As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever
Pelosi: We Need to Protect the Capitol from ‘All the President’s Men out There’
By Glenn Greenwald | March 5, 2021
Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.
First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday’s ceremony,” announced CNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”
The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington, D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington Post, “state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up, National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.” All of this, said the paper, “reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned demonstrations.”
But none of that happened — not even close. The Washington Post acknowledged three weeks later:
Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses. In Tallahassee, just five armed men wearing the garb of the boogaloo movement — a loose collection of anti-government groups that say the country is heading for civil war — showed up. Police and National Guard personnel mostly ignored them.
All over the country it was the same story. “But at the moment that Biden was taking the oath of office in Washington, the total number of protesters on the Capitol grounds in Topeka stood at five — two men supporting Trump and two men and a boy ridin’ with Biden,” reported The Wichita Eagle (“With Kansas Capitol in lockdown mode, Inauguration Day protest fizzles). “The protests fizzled out after not many people showed up,” reported the local Florida affiliate in Tallahassee. “The large security efforts dwarfed the protests that materialized by Wednesday evening,” said CNN, as “state capitols and other cities remained largely calm.”
Indeed, the only politically-motivated violence on Inauguration Day was carried out by Antifa and anarchist groups in Portland and Seattle, which caused some minor property damage as part of anti-Biden protests while they “scuffled with police.” CNN, which spent a full week excitedly hyping the likely violence coming to state capitols by right-wing Trump supporters, was forced to acknowledge in its article about their non-existence that “one exception was Portland, where left-wing protesters damaged the Democratic Party of Oregon building during one of several planned demonstrations.”
Completely undeterred by that debacle, Democrats and their media spokespeople returned with a new set of frightening warnings for this week. The date of March 4 has taken on a virtually religious significance for the Q-Anon movement, announced NBC News’ Ben Collins, who was heard on NPR on Thursday speaking through actual, literal journalistic tears as he recounted all the times he called Facebook to plead with them to remove dangerous right-wing extremists on their platform (tears commence at roughly 7:00 minutes in). Valiantly holding back full-on sobbing, Collins explained that he proved to be so right but it pains and sorrows him to admit this. With his self-proclaimed oracle status fully in place, he prophesized that March 4 had taken on special dangers because Q-Anon followers concluded that this is when Trump would be inaugurated.
This is how apocalyptic cult leaders always function. When the end of the world did not materialize on January 6, Collins insisted that January 20 was the day of the violent reckoning. When nothing happened on that day, he moved the Doomsday Date to March 4. The flock cannot remain in a state of confusion for too long about why the world has not ended as promised by the prophet, so a new date must quickly be provided with an explanation for why this is serious business this time.
This March 4 paranoia was not confined to NBC’s resident millennial hall monitor and censorship advocate. On March 3, The New York Times warned that “the Capitol Police force is preparing for another assault on the Capitol building on Thursday after obtaining intelligence of a potential plot by a militia group.” All this, said the Paper of Record, because “intelligence analysts had spent weeks tracking online chatter by some QAnon adherents who have latched on to March 4 — the original inauguration date set in the Constitution — as the day Donald J. Trump would be restored to the presidency and renew his crusade against America’s enemies.”
These dire warnings also, quite predictably, generated serious reactions. “House leaders on Wednesday abruptly moved a vote on policing legislation from Thursday to Wednesday night, so lawmakers could leave town,” said the Times. We learned that there would be further militarization of the Capitol and troop deployment in Washington indefinitely due to so-called “chatter.” NPR announced: “The House of Representatives has canceled its Thursday session after the U.S. Capitol Police said it is aware of a threat by an identified militia group to breach the Capitol complex that day.”
Do you know what happened on March 4 when it came to violence from right-wing extremists? The same thing that happened on January 20: absolutely nothing. There were no attempted attacks on the Capitol, state capitols, or any other government institution. There was violent crime registered that day in Washington D.C. but none of it was political violence by those whom media outlets warned posed such a grave danger that Congress has to be closed and militarization of Washington extended indefinitely.
Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”
This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra:
But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.
Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone.
(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)
What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:
(The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police Officer).
The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.
Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City court bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.
The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.
There is, relatedly, a massive political benefit from convincing the population that the opponents and critics of those in power do not merely hold a different ideology but are coup plotters, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. That is the same political benefit that accrued from trying to persuade the population that adversaries of the Democratic Party were treasonous Kremlin agents. The more you can demonize your opponents as something monstrous, the more political power you can acquire.
