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BBC’s Fake Climate Check On Hurricanes

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 12, 2021

The BBC’s Climate Check is unsurprisingly about hurricanes, and equally unsurprisingly does not tell the truth:

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/58503854

Ben Rich repeats the BBC’s frequent lie, that climate change is making hurricanes stronger, expressed of course in the usual “scientists say” way. These are his exact words:

“Climate scientists believe that global warming is making them stronger”

It is of course true that some scientists say this, but equally many hurricane experts maintain the opposite, something you might have thought the BBC would have reported.

And, given this is supposed to be a “Climate Check”, you might have thought the BBC would actually have provided some facts, rather than just opinions. The IPCC were quite clear in their last Assessment Review, AR5:

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IPCC AR5

They could find no evidence whatsover of any “significant observed trends” in tropical cyclone activity over the past century. All they could find was an increasing intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes since the 1970s, which hurricane experts such as Chris Landsea believe is part of the multidecadal cycle, the AMO. This is borne out by the fact no that robust trends in major hurricanes has been found in the North Atlantic in the past 100 years.

Little has changed in the latest AR6, which can still find no long term trends.

One particular omission in the video is the role of wind shear, high level winds which act to break up hurricanes. While Rich mentions this factor, he omits to tell viewers that scientists believe that global warming will increase wind shear.

This Climate Check has little to do with facts, and is little more than propaganda.

September 12, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The tragedy of Australia

By Paul Collits | TCW Defending Freedom | September 10, 2021

The writer is in Australia

THE British historian Guy de la Bédoyère claims that ‘Australia is falling apart’. Off Guardian suggests that we are ‘going full fascist’. Daily reports in France, Russia and everywhere in between and beyond, hover between pity, amusement and disbelief. How did this happen – in Australia? The overseas storytelling can barely keep up with the never-ending stream of new announcements designed to grind us into the ground.  But on and on it goes.

There is, at last, a book-length account of Australia’s eighteen months of madness that will either warm the hearts of Covid realists, remind us of all the Covid policy absurdities or perhaps simply provide yet more chilling evidence of the sinister forces at work that are changing us irrevocably.

Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia (Sense of Place Publishing, 2021), by John Stapleton, restores – though perhaps only a little – the faith we ought to have in the journalist class, so utterly diminished by their sitting out the crushing of our lives (at best) and their active collaborating in the spread of Covid propaganda (at worst).

Recognising early on the biggest story of all of our lives, Stapleton set out to record in graphic detail and with authenticity the developing catastrophe, from the toilet paper crisis at the start to the emerging apartheid regime for those who refuse the State Injectible.

Stapleton records with palpable astonishment the now familiar litany of harms that have been done, not only to the body politic, but to our core values, indeed, to our very sense of our country. Our place. They include the impositions of lockdowns that do not work but cause harm beyond telling; the ‘wildly inaccurate’ modelling that predicted catastrophe and instead merely delivered fame and riches for those involved; the succession of non-medical interventions with no basis in science and without popular understanding that this is the case; the low information voter; the punitive policing; the absence of real leadership in the crisis; the incoherent messaging from the top; the disaster that is ‘National Cabinet’; magic money tree economics; the relentless announcables; the Covid cronyism; the entrenching of power by the political class.

This all amounts to ‘a radical social experiment going against decades of epidemiological wisdom’.  It has been, Stapleton suggests, ‘demonic’. Not just stupid and deranged, but evil. It has caused, as we now see in all our empty churches, ‘spiritual damage’. Earthly lives gone, and souls lost. A sad tale of deceit and compliance, of induced fear, isolation, economic deprivation, destroyed friendships and civil fracture. A creepy but unmistakable feel of the Biblical End Times, the streets empty. Astonishing submissiveness. A story of manufactured narratives, of a ‘disinformation feedback loop’ as Stapleton reports, his previous faith in the scepticism of his countrymen utterly destroyed. Societal dysfunction. Many ‘conspiracy theories’ across the internet have proved to be spot on.

