The climate scaremongers: Health chief’s nonsensical warning of doom
By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | November 4, 2022
We are used to silly, irresponsible climate scare stories from the BBC and the papers, but when they come from the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency it is quite another matter.
According to the Guardian last week: ‘The climate crisis poses a “significant and growing threat” to health in the UK, the country’s most senior public health expert has warned.
‘Professor Dame Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, said there was a common misconception that a warmer climate would bring net health benefits due to milder winters. But the climate emergency would bring far wider-reaching health impacts, she said, with food security, flooding and mosquito-borne diseases posing threats.
‘Referring to the recent floods in Pakistan, Harries said the UK needed to build resilience to protect the population from the health impacts of extreme weather events. “Colleagues from Pakistan . . . are suffering from the impacts of flooding. They are dealing with stagnant water, higher risks of sewage overflowing into publicly accessible water spaces,” she said. “We are seeing some of the things that could be happening in the UK”.’
She went on to repeat the fake claims that this summer’s heatwave had killed 2,800 people, a claim already exposed as a sham on TCW. And she warned us that we would have to stay indoors in the middle of the day in summer, and have longer summer holidays for schools. She even ridiculously claimed that we would soon have outbreaks of dengue fever.
The comparison with Pakistan is utterly absurd, and there’s no evidence that summers in England are getting wetter, or for that matter drier.
Indeed, even her claim that we would soon be having Mediterranean summers is just as ridiculous. The simple fact is that even this summer was not as hot as 1976. The average summer temperature may have increased, as cold summers become less frequent, but even with the wall-to-wall sunshine we had this year, summers show no sign of breaking through that 16C barrier:
By contrast, average summer temperatures in the south of France are typically six or seven degrees higher.
Harries’s comments about dengue are particularly misleading. The spread of dengue globally has not been because of climate change, as one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases, Professor Duane Gubler, has explained.
According to him, the principal drivers are urbanisation, globalisation and lack of effective mosquito control. The mosquitoes which carry the virus thrive in urban habitats, where dengue quickly spreads, while air travel provides the ideal mechanism for transport of viruses to new cities, regions and continents. The result, he says, is epidemic dengue.
The World Health Organisation also notes that the mosquito which has brought the dengue virus to Europe is actually adapted to cold weather: ‘Aedes albopictus, a secondary dengue vector in Asia, has spread to North America and more than 25 countries in the European Region, largely due to the international trade in used tyres (a breeding habitat) and other goods (e.g. lucky bamboo). Aedes albopictus is highly adaptive and, therefore, can survive in cooler temperate regions of Europe.’
Britain is no stranger to mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue. Large epidemics of dengue have been recorded here and elsewhere in Europe since the 18th century. One massive epidemic, estimated at one million cases with at least 1,000 deaths, occurred in Greece in 1927-28. Climate change has nothing to do with the spread of dengue.
And what about this ‘food security’ Harries is waffling on about? Agricultural output has been rising since the BSE scare of the 1990s:
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
If the professor is worried about Britain’s food security, maybe she should be objecting to the government’s plans to rewild large swathes of our countryside, to attack the dairy and meat industry and to build solar farms on prime agricultural land.
BBC’s Arctic warming trick
ACCORDING to a BBC report, Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago deep inside the Arctic Circle, is heating at six times the global average. (The BBC and Guardian now routinely call it ‘heating’ rather than ‘warming’, though I don’t think the Svalbarders would call average annual temperatures of 1C ‘hot’!)
The report, Svalbard: The race to save the fastest-warming place on Earth, states: ‘Svalbard is home to the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, Longyearbyen, which is estimated to be heating at six times the global average. So what is being done to save it?
‘Svalbard’s church is a blood-red wooden building with bright white trim – the most northerly place of worship in the world. Its priest, Siv Limstrand, has been here for only three years but is shocked by the impact of climate change she has witnessed in that time. “Every Sunday when we gather for worship, a part of our intercessions is always about climate change and its threats,” explains Limstrand. “We know that the clock is ticking.”
‘You feel on borrowed time here in what successive scientific studies have found is the fastest-warming place on Earth. Experts from the Norwegian Polar Institute are among those who calculate it is heating six times faster than the global average. The consensus is that the temperature in Svalbard has jumped 4C in the past 50 years. Wildlife and human life are now in a struggle to survive. This is why Limstrand’s congregation is praying for help.’
Obviously a priest who has been there three years is an expert on Svalbard’s climate!