And as Democrats and liberals now gear up to demand a new War on Terror, this one domestic in nature, it should be no surprise that the rhetorical leaders of their effort now are the same lowlife neocon and Rovian slanderers — Bill Kristol, David Frum, Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Rick Wilson — who demonized everyone who questioned them as part of the first War on Terror as traitors and terrorist-lovers and subversives. It is not a coincidence that neocons are leading the way now as liberals’ favorite propagandists: they are the most skilled and experienced in weaponizing and exaggerating terrorism threats for political gain and authoritarian power.
Ultimately, if this “armed insurrection” and threat of domestic terrorism are so grave, why do media figures and politicians in both parties — from Adam Schiff to Liz Cheney — keep lying about it and peddling fictions? Politicians and media figures do that only when they know that the threat, in reality, is not nearly as menacing as they need it to be to fulfill their objectives of political gain and coercive power.
Mass Rejection of Covid Jabs by US Military Families
By Stephen Lendman | February 28, 2021
Leading promoter of hazardous experimental covid jabbing NYT expressed angst over mass rejection of getting them by US military families.
According to The Vaccine Reaction on February 21, a Blue Star Families (BSF) survey found that 53% of US military families reject being used as Pharma guinea pigs for unapproved Pfizer and Moderna experimental mRNA jabs.
According to BSF head Kathy Roth-Douquet, “military families are expressing a lot of concern about” jabbing with what they don’t trust.
One military spouse likely spoke for many others, saying she, her family, and other service members don’t want to be “guinea pigs” for what hasn’t be adequately tested or proved safe.
According to Air Force General Paul Friedrichs, the US war department cannot or will not mandate what hasn’t received FDA approval, just emergency use authorization even though no real emergency exists.
At this time — what could change ahead — to be jabbed or not jabbed for covid is a personal decision by US military personnel at all levels.
Vaccines take years to develop. Pfizer and Moderna entries into the covid mass-jabbing sweepstakes are high-risk, experimental, gene altering mRNA technology.
They’re not vaccines. They were rushed to market with inadequate testing.
Since mass-jabbing began in December, large numbers of adverse events and deaths were reported, especially among elderly nursing home residents in the US and Europe.
If what’s experimental and unapproved is mandated, it would be an unprecedented experiment with human health virtually certain to turn out badly because of what’s already known.
According to one nursing home health worker, residents and some staff are “dying like flies” after jabbed.
No credible evidence suggests that mRNA technology is safe or effective.
The same holds for Johnson and Johnson’s covid vaccine about to be granted emergency use authorization.
Joseph Mercola explained that rushed Pfizer and Moderna trials were “rigged” to produce results that aren’t credible.
Their mRNA technology wasn’t evaluated on the ability to prevent infection and viral transmission.
Last November, associate editor of the BMJ publication for health professionals Peter Doshi said Pfizer’s claim of 95% effectiveness is false.
Its risk reduction to flu-renamed covid is less than 1%, rendering it virtually useless for protection.
The same holds for Modern’s mRNA technology and most likely for J & J’s vaccine as well.
On Friday, the NYT understated the number of US military families who decline to be jabbed for covid, claiming it’s about “one-third” of US forces, mostly younger personnel.
Young healthy people need no protection for flu, now called covid.
Over 99% of young people who contract covid recover normally with no special medical intervention for help.
The Times expressed concern about millions of US military personnel who refuse to be jabbed with what may cause irreversible harm to their health, saying:
It’s “a warning to civilian health officials about the potential hole in the broad-scale immunity that medical professionals say is needed for Americans to reclaim their collective lives.”
Unexplained by the Times and other establishment media is that mass-jabbing provides no protection, no immunity, no ability to prevent covid from spreading from one person to others.
It only risks great harm to health that in some cases is lethal.
What major media should headline and repeat time and again, they suppress.
Instead of wanting public health protected and preserved, the corporate fourth estate is pushing what risks unprecedented harm to millions of people in the US and elsewhere by promoting hazardous mass-jabbing.
The Times is the lead print culprit, providing press agent services for US dark forces and Pharma profiteers — at the expense of public health.
The broadsheet falsely claimed that concerns shared by countless millions of people in the US and elsewhere is from “misinformation that has run rampant on Facebook and other social media.”
What the self-styled newspaper of record calls “misinformation” is refuted by indisputable hard evidence of mass-jabbing hazards.
Protecting and preserving what’s too precious to lose requires saying “no” to what won’t protect and risks great harm if use as directed.
