Sorry, Google, Middle East Crops Are a Success Story, Not a Climate Crisis
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | December 3, 2020
Google News is hyping a story published by Agrinews, which promotes a month-old World Bank report claiming water scarcity in the Middle East – caused by climate change – threatens crop production. The World Bank report, “Water in the Balance,” is old news, made up of model-driven speculation, instead of data. Real-world crop data, by contrast, tell a story of stunning crop success in the Middle East and throughout the world.
Climate Realism discredited the World Bank report in early November. Data show that despite considerable political turmoil and ongoing conflicts in the region, the naturally arid Middle East has seen its crop production grow as the earth has modestly warmed.
Since media outlets are still reporting the World Bank’s fiction as fact, Climate Realism’s refutation bears repeating.
The World Bank’s study says, “[w]hile information about water scarcity at present and in the future is available there is little knowledge of what this increasing scarcity means for Middle Eastern … food security. Agriculture will suffer because of climate change and water scarcity….”
In particular, in Summary for Policy Makers, the World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. The available evidence strongly suggests that will not happen.
Real-world data concerning crop production across the Middle East shows crop yields and overall production have increased dramatically. More food is being produced even as thousands of acres of agricultural lands have been abandoned during regional conflicts.
Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:
- Cereal crop production in Iraq increased 91 percent, even as the acreage being harvested fell 5 percent.
- Cereal crop production in Iran increased 187 percent, while the acreage harvested increased by just 2.6 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Jordan increased 15 percent, even as the acreage harvested declined 30 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Lebanon increased 115 percent, while acreage harvested increased 30 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Syria increased 22 percent, even as acreage harvested declined 66 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Turkey increased 46 percent, even though acreage harvested declined 19 percent.
That Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production even as many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts, is clearly good news—not a climate crisis.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water through transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change-induced water shortages leading to crop failure.
The benefits of more atmospheric carbon dioxide and a modestly warming world have resulted in 17 percent more food being available per person today than was the case 30 years ago, even as the number of people has grown by billions. Indeed, United Nations data show the last 20 years have seen the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Rather than regurgitating the World Bank’s flawed report as fact, Agrinews should have done some honest, independent research. Had the paper done so, it would have found crop production in the Middle East, as is true for most of the rest of the world, is booming during the period of purported catastrophic warming. Sorry, Google, Agrinews, and the World Bank, increased crop production and yields are the very opposite of a climate crisis.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.
Obama would take the COVID vaccine on live television if Fauci assured him it was safe
By Jon Rappoport | December 4, 2020
SiriusXM, The Joe Madison Show, Obama [1] [2]: “I promise you that when it’s [the vaccine] been made for people who are less at risk, I will be taking it, and I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed just so that people know that I trust this science… People like Anthony Fauci, who I know, and I’ve worked with, I trust completely… So if Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting COVID, absolutely, I’m going to take it…I understand, historically, everything dating back all the way to the Tuskegee experiments and so forth, why the African-American community would have some skepticism, but the fact of the matter is, is that vaccines are why we don’t have polio anymore.”
There’s no risk here, because if doctors have any sense, they’ll make sure Obama is jabbed with a shot of saltwater, a placebo, masquerading as the real thing.
The real thing, the RNA COVID vaccine, poses all sorts of dangers. No RNA technology for a drug or vaccine has ever been approved for public use. [3]
Efforts in the past to bring the technology to market have failed, owing to adverse effects. The basic effect has been auto-immune reactions. The body attacks itself. [3]
Further, as I’ve described several times, the major clinical trials of the COVID vaccine are not designed to prevent serious illness, hospitalization, or death. They’re designed to prevent “mild cases”—meaning a cough, or chills and fever. [4]
A mild case cures itself naturally. No need for a vaccine.
Other than danger, and uselessness, the vaccine is perfect.
Obama is grandstanding. He’s looking for publicity any way he can get it, as he re-enters the political scene standing right behind his former assistant, Joe Biden.
Maybe Joe can appoint Obama to the post of press secretary, to stand up on television once a week to deliver messages to the nation. Just like old times.
Unless the building tsunami of vote fraud sweeps Joe away into obscurity.
Now that he’s back on the scene, Obama might feel a need to re-enforce his image as the “great peacemaker.” You know, “bridging the divide in a nation seized by a frenzy of hatreds.”
Just in case, I offer this look back at his actual record. The Guardian, “America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. What a bloody end to Obama’s reign,” by Medea Benjamin. [5]
Sub-headline: “According to new figures, the US dropped nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.”
“… in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.”
“While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. That’s seven majority-Muslim countries.”
“One bombing technique that President Obama championed is drone strikes. As drone-warrior-in-chief, he spread the use of drones outside the declared battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, mainly to Pakistan and Yemen. Obama authorized over 10 times more drone strikes than George W Bush, and automatically painted all males of military age in these regions as combatants, making them fair game for remote controlled killing.”
“President Obama has claimed that his overseas military adventures are legal under the 2001 and 2003 authorizations for the use of military force passed by Congress to go after al-Qaida. But today’s wars have little or nothing to do with those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.”
Getting the picture?
Then there was Obama’s military adventure, in partnership with Hillary Clinton: the bombing of Libya, which turned that place into a non-nation terrorist nightmare.
So, would you buy a used car from that man, or trust his assurances about a COVID vaccine?
Update: Now we have rogue’s gallery of ex-presidents who say they’ll take the COVID shot publicly, to assure everyone it’s safe: Obama, Bush, and Bill Clinton. [6]
Hell of a trio. Will Trump and Biden join the team? [7]
Bush is the perfect dupe. You see, he’s done this before. Years ago, when it was falsely announced that the country was under threat from a bio-attack of smallpox, Bush rolled up his sleeve on live television and took the vaccine.
Tommy Thompson, then the head of Health and Human Services, announced there was a vial of smallpox vaccine ready for every American, and special centers would be set up across the nation to deliver it.
Only a few centers were established. Months passed. Then, all sorts of doctors objected, saying the live vaccine was too dangerous for mass public consumption.
Tommy Thompson blithely made a new announcement. He was NOT recommending that any of Bush’s cabinet members take the shot.
The whole program collapsed.
Of course, the vaccine, which was too dangerous, was the same brew that had been given to millions upon millions of people in Africa, decades earlier.
Upon completion of the program, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued heraldic proclamations of success. Smallpox had been conquered.
A very trustworthy source told me the following: After the smallpox vaccine campaign in Africa was over, a secret WHO meeting was held in Geneva.
A decision was made never to deploy that vaccine again.
Why? Because it caused smallpox.
But don’t worry. All is well. Take the COVID vaccine. Carry the immunity certificate with you wherever you go. Flash it, smile, be happy.
Obama likes the vaccine. Bush does. Clinton does. Trump and Biden, too.
What else do you need to know?
SOURCES:
[3] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/05/22/moderna-and-the-covid-vaccine-what-kind-of-lunacy/
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy
[6] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/02/politics/obama-vaccine/index.html
The Mainstream Press Has Failed America
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 1, 2020
While President Trump continues to maintain that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud, the mainstream press continues to maintain that Trump’s charges are “false” and “baseless” and that his allegations are damaging trust in America’s democratic electoral system.
Actually, however, it’s the other way around: It’s the mainstream press, owing to its extreme deferential attitude toward the Washington, D.C., establishment, that has severely damaged trust in America’s democratic system.
Of course, this isn’t the first election in which the losing side has charged that he has been cheated out of his victory. In virtually every election cycle, there is at least one political candidate that charges that he lost because of fraud committed by the other side.