But as this is the BBC, they tell you only half the story. In line with most of the Arctic, Svalbard was virtually as warm as now in the 1930s and 40s, as the chart for Bjoernoeya (Bear Island) shows:
https://www.ecad.eu/indicesextremes/customquerytimeseriesplots.php
In between, as the chart highlights, Svalbard went through a drastic cooling episode in the 1960s and 70s. It is from this unusually cold base period that the BBC claim their 4C of warming. That extreme cold interval affected much of the Arctic, and had a particularly catastrophic effect on countries like Iceland. Trausti Jonsson, senior researcher at the Iceland Met Office, lived through those times and said this:
‘In 1965 there was a real and very sudden climatic change in Iceland (deterioration). It was larger in the north than in the south and affected both the agriculture and fishing – and therefore also the whole of society with soaring unemployment rates and a 50 per cent devaluation of the local currency,’
Going further back in time, ice core studies have shown that Svalbard was as warm as now, if not warmer, in the 1300s, before temperatures plunged in the Little Ice Age. The 1800s were the coldest period of the lot in the last 1,000 years.
There is nothing unprecedented or unusual about Svalbard’s climate nowadays. But the BBC would rather the inhabitants return to the freezing days of the 1960s!
How the US regime attempts to control public perception of its aid to Ukraine
By Scott Ritter | RT | November 5, 2022
NBC News has reported that, according to four people familiar with the incident, a phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, turned testy after the Ukrainian leader pressed Biden for more assistance.
On June 15, Biden called Zelensky to inform him of the recent release of some $1 billion in assistance (this included the drawdown of arms and equipment from US Department of Defense inventories valued at $350 million, and $650 million in additional assistance under the department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative). This type of person-to-person communication had become commonplace since Russia’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022, with Biden informing Zelensky of each major assistance allocation in a program that had, as of June 15, seen the dispatch of some $5.6 billion in American military aid.
This time, however, rather than thank the US president, as had been the previous practice, Zelensky proceeded to ask for more assistance, citing specific requests for equipment that had not been included in the June allocation of aid. At this point, NBC’s sources say, Biden lost his temper. “The American people were being quite generous, and his administration and the US military were working hard to help Ukraine, he said, raising his voice, and Zelensky could show a little more gratitude,” the NBC story reports.
According to NBC, the source of Biden’s anger went beyond the lack of gratitude shown by Zelensky (NBC reports that the two leaders have since warmed to one another), but rather the growing realization on the part of the Biden White House that support for the blank check being written for Ukraine’s war effort is waning among members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. With the Republicans expected to retake control of the House of Representatives and positioned to do the same in the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections, the Biden administration appears poised to try to squeeze out another $40-60 billion in aid during the lame duck session between the election and when the present term of Congress expires next January. It is expected that this new aid package will be challenged by the Republicans, who will seek to have its consideration postponed until the new Republican-controlled Congress is sworn in.
Shortly before NBC News broke the story of the contentious Biden-Zelensky phone call, The New Yorker ran a glowing review of the state of US-Ukrainian military cooperation. Entitled ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine, the piece, authored by Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer for the magazine, provides an expansive and yet intimate look at the complex interaction between the US and Ukraine about not only the provision of military equipment, but also the active cooperation between US and Ukrainian military and intelligence officials concerning the actual conduct of the conflict, including the provision of targeting data in support of US-provided artillery systems such as the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.
Its two main messages can be summarized as follows: first, American weapons are helping Ukraine stand up to Russia and showing the world Putin can be defeated, and second, the US is taking every care not to cross any lines that would escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow.
Yaffa is an accomplished writer on Russian affairs. His most recent book, ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’, has won several prizes, and he has published numerous articles in The New Yorker about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But even this extensive journalistic record doesn’t prepare one for the scope and scale of the sources Yaffa was able to draw upon in writing his most recent article. It is a ‘who’s who’ of US and Ukrainian officialdom, both named and unnamed, all of whom are well positioned to provide Yaffa with the kind of inside information that makes his article so attractive, both from an informational aspect, and readability.
On the Ukrainian side, Yaffa interviewed Aleksey Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister; Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky; Aleksey Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council; and “a senior Ukrainian military official” close to the commander in chief of the military, Valery Zaluzhny. Ukrainian officials habitually interact with Western journalists as part of their effort to shape the narrative about the ongoing conflict with Russia. The surprise isn’t that Yaffa was able to interview these individuals, but rather what they were willing to open up about – the hitherto obscure details of the sensitive cooperation between the US and Ukraine in the actual conduct of the conflict.
The US is very controlling about the release of information about classified cooperation with other nations. This reticence to be transparent extends not only to the US officials involved, but also to the foreign nationals participating in the secret work. In short, there is no way the three Ukrainians would have agreed to sit down and talk to Yaffa about these issues unless their participation had been green-lighted by the Biden administration beforehand.
The extent to which the Biden administration was behind the decision to cooperate with Yaffa on this story becomes clear upon closer examination of the anonymous sources drawn upon for the article. “A Biden administration official involved in Ukraine policy”; “a senior official at the Defense Department”; “a person familiar with Biden White House discussions of Ukraine”; “an administration official”; “a senior US official”; “a US military official” close to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley; “a senior Biden administration official”; and “a senior US intelligence official.”
Numerous other sources, both named and unnamed, were also interviewed by Yaffa.