The book draws upon a broad range of expert observers, who include journalists of every colour and distinguished academics such as the Spectator’s Ramesh Thakur, a breath of fresh air amid the fetid atmosphere of secular decline. Ramesh’s call on the Covid response, as reported by Stapleton: ‘The greatest mistake in history’. World War One is right up there, but this call is no exaggeration.

Rational argument simply does not work with our rulers. Copious evidence relating to the policy disasters of the pandemic never breaches the walls of the bubble. As Stapleton said in an interview with Sydney Criminal Lawyers, ‘it all fell on deaf ears’.

Is the tide of opinion turning against the ever-increasing crush of medical technocracy? Stapleton has cautious optimism. Speaking up for those of us who, mercifully, live outside the cities, he says: ‘But there are no cases or virtually no cases in this area. Nobody knows anybody who has died.’ Pennies may, at last, be dropping. Crisis? What crisis? It is a case-demic of a very mild strain of the initial virus, without the remotest hospitalisation crisis

Chillingly, as Stapleton says, ‘All of this has been done in secret, and in our name.’ The parliaments rarely sit. Public Health Orders trump democratic processes. Reasons are never given for policy actions beyond formulaic tosh. We never signed up for this.

Steve Waterson, one of the few consistently sane voices in the corporate media, describes the book as a ‘devastating indictment of Australia’s response to the Covid pandemic’. I am glad Waterson didn’t confine himself to ‘Australian governments’, for we are, all of us, complicit in this truly diabolical attack on everything we have all lived for. Stapleton uses the term ‘manipulated’ and ‘held hostage’ to describe our corporate media’s role in the fiasco.

Stapleton, alone, it seems, among our publishers and authors, has taken a stand – for freedom, common sense, perspective and Aussie values. His is a stand for life itself. His work shames his colleagues who have chosen to sit quietly in the corner these past eighteen months, or worse, to join in the chanting for the Covid Fascist State. This book is the methodical work of a brave truth-teller who is willing to call a spade a bloody shovel, in the best tradition of fair-dinkum journalism.

As the first draft of history, this magnificent book should be marked ‘essential reading’. Normally one might add here: ‘Send a copy to your member of parliament’. Alas, I fear, in this case, such a course of action would be pointless. Our rulers are in and settled, on a good wicket, and they intend to bat on.

A ‘signal collapse and rearrangement of society’? Who on earth could disagree?

September 12, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

World Health Organization Enters Damage Control Mode

This article was previously published on April 9, 2021, and has been updated with new information.

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 10, 2021

While the mainstream media has, by and large, dismissed the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created and leaked from a high-security biocontainment lab in Wuhan, China, a number of high-ranking U.S. officials are sticking to it, and there’s probably good reason for this.

On the whole, if the virus was actually a natural occurrence, a series of improbable coincidences would have had to transpire. Meanwhile, a series of highly probable “coincidences” point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) being the most likely source, and to dismiss them as a whole simply doesn’t make sense.

Media Struggle to Prop Up Unproven Zoonotic Theory

I first mentioned that the outbreak had the hallmarks of a laboratory escape in an article we posted February 4, 2020. On the upside, some members of the media are now finally starting to inch toward more honest reporting on this — probably because U.S. officials keep leaning that way.

That doesn’t mean some aren’t still trying to defend the official narrative. Take The New York Times, for example. The original headline of its March 26, 2021, article about Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, read: “Ex-CDC Director Favors Debunked Covid-19 Origin Theory.”1

Three days later, that headline was toned down to: “The CDC’s Ex-Director Offers No Evidence in Favoring Speculation That the Coronavirus Originated in a Lab,”2 with a correction notice noting that the earlier headline “referred incorrectly to a theory on the origins of the coronavirus. The theory is unproven, not debunked.”

Well, the truth is, all other theories are equally unproven — and are riddled with far more holes. The theory that the virus arose through natural mutation, for example, looks like Swiss cheese in comparison to the lab-leak theory.