But let’s face it: Sometimes there is fraud. As I have pointed out before (see here and here and here), there is now no doubt that Lyndon Johnson employed fraud to win the 1948 U.S. Senate race in Texas against popular Governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson told a South Texas crony who controlled some South Texas counties to keep his poll results open in case Johnson needed extra votes to win. When the vote-counting was over, Johnson did need a few more votes to win. He called his crony, a man named George Parr, and Parr ordered a local election judge to produce 200 additional votes for LBJ, which then gave Johnson the win. Many years later, the election judge confirmed that he had done this. The 200 signatures on the voter list were all in the same ink, and the names of the 200 voters were in alphabetical order. If Johnson had lost the election, he never would have become vice-president or president, which truly made him a truly illegitimate president in U.S, history, one who ended up sending tens of thousands of American men to their deaths in a senseless war thousands of miles away in Southeast Asia.
The problem with the mainstream press in the Trump-Biden race is the speed by which it concluded that the 2020 presidential election was not marred by fraud. It reached its conclusion before the election was even over.
Now, it’s very possible that Trump’s assertions are, in fact, false and baseless, but how could the mainstream press know that before or immediately after the election without even the semblance of any press investigation into the allegations?
Perhaps the mainstream press believed that the stealing of an election through fraud is simply inconceivable. But how can it be inconceivable when it is undisputed that LBJ won his Senate race through fraud? If it happened once, doesn’t that negate the idea of inconceivability?
It certainly can’t be that the press immediately conducted an investigation and found no evidence of fraud in the Trump-Biden race because the mainstream press reached its conclusions immediately and never conducted any independent investigation.
And that’s the core of the problem — the mainstream press’s deference to the Washington, D.C., establishment by automatically embracing its official position that the election was honest and above board.
In a free society, the citizenry necessarily depend on an independent press to keep government honest. The citizenry simply lack the resources and time to investigate official misconduct. Thus, they necessarily depend on a vibrant, dynamic independent press to do this job for them.
That’s where the mainstream press has failed America and has severely damaged America’s democratic system. It has essentially become a loyal lapdog of the Washington, D.C., establishment, never daring to challenge it, question, or investigate it at a fundamental level.
That’s why people don’t trust the mainstream press. That’s one big reason why mainstream papers have lost massive numbers of subscribers ever since the Internet came into existence. People know that when it comes to confronting political power with truth, they are going to find it on the Internet rather than in the mainstream press.
In the meantime, the mainstream press cannot figure out why people don’t blindly accept its pronouncements. They cannot figure out why people have been leaving them in droves and going to the Internet for answers. They cannot figure out why people don’t trust them or believe what they say.
Now, I’m not saying that the mainstream press should go out and investigate every charge of fraud that every loser of a political race makes. What I am saying is that when there are extreme anomalies in votes, as there have been in the Trump-Biden race, it is incumbent on an independent press to severely scrutinize them. Extreme anomalies, of course, don’t equate to fraud but they do equate — or should equate — to the need for extremely careful scrutiny to ensure that there is no fraud.
An independent press is in the best position to perform such an investigation. If America were characterized by such a press, it would actually strengthen, not weaken, America’s democratic system because then people would be more assured that elections were not marred by fraud. When you instead have a passive and deferential press that automatically defers to the D.C. establishment, immediately concludes that the election is on the up and up despite extreme anomalies, and just pokes fun of the losing candidate for asserting fraud, that tends to make people suspicious, distrustful, and cynical.
Of course, the passive and deferential nature of the mainstream press has been going on for much longer than the 2020 presidential race. One of the best examples is the Kennedy assassination. From the time Kennedy was declared dead, the mainstream press has always automatically accepted the official version of events of the national-security establishment, never daring to conduct independent investigations into whether that version was false and baseless.
In the 1970s, after the House Select Committee on Assassinations met to reinvestigate the assassination, several enlisted men came forward with a remarkable story. They said that they had secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue almost 1 1/2 hours before the body was officially reintroduced into the morgue. They said that they had been sworn to secrecy on the weekend of the assassination and had been forced to sign secrecy oaths. Their superiors threatened them with extreme punitive action if they ever disclosed what they had seen or done.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that was something that the mainstream press would find worth investigating? Were these enlisted men lying? Were they just making up a story? Why would they do that? Why would the national-security establishment be sneaking the president’s body into the morgue? Why was the military in charge of the autopsy?
Wouldn’t just one mainstream investigative reporter want to investigate such things? Well, if he did, he would be fired by every mainstream paper in the land, owing to the passivity and deferential attitude that the mainstream press have had about the Kennedy assassination since the beginning.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board discovered the existence of a Marine Sergeant named Roger Boyajian, who told the ARRB that it was his team that secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m., almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time of 8 p.m. Boyajian even produced a copy of his official report that he had submitted to the military immediately after the assassination weekend in November 1963, a report that the military had kept secret. His statement and his report confirmed what those enlisted men has said back in the 1970s.
Did the mainstream press then conduct an investigation? Not on your life. It was still considered verboten for any mainstream news media outlet to investigate any aspect of the Kennedy assassination.
When Congress enacted the law that established the ARRB, someone slipped a provision into the law that prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. It was a prohibition that was strictly enforced by the ARRB board of trustees. Now, wouldn’t you think that some enterprising, independent-minded mainstream investigative reporter would want to find out why anyone would want to keep the ARRB from investigating things it discovered while securing the release of long secret records of the national-security establishment? Nope. It just didn’t happen.
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer. She was a chief petty officer in charge of the Navy’’s lab at its photography center in Washington, D.C. She had a top secret security clearance and worked closely with the White House on both classified and unclassified photographs.
Spencer told the ARRB a remarkable story. She said that on the weekend of the assassination, she had been asked to develop, on a top-secret basis, the photographs of President Kennedy’s autopsy, which had been conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment on the night of the assassination. Spencer had kept her secret for more than 30 years.
Spencer was shown the official autopsy photographs in the record. After closely examining them, she said: No, those are not the autopsy photographs I developed. The ones I developed showed a massive exit-sized wound in the back of the president’s head. The photographs in the official record show the back of the president’s head to be fully intact.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough to get the mainstream press to send an investigative reporter out to get to the bottom of this, especially given that Spencer’s testimony about the massive exit-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head matched the statements of the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, along with the treating nurses, two FBI agents, a Secret Service agent, and others? Wouldn’t you think that fraudulent autopsy photographs would be enough to generate such an investigation?
Nope. The position of every mainstream paper in the country has always been: “Stay away from the Kennedy assassination. That’s what the national-security establishment wants and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
The ARRB made another remarkable discovery. It discovered that there were two separate brain examinations in the Kennedy autopsy. At the first one, the president’s brain was “sectioned,” which meant cutting it like a loaf of bread to study the trajectory of the bullet that hit the president in the head. At the second brain exam, the brain was fully intact.
There is one big problem: Once a brain is sectioned, it cannot reconstitute itself. That means that the second brain exam had to have involved a brain that wasn’t the same brain at the first exam.
Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream press would find this worth investigating? Nope. And it’s not like they weren’t aware of the two brain exams. The Washington Post and the Associated Press both carried stories on the ARRB’s discovery (see here and here). Unfortunately, as astounding as it is, the discovery of a fraudulent brain exam was not enough to induce the mainstream press to follow up with aggressive investigations to get to the bottom of this.
Many years ago, the American people discovered the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret illegal operation of the CIA to convert journalists in the mainstream press into CIA assets and operatives. Mainstream journalists who were asked to serve loved it and considered it a great honor to secretly serve the national-security establishment.