Anyone with any experience with sensitive national security activities knows that there are two hard-fast truths when it comes to such activities – they are highly classified and compartmentalized, and any unauthorized release of information pertaining to such activities is a serious violation of the law, subject to prosecution and imprisonment for anyone caught leaking such information to the press.
Accordingly, either every source cited by Yaffa had been simultaneously overcome with a Lemming-like desire to jump off a figurative cliff, risking losing their careers and going to prison in order to help the young New Yorker contributing writer pull off the scoop of a lifetime, or the Yaffa article was part and parcel of a Biden administration information operation designed to inject a positive narrative about US-Ukrainian military relations into the mainstream discussion on Ukraine in a concerted effort to shape public perception in the lead-up to the mid-term elections.
My money is on the latter.
Good journalism is all about ‘bottom-up’ reporting, where a reporter conceives a story and then runs it to the ground by seeking out interviews with relevant sources. Stenography is about having a story spoon fed to you by sources for the purpose of serving an agenda that has nothing to do with the pursuit of fact-based truth, but rather shaping public opinion about a matter of importance.
Yaffa’s ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine’ is a clever piece of government-dictated stenography disguised as journalism and should be treated as such by all who read it.
Russia Says “Top Priority” Is To Avoid Nuclear Clash, Reiterates Purely Defensive Use
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 2, 2022
Russia on Wednesday warned that the world’s “top priority” should be the nuclear-armed super powers avoiding confrontation at all costs or else this would lead to “catastrophic consequences.”
“We are firmly convinced that in the current difficult and turbulent situation — a consequence of irresponsible and shameless actions aimed at undermining our national security — the top priority is to prevent any military clash of nuclear powers,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.
While not naming its chief nuclear-armed rivals the United States or the United Kingdom specifically, the Kremlin called on all other nuclear states to “abandon dangerous attempts to infringe on each other’s vital interests.”
The statement reiterated a key tenet of Russia’s official nuclear doctrine, saying, “Russia is strictly and consistently guided by the tenet that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It reemphasized a nuclear doctrine that is “purely defensive in nature” – which only allows deployment of nuclear arms “when the very existence of our state is threatened.”
In a statement early last month, President Joe Biden expressed that he doesn’t think Russia’s Vladimir Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. “Well, I don’t think he will,” Biden previously said in a CNN interview. “But I think that it’s irresponsible for him to talk about it.”
Also on Wednesday The New York Times has published some hugely significant claims…
Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
President Vladimir V. Putin was not a part of the conversations, which were held against the backdrop of Russia’s intensifying nuclear rhetoric and battlefield setbacks.
But the fact that senior Russian military leaders were even having the discussions alarmed the Biden administration because it showed how frustrated Russian generals were about their failures on the ground, and suggests that Mr. Putin’s veiled threats to use nuclear weapons might not just be words.
According to follow-up reporting in CNN, the alleged Kremlin discussion among top officials of using tactical nukes against Ukraine is based on a US intelligence assessment.
But importantly, CNN cites that there remain dissenting opinions within the US intelligence community. CNN’s reporting begins, “Russian military officials have discussed how and under what conditions Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a US intelligence assessment described to CNN by multiple sources who have read it.”
“The assessment, drafted by the National Intelligence Council, is not a high confidence product and is not raw intelligence but rather analysis, multiple people who have read it told CNN,” the report continues, before emphasizing: “For that reason, some officials believe the conversations reflected in the document may have been taken out of context, and do not necessarily indicate that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”
It is a significant and eye-brow raising moment when CNN spotlights the likelihood of intelligence ‘cherry picking’ in a story which relates to Russia, which indeed casts serious doubt on the original NYT Times reporting and claims by unnamed US intelligence officials.
On The Worship Of Sacred Cows
The strange death of real journalism
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 1, 2022
One of the extraordinary things about the past few years is the extent to which data which very obviously suggests one thing has been reinterpreted to suggest something else, merely to fit the “approved” narrative.
For no subject is this more apparent than that of the miracle covid injections. As a society we strained to attribute as many deaths as possible to “covid” — however unlikely they seemed to be connected. When discussing the vaccines, however, many defenders of the covid-cult seem willing and able to twist themselves into ludicrous contortions in an attempt to explain away any observations which don’t fully support the “safe and effective” (and necessary) official narrative.
This week has actually seen a flurry of such articles, of which the three below are just a selection.
Firstly, Canadian TV News excitedly reported on a study published in JAMA which found that the more severe the symptoms after mRNA vaccination, the higher the antibody levels generated.
This is, of course no surprise whatsoever, though is of questionable relevance given that even the CDC has said that there are “no correlates of protection” in terms of antibody levels. This is amply illustrated by the fact that despite extremely high Spike protein antibody levels in the population, seasonal waves of covid infections still appear to come and go in highly vaccinated countries, and triple (or more) vaccinated people still seem to be getting severely ill and even dying from covid.
The authors, all US clinicians or scientists, conclude their paper thus:
“In conclusion, these findings support reframing post vaccination symptoms as signals of vaccine effectiveness and reinforce guidelines for vaccine boosters in older adults.”