Forbes Blames Global Warming for Record Cold – Science Disagrees
By James Taylor | ClimateRealism | February 17, 2021
In a major victory for Newspeak, the propaganda language in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” Forbes.com published an article yesterday blaming global warming for the record cold pummeling much of the nation. Google News, moreover, promoted the Forbes article by placing it at the top of search results for “climate change.”
The title of the Forbes article is “Blackouts In Texas and California Teach A Hard Lesson: Climate Change Is Costly.” The author writes, “These grid failures are wake-up calls and provide further proof that the impacts of climate change are not geographically constrained, nor do they take aim at one political party. One way or another, the cost of climate change on each of us will make itself known: in this both California and Texas can now agree.”
The author does not, however, explain how or why global warming causes record cold temperatures. Climate activists have occasionally, and when politically convenient, claimed climate change causes more polar-vortex extreme cold events. However, the scientific data strongly contradict Forbes’ assertion that global warming is to blame for the cold outbreak in Texas. Indeed, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data show the number days each year with below-freezing temperatures in Texas is neither unusually high nor unusually low so far this century.
Similarly, NOAA data for neighboring Oklahoma – which is also getting walloped right now by cold weather – show a decline in the frequency of very cold weather events in recent decades.
So, there clearly is no recent increase in the frequency of severe cold events in Texas and Oklahoma. So, by what logic does Forbes blame the current very cold conditions on global warming? Well, the author of the Forbes article is Chief Science Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at New Energy Risk, which is comprised of “climate-conscience venture capitalists” seeking to make money promoting “green” energy.
Forbes clearly has no conflict-of-interest standards for its authors and articles, nor does it attempt to investigate what the scientific data show regarding its articles’ claims.
No, NY Times, Climate Change Does Not Threaten Power Grids
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | February 19, 2021
The New York Times published a February 16 article claiming climate change is making America’s power grid more vulnerable due to an increase in extreme weather events. However, objective data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show the Times’ claim that extreme weather is becoming more common is false. The evidence indicates it is policies promoting wind and solar power to fight climate change, rather than climate change itself, that is putting the most pressure on power grids.
The Times story, “A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids,” claims, “Systems are designed to handle spikes in demand, but the wild and unpredictable weather linked to global warming will very likely push grids beyond their limits.” The story continues saying “as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure … it is clear that global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems nationwide, including fiercer heat waves….”
This Times’ claims are convincingly refuted by objective climate data. Let’s examine them, one at a time.
The Times says climate change is making heatwaves worse, yet, as shown in Climate at a Glance: Heatwaves, data from NOAA demonstrates heatwaves have become far less frequent and severe in recent decades than they were in the early part of the 20th century (See the graph).
Indeed, temperature records show, the vast majority of each state’s all-time high temperatures were set during the first half of the 20th century – approximately 100 years of global warming ago. In fact, 40 states’ record-high temperatures were set before 1960, with 25 of the record highs being set or tied in the 1930s alone. That is three times more than have been set in the 33 years since 1988, when NASA’s James Hansen first pronounced humans were causing dangerous global warming. Only two states have set new record highs since 2000, fewer than the number of temperature records set in the 1890s alone, 130 years of global warming ago.
In addition, the most accurate nationwide temperature station network, implemented in 2005, shows no sustained increase in daily high temperatures in the United States since at least 2005.
Similarly, objective data destroy allegations that climate change is to blame for record cold that struck Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere this past week. NOAA data show the number days each year with below-freezing temperatures in Texas is neither unusually high nor unusually low so far this century. Similarly, NOAA data for neighboring Oklahoma show a decline in the frequency of very cold weather events in recent decades. The assertion that climate change makes extreme temperatures more frequent on both ends of the temperature spectrum is destroyed by science – on both ends of the temperature spectrum.
Data from NOAA and the IPCC make it equally clear other extreme weather events that might be thought to cause power failures, like cold spells, floods, hurricanes, or tornados, have not increased in number or in severity as the earth has modestly warmed. You can see the evidence for yourself via the links in this paragraph.
While weather extremes aren’t increasing, policies enacted with an intent to prevent climate change are making the grid less reliable and flexible in response to peaks in power demand. In particular, state mandates to incorporate ever-greater amounts of intermittent wind and solar power, and federal and state subsidies for the same purpose, have resulted in the premature retirements of tens of thousands of megawatts of baseload coal power plants over the past decade. These power plants have been replaced by wind and solar industrial facilities which cannot be relied upon to provide a consistent flow of power to the grid because they are dependent on weather conditions. Nor can they be relied upon to provide on-demand power or peaking power during emergencies.