Today, the CIA need not bother because the entire mainstream press has willingly made itself a de facto asset of the national-security state. The American people have been left without an independent mainstream press whose mission is to keep the government honest and instead rely on people on the Internet to perform that service. In the process, the mainstream press has done a tremendous disservice to the American people and to America’s democratic processes by abdicating its responsibility to be a watchdog, not a lapdog, to the Washington, D.C., establishment.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
‘I want blood’: Rachel Maddow’s audience fired up by NYT story baselessly accusing ‘Russian hackers’ of attacking US hospital
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | November 30, 2020
Accusing Russia of hacking anything from the 2016 election to US cancer hospitals may be fun and games for MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, but when her audience responds by demanding apocalypse, the shtick stops being funny.
Maddow’s conspiracy theories about ‘Russian collusion’ and supposed hacking of the 2016 election that resulted in President Donald Trump have been a staple of MSNBC audiences over the past four years. She’s not giving up that routine now, even as the entire mainstream media machine has turned on a dime and insists that the 2020 election was flawless – since it resulted in Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, that is.
On Monday, Maddow cherry-picked a couple of quotes and linked a New York Times story – published last week – about ‘Russian’ hackers allegedly targeting the University of Vermont Medical Center last month.
The Times story is long on feelings and emotions of the medical personnel and cancer patients affected by the fact that the UVMC computers stopped working, but short on actual facts about the case. It works in a jab at President Donald Trump for firing head of the cybersecurity agency Chris Krebs – for disputing “baseless claims of voter fraud,” of course – even though that happened long after the alleged attack.
The story also notes that the FBI has requested the center administrators to refrain from commenting on the case – even to confirm or deny their own statements about alleged ransom requests. Absent the facts, the Times is happy to fill in the blanks by citing a private cybersecurity company, Hold Security.
Hold Security and its chief executive Alex Holden are the sole source for the claim that ‘Russian’ hackers were behind the alleged cyberattack on UVMC and other US hospitals – at least according to the Times, as well as the media coverage of the FBI’s warning in late October that Maddow referenced.
The whole thing sounds much like the debunked Times story about Russia allegedly paying “bounties” to the Taliban for killing US troops in Afghanistan, a June bombshell that was used to hammer Trump and oppose his efforts to end the endless US war there.
Even the Pentagon’s own denials didn’t make a difference; Maddow and her colleagues were “all in” on the bounties story being true. So was her audience, as evidenced by some of the replies to her tweet.
While much of the replies were in the same vein, there were some that crossed the line from partisanship into genocidal – and apocalyptic – calls for blood.
“Russia needs to finally be handled. They need to be knocked back into the stone age,” said one follower.
“I did not hate the leaders of the old Soviet Union as much as I hate the leaders of Russia right now. I want them to experience monumental, historic, unprecedented, apocalyptic pain for what they have done to us. I want blood,” said another.
Earlier this year, MSNBC’s lawyers defended Maddow against a defamation lawsuit by One America News (OANN) – whom she called “literally Russian propaganda” – by arguing her show isn’t news but opinion, and that her statement was “rhetorical hyperbole” that no reasonable person would understand as fact.
While that admission got Maddow and MSNBC off the legal hook, it raises the question of how many of her followers and their audience qualify as “reasonable” people – as the comments on her tweet about the Times story show anew.
No one, Maddow included, should be held legally liable for the content of their replies, obviously. It’s something beyond their control. But when a steady diet of propaganda, ‘insinuendo’ and conspiracy theories presented as facts creates an atmosphere that results in this sort of bloodthirst that’s on display, it doesn’t inspire confidence in her audience’s mental state.
Keep in mind that the politicians Maddow supports may soon end up with absolute power, if Trump’s claims about election fraud are really as “baseless” as the media claim. Also, don’t forget that the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy all life on the planet. And that’s something people so obsessed with their feelings to be calling for “monumental, historic, unprecedented, apocalyptic pain” clearly haven’t given any thought.
The Russian Brexit Plot That Wasn’t
By Paul Robinson | Irrussianality | November 26, 2020
Russian Disinformation. Russian Disinformation. Russian Disinformation. How many time have you heard that over the past four years?
But what about British disinformation?
Much of the current Russia paranoia began with the claims that Donald Trump was recruited by Russian intelligence years ago as a sleeper agent, and then given a leg-up into the presidency of the United States with the help of the GRU. The claims of ‘collusion’ were repeated over and over, and yet at the end of the day none of them could be substantiated. And where did it all start? In the now notorious dossier assembled by former British spook Christopher Steele.
Steele, it has now been revealed, got his information from a guy called Igor Danchenko. He in his turn got a lot of it from a former classmate, Olga Galkina, described as an alcoholic ‘disgruntled PR executive living in Cyprus’, and as such obviously a well-informed source with intimate knowledge of the Kremlin’s innermost secrets.
In short, the Steele dossier was a load of hokum, commissioned by a British Black PR operative and then fabricated by some random Russian émigrés with no access to anything of value. And yet, millions believed it.
And then, we have the story of Brexit. Ever since the 2016 referendum which resulted in Britain leaving the European Union, we have been repeatedly told that the victory of the Leave campaign was made possible by ‘Russian interference’. Most significantly, it was claimed that the Russian government illicitly funded the Leave campaign by funneling money through the campaign’s most significant financial backer, businessman Arron Banks.
Leading the charge against Russia and Banks was journalist Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer (as the Sunday version of The Guardian is known). ‘We know that the Russian government offered money to Arron Banks’, she said. ‘I am not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government’, she added, ‘I say he lied about his contact with the Russian government. Because he did.’
But it turns out that it was Cadwalladr who had a tricky relationship with the truth. Angered by her assertions, Arron Banks sued her for libel. Three weeks ago, she publicly backed down from one of her accusations. ‘On 22 Oct 2020,’ she said, ‘I tweeted that Arron had been found to have broken the law. I accept he has not. I regret making this false statement, which I have deleted. I undertake not to repeat it. I apologise to Arron for the upset and distress caused.’
This week Cadwalladr went further. The judge in the libel trial ruled that the meaning of her statement that Banks had lied about his relationship with the Russians was that he had lied about taking money from Russia, and that she had intended this as a statement of fact, not a call for further investigation. In the face of this judgement, Cadwalladr withdrew her ‘truth’ defence and has been ordered to pay Banks’ costs relating to this aspect of the case. In this way she in effect conceded that she was not willing to defend as fact the proposition that Russia financed Leave via Banks. While Cadwalladr continues to fight the case using a ‘public interest’ defence, the withdrawal of the truth argument is a dramatic concession.
The Banks story is not the only problematic aspect of Cadwalladr’s reporting. The journalist earned international plaudits and a prestigious Orwell prize for her report on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica supposedly used big data dredged up out of Facebook to help both the Leave campaign and Donald Trump win victories in 2016. This too had a Russian connection. In a 2018 article for The Observer Cadwalladr described how, ‘Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties a Russian university. … Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with … also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin.’
Others jumped on the Russia-Cambridge connection. ‘The Facebook data farmed by Cambridge Analytica was accessed from Russia’, claimed British MP Damien Collins, head of the House of Commons Select Committee for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. In this capacity, he then published a report outlining allegations of Russian propaganda and meddling in British affairs, including unsubstantiated insinuations that Russian money had influenced the Brexit campaign via Mr Banks.
And yet, all this was false too. The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spent over two years investigating Cambridge Analytica, including its alleged role in the Brexit referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and its supposed ties to Russian government influence operations. Having completed its investigation, the ICO reported that apart from a single Russian IP address in data connected to Cambridge Analytica, it had found no evidence of Russian involvement with the company. Moreover, it concluded that claims of the company’s enormous influence were ‘hype’, unjustified by the facts.
