to allegedly spy Danish and other Scandinavian ministries and private companies. Details of such activities were revealed in a recent Danish Radio’s article, in which the alleged anonymous informer is referred to as an agent of the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE). Operations would have started around 2015.
Among many points, the report denounced illegal activities promoted by American intelligence in collaboration with various sectors of Danish intelligence itself, which were conspiring against the interests of their own country by extracting information from Danish internet cables and passing it on to external agents. Among several other illegal operations, the report also revealed the espionage against the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Economy of Denmark, as well as neighboring and allied countries, such as Norway and Sweden, indicating that the limit of such activities is much higher than mere surveillance over Denmark, expanding across a major part of the European continent. According to information contained in the report, the NSA obtained access to fiber optic cables and a data center on the island of Amager, south of Copenhagen. From then on, data traffic from the Netherlands, Norway, France and Germany, and political institutions in Denmark were constantly monitored, remaining under full surveillance by US agents.
In addition, it was mentioned that the NSA wanted to obtain more information about the activities of private companies in the defense and military industry, especially Terma, a major Danish company based in Aarhus that stands out internationally in the aerospace industry. According to information in the report, the US interest would have arisen from the moment that the Danish State decided to buy multibillion-dollar fighters to replace its F-16 fleet. At the beginning of the negotiations, Terma and the Swedish company Saab were competing for a prominent position before the Danish government, but after many debates and long controversies the government’s choice was to purchase a new fleet of dozens of American F-35 fighters. Apparently, constant surveillance and data stealing were key points for Washington to take advantage of European companies during the negotiations.
The anonymous informant said he had tried to warn of the dangers of espionage on several previous occasions, but was only successful when he turned to the Danish Defense Intelligence Service supervisor, whom he accused of having failed to follow or investigate the various espionage reports. On a later occasion, the current Danish defense minister, Trine Bramsen, announced the resignation of five high-ranking agents of the national secret service. So far, the information is not clear due to all the precautions that encompass such issues, but everything indicates that the dismissals occurred due to the spying allegations – however, these were carried out at a late time, indicating a long delay in acting against the internal sabotage.
In fact, espionage against European private companies is absolutely harmful to the interests of these nations, being an activity as dangerous as the espionage of official government agencies – which has also been occurring frequently. The authorities that were supposed to guarantee the security of Danish companies helped to undermine the country’s interests as they were ineffective in combating data theft schemes and enabled, among other things, commercial advantages for Washington in negotiations that prioritized the Danish private market. Still, it is necessary to take into account that during the leak of confidential information by anonymous informants it is very common that only a portion of the real information is revealed, exposing an “outer layer” of the content, but preserving the silence about more compromising data. This leads us to speculate to what extent American espionage is actually at work in Europe – certainly, the information contained in the anonymous informant’s report is only a small part of what is actually known on the subject.
The case has already begun to generate outrage in neighboring countries. Norwegian lawmaker Freddy Ovstegard said he believes Norway is also being spied on by the US, considering that this is a common practice of Washington with its own allied countries. The tendency is for these reactions to spread more and more and for a wave of aversion to Washington and its surveillance and espionage policies to grow across the European continent. A possible scenario is the gradual separation between the US and the EU, considering that the issue directly affects the interests of multibillionaire private companies, going far beyond the relations between states. If such companies fail to cooperate with the governments of their own countries and start selling military equipment to enemy nations, the result will be absolutely catastrophic – Europeans will certainly try to avoid this.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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