So, despite a complete lack of evidence for the clinical relevance of the raised antibody levels, they’re essentially saying “tell them that the more ill you are, the better it is working”.
Aside from the dubious ethics of this approach given the lack of supportive evidence of clinical relevance, this would of course discourage recipients from reporting adverse events, further compromising proper safety surveillance and signal detection in relation to these products, not that regulators appear to have actually performed any such useful analysis.
Lest those NOT experiencing side-effects be concerned about a lack of protection, CTVNews was of course happy to reassure them, apparently unaware of the contradiction with their main “message”, stating that:
But even though some people may have small, localized side effects or no symptoms at all, the vaccine still elicits robust immune responses in them too. Nearly all study participants exhibited a positive antibody response after completing a two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.
Our second example of delusional thinking this week is from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Their staff writer Sarah Knapton, who has fairly reliably been against the lockdowns and other restrictions, still cannot bring herself to question the “vaccine is our saviour” story, as evidenced in this bizarre piece, claiming, “Covid vaccines appear to work better for active people… suggesting that hard lockdowns were counterproductive.”
It is of course well known that fit and healthy and regularly active people were always at much lower risk from covid and stopping people exercising during lockdowns was just one of the more ridiculous features of such policies.
Hence it is difficult to see why this observation by a researcher in South Africa should come as a surprise to anyone:
“In terms of policy, retrospectively we can say those hard lockdowns were counterproductive from an immune point of view, and trying to facilitate exercise is beneficial.”
The paper’s authors, writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, conclude that:
“Public health messaging should encourage physical activity as a simple, cost-effective way of enhancing vaccine effectiveness to mitigate the risk of severe Covid-19 illness requiring hospital admission.”
So, apparently, the reason exercise works in reducing covid mortality is by “enhancing vaccine effectiveness”? It seems hard to believe that anyone could fail to see the ridiculousness in that conclusion. However, Sarah clearly doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to promote the vaccines, hence, combining her disdain for lockdowns with her cult-like devotion to the vaccines, she gives her piece the title:
Covid vaccine study finding contradicts lockdown rule
Later, she states that:
A new study by South African researchers has found that people who got the most exercise responded better to the vaccine, with fewer ending up in hospital following the jab.
So basically: lockdowns are bad as they reduce vaccine effectiveness.
You really cannot make this stuff up (well, apart from the fact that some people are making this stuff up).
Finally, this week also saw the publication of a major analysis of the waning over time of vaccine efficacy (for both Astrazeneca and Pfizer mRNA products) in the United Kingdom in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
This was a “target trial”, which seeks to emulate a “real” trial by identifying naturally occuring exposure groups. The study is notable for its size, covering 12.9m people.
Here is not the place to delve into the results in detail, except to mention that within the period of the study vaccine efficacy became negative (meaning an increased risk over the unvaccinated) for deaths and hospitalisation within just a few months of injection for all doses except the 2nd dose of the Pfizer product.
The results are summarised here:
The curious reader may ask why they are combining deaths and hospitalizations into a single metric; if there had actually been any reduction specifically in deaths (or the waning for protection against death had been less), the authors would surely have highlighted that.
The next point about this is that when they say the vaccine efficacy remained above zero “throughout” what they mean is “throughout the period observed”, which was stated to be 98 days (although in the graphs the data appears to extend approximately another week or so beyond that).
It can clearly be seen from the graph below that efficacy is tending consistently downwards (as the RR, or relative risk, trends upwards towards 1), and by eye one can estimate that it too would turn negative after around 120 days, or 4 months.
No mention of this is made in the paper.
The final point to make is that in attempting to explain away this phenomenon, the authors claim that:
We believe that the most likely explanation for negative VE/rVE is that vaccination caused recipients to believe they were protected, leading them to change their behaviour in ways that increase their chance of contracting the infection.
Aside from there being no evidence for this assertion (or “belief” as they quite rightly call it), it is to be noted that most of the severe illness is seen within the elderly and frail, and it is hard to imagine these people deciding suddenly to start partying after vaccination.
In fact, a notable feature of the vaccination campaign was that, in the elderly at least, the level of fear and apprehension about the virus appeared to be largely unchanged afterwards.
Moreover, for the authors’ explanation to have any credence, the vaccinees’ confidence would have had to have increased over time since injection, to account for the direction of travel of vaccine efficacy, whereas surely the opposite would seem more likely.
Stop Press:
Sarah Knapton has written a further piece for the Daily Telegraph. The headline and byline are below. The word “vaccine” does not appear anywhere in the article, despite the plethora of published papers now linking the mRNA vaccines to cardiac issues.
The BBC’s Hurricane Unreality Checked
By Paul Homewood |October 26, 2022
I have collaborated with Net Zero Watch to produce this video on hurricanes.