In other words, just like the Steele dossier, the whole story about Russia influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum was made-up nonsense.
And yet, it has had an enormous influence. The allegations that Russia ‘interfered’ in Brexit have been repeated again and again – in parliamentary reports, newspaper articles, scholarly journals, books, social media, and so on. Despite their falsehood, they have enjoyed a spread and influence that Russian ‘meddlers’ could only dream of.
Will the peddlers of British disinformation repent? Will they now pen scores of articles admitting that they were wrong? Will they give evidence to parliament denouncing the scourge of false stories about Russia emanating from the British media and MPs?
Of course not. Ms Cadwalladr’s humiliation will get a few lines buried somewhere deep in some newspapers’ inner pages, and will then be forgotten. Meanwhile, the original claims will remain uncorrected in the many documents that repeat them, and the myth of Russian interference in Brexit will trundle on as a basis for denouncing the threat emanating from the East. The damage has been done. Ms Cadwalladr has been discredited, but someone else will soon be found to pick up the torch.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.
Cause of Death: A Primer
By Kip Hansen | Watts Up With That? | November 28, 2020
There has been massive media attention on Covid-19 deaths – and there have been a lot of them. The CDC as of noon on 26 November 2020 was reporting that there have been 259,005 total Covid-19 deaths in the United States.
Yet anyone who reads widely is aware that there have been reports of a motorcycle accident victim being reported as a Covid death. There are many who correctly report that all people dying from or with Covid and even suspected of dying from-or-with Covid-19 are all being counted as certified reportable must-make-the-headlines Covid-19 Deaths.
[Note: This is a long and rather detailed explanation of what leads to the situation in which we find ourselves regarding Covid-19 Deaths reporting. Those who want a better understanding of the issue should continue reading. Readers with no or little interest can just accept this brief synopsis: “It’s Complicated” and move on to other posts. ]
Various experts, journalists, bloggers, and pundits tells us that “Covid Deaths” are being over-counted, mis-counted and even under-counted. Other pundits and media-reported experts desperately try to reassure us that Covid Death counts are correct and real – and that we should all stay concerned and follow all government mandates – which vary from “reasonable” to “obviously based on magical thinking” (closing bars and restaurants at 10 PM because that’s when the Corona Virus Zombies attack) — all this despite various governments having different and contradictory mandates (or even an absence of mandates) and the various States in the United States following differing rules and policies on Covid Deaths reporting. Those reporting “facts” like “US Covid-19 Deaths overestimated by 17 times” (based on this CDC comorbitity data) are sadly mistaken and misinform the general public, just adding to the general confusion on the subject.
Doctors, Coroners and Medical Examiners will calmly explain that “Cause of Death” is complicated and not simple. And they are right. Most of us think that when a person dies, it is obvious what killed him/her. But that is just not the case. In fact, everyone dies of a combination of ”heart stoppage” [cardiac arrest] and “cessation of breathing” which eventually leads to “brain death”. But these are not usually listed as the Cause of Death on a death certificate.
Covid Deaths are being counted and reported based on advice from the CDC, who has based its advice on advice from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (.pdf). More on what that means later.
The Primer: What is meant by Cause of Death?
When a person dies in a hospital or other setting, there is some doctor, coroner or medical examiner that fills out a death certificate – officially certifying that John/Jane Doe has died and reports the date, time, place, Social Security number and other personal details along with the circumstances and sequence of events that led to that death.
Here’s a CDC-annotated image of the Cause of Death portion of a typical death certificate:
We are interested here only in Parts I and II.
“Part I
This section on the death certificate is for reporting the sequence of conditions that led directly to death. The immediate cause of death, which is the disease or condition that directly preceded death and is not necessarily the underlying cause of death (UCOD), should be reported on line a. The conditions that led to the immediate cause of death should be reported in a logical sequence in terms of time and etiology below it.
The UCOD, which is “(a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death or (b) the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury” (7), should be reported on the lowest line used in Part I.”
[ source: CDC here – .pdf ]
Let’s look at a CDC example:
This patient had Coronary Artery Disease for seven years — which led to Coronary artery thrombosis from which the patient suffered for 5 years — which led to Acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) after which he survived for 6 days until — his heart ruptured resulting in death within minutes. Conditions contributing to his/her death were diabetes, COPD, and smoking. Each of these “significant conditions contributing to death, but not resulting in the underlying cause” are themselves known to cause a wide range of other serious conditions. For instance, smoking is believed to cause COPD and heart disease. Diabetes can cause cardiovascular diseases “including coronary artery disease with chest pain (angina), heart attack, stroke and narrowing of arteries (atherosclerosis).” Notice that there is a dedicated section “35” asking “Did tobacco use contribute to death?” For this patient, the doctor chose “Yes” – thus the CDC will count this death as one of the 480,000 annual tobacco deaths.
Let’s look at another example (from the same document):
This person suffered from noninsulin dependent Diabetes mellitus, often called Type 2 Diabetes, for 15 years. As sometimes happens, this diabetes sufferer eventually went into a Hyperosmolar nonketotic coma in which she/he remained for 8 weeks before finally succumbing to Acute renal failure (kidney failure). The family of the patient would have told friends and neighbors that their loved one died of kidney failure. They may have mentioned this was probably the end-of-line result of his/her long-term diabetes. Type 2 Diabetes is known to cause the following conditions: Heart and blood vessel diseases, Nerve damage (neuropathy), Kidney damage (as in this patient), Eye damage, Slow healing, Hearing impairment, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
It is clear that this second patient died of acute kidney failure – “Acute kidney failure is most common in people who are already hospitalized, particularly in critically ill people who need intensive care” — and is not necessarily a direct result of diabetes – but assumed in this case as kidney damage can be caused by diabetes. The death certificate Part I sequence is reasonable and represents the doctor’s professional opinion.
“In certifying the cause of death, any disease, abnormality, injury, or poisoning, if believed to have adversely affected the decedent, should be reported. If the use of alcohol and/or other substance, a smoking history, or a recent pregnancy, injury, or surgery was believed to have contributed to death, then this condition should be reported. The conditions present at the time of death may be completely unrelated, arising independently of each other; or they may be causally related to each other, that is, one condition may lead to another which in turn leads to a third condition, and so forth. Death may also result from the combined effect of two or more conditions.”
Source CDC Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration (.pdf)
So, you call the Cause of Death of these two patients. What was the Cause of Death of each? Did diabetes kill them both? The first patient via atherosclerosis which kicked off the sequence in Part I? The second from the diabetes induced coma or was the coma from simply caused by being in intensive care? Or was it the first patient’s life-long cigarette smoking causing the coronary artery disease? Or would you, as this doctor did, start the death sequence with his/her seven years of Atherosclerotic coronary artery disease? In each case, there are several sequences that would be reasonable and could have been correctly entered by the attending physician, a coroner, or later by a medical examiner.
The above are pretty common examples – long-term conditions which lead to the next condition that finally leads to death. We don’t see the personal information part of the Death Certificate so we don’t know the age of these patients. The age of the patient is often key to Cause of Death – but is not to be used as a cause itself.
“Common problems in death certification
The elderly decedent should have a clear and distinct etiological sequence for cause of death, if possible. Terms such as senescence, infirmity, old age, and advanced age have little value for public health or medical research. Age is recorded elsewhere on the certificate. When a number of conditions resulted in death, the physician should choose the single sequence that, in his or her opinion, best describes the process leading to death, and place any other pertinent conditions in Part II.” [ source: CDC my bolds – kh ]
And then this:
“For statistical and research purposes, it is important that the causes of death and, in particular, the underlying cause of death, be reported as specifically and as precisely as possible. Careful reporting results in statistics for both underlying and multiple causes of death (i.e., all conditions mentioned on a death certificate) reflecting the best medical opinion.