In a February 16, 2021, article3 in Independent Science News, molecular biologist and virologist Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., a molecular biologist, reviewed the evidence for a laboratory origin and the reasons why a zoonotic origin “will never be found.” I also summarized their review in March 2021 article, which explains that:

  • The chance of a person from Wuhan being patient zero is approximately 1 in 630, based on calculations that take into account the population size of Wuhan, the global population and the fact that coronavirus-carrying animals are found virtually all over the world
  • Taking into account that there are 28 Alpha- and Beta-coronavirus species with members that affect humans, the chance of Wuhan hosting a SARS-related coronavirus outbreak is 17,640 to 1
  • No credible theory for natural zoonotic spillover has been presented, to date
  • There are at least four distinct lab origin theories, including the serial passage theory (which proposes the virus was created by serial passaging through an animal host or cell culture). There’s also a variety of evidence for genetic manipulation
  • A third theory is that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of vaccine development, and the fourth is the Mojiang miners passage theory, which proposes a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 sickened the miners, and once inside these patients, it mutated into SARS-CoV-2

No matter which way you look at it, the half-baked idea brought forth by the World Health Organization’s investigative team, that the virus somehow naturally evolved in some unknown part of the world and then piggy-backed into Wuhan on top of frozen food, is held together by even fewer facts.

Among the more compelling “coincidences” that hint at lab-origin are the facts that the WIV has admitted storing and working with bat coronaviruses collected significant distances away from the lab, and that it’s the only biosafety lab in China that studies human coronaviruses. These viruses include RaTG13,4 the closest known ancestor to SARS-CoV-2, obtained from miners who fell ill with severe respiratory illness after working in a Mojiang mine in 2012.

WHO COVID Report ‘Totally Flawed’

In a March 30, 2021, opinion piece in The Washington Post,5 Josh Rogin accurately points out that the WHO’s report6 on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is so flawed, “a real investigation has yet to take place.” We simply cannot count that report as the result of a true investigative effort.

“Determining the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus should have nothing to do with politics,” he writes.7 “It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories, and one that should encompass both the scenario that the virus jumped from animals to humans in nature as well as one related to human error in a Wuhan lab.

But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration.”

As noted by Rogin and many others, the investigation was far from independent and transparent, as China was allowed to select its members, who then relied on their Chinese counterparts when it came to data collection. It’s no surprise then that this team decided the natural origin theory is the most credible, while the lab-accident theory is summarily dismissed as unworthy of further consideration and study.

In a March 25, 2021, CNN interview,8 Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.” Rogin adds:9

“Specifically, declassified U.S. intelligence, confirmed by Blinken’s own State Department,10 alleges that the WIV was conducting undisclosed research on bat coronaviruses, had secret research projects with the Chinese military, and failed to disclose that several lab workers got sick with COVID-like symptoms in autumn 2019.”

Someone’s Not Telling the Truth

According to the WHO report, the labs “were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring program with no reporting of COVID-19 compatible respiratory illness during the weeks/months prior to December 2019.” “In other words, the WHO is saying the U.S. intelligence is wrong,” Rogin writes.11

Not a word is mentioned in the report about U.S. government claims that the WIV engaged in the very research required to create a novel coronavirus with the specific affinity to infect human cells.

Recently, Shi Zhengli, who heads bat coronavirus research at the WIV, spoke at a Rutgers University seminar, calling the WIV’s research “open” and “transparent.” Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger disagrees. In an interview with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” he said:12

“There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples — and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences. There is a body of research that’s been taking place, conducted by the Chinese military in collaboration with the WIV, which has not been acknowledged by the Chinese government.

We’ve seen the data. I’ve personally seen the data. We don’t know [why the military were in that lab]. It is a major lead that needs to be pursued by the press, certainly by the WHO.”

As noted by Pottinger, Shi published studies showing how bat coronaviruses were manipulated to render them more infectious to humans, and the U.S. government has in the past received reports of safety concerns due to lax standards at the WIV.

“They were doing research specifically on coronaviruses that attach to the ACE2 receptors in human lungs just like the COVID-19 virus,” Pottinger told Stahl.13 “It’s circumstantial evidence. But it’s a pretty potent bullet point when you consider that the place where this pandemic emerged was a few kilometers away from the WIV.”