Even if the Times was right that climate change is making extreme weather events more common and severe, relying on increasing amounts of intermittent power can only worsen the problems of grid reliability, both during normal operation and during extreme weather events. Wind turbines don’t work if the temperature is too cold or if winds die down. Solar panels don’t provide energy at night, on cloudy days, or if covered by ice, snow, dust, or dirt.
Texas’s recent power emergency came as thousands of megawatts of wind power went off-line when the weather turned unusually cold, even before any ice and snow hit. Meanwhile, California has experienced repeated rolling blackouts during the summer months. What these two states have in common is they have both come to rely on increasing amounts of intermittent electric generating sources to power their respective grids. The evidence shows replacing reliable sources of electric power, like coal, natural gas, and nuclear with ever more intermittent power makes power failures more likely, whatever the weather. That’s the fact the New York Times should report.
Trend in Global Fires
By Zoe Phin | February 17, 2021
Climate alarmists claim that an increase in man-made greenhouse gas emission will cause more fires. For example …
Human-induced climate change promotes the conditions on which wildfires depend, increasing their likelihood …
Funk … says there is very well documented scientific evidence that climate change has been increasing the length of the fire season, the size of the area burned each year and the number of wildfires.
— DW
The clearest connection between global warming and worsening wildfires occurs through increasing evapotranspiration and the vapor-pressure deficit. In simple terms, vegetation and soil dry out, creating more fuel for fires to expand further and faster.
… Global warming will keep worsening wildfires …
Sounds serious. Is it true?
We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length. We also show a doubling (108.1% increase) of global burnable area affected by long fire weather seasons and an increased global frequency of long fire weather seasons across 62.4 million km2 (53.4%) during the second half of the study period.
— Nature: Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013
This is just about the most scientific paper I could find on the issue. Why are they obsessed with the length of the fire season? Why can’t they just answer the simple question: Is there more or less fire?
NASA has collected daily data on Active Fires since 2000.
I downloaded and analyzed all of their Active Fires data. Here’s the result:
Active Fires, March 2000 [Source]
Now it all makes sense. Climate scammers need to cherrypick locations and seasons in order to distract from the empirical truth that global fires have been decreasing. Disgusting.
WSJ Magazine Promotes False Tuvalu Myth in Bill Gates Climate Change Article
By James Taylor | ClimateRealism | February 16, 2021
WSJ Magazine, a product of the Wall Street Journal, told an outlandish climate change falsehood about Tuvalu and sea-level rise yesterday in an article about Bill Gates. In the article, titled “Bill Gates Has a Master Plan for Battling Climate Change,” WSJ Magazine claims, “Residents of Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific, are jockeying for space as their archipelago is swallowed by rising seas.” The truth is exactly the opposite.
For background, climate activists have made Tuvalu – a nation of coral reefs and small islands in the South Pacific – a poster child for climate change. Activists claim rising seas are swallowing the nation and its islands. However, as documented by Climate Realism here and here, the majority of Tuvalu’s islands are growing in size, not shrinking.
While seas are modestly rising, modestly rising seas bring new sediment and allow for new coral to grow. The result is net land growth for islands like those in Tuvalu.
For example, a recent peer-reviewed study found eight out of Tuvalu’s nine coral atolls have grown in size during recent decades, and 3/4ths of Tuvalu’s 101 reef islands have similarly grown in size. Also, Tuvalu is experiencing net immigration rather than net emigration. There are 20% more people living in Tuvalu now than 30 years ago. Tuvalu’s population has doubled since 1970. Far from “jockeying for position” on an island being swallowed, people are flocking to Tuvalu, instead.
Additional peer-reviewed studies (see here, here, and here) confirm the same processes are allowing – and will continue to allow – other Pacific islands to keep up with rising seas.
The lesson to be learned at WSJ Magazine’s expense is that just because “everybody knows” or “Al Gore says” that some asserted climate harm is happening, that does not make it so. Trust scientific data, not the propaganda of climate activists and their messengers.
Climate Realism hopes to address other aspects of WSJ Magazine’s Bill Gates article in the days to come, although there are so many daily media climate falsehoods to debunk….
Wind Power Did Cause The Texas Blackouts!
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 22, 2021
There has been a marked lack of data made public about last week’s blackouts in Texas, which has allowed all sorts of misinformation to fly around. I suspect this is quite deliberate.