Every cause-of-death statement is coded and tabulated in the statistical offices according to the latest revision of the International Classification of Diseases. “
Source CDC Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration (.pdf) – my bold — kh
There are over 69,000 ICD-10 diagnostic codes. Someone goes through every death certificate filed and translates the diseases and conditions the doctors, coroners and medical examiners enter in Parts I and II into ICD-10 codes (soon to be ICD-11 codes). There are so many codes that there are many online look-up tools and apps to help medical staff code up office visits and others to code up Cause of Death certificates. The first Death Certificate above might be coded: “ E08.01 Diabetes mellitus due to underlying condition with hyperosmolarity with coma” – which would cover Part I lines “c” and “b”. This diagnosis is billable. This app helpfully informs the staff if the ICD-10 code they select is “billable” – if not billable, we can safely suspect that office assistants coding office visits can search for a true but alternate diagnostic code that is billable. “All conditions mentioned on a death certificate” are translated to ICD-10 codes and eventually tabulated “for statistical and research purposes.” In our two sample Death Certificates, there are ten different diseases and conditions mentioned. Thus each of the ten condition codes eventually, at the CDC and WHO level, gets a little “tick-mark” – a plus one – added to the number of deaths involving that ICD-10 code.
Thus the huge number of deaths reported for which smoking is claimed to be the cause, as we see in this next quote from the CDC:
“Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death.Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year. If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn’t change, more than 8 million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.
Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.”
[ source: CDC here ]
Most people simply accept those statements as fact, though they know of no one who put a cigarette in their mouth, lit up, and died as a direct result. Through many years of public health anti-smoking/anti-tobacco education we have been taught that smoking or otherwise using tobacco can lead to a long list of health problems, many of which cause or contribute to the eventual death of the smoker. In this case, a life-time of tobacco use is referred to, by public health officials, as a “cause” of death – though it probably would not be listed as a cause on a death certificate. Despite not being listed as a cause on the Death Certificate, the CDC and WHO unequivocally tells us that smoking is “the leading cause of preventable death”.
As in many complicated subjects, there are varying definitions in use for the same terms – in this case “cause of death”. There is the general everyday use – like “something that directly causes the death of a person, if it hadn’t happened, they wouldn’t have died”. So, a person gets lung cancer, probably or presumably because they had been a life-long smoker, and dies from the lung cancer. We know they died of lung cancer but accept that smoking led to that death. It is this definition that the WHO uses above. But it is not the official definition that is to be used on a Death Certificate as Cause of Death, which is in the quote far above, labelled Part I.
Those readers who watch any of the popular crime and police television series know that Cause of Death in trauma deaths is even more complicated — “homicide, accident or suicide?” — though those TV Medical Examiners are always portrayed as having almost paranormal insight – “blunt trauma to the head…but that’s not what killed him.”
One last quote from the handbook for medical examiners:
“Precision of knowledge required to complete death certificate items
The cause-of-death section in the medical examiner’s or coroner’s certification is always a medical opinion. This opinion is, of course, a synthesis of all information derived from both the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death …. It represents the best effort of the medical examiner or coroner to reduce to a few words his or her entire synthesis of the cause of death.”
[ emphasis in the original – kh ]
Bottom Line: Cause of Death determination and reporting is complicated and highly dependent on the training and opinion of the person making the report.
# # # # #
Reporting of Covid-19 Deaths
Here’s the pivot point on Covid-19 Deaths:
This is from the CDC’s weekly Covid report. See the Column 2 heading? It says “All Deaths Involving Covid-19 (U07.1)1”. The keyword is INVOLVING. To be perfectly clear, what is being reported by the CDC, as collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, are All (every one) Deaths (people dying) that Involved Covid-19. See the little footnote indicator “1”?
Footnote 1 says: “COVID-19 deaths are identified using a new ICD–10 code. When COVID-19 is reported as a cause of death – or when it is listed as a “probable” or “presumed” cause — the death is coded as U07.1. This can include cases with or without laboratory confirmation.”
Not just verified cases in which Covid-19 was the immediate cause of death. At least, to be even clearer, not necessarily what you, the average reader, would consider THE cause of death.
So, what exactly are they counting when the CDC and WHO report Covid-10 Deaths? The World Health Organization’s official guidelines are:
2. DEFINITION FOR DEATHS DUE TO COVID-19
A death due to COVID-19 is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma). ….
A- RECORDING COVID-19 ON THE MEDICAL CERTIFICATE OF CAUSE OF DEATH
COVID-19 should be recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the disease caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.
[ my emphasis – kh source: WHO here .pdf ]
Note that the Death Certificate — Cause of Death Part II is “Other significant conditions contributing to…”. So, there is where Covid-19 (ICD code U07.1) would be written for any death in which Covid wasn’t “caused, or is assumed to have caused” but only contributed to the death. If the decedent was a “Covid case” then he/she becomes a “Covid Death” if they die. Read on . . .
For the general public, who want to know “How many people are being killed by the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic?”, this definition does not supply the answer to their question. The vagueness and breadth of these definitions is exacerbated, in this “possibly-too-broad” sense, by the definitions being used to define “What is a Covid-19 case?” We see that the WHO definition of a Covid death includes “a probable or confirmedCOVID-19 case”.
So, how do WHO and the CDC define or advise doctors how to define/determine a Covid-19 case?
Clinical Criteria
At least two of the following symptoms: fever (measured or subjective), chills, rigors, myalgia, headache, sore throat, new olfactory and taste disorder(s)
OR
At least one of the following symptoms: cough, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing
OR
Severe respiratory illness with at least one of the following:
Clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia, OR
Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
AND
No alternative more likely diagnosis
[ source: CDC here ]
So, by this definition, I could at this very moment be declared to be a Covid-19 case. I have muscle pain (myalgia) and a headache — two symptoms – — and yesterday, I had a cough — and, if I have reported to the ER and doctors are both rushed and spooked by the pandemic, there might be “no alternative more likely diagnosis”, in their minds at least. (Of course, I have these symptoms for reasons well known to me and my personal physician but this might not save me in the ER.) Especially if they also ask me a bunch of epidemiological questions:
“Epidemiologic Linkage
One or more of the following exposures in the 14 days before onset of symptoms:
Close contact** with a confirmed or probable case of COVID-19 disease;
OR
Close contact** with a person with:
clinically compatible illness
AND
linkage to a confirmed case of COVID-19 disease.
Travel to or residence in an area with sustained, ongoing community transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Member of a risk cohort as defined by public health authorities during an outbreak.
**Close contact is defined as being within 6 feet for at least a period of 10 minutes to 30 minutes or more depending upon the exposure. In healthcare settings, this may be defined as exposures of greater than a few minutes or more. Data are insufficient to precisely define the duration of exposure that constitutes prolonged exposure and thus a close contact.”
[ source: see previous quote ]
So, if I were in the Emergency Room, the ER doctor might ask me these questions: Do you know anyone who isn’t feeling well? Have you been in close contact with them for more than 10 minutes? Have you attended any meeting with more than 10 people in the last 14 days? Have you been to church or a party? Have you visited a restaurant or a bar? Any YES epidemiologically qualifies me as a Covid case. More questions: Do you wear a face mask whenever you are out of your own home? in your car? in WalMart? at the park? while mountain biking? Any NO qualifies me as a Covid case epidemiologically.
You can see how easy it is to be classified as a Covid-19 case. And they haven’t even tested me yet. (Read the link to see why even testing wouldn’t save me.) They would report me as a Covid case even if I tested negative – I might not be positive “yet”.