A Tale of Two Pills: Media bias in reporting Ivermectin and ensitrelvir
By Guy Gin | Making (Covid) Waves in Japan | October 21, 2022
Last month, Japanese pharma company Kowa put out a press release of the results of its 1030-person double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) of Ivermectin conducted at 54 institutions in Japan and 2 in Thailand.
Here’s how the results were reported in The Japan Times.
Not effective, you hear! I mean, look at the photo. You don’t get Ivermectin from a pharmacy; you get it from a farmer. Anyway, on to the trial.
A clinical trial was unable to prove the efficacy of the antiparasitic medicine ivermectin against coronavirus variants, according to Japanese drugmaker Kowa Co., which has indicated that it will no longer seek approval for the drug as a COVID-19 treatment.
So this means that not only has IVM not been widely used in Japan (despite what many people outside Japan think) but probably never will be. So what happened? Did the people who took the anti-vaxers’ favourite veterinary medicine all get sick?
In the trial, 1,030 patients with mild COVID-19 were orally administered the drug daily for three days and then compared to others given a placebo.
Ivermectin was found to be safe and few people given the drug developed severe symptoms, Kowa said. But both the group given the drug and the one administered a placebo saw improvements in symptoms, meaning the trial did not show the drug’s efficacy over the placebo as a COVID-19 treatment.
So the reason Kowa was “unable to prove the efficacy” wasn’t because IVM is “not effective”; it was because almost everyone in the placebo group got better quickly too. According to Kowa’s press release, “Both intervention and placebo arms showed milder symptoms around 4 days after the start of administration” and “There were no deaths and hardly any severe cases.”
Although Kowa hasn’t released the full trial details or results, the 0% mortality rate among the 500+ participants in the placebo arm suggests they were mostly at very low risk of severe disease. So the results don’t show IVM was ineffective; they show no medication was necessary for these participants to prevent symptoms worsening or for them to recover quickly.
This a not a new issue in studies on early treatments. Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch noted the same thing in RCTs showing non-significant effects for another “controversial” drug, hydroxychloroquine.
The RCT studies proclaimed supposedly as definitively showing no benefit of HCQ use in outpatients have all involved almost entirely low-risk subjects with virtually no hospitalization or mortality events and are uninformative and irrelevant for bearing upon these risks according to HCQ use in high-risk outpatients.
When tested on larger numbers of people for mortality benefit, IVM often performs a bit better.
Next, let’s compare how the JT reported Kowa’s IVM trial press release with how Reuters reported Shionogi’s press release for its 1821-person RCT of its anti-Covid drug ensitrelvir.
Japan’s Shionogi & Co Ltd said on Wednesday its oral treatment for COVID-19 demonstrated a significant reduction in symptoms compared with a placebo in a Phase III trial in Asia.
The drug, a protease inhibitor known as ensitrelvir, met its primary endpoint in a trial conducted among predominantly vaccinated patients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19, the company said in a statement.
A significant reduction in symptoms! So how many people were kept out of the ICU? Well, the Reuters article didn’t clarify what the main result was, so here it is from Shionogi’s press release.
the median time to resolution of the five COVID-19 symptoms [stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish, and low energy or tiredness] was significantly reduced in those treated with the low dose of ensitrelvir (the dose level submitted for approval in Japan) compared to placebo: 167.9 hours versus 192.2 hours, a statistically significant difference of 24 hours (p=0.04).
Yep, ensitrelvir cleared runny noses 1 day quicker than a placebo. So the media reporting of Shionogi’s results wasn’t dishonest, but it wasn’t exactly candid.
Similar to in Kowa’s IVM trial, no deaths were reported among the 900+ placebo recipients in Shionogi’s trial, which again suggests they were very low risk. So these results give us no idea about whether ensitrelvir will prevent the progression to severe disease in high-risk immunocompromised people, which is what actually matters.
Shionogi also reported that no serious adverse events occurred in the intervention arm. But one problem with not trialing a medication on the type of high-risk people who will actually need it is that the trial probably won’t pick up major safety signals that become clear later.
But as El Gato Malo has said, pharma doesn’t make mistakes in trial design; it makes choices.
Moscow comments on alleged military use of Iranian drones
Samizdat | October 18, 2022
All weapons used by troops have Russian designations, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov has said, reiterating a denial of reports that Moscow was using Iranian-supplied drones against Kiev.
“No, we have no such information. Russian hardware is being used. You know it well. It has Russian designations. All further questions can be addressed to the Defense Ministry,” Peskov said on Tuesday.
American and Ukrainian officials have claimed on many occasions that Russia received various unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) from Iran and was using them in the conflict with Ukraine.
On Monday, multiple drones were spotted flying over the Ukrainian capital Kiev, with troops desperately trying to shoot them down with small arms, according to videos from the scene.
At least one “kamikaze drone” was reportedly hit and crashed into an apartment block, setting off a deadly explosion. A soldier interviewed by Ukrainian television claimed that he was among those who managed to divert the aircraft off its course with gunfire, adding that he later helped rescue people from under the rubble at the crash site.
The mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klitschko, said that Russia attacked the city with 28 drones on Monday morning and that the Ukrainian military managed to intercept “most” of them. He reported a total of five explosions, including the one at the residential building. Other drones apparently reached their intended targets, including energy infrastructure facilities.
The drones, designated Geran-2 in Russia, are allegedly a localized version of the Iranian-made Shahed-136. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed last week that Russia had acquired as many as 2,400 Shahed UAVs, as he asked G7 members to provide more air defense systems.
Last month Ukraine cut diplomatic ties with Iran over the alleged supply of weapons to Russia. Neither Moscow nor Tehran confirmed the purported purchase.
Kiev reportedly urged Israel to ramp up intelligence-sharing in response to Moscow’s alleged deal with Iran. Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Nachman Shai said last Sunday that he supported taking Kiev’s side because of the claimed Iranian involvement.
Submission to Canada’s Public Order Emergency Commission
Fearless Canada | October 16, 2022
As a non-partisan, volunteer activist group, Fearless Canada was present at the beginning and on several other occasions during the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa. As such, many of our members witnessed first-hand what the situation looked like on the ground and how it all began. We took extensive video footage of the events during the first weekend from the moment when truckers were being directed toward Parliament by Ottawa police. We have decided to submit our evaluation of the events as well as our strongly held view that the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act (hereafter referred to as “EMA”) by the Trudeau government was not only inappropriate, but also unlawful and unconstitutional.
We must first unequivocally state that, in our view, the Trudeau government’s decision to invoke the EMA in no way met the legal threshold to do so. The usage of the EMA is reserved for exceptional circumstances in which a serious foreign or existential threat imperils the security of the nation. Such security threats would be typically related to war, as the older, subsequently replaced War Measures Act aimed to address. In no conceivable way could the temporary discomfort or inconvenience borne by Ottawa citizens or businesses justify the use of an Act that is meant to aid the government in protecting the nation against threats of an incalculably larger scale. As such, the purpose of the Commission is not to determine whether the invocation of the EMA served the Trudeau government in its objective to deescalate the so-called “occupation” of Ottawa’s downtown core, but rather to assess whether the legal threshold for its invocation was met.
The Early Days in Ottawa
Our group arrived in Ottawa in the early afternoon of January 28, 2022. The first thing we noticed was Ottawa police directing truckers and their rigs onto Wellington Street towards Parliament. The atmosphere was festive and light despite the frigid weather. As more protesters arrived in Ottawa over the course of the weekend, we would quickly observe that the crowds were both peaceful and diverse. Men, women, and children from all different backgrounds and walks of life gathered in the capital with a common goal. They demanded that the Trudeau government lift measures that, in their view, were both unjustified and discriminatory in nature. As a result of those measures, the majority of protesters in Ottawa were themselves directly impacted in profound and often irreversible ways.
In talking with dozens of truckers and protesters, we learned that many had lost their jobs, connections to loved ones, access to essential services, and much more. While speaking with police officers, we learned that many felt they were unlawfully coerced into taking a COVID vaccine in order to keep their jobs. Our impression on the ground was that the majority of police officers were in fact aligned with the goals of the protest. They, too, wanted to see an immediate end to damaging and ineffective policies that divided our nation along medical lines previously acknowledged as a matter of private and personal concern.
Legacy Media and the Trudeau Government’s Portrayal of the Freedom Convoy
While in Ottawa, our group kept an eye on the news coming out of legacy media outlets such as the CBC, CTV News, and Global News. It became impossible not to notice that a concerted narrative had quickly taken shape to misrepresent the situation and characterize protesters as far-right extremists, racists, antisemites, and more. The unjustified slander of protesters directly conflicted with our experience on the ground. What we saw was a festive and peaceful rally, replete with volunteers offering food and shelter from the cold, routinely cleaning streets and sidewalks, and organizing fun activities for the kids. At no time did we spot a single racist or Nazi in the vast crowds, as was incessantly suggested by both the Liberal government and the mainstream media. From what we could tell, these characterizations were fabricated in order to serve a narrative that aimed to discredit the legitimacy and lawfulness of the protest.
As time went on, the media’s portrayal of the situation continued to unhinge itself from reality. The press published stories about imminent violence, a van loaded with illegal firearms, and more. None of these allegations turned out to be true. Yet, the misrepresentation of the situation had already reached the eyes and ears of Canadians from coast to coast, very few of which witnessed the event themselves. But by then, the damage had already been done, just as it seemed to have been intended.
The Invocation of the EMA
At the moment the Trudeau government invoked the EMA, it must be noted that the protest in Ottawa was already in the process of de-escalation. The protest organizers and their lawyers had already brokered a dismantlement deal with the Ottawa mayor and police services. Truckers were already on their way out of the downtown core and the blockades at two Canadian points of entry had already long-since been dismantled. Yet rather than follow an organized de-escalation plan agreed to by all factions, Ottawa police and the Trudeau government instead opted to escalate the situation by using violence and propaganda against Canadian citizens. The impacts of the invocation of the EMA were profound and unwarranted.