I have however found hourly data on the US EIA website. This is what happened on those crucial couple of days:
https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/GenerationByEnergySource-4/edit
The chart is interactive, and below are the actual numbers from Sunday evening to Monday morning:
| MW | Wind | Gas | Total Generation |
| Sunday 18.00 | 9015 | 41042 | 66449 |
| Sunday 22.00 | 7083 | 43720 | 66804 |
| Monday 02.00 | 5205 | 40405 | 62198 |
| Monday 03.00 | 5154 | 33096 | 52952 |
So, consider this.
Between 6 pm and 10 pm on the Sunday, wind power suddenly lost 2 GW, about a quarter of its load. Fortunately, gas power was quickly ramped up to fully compensate for this.
Wind power continued to be shed, with another 2 GW disappearing by 2.00 am on the Monday morning. As demand was also declining, gas power was reduced accordingly.
However, it was between 2.00 and 3.00 am that gas power too fell off the cliff.
It must be fairly evident that this had nothing to do with weather conditions, which could not possibly have had such a sudden impact. (In this respect, gas power was perfectly stable after 3 am for the rest of the day and week).
So what did cause that sudden drop in generation, something we also see with coal at exactly the same time, which dropped from 11 GW to 9 GW in that hour?
There is only one possible conclusion, and it is that the grid itself has become totally unstable, as wind power fell away. The evidence points to massive tripping out at gas and coal power stations as generation and demand got out of balance.
I would guess that just one gas plant tripping out in this fashion would have a cascading effect.
Whilst it has been evident from the start that the sudden shedding of wind power played a major part in the blackouts, the establishment media have been quick to close ranks by putting most of the blame on gas power stations, which having much greater capacity naturally suffered bigger drops in generation.
They have done so without publishing any of the detailed data, which I have done above. All they are interested in, of course, is deflecting the blame from renewable energy.
If they had done so, it would have been obvious that the real culprit was unreliable wind power.
Health Staff Injured By Covid Jab Are “Imagining It” – Telegraph
By Richie Allen | February 22, 2021
Writing in the Telegraph today, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard claims that German health workers who reported feeling ill after receiving their Covid jab, were in fact imagining it. It’s an example of the Nocebo effect according to Evans-Pritchard. He says that exposure to fake news about the vaccine, can lead to some recipients believing that the dose has harmed them in some way, even when it hasn’t.
Evans-Pritchard claims that people have been primed to believe that the vaccines will make them ill, by exposure to disinformation. He writes:
Europe has succumbed to the nocebo effect. If people are primed to believe that something makes them ill, they discover illness. It is the reverse placebo.
Tens of millions have received the AstraZeneca jab in the UK and India without meaningful side-effects beyond minor – and desirable – signs of an immune reaction. Yet frontline health workers in Germany, Austria, France, and Spain have convinced themselves that it is doing them real harm, and that it is also ineffective.
The Nocebo Effect is a known pathology in medical science. It has been well-documented following false reporting on statins. One clinical trial studying headaches from electric currents found that two-thirds of the volunteers in the harmless control group also had headaches. Nocebo responses can be powerful and physiological. The symptoms are real.
37 out of 88 staff at Braunschweig’s Herzogin-Elisabeth hospital became ill after having the jab and dozens of ambulance drivers in Dortmund reported that they’d had a bad reaction to the vaccine. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, they’re all imagining it. He blames fake news about the AstraZeneca jab:
That is probably what has been happening with AstraZeneca In Germany where fake news has run rampant, to the point of mass hysteria.
Astonishing isn’t it? Twenty-two seniors died in a care home in Basingstoke, after they’d received the vaccine. 23 died in a Norwegian home. Reports have come in from the US of people dropping dead within minutes of having a jab. A woman in Wisconsin was declared brain dead after having her second dose. I wonder if Ambrose Evans-Pritchard blames fake news in those cases?
The worst of it, is that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and his pals in the media KNOW that this vaccine is causing harm. They know and they choose to ignore it. How do they sleep at night? Nocebo effect? They’re getting desperate now. It seems to me that someone somewhere knows that soon enough it’ll be impossible to hide the extent to which these vaccines are causing harm. Are they really going to claim that vaccine injured people are imagining it, that they were “primed” to believe the vaccine would hurt them, because they read something on Facebook?
Imagine the scenario. “Mrs. Johnson your kidneys are shutting down, you may need a transplant.”
“I was fine, until I had the vaccines!”
“Yes Mrs. Johnson. We don’t believe it’s the vaccines though. We think you were reading too much fake news and convinced yourself that the vaccines are harmful.”