And while I describe my pending Covid-19 Case classification jokingly, it is a very real scenario. And, heaven forbid, were I to die of almost anything (except obvious trauma) in the next 14 days, I would become another Covid-19 Death statistic.
As most of us know by now, advanced age is a key factor in the vast majority of Covid-19 deaths:
Eighty percent (80%) of Covid-19 deaths are of those 65 years of age of or older – and a full one-third of the deaths occur in those over 85 years. If you are an adult today, then you were born between 1925 and 2000. At your birth, you could expect to live (life expectancy at birth) between 58 to 72 years, depending on your birth year. Those who are dying at 85 or older had a life expectancy at birth of less than 61 years. [My life expectancy at birth was about 66 years – so I have beaten the odds and hope to continue to do so for many years more.]
If this does not seem significant to you, I’ll repeat the CDC quote on reporting cause of death for the elderly – those 65 year of age or older.
“Common problems in death certification: The elderly decedent should have a clear and distinct etiological sequence for cause of death, if possible. Terms such as senescence, infirmity, old age, and advanced age have little value for public health or medical research. Age is recorded elsewhere on the certificate. When a number of conditions resulted in death, the physician should choose the single sequence that, in his or her opinion, best describes the process leading to death, and place any other pertinent conditions in Part II.” [ source: CDC my bolds – kh ]
For the elderly, the aged, the older citizen, which comprise the majority (80%) of Covid-19 deaths, any illness or condition that leads to breathing problems is prone to being classified as a Covid case, and thus a Covid-19 death in “a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case”.
Bottom Lines:
- It is complicated.
- Make no mistake, there are lots of people dying deaths that involve confirmed, assumed, or suspected Covid-19.
- Somewhere between “Most” and “Almost All” of those deaths involved other conditions that were already killing the patients – sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.
- The official health organizations have their own reasons for what they are counting and they are counting exactly what they say they are counting – but it is not what you or I would expect them to count. They are counting, as the CDC does, “All Deaths Involving Covid-19”.
- The Covid-19 Death statistics represent the counts of the WHO, the CDC and other National and State public health agencies. The general public often mistakenly thinks those counts mean deaths in which Covid-19 was the immediate cause of death – deaths in which the person was killed by Covid-19. That is not the case – it is far more complicated than that.
- The common citizen would have grave doubts about including each and every one of those dead people in the count of “Deaths Caused by Covid-19” if they were tasked with the job of reviewing all of the details of each death. Our citizen might make up our own sensible classifications: such as: ”Old Age complicated by Pneumonia initiated by a viral respiratory infection: maybe Covid-19 or influenza or the common cold”.
- Doctors (and here), Coroners and Medical Examiners are not immune to taking easy shortcuts. The official definitions for Covid-19 cases (in the essay) make it an easy choice for hurried doctors, and official guidance requires at least Covid-19’s mention on Death Certificates, under a vast array of normal circumstances during this pandemic. This is exacerbated by RT-PCR tests returning “positive” test results for very small amounts of viral RNA fragments in asymptomatic people.
# # # # #
Addendum:
There has erupted a flap concerning Genevieve Briand’s research at John Hopkins on U.S. Covid-19 Deaths: I supply these links on the controversy:
Covid-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data
pdf file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iO0K75EZAF8dkNDkDmM3L4zNNY0X-Xw5/view
William Briggs: https://wmbriggs.com/post/33680/
Twitter Thread on the Paper: https://mobile.twitter.com/jhunewsletter/status/1332100136152035330
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKJN61aflI
John Hopkins News-Letter retraction notice: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
Author’s Comment:
I have mentioned previously that I come from a medical family and studied the prerequisites for medical school in university, before changing majors for personal reasons. Our home was filled with the joys of new life and the sorrow of babies’ and children’s deaths. My generation fought and died by the thousands in the misguided military intervention in Viet Nam – some of these were my cousins and high school and college friends.
We are all sad when lives are cut short.
Covid-19, the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is shortening the lives of thousands in the United States and around the world. One blessing is that it is mostly shortening the lives of those who have already had a life – as opposed to stealing the entire lives of our children and young people.
Public health organizations have valid reasons for counting “All Deaths Involving Covid-19” using their own internal definitions, which are suitable for epidemiological studies and research when combined with all the other information being collected to produce that statistic. That statistic, created with their surveillance and epidemiological definitions, is not suitable for release to the general public without a long and complicated explanation – releasing just the number, and labeling it as Covid-19 Deaths is a form of misinformation.
The media, politicians, health agencies and governments have utterly failed to effectively communicate the reality of Covid deaths, failed to illuminate the caveats and complexities of Cause of Death reporting and instead of have repeatedly just reported this “Big Number” in a usage that is seems to be intentionally misleading.
With Carole Cadwalladr’s ‘journalism’ deemed untrue and her libel trial unravelling, will she get to keep her awards?
By Damian Wilson | RT | November 26, 2020
Discredited, Brexit-obsessed hack Carole Cadwalladr faces having to explain why demonstrably false claims of dodgy Russian links, illegal funding and data manipulation during the referendum deserve journalism’s highest accolades.
The headline said it all above the prize-winning journalist’s latest piece, ‘A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum.’
Wow! As a tale, it was a liberal journalist’s jackpot. Scheming Russians meddling in British democracy from the heart of Westminster, nefarious foreign agents pulling the strings of populist political puppets to influence the outcome of the most important referendum in a generation.
The shocking details of wrongdoing certainly would have been award-worthy journalism, had any of it been true.
The wild allegations have been slowly unravelling in the Le Carré-style intrigue woven by Carole Cadwalladr, a features hack on The Observer newspaper (circulation a humble 140K), who claims one of the key actors, Leave.EU backer Arron Banks had called her “a crazy conspiratorial woman who lives alone with their cats.” While she was offended by the misogyny of that insult, it’s nothing to the shame she now faces.
With her credibility shot to pieces, surely crusading Cadwalladr should hand back her coveted Orwell Prize and the Reporters Without Borders ‘L’esprit de RSF’ gong she won for her series of articles on alleged foreign interference in British politics.
Because her world of carefully crafted conspiracy has finally crumbled, she was expected to appear in court this morning for the latest round of Banks’ libel case against her – she accused him of telling lies about his relationship with Russia in a TED Talk. Online reports claimed the journalist had pulled the plug at the eleventh hour on two of the three defences she was relying on – truth and limitation – clinging to the lone defence that her claims against Banks were all in the public interest.
But, surely, by admitting that you have no evidence to prove something is true, it cannot logically be argued that publishing said thing is in the public interest? Or am I missing something?
Banks, who has clearly got under Cadwalladr’s skin, expects a finale, tweeting today: “It’s hugely disappointing that she couldn’t just apologise months ago and draw a line under this whole episode.”
What should really sting Cadwalladr is the bill for a £62,000 (almost $83,000) down-payment towards Banks’ legal costs – likely to be much higher later – that she has been ordered to make. But that financial pain has been massively eased by the vast stockpile of cash her gullible supporters have donated, thanks to her crowdfunding efforts. So far her fantasies have raised more than half a million pounds – £364,000 ($486,000) on gofundme, £168,000 ($224,000) on crowdjustice and almost £10,000 on crowdfunder. Who needs to worry about legal costs when the money is so easy to come by?
No doubt Banks will have his eye on that crowdfunded war chest.
With the National Crime Agency finding no evidence of wrongdoing, the Information Commissioner (ICO) clearing Cambridge Analytica of any wrongdoing whatsoever and Cadwalladr herself admitting she had wrongly accused Banks of having broken the law, this shameful put-up job may finally have run its course.