Immediately ensuing the invocation of the EMA, police and governmental authorities froze protesters’ bank accounts and deployed violent anti-riot squads all over the downtown core of Ottawa. Several protesters were injured as police again escalated tensions using all manner of crowd dispersal techniques. In the days following the invocation of the EMA, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland wasted no time in announcing that certain aspects of the EMA would be written into law, granting broad and unconstitutional powers to government without the requisite EMA enacted. It had become clear that the Trudeau government had a predetermined objective in enacting the EMA, one that would grant greater leverage over political dissidents and, more broadly, Canadians that disagreed with its ideology. This in itself represents an egregious misuse of the EMA in order to further a political agenda.
Conclusion
The volunteer activists at Fearless Canada include Canadian scholars, lawyers, professors, small business owners, and artists. We unanimously and unequivocally feel that the Trudeau government’s invocation of the EMA as a response to ongoing protests in Ottawa was both unlawful and unconstitutional. We submit that the government manipulated public opinion by fabricating evidence of unlawful activity in Ottawa and invoked the EMA under false pretenses in order to abet their predetermined agenda. We believe that the evidence overwhelmingly supports our position, and we look forward to seeing all of it brought to light during the Commission’s discovery process.
This statement was authored by the executive of Fearless Canada and endorsed by members.
The statement has been submitted to the Public Order Emergency Commission of Canada, which began public hearings on Thursday, October 13, which will run every weekday until November 25. Live hearings can be viewed here, and True North Centre publishes a recap for each day.
Corona is a Flat Circle
For the third autumn in a row, the German press screeches about overwhelmed hospitals, and there’s no reason to think they’ll ever stop.
eugyppius | October 15, 2022
It’s virus season, and the headlines are already here: Many New Corona Infections: Hospitals Demand Indoor Mask Mandate — Lauterbach Already Hopes for Corona Restrictions — High Covid Incidences: Medical Association Wants Compulsory FFP2 Masks Indoors — Corona: Baden-Württemberg Health Minister Considers Mask Mandate Possible. I could add a dozen more, but you get the idea. It’s the same reheated pablum from last year. Hospital staff have their backs against the wall; a new tide of Corona patients threatens to overwhelm their meagre resources; the Apocalypse threatens if we don’t immediately return to indoor plastic face coverings.
If you look at hospitalisations, though, you’ll have a hard time finding any crisis at all. Here, for example, are hospitalisations for severe acute respiratory infections since 2017, as published last week by the Robert Koch Institut:
The red dot is where we are right now. Admissions are totally in line with the pre-pandemic era. The ICU admissions tell exactly the same story:
Nor is anybody really dying at the moment:
To the extent that there is any crisis at all here, it’s of our own making. Hospital patients with Corona diagnoses have to be treated according to strict isolation protocols, in special wards. These rituals are staff-intensive, and they effectively reduce across-the-board hospital capacity. It’s the same as our quarantine laws, which induce worker shortages by forcing millions of otherwise healthy Germans into isolation whenever they test positive. We could declare a rhinovirus pandemic tomorrow and suffer all the same problems from the common cold, and by the same token we could end all of this ourselves in an instant, by abolishing our foolishness and choosing to ignore SARS-2. Instead, we insist that this virus is dangerous and through our own behaviour we make it so.
The most onerous part of all this, is the inability of the German press to find a new narrative, ask new questions, or to change their reporting in any way at all — despite the totally different behaviour of Omicron and the near-universal levels of immune exposure to SARS-2. I know some of you complain that I repeat the same themes and arguments overmuch, but Germany has descended into some kind of purgatorial alternate reality, where it’s always March 2020, and our hospitals are always on the verge of melting down, and we never have enough information, so we just have to try masking and social distancing and hope for the best. They’re wrong about everything and they just keep telling the same lies over and over.
As the Climate Refuses to Break Down on Cue, the Pseudoscience of ‘Attribution Studies’ Rises Up to Plug the Holes
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 14, 2022
The last few years have seen the climate alarmist industry go all in on ‘attributing’ bad weather to humans causing the climate to change. As global warming goes off the boil and the climate resolutely fails to break down on cue, an entire industry of pseudoscience has sprung up to scour the world and catastrophise every unusual natural weather event or disaster. It will not come as a surprise to discover that such attribution is based on climate models. As we shall see, the models do nothing more than produce worthless guesses.
When Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT noted that the current climate narrative is “absurd”, but trillions of dollars says it is not “absurd”, he was undoubtedly thinking of the product of climate models. Roger Pielke, a noted science writer and a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is particularly scathing about attribution work: “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits. But there you go.”
It is simple to explain what ‘attribution’ models do. First they simulate a climate with no human involvement that does not exist, and then compare it with another simulation that is supposed to reflect the involvement of humans burning fossil fuel. Any weather event at a local level that is magnified in the second is, abracadabra, said to be due to human-caused climate change.