US State Department Suspects Lab Leak

In a March 21, 2021, interview with Sky News Australia,14 David Asher, former lead investigator for the U.S. State Department’s task force that looked into the origins of COVID-19, also stated that the data they collected “made us feel the Wuhan Institute was highly probably the source of the COVID pandemic.”

According to Asher, three workers at the WIV who worked with the RatG13 coronavirus — the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 identified to date — appear to have actually been the first cluster of cases of COVID-19. They fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as early as October 2019. At least one of the workers required hospitalization.

He also pointed out there is evidence in the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggesting it’s been synthetically altered. It has the backbone of a bat coronavirus, combined with a pangolin receptor and “some sort of humanized mice transceptor.” “These things don’t naturally make sense,” Asher said, adding that experts around the world agree that the odds of this configuration occurring naturally are “very low.”

Another troubling indicator that something was amiss at the WIV was the Chinese government’s taking down of a WIV database in September 2019. According to the Chinese, this was done because of “thousands of hacking attempts.”

However, Asher pointed out many other databases were taken offline around the same time as well.15 The Chinese even tried to remove data posted in a European database containing viral sequencing from patients exhibiting COVID-19-related symptoms. Interestingly, those sequences included adenovirus, which is a vaccine vector. This, Asher said, could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is part of a vaccine developed in response to a biological weapon.

In an earlier article16 by The Sun, Asher is quoted saying the WIV “was operating a secret, classified program,” and that “In my view … it was a biological weapons program.” He stops short of accusing China of intentional release, however, which also would not make sense from a bioweapon point of view. Instead, he said he believes it was a weapon vector that, during development, “somehow leaked.”17

A March 27, 2020, assessment report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency also concluded SARS-CoV-2 was likely an accidental release from an infectious diseases laboratory, but stops short of calling it a biological weapon.18 Asher also told Sky News19 he’s never seen a more systematic cover-up, and The Sun 20 quotes him as saying that “Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all the hallmarks of guilt are associated with this.”

Former FDA Commissioner Weighs in on Lab Origin

March 28, 2021, former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb, now a board member of Pfizer (producer of one of the COVID vaccines), weighed in on the origin of the pandemic in a “Face the Nation” interview, saying:21

“It looks like the WHO report was an attempt to try to support the Chinese narrative … You know, the lab leak theory doesn’t seem like a plausible theory unless you aggregate the biggest collection of coronaviruses and put them in a lab, a minimum-security lab in the middle of a densely-populated center and experiment on animals, which is exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology did.

They were using these viruses in a BSL-2 lab and, we now know, infecting animals. So that creates the opportunity for a lab leak. It might not be the most likely scenario on how this virus got out, but it has to remain a scenario. And I think at the end of the day, we’re never going to fully discharge that possibility. What we’re going to have here is a battle of competing narratives.”

WHO Enters Damage Control Mode

In response to growing critiques, WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and 13 other world leaders have joined the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.” As reported by The Washington Post, March 30, 2021:22

“Ghebreyesus said in a briefing to member states … that he expected ‘future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing’ — the most pointed comments to date from an agency that has been solicitous toward China through most of the pandemic.

He said there is a particular need for a ‘full analysis’ of the role of animal markets in Wuhan and that the report did not conduct an ‘extensive enough’ assessment of the possibility the virus was introduced to humans through a laboratory incident …

The United States, Britain, South Korea, Israel, Japan and others issued a joint statement23 … expressing concern. ‘Together, we support a transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence,’ it reads …

Tedros said24 … that mission team members raised concerns to him about access to raw data needed for the report … ‘The team reports that the first detected case had symptom onset on the 8th of December 2019. But to understand the earliest cases, scientists would benefit from full access to data, including biological samples from at least September 2019,’ he said.”

WHO Investigation Team Accused of Spreading Disinformation

In a March 2020 interview with Independent Science News,25 molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University and the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the state of New Jersey, called out the members of the WHO-instigated investigative team as “participants in disinformation.”