And what about the allegedly suspect £8 million in loans Banks lent to Leave.EU probed by the NCA? It’s final report read, “The NCA has found no evidence that any criminal offences have been committed… It will therefore take no further action against Mr Banks.”
And all that dodgy data manipulation by Cambridge Analytica? Just last month, the ICO, Elizabeth Denham, completed a three-year inquiry only to announce there was “no further evidence to change my earlier view that CA (Cambridge Analytica) was not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK.”
These findings make a mockery of all those self-congratulatory awards handed out among the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic for exposing… absolutely nothing.
No Russian funding. No Cambridge Analytica interference. No criminality. Nothing.
This humiliation wasn’t the end. Last month Cadwalladr couldn’t bear to leave well-enough alone and took to Twitter once more to attack her nemesis, in a move that hilariously backfired.
The result? Well, it wasn’t pretty. The journalist, no doubt through gritted teeth, announced on Twitter on November 6 that, “On 22 Oct 2020, I tweeted that Arron had been found to have broken the law. I accept he has not. I regret making this false statement, which I have deleted. I undertake not to repeat it. I apologise to Arron for the upset and distress caused.”
Still, the libel case hung over Cadwalladr’s head but the slim thread holding it looks about ready to snap, thanks to the lack of any viable defence, and that should finally close the book on this fairy tale, as soon as a few remaining wrongs are righted.
Because if justice really is to be done then Cadwalladr should hand back those prizes wrongly awarded to her on the basis of disinformation, accompanied by a grovelling apology and that self-righteous TED Talk should be taken down immediately. Yet somehow I don’t think any of this will happen because we all know that the liberal media is never wrong, even when it clearly is.
Depressingly, it appears yet again that there is more than a shred of truth to the cynical maxim in journalism, to NEVER let the facts stand in the way of a good story.
Damian Wilson is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.
Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud
By Glenn Greenwald | November 25, 2020
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.
In Tuesday’s New York Times, three of those censorious tech reporters — Kevin Roose, Mike Isaac, and Sheera Frenkel — published an article on Facebook’s post-election deliberations over how to alter its algorithms to prevent the spread of what they deem “misinformation” regarding the election. The most consequential change they implemented, The New York Times explained, was one in which “hyperpartisan pages” are repressed in favor of promoting “a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR” — a change the Paper of Record heralded as having fostered “a calmer, less divisive Facebook.”
More alarmingly, the NYT suggested (i.e., prayed) that these changes, designed by Facebook as an election-related emergency measure, would instead become permanent. Marvel at these two paragraphs and all of tenuous and self-serving assumptions buried in them:
New York Times article, “Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth,” Nov. 24, 2020
The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so.
As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.
Then there is the question of who does and does not spread “misinformation.” It is rather astonishing that the news outlets that did more than anyone to convince Americans to believe the most destructive misinformation of this generation: that Saddam had WMDs and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda — The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC and The New Yorker — have the audacity to prance around as the bulwarks against misinformation rather than what they are: the primary purveyors of it.
Over the last four years, they devoted themselves to the ultimate deranged, mangled conspiracy theory: that the Kremlin had infiltrated the U.S. and was clandestinely controlling the levers of American power through some combination of sexual and financial blackmail. The endless pursuit of that twisted conspiracy led them to produce one article after the next that spread utter falsehoods, embraced reckless journalism and fostered humiliating debacles. The only thing more absurd than these hyper-partisan, reckless outlets posturing as the alternatives to hyper-partisanship is them insisting that they’re the only safeguards against misinformation.
Note how insidiously creepy is The New York Times’ description of a censored, regulated internet. They call it “a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like,” and claim an unnamed Facebook employee described it as “a nicer news feed.”
Yes, discourse that is centralized and regulated, where no dissent is tolerated, where alternative voices are silenced, is always “calmer” and “less divisive.” That’s always the core goal of censorsing speech and ideas: to eliminate “divisiveness” and to pacify the population (“calmer” and “nicer”). That is always the result when orthodoxies imposed downward from the most powerful institutions of authority can no longer be meaningfully challenged.
The censorious mentality being peddled with increasing aggression is always chilling and dangerous. That it is media outlets — which ought to be the most vocal champions of free discourse — instead taking the lead in begging and pressuring Silicon Valley to censure the internet more and more is warped beyond belief. The internet should be free and left alone, especially by those with their record of deceit and propaganda.
Indeed, if we are to have it an internet controlled from above by unseen tech overlords in the name of eliminating “hyper-partisanship” and “disinformation” and fostering a “calmer” and “nicer” population, the sites now being artificially and manipulatively promoted are the absolute last ones who can credibly claim entitlement to that benefit.
Propaganda, Election Fraud and the Death of Journalism
By Frank Miele | Real Clear Politics | November 23, 2020
Easy question: Is it illegal to steal an election or not?
You would have to assume that it is no big deal based on the response to claims of widespread fraud in the contest between President Trump and Joe Biden. Big Media says the evidence just doesn’t exist, and most Americans seem to be lost in a blue haze of blind acceptance that whatever they are told by the talking heads on TV must be true.
This kind of unthinking obedience to authority is a frightening harbinger of an America that is no longer a nation of laws, but rather a nation of edicts. You can already see that unfolding in the sheep-like acceptance of COVID-19 restrictions that blatantly ignore the Constitution. But if you dare do your own independent assessment of facts — whether regarding the efficacy of mask use in preventing spread of coronavirus or regarding the security of electronic voting — you will quickly come to a different conclusion than that which is approved by Big Tech, Big Media and Big Money.
Unfortunately, most people don’t take the time to do their own research. They simply believe whatever is told to them. For those in thrall to the establishment media, that means they believe that Trump’s allegations of election fraud are “baseless.” Remember, the media made that declaration within hours of the election, long before any evidence had been presented in a court of law and before analysis had begun on the raw vote totals. Once that narrative was established, it didn’t matter how many affidavits were presented, how many witnesses came forward, or how much analysis suggested that the vote count may have been manipulated. The jury of the American people had already been tainted by Big Media to believe the narrative that Trump is a sore loser.
Don’t forget, the mainstream media — in the interests of public enlightenment (now known as wokeness) — have spent the past four years reporting as fact that the duly elected president of the United States is a liar, a tax cheat, a Russian puppet, and a racist. In other words, he is a con man who never should have been anywhere near the Oval Office in the first place. So why would anyone now believe his claims that Democrats used phony mail ballots, vote-counting software and foreign manipulation to steal the election? Most of the media is pretending that there is not even a real story to report in what, if true, would be one of the gravest constitutional crises in the history of our republic.
As Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in his press conference Thursday, “The coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this,” he warned the press. “You don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t have a right to lie about it.”
But, the newsrooms at CNN and MSNBC are keeping it from the public. They refused to even carry Giuliani’s press conference laying out the evidence of election fraud. As for Fox News, they covered it, and then put a reporter on the air to say the claims were “simply not true” or “baseless.” Clearly, we are not going to get the truth from the media. Has there been even one reporter for a mainstream outlet such as the Washington Post asking questions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to hacking or manipulation? Is any news organization demanding that the Justice Department or FBI get to the bottom of the story?
The loss of a free and neutral press means that democracy cannot work even if its elections were completely above board. The capacity of the people to self-govern is dependent on their access to true and accurate information. Sadly, the opposite principle applies as well. When journalism abandons objectivity in favor of an agenda, then the people are in the position of cattle being led to slaughter.
Thomas Jefferson described the abuses of a free press in 1814 in a letter to his friend Walter Jones:
“I deplore … the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write for them… These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief… This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit.”
Ouch! Take that, New York Times! Take that, CNN!