“Are you saying that I’m responsible for my kidney failure and not the vaccines?”
“Yes Mrs. Johnson, it’s obvious this is what is happening…”
Navalny and Treason
By Patrick Armstrong | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 8, 2021
Collaborating with foreign intelligence structures to create a poisoning narrative would appear to fit the definition of treason. How about writing a letter to a foreign head of state asking him to sanction your country?
(Thanks to John Helmer who, as far as I know, was the first to suggest that Moscow is preparing a treason accusation against him.)
On 1 February RT published a video taken by the FSB of a meeting between Second Secretary Ford of the British Embassy in Moscow, identified by the FSB as an SIS officer, and Vladimir Ashurkov at a restaurant in Moscow. The video was filmed some time in 2012. Ashurkov is the Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation; he is presently living in the UK where he sought refuge after being charged with embezzlement. In the video he is making a pitch for financial support to the tune of “10, 20 million dollars a year” not, he assures Ford, “a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake”. In short, invest in us us and, when we take over, we’ll pay you back. With interest. Big interest. In the meantime, perhaps Ford could get him some kompromat for use inside Russia. In a word, he’s trying to sell Russia to a foreign power. Which, by any standards, is treason. Ford is non-committal and merely suggests that Ashurkov look to one of the foreign NGOs that the British fund. (It should be understood that the “N” in “NGO”, is silent like the “p” in “pseudo”.). But, given that the video was made six or seven years ago, we don’t know whether the British or others took up Ashurkov on his offer. But we can be reasonably sure that the FSB knows the answer to the question.
I believe that the publication of this video marks a major step towards the Russian government charging Navalny and his organisation with treason. Note that RT attached to its report a discussion of the famous “spy rock”. Utter nonsense: “alleged… allegedly… allegations”, a “fabrication”, more “pressure against Russian NGOs” RFE/RL assured us in 2006; “they had us bang to rights” admitted a British official in 2012. The FSB has cleverly disarmed the expected cries of fake! setup! lies! and other denials from the West by reminding everyone that it was the FSB that told the truth that time.
Security services hate revealing anything. Their unvarying intention is to hang onto information because a little bit of information can be nursed into a lot of information: a seed revealed is just a seed, but a seed kept and nurtured can grow into a forest. I recommend Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America to show how the ancestors of Russia’s security organisations nurtured every little seed until they grew so big a network in the American government that they were probably better informed than the White House. So, to get them to give up a seed is a big step. It doesn’t happen, as they say, by accident.
Consider what seeds and seedlings the FSB gave up with this video.
The video exposed a man the FSB had identified as British intelligence. They could have marked him, followed his career, noticed with whom he associated, where he went, whom he met. Fed him false information, exposed his network, found others, followed them and, who knows, turned or compromised some. Now, he’s blown and probably won’t go anywhere near the Russian world again. The British will be back-checking his contacts and network and making a damage assessment and probably shutting things down. So, the FSB gave up years of exposure and mapping of networks.
The video also reveals the degree to which the FSB is following Navalny’s organisation. Everyone assumed that it was, of course, but it appears that the surveillance team was waiting in the restaurant. So that gives away another part of the FSB’s modus operandi. For all we know, the restaurant was a favourite place of the Navalny organisation; not any more: they won’t be going there again.
Note how good the sound recording is. That would presumably reveal something about the technology and trade-craft the FSB possesses. I’m sure that, to those who know these things, other details of trade-craft and equipment were revealed as well.
It is an easy deduction that the FSB has more information that it has not revealed: for example whether Ashurkov’s pitch resulted in a sale. (Note that Navalny’s organisation receives a certain amount of funds via the anonymous Bitcoin). Neither has it revealed any other videos of similar sales pitches that one must assume it has. One can only assume that the FSB already has a good case and can trace the money.
As everyone knows, Navalny fell sick on a flight inside Russia and a few days later, wound up in a hospital in Germany saying he had been poisoned with novichok. While the ever-changing story requires the reader to completely suspend disbelief, as usual in the information war against Russia, new variants are rolled out, confident that its targets aren’t paying attention past the headlines that Putin has poisoned someone again. Thanks to John Helmer’s reporting, we know that the doctors at the Charité Hospital found many health problems when it examined Navalny but no evidence of novichok. The novichok “evidence” comes from German and Swedish military facilities which have declined to publish their findings. Navalny, for his part, has several times asserted that Putin attempted to kill him with novichok. So, we have evidence from two civilian hospitals that show no novichok; there are assertions that it was novichok, but they’re secret and come from military sources; Navalny says it was novichok. Does this look like prima facie evidence that Navalny collaborated with foreign intelligence agencies against his country?