To take such results seriously it must be assumed that the models have correct information in the first place. An inability over 40 years for climate models to predict an accurate temperature would seem to indicate they are work in progress. Ignorance of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) number – the amount the Earth will warm if carbon dioxide is doubled in the atmosphere – would be considered another handicap. In addition, it is interesting to observe some academics attempting to produce a perfect model capable of such precision when they are mapping a climate system that is non-linear with numerous, only partially understood, powerful forces at work. How anyone can take the results seriously, with all the inevitable ‘garbage in-garbage out’ possibilities, is a mystery. Measuring cats in a sack might be considered a marginally easier task.
Attribution studies fail the falsification principle outlined by the science philosopher Karl Popper. This is held to be the test that differentiates real science from pseudoscience. Any hypothesis must be testable and conceivably proved false. Unless a suggestion can be tested in this way, it is opinion, guesswork, or, more uncharitably, crystal ball-gazing. Stating, for instance, that a bad storm was caused by humans when a natural explanation is also available, or calculating that wildfires will consume so many more acres than before, is unprovable. It therefore fails the test to be termed science.
Of course, the attribution claims are all over the popular prints. Within just a few days of last July’s U.K. brief heatwave, the Guardian was reporting: “Climate breakdown made U.K. heatwave 10 times more likely, study finds.” Of course there was a natural explanation for the soaring summer temperature, caused by southern winds being supercharged by an adjacent intense low pressure system. Friederike Otto from the Grantham Institute at Imperial, an operation partly-funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, said the 10 times finding was worrying, and if carbon emissions were not rapidly cut it could be “even worse” than previously thought.
According to Roger Pielke, the rise of individual ‘event attribution’ studies coincides with frustration that the IPCC has not ”definitively concluded” that many types of extreme weather have become commonplace. In his view they offer “comfort and support” to those focused on climate advocacy. Since they fill a strong demand in politics, Pielke suggests they are “here to stay”.
Friederike Otto is at the forefront of such studies and is the co-lead of World Weather Attribution (WWA), a body that specialises in near-instant weather attributions. On her Grantham CV, Otto claims WWA provides “timely scientific evidence” on single events, “paving the way for new sustainability litigation”.
Meanwhile any scientific work that, by suggesting the climate is not breaking down, is inconvenient for those promoting the command-and-control Net Zero political project, is be suppressed. Otto was one of four “experts” used by state-owned Agence France-Presse in a footling ‘fact check’ of a recent paper from four leading Italian scientists. They argued that a climate emergency is not supported by the data. She said the authors, including two physics professors, were “of course” not writing in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should never have been published,” she demanded.
Contacted by the Daily Sceptic, she added that the paper was “bad science”. She obviously feels able to try to cancel professorial physics authorities since she has a “diploma” in physics from the University of Potsdam. Otto’s doctorate was in the philosophy of science, and before joining Grantham she spent 10 years teaching in the School of Geography at Oxford University. “I am not trying to ban anyone and I do not think it is relevant whether their first degree is in art history or physics,” she explained
Otto is also behind a WWA guide for journalists titled: “Reporting extreme weather and climate change“. In a foreword, the former BBC Today editor Sarah Sands bemoans the time when the former U.K. Chancellor Nigel Lawson managed to suggest there had been no increase in what she called extreme weather. I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim, wrote Sands. These days , she enthused, attribution studies have given us significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse.
“In this way we are able to move from anecdote and conjecture, from superstition and wishful thinking, to science. We have evidence and we have facts. They are a secure foundation for news,” she said.
Science? Unverified guesswork would be more accurate. Popper must be turning in his grave.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Douglas Macgregor: No Peace – U.S. Prepares for ‘Total War’ Against Iran
- How A Fake Iranian Terror Group Was Invented To Proscribe IRGC in Europe
- Iran’s judiciary rejects Trump’s claim on ‘planned execution’ of 8 women
- Israeli army blows up school in southern Lebanon in violation of ceasefire
- The desalination front: Water as Israel’s Achilles heel
- Washington cuts flow of US dollars to Iraqi central bank until ‘acceptable’ government formed
- China blames US for diplomatic impasse with Iran, urges it to show ‘sincerity’ in talks
- Iran announces new Hormuz restrictions after US ceasefire violations
- After Islamabad: How the Global South Is Reshaping Eurasian Geopolitics
- Is Trump Going for Armageddon?
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank, report says
- Top Biden Official Supports Trump Iran Attack, Says Biden May Have Done The Same
- A history of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon
- How the powerful pro-Israel lobby keeps controlling Democrats in the US
- Replay: Israel’s slow ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Holy Land
- 5 times Israelis desecrated Christian sites in the past two years
- US running out of weaponry for Israel’s war; Iran has plenty – Daily Update
- Israel is (still) killing aid workers in Gaza
- Catholics finally splitting with Trump over Iran war and Israel
- Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA To ID Loved One’s Remains
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
Aletho News 