Of course, it is just such a malign “party spirit” that informs almost all mainstream journalism in the Age of Trump — a spirit that is visible in the hostility towards Trump himself, but also in the accommodation towards Democrats such as Joe Biden. Last Monday’s Biden press conference was a stunning abdication of responsibility by the media for its much-vaunted role of “speaking truth to power” — or at least asking tough questions.
Three of the first four queries were merely anti-Trump questions asked in a new way. Instead of asking Trump “How do you justify your unprecedented attempt to obstruct and delay a smooth transfer of power?” the reporters merely asked Biden what he thought about Trump’s “unprecedented attempt” blah blah blah. Then the next three questions were about COVID, which after six months of campaigning, even Sleepy Joe Biden could answer with his eyes closed.
Isn’t the media going to hold Biden accountable just like they claimed to hold Trump accountable? Why not ask about the curious patterns of vote counting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia that make millions of people think Biden tried to steal the election? Shouldn’t he be asked to support a full investigation to prove his victory was legitimate? How about a question about whether Hunter Biden will come out of hiding now that the election is over? How about asking the “president-in-waiting” to condemn the BLM and antifa violence that sent several innocent Trump supporters to the hospital two weeks ago?
How about our celebrity journalists celebrate their own crucial role as defenders of democracy? If they don’t want to “render themselves useless,” they need to swear allegiance to facts, wherever they lead, and not to one party. Or as Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana put it more indelicately, “They have to be equal opportunity assholes.”
But they aren’t — and sooner or later the American people will get tired of being manipulated. Journalism is supposed to give an honest account of the facts so that people can make up their own minds what they believe to be true. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a dishonest attempt to persuade people not to examine the facts for themselves. Journalism starts with facts and allows people to reach their own conclusion. Propaganda starts with a conclusion and manipulates people into accepting it as fact. You can decide for yourself whether what we have today is journalism or propaganda.
But the bottom line is this: Whether or not Donald Trump can prove his case in court should be irrelevant to the job of the press. What honest reporters ought to recognize is the significance of the allegation itself, the historical nature of the crime being alleged, and the importance to the future of our republic that the case must be heard.
Too bad there are so few honest reporters left.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Parler @HeartlandDiary.
On Coronavirus, We Must Not Allow Politics to Dictate Science
By Ron Paul | November 23, 2020
In these past couple of weeks, two important studies have been published that could dramatically increase our understanding of the Covid-19 disease. Adding to the science of how we understand and treat this disease is something that should be welcomed, because properly understood it can save lives.
The only problem is that because the results from these two studies challenge what the media has established as conventional wisdom about the disease, the reports are at best being ignored and at worst being openly distorted by the mainstream media.
This is in my view a dangerous and foolish subjugation of science to politics and it may well end up causing many more unnecessary deaths.
First is the Danish mask study, which was completed several months ago but was only recently published in a peer-reviewed journal. The study took two groups and gave the first group masks to wear with instruction on how they should be used. The other group was the mask-free control group.
The study found that coronavirus spread within the statistical margin of error in each group. In other words, wearing the mask did little if anything to control the spread of the virus.
As the wearing of masks is still being mandated across the country and the globe, this study should be reported as an important piece of counter-evidence. At the very least it might be expected to invite a rush of similar studies to refute or confirm the results.
However, while mostly ignored by the media, when it was covered the spin on the study was so strange that the conclusion presented was opposite to the findings. For example, the Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline, “Face mask trial didn’t stop coronavirus spread, but it shows why more mask-wearing is needed.”
Similarly, a massive new study conducted in Wuhan, China, and published in the respected scientific journal Nature, reports that asymptomatic persons who have tested positive for Covid-19 do not pass on the infection to others. Considering that mask mandates and lockdowns are all based on the theory that asymptomatic “positive cases” can still pass on the sickness, this is potentially an important piece of information to help plan a more effective response to the virus.
At the least, again, it should stimulate additional, far-reaching studies to either confirm or deny the Wuhan study.
We do know, based on information from widely-accepted sources as the CDC and World Health Organization, that lockdowns can have a very serious negative effect on society. On July 14th, CDC Director Robert Redfield told a seminar that lockdowns are causing more deaths than Covid.
So if there is a way to continue fighting Covid and protecting those most at risk while drastically reducing deaths related to lockdowns, isn’t this worth some consideration? Isn’t this worth at least some further research?
Well, not according to the mainstream media. They have established their narrative and they are not about to budge. The two studies are fatally flawed, they report. Of course that might be the case, but isn’t that an argument to attempt to replicate the studies to prove it?
That would be the scientific approach. Sadly, “trust the science” has come to mean “trust the narrative I support.” That is a very dangerous way of thinking and can prove to be deadly.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute
Featured Video
MIT Prof Ted Postol: U.S. Iran Missile War
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Frlom the Archives
Not Ready for the Big Leagues
Patriot Missile Launcher
By William Schryver | imetatronink | January 20, 2024
… In an attempt to cover just three large airbases against a series of salvos of 100+ missiles of various types, the entire US stockpile of PAC-3 interceptors could very conceivably be exhausted in little more than a week or two. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- MIT Prof Ted Postol: U.S. Iran Missile War
- Unpacking glaring contradictions in US-Zionist justifications for war against Iran
- Iraq and Cuba hit by blackouts amid US pressure and attacks on Iran
- US-Israeli Efforts to Degrade Iran’s Missile Might Failed – Military Researcher
- New American copium: Ghost of Kuwait
- IRGC strikes critical Israeli military sites with Khorramshahr-4 missiles in latest wave
- US racks up billions in losses during first four days of war as Iran pummels key Pentagon assets: Report
- US and Israeli Claims of Depleted Iranian Arsenals are Just Military Propaganda – Expert
- Iran denies attacking Azerbaijan, suggests Mossad involvement
- Iranian Armed Forces say no missile fired from Iran into Turkey
- If Americans Knew
- ‘Dirty Work’ :The truth about how Israel was founded
- Mass Expulsion in Lebanon as Israel Expands War: “We Don’t Know Where to Go”
- Lies, distortions, and propaganda: how the U.S. mainstream media coverage on Iran hides the truth
- Palestinians in Gaza fear famine returning as Israel cuts off food amid Iran war
- AIPAC, other pro-Israel groups enter midterms with $100 million to spend
- Iranian girls killed by ‘double-tap’ strikes on Minab school
- Bari Weiss Is Going Full ‘Propaganda-Palooza’ With the Iran War
- Inside the Pro-Israel Campaign to Stop ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ From Winning an Oscar
- After Iran, It’s Turkey
- War rages on Iran, while Israel withholds everything from Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 146
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: A Century Warming Of 1.1°C Is ‘Commonplace’ And ‘Not Unusual’ During This Interglacial
- New Study: ‘Internal Noise’ And Volcanic Forcing Can Trigger 10-15°C Warming Within Decades
- Glaciers Worldwide Are Suddendly Surging, Experts Blame Warming!
- Surprising Discovery: Sahara Is Greening…Billions Of Trees Where Once Thought To Be Barren
- New Research Reaffirms Clouds, Aerosols, And Surface Solar Radiation Are ‘Driving The Climate System’
- Germany: Electric Car Catches Fire At Charging Station, Sets Off Local “Inferno”, Widespread Damage
- New Study: Canada’s New Brunswick Was 1°C Warmer Than Today During The Medieval Warm Period
- Coal Power Back In Trend As Globe Tries To Keep Pace With Growing Demand For Power
- New Study: A 4°C Warmer Beaufort Sea Had ‘No Sea Ice’ 11,700 – 8200 Years Ago
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
Aletho News 