Where did Navalny get the illustrations for his video on Putin’s supposed palace? We know that the building is very far from finished because people went to see it. So somebody supplied the faked-up interiors (complete with Putin himself). A Germany-USA production? “in early December, the [German] studio received a request from the United States about whether it had free production capacity. In strict secrecy, work began on Navalny’s film”. Perhaps there’s another charge here, given the expected importance of this “proof” of Putin’s supposed corruption for Navalny’s campaign. (Another silly story for the gullible, by the way: where would he keep his loot and when does he have time to enjoy it?)
The entire Western propaganda structure leapt on the story. I’ll just quote this one thing from the NYT’s resident sage, Thomas Friedman, because of its amusement value:
Putin is not very important to us at all. He’s a Moscow mafia don who had his agents try to kill an anti-corruption activist, Aleksei Navalny, by sprinkling a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok, in the crotch of his underwear. I’m not making that up! Russia once gave the world Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Dostoyevsky, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin’s Russia will be remembered for giving the world poisoned underwear.
“Poisoned underwear”, “mafia don”, “he keeps stalking us”. Plenty more where that came from: if it’s Putin or Russia, the accusation is the proof. Vide Biden’s demand that “He should be released immediately and without condition“. Suspiciously like a coordinated operation; perhaps the FSB can actually show connections.
Navalny is the latest in a long line of Western anti-Putin heroes. I’ve been in this business for three decades and I’ve forgotten half of them. Reports on protests that carefully avoid mentioning people who would spoil the narritive. Putin is a “moral idiot“. Lots of poisonings of opponents (is the absence from that list of the long-recovered and now-discarded Yushchenko significant?) and even non-poisonings; but no explanations for why the (almost invariably ineffective) poisons change: dioxin, thallium polonium and now novichok. Protests are always about to bring him down. Endless endless nonsense about Putin himself – too much to catalogue. Russophrenia. And so on and on; the people change – Browder and Khodorkovskiy fade to the background, Berezovskiy gives up, begs to be allowed home, kills himself (they say) – but the story never changes. Pussy Riot was huge until it wasn’t. Pavlenskiy does something in Russia, he’s a hero, same thing in France, he’s arrested. Always a fraudulent election in Russia (Moscow should take a leaf out of Washington’s book and call all such claims “conspiracy theories” and block discussion.) Washington says it had the MH17 shootdown on film, but you can’t see it. Nothing is ever proven but it never stops. The audience is assumed to have the IQ and attention span of gnats: Moscow hacked the U.S. election system in 2016 but in 2020 the system was watertight while Russia was hacking everything else. It’s information war; most of it nonsense from proven liars. Maybe Moscow has had enough. The Biden Administration is full of Russia-baiters all fully invested in the Trump/Putin conspiracy theory; there will be no change; it’s time for Moscow to give up expecting anything else.
Maybe Moscow is going to make an example of the latest Western favourite and charge him with treason and prove it. Maybe that’s why this video was released. It would appear to be a case of “providing financial, technical, advisory or other assistance to a foreign state or international organization . . . directed at harming Russia’s security” as the treason law puts it. A revision of the law that came into effect, as it happens, in the year the video was recorded. Collaborating with foreign intelligence structures to create a poisoning narrative would appear to fit the definition too. How about writing a letter to a foreign head of state asking him to sanction your country?
And more hints of evaporated patience: Moscow handed over to the OSCE videos of Western police beating up protesters – Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, the USA, Finland, France and the Czech Republic – helpfully pointing out “For doubters, we have shown a contrasting model. How they do it and how we do it. Feel the difference”. The message is clear: motes and beams; or, as they like to say in the West, “whataboutism“. Moscow then expelled diplomats from three countries, accusing them of participating in protests.
Washington, London et alia will protest in the usual way with all the usual statements about human rights that they themselves are pretty casual about at home (“Почувствуйте разницу”), but I suspect that Moscow doesn’t care much what its enemies say. In this matter it may well be that the idiotic Navalny poisoning story, coming after all the other evidence-free accusations, was the last straw. And perhaps Beijing’s success in shutting down the equally foreign-inspired troubles in Hong Kong was an encouraging example.
We will see, but it’s another indication that Moscow has had enough. After all, there’s an audience out there that isn’t glued to CNN and the NYT. There’s no chance of changing minds in Washington or London; it might still be possible in Berlin and Paris – Nord Stream II is probably the test – but there are hundreds of millions out there who are listening. Zone B, the Saker calls it.