Ebright was one of 26 scientists who signed an open letter26 demanding a full and unrestricted forensic investigation into the origins of the pandemic, published in the Wall Street Journal and French Le Monde, March 4, 2021. When asked to describe the shortcomings of the WHO-China team’s investigation, he responded:

“A credible investigation would have had Terms of Reference that: 1) Acknowledged the possibility of laboratory origin, 2) Ensured access of investigators to records, samples, personnel, and facilities at the Wuhan laboratories that handle bat SARS-related coronaviruses,

3) Enabled collection of evidence, not mere meet-and-greet photo-ops, 4) Authorized an investigation of months, not mere days, and 5) A credible investigation also would have had conflict-of-interest-free investigators, not persons who were subjects of the research and/or closely associated with subjects of the investigation …

It is crucial that any team reviewing the issues include not only research scientists, but also biosafety, biosecurity, and science policy specialists.”

Ebright, who has repeatedly called the WHO mission “a charade,” stated that “its members were willing — and, in at least one case, enthusiastic — participants in disinformation.” Importantly, the terms of reference for the investigation were prenegotiated, and did not include even the possibility of a laboratory origin. He’s also highly critical of the inclusion of Peter Daszak, whose conflicts of interest alone are enough to invalidate the investigation.

“Daszak was the contractor who funded the laboratory at WIV that potentially was the source of the virus (with subcontracts from $200 million from the US Department of State and $7 million from the US National Institutes of Health), and he was a collaborator and co-author on research projects at the laboratory,” Ebright noted.

What Do We Know?

While another signer of the open letter, Dr. Steven Quay, claims to have calculated27 the lab-origin hypothesis as having a 99.8% probability of being correct, Ebright is unwilling to assign relative probabilities to either theory. Rather, he insists a truly thorough forensic investigation and analysis is what is required, as there is biological evidence going in both directions. He explains:

“The genome sequence of the outbreak virus indicates that its progenitor was either the horseshoe-bat coronavirus RaTG13, or a closely related bat coronavirus.

RaTG13 was collected by Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2013 from a horseshoe-bat colony in a mine in Yunnan province, where miners had died from a SARS-like pneumonia in 2012, was partly sequenced by WIV in 2013-2016, was fully sequenced by WIV in 2018-2019, and was published by WIV in 2020.

Bat coronaviruses are present in nature in multiple parts of China. Therefore, the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident, with a virus passing from a bat to a human, possibly through another animal. There is clear precedent for this. The first entry of the SARS virus into the human population occurred as a natural accident in a rural part of Guangdong province in 2002.

But bat coronaviruses are also collected and studied by laboratories in multiple parts of China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Therefore, the first human infection also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with a virus accidentally infecting a field collection staffer, a field survey staffer, or a laboratory staffer, followed by transmission from the staffer to the public.

There also is clear precedent for this. The second, third, fourth and fifth entries of the SARS virus into human populations occurred as a laboratory accident in Singapore in 2003, a laboratory accident in Taipei in 2003, and two separate laboratory accidents in Beijing in 2004.

At this point in time, there is no secure basis to assign relative probabilities to the natural-accident hypothesis and the laboratory-accident hypothesis. Nevertheless, there are three lines of circumstantial evidence that are worth noting.

1. First, the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, a city of 11 million persons that does not contain horseshoe-bat colonies; that is tens of kilometers from, and that is outside the flight range of, the nearest known horseshoe-bat colonies. Furthermore, the outbreak occurred at a time of year when horseshoe bats are in hibernation and do not leave colonies.

2. Second, the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the laboratory that conducts the world’s largest research project on horseshoe bat viruses, that has the world’s largest collection of horseshoe-bat viruses, and that possessed and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus …

3. Third, the bat-SARS-related-coronavirus projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used personal protective equipment (usually just gloves; sometimes not even gloves) and biosafety standards (usually just biosafety level 2) that would pose very high risk of infection of field-collection, field-survey, or laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.”

Who’s Qualified to Opine on Viral Origin?