Truth Slips Out in Coronavirus Vaccine Deaths ‘Fact Check’?
By Adam Dick | February 17, 2021
The big money media that have been working for a year to stir up maximum fear of coronavirus have been taking the opposite tack regarding coronavirus vaccines. These experimental vaccines, which are not even vaccines under the normal understanding of what qualifies as a vaccine, rushed to the public without the regular testing, the big money media insists, are safe and should be taken by everyone.
Yet, even in this Pollyanna coverage of the experimental vaccines, occasionally the truth slips out.
On February 3, ABC News ran an article by Stephanie Widmer titled “Fact-check: No link between COVID-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” The main thrust of the article is that all the people who die after taking the experimental coronavirus vaccines would have died anyway: The vaccine never caused the death no matter how soon the death occurred after a person received a shot or how out of the blue and strange the circumstances of the death. The deaths are all just a coincidence, the article suggests. Plenty of people — around 8,000 people according to the article — die each day in America, you know.
This seems like some fanciful thinking. And the thinking is the opposite of the thinking employed in attributing deaths to coronavirus. With coronavirus, the presumption generally employed by government and big money media in America is that coronavirus is the killer if a person who tested positive for coronavirus dies, no matter what other health problems he had and irrespective of coronavirus tests producing many false positive results.
Still, there is some value in this ABC News article for people not interested in reading yet another big money media article promoting everyone having an experimental vaccine injected into his arm. Around halfway through the article is a sentence that suggests something much less fanciful to explain the conclusion that the experimental coronavirus vaccines kill nobody. The article states. “Every time someone gets sick or dies shortly after getting a vaccine, government agencies investigate to ensure there’s no link.” Is this the truth slipping out?
Copyright © 2021 Ron Paul Institute
Featured Video
Bombing Hitler’s Hometown
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
‘Conspiracy Theory’ Now Fact: Greater Israel Has Arrived
By Kit Klarenberg | Mint Press News | January 28, 2025
Ever since Tel Aviv’s 1948 creation, much has been said and written about ‘Greater Israel’ – the notion Zionism’s ultimate end goal is the forcible annexation and ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of Arab and Muslim lands for Jewish settlement, based on Biblical claims this territory was promised to Jews by God. The mainstream media typically dismisses this concept as antisemitic conspiracy theory, or at most the fringe fantasy of a minuscule handful of extremist Israelis.
In reality … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- IRGC: Israeli, US universities in region legitimate targets after strikes on Iranian university
- Trump admits Iran hit USS Ford carrier: ‘We ran for our lives’
- Battle for Hungary: EU attacks on Orban are a sign of worse things to come
- Iraqi resistance conducts drone strike on US-run base in Syria
- Failing to Defeat Hezbollah, Israel & US Pressure Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa to Join War
- US-Israeli war on Iran drives global fertilizer prices up 40%
- Hezbollah’s Surprise Weapons Redefine Ground Battle with Israel
- Yemen joins fight against US, Israel by firing missiles at occupied territories
- Seizing the Kharg: Washington’s path to defeat in the Persian Gulf
- Iran reports 500 US casualties in strikes on covert US military sites
- If Americans Knew
- Over 300 US service members wounded, majority have brain injuries – Not a ceasefire Day 169
- Researchers at Human Rights Watch Resign Over Blocked Report on Palestinian Refugee Return
- Jewish Groups Are Backing a War Americans Don’t Want
- Eric Fingerhut Thinks He’s the President of the Jews
- Top Jewish Philanthropists, Rabbis Urge Israeli President to Take Action Against ‘Jewish Extremists’
- Don’t Be Fooled. Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted to Control Southern Lebanon
- Israel’s widespread use of torture is a core element of its genocide against the Palestinian people
- In Israel’s War on Iran, Many Middle East US Bases Rendered “All But Uninhabitable”
- ‘Burn the lawn’: Israel pursues ‘Rafah model’ in southern Lebanon
- A genocide here, an amputation there
- No Tricks Zone
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
- Storing Green Energy To Last Germany 10 Days Would Require A 60-Million Tonne Battery
- New Studies: UK Sea Levels Were 4 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Destructive Green New Deal: German Energy And Metal Group Warns Of Drastic Crisis
- New Study Documents A 20-Year Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Decline – Driven By Internal Variability
- Wake-up Call: Survey Shows Majority Of Germans Now Favor Postponing Climate Targets!
Aletho News 