When asked “What would you say to the scientists who declined to comment on the open letter because it does not come from virologists?” Ebright responded:28

“The claim is unsound. There were virologists among the signers of the Open Letter. There even were coronavirologists among the signers of the Open Letter. More important, COVID-19 affects every person on the planet. Not just virologists …

Microbiologists and molecular biologists are as qualified as virologists to assess the relevant science and science policies. Virology is a subset, not a superset, of microbiology and molecular biology. The sequencing, sequence analysis, cell culture, animal-infection studies and other laboratory procedures used by virologists are not materially different from the procedures used by other microbiologists and molecular biologists.”

Is Gain-of-Function Research Ever Justifiable?

Clearly, getting to the bottom of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial if we are to prevent a similar pandemic from erupting in the future. If gain-of-function research was in fact involved, we need to know, so that steps can either be taken to prevent another leak (which is not likely possible) or to dismantle and ban such research altogether for the common good.

As long as we are creating the risk, the benefit will be secondary. Any scientific or medical gains made from this kind of research pales in comparison to the incredible risks involved if weaponized pathogens are released, and it doesn’t matter if it’s by accident or on purpose. This sentiment has been echoed by others in a variety of scientific publications.29,30,31,32

Considering the potential for a massively lethal pandemic, I believe it’s safe to say that BSL 3 and 4 laboratories pose a very real and serious existential threat to humanity.

Historical facts tell us accidental exposures and releases have already happened, and we only have our lucky stars to thank that none have turned into pandemics taking the lives of tens of millions, as was predicted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seeing how scientists have already figured out a way to mutate SARS-CoV-2 such that it evades human antibodies, having a frank, open discussion about the scientific merits of this kind of work is more pertinent than ever before.

If SARS-CoV-2 really was the result of zoonotic spillover, the easiest and most effective way to quash “conspiracy theories” about a lab origin would be to present compelling evidence for a plausible theory. So far, that hasn’t happened, and as noted by Latham and Wilson, the most likely reason for that is because the virus does not have a natural zoonotic origin, and you cannot find that which does not exist.

Summary

Ideally, we need to reevaluate the usefulness of the WHO. Strong evidence indicates it is heavily influenced, if not outright controlled by Bill Gates. On the whole, it seems it would be far wiser to decentralize pandemic planning from the global and federal levels to the state and local levels. Both medicine and government work best when individualized and locally applied.

Sadly, even though this is clearly the best strategy for successfully addressing any truly serious infectious threat, the likelihood of this happening is very close to zero.

This is largely due to decades of careful planning by the technocrats that have carefully placed their surrogates in virtually every arena of global government, finances and media, which allows them to easily dictate their propaganda campaigns and censor or deplatform virtually anyone who disagrees and seeks to provide a balanced counter-narrative.

Sources and References

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Covid and the crisis of scientific integrity

By Mark Pickles | TCW Defending Freedom | September 9, 2021

MANY of us in the UK who have been writing about the Covid-19 vaccines (and have declined them) have found ourselves fighting what I call ‘data wars’.

Although it is necessary to engage in these wars, in this article I explain why we need an additional tactic to defeat those who are using highly selective scientific data to impose a political will and a ‘new normal’ of social control.

We need to start with the obvious, for which we do not need the nitty-gritty of data, such as this tweet from the editor of TCW Defending Freedom:

As a scientific technical writer, I am very aware that scientific data – and language, terminology, jargon and marketing copywriting – can be used to ‘prove’ almost anything. It is easy to blind people, including scientists, with science.

Much scientific data today is dubious. In our times of huge proliferation of science, the majority of published studies cannot be replicated independently by peers. In other words, published science is not necessarily true. The journal Nature calls this situation a ‘crisis’.

Furthermore, much data that is passed off as science cannot, by its very nature, be replicated and tested, such as so-called behavioural science and data modelling, that we might call crystal-ball science.

Equally concerning is that most scientific experiments fail, and details are hardly ever published, meaning that science does not properly learn from its failures. This is sometimes called ‘publication bias’. Science, of all academic disciplines, is vulnerable to the pressure of ‘publish or perish’. In other words, we must always be cautious of scientists armed with data.

Commerce (not least Big Pharma), government, and the colluding mainstream media can simply pick the scientific data they want to believe or they want the public to believe. At no time has this been more obvious than since early 2020, when large corporations were given political permission and public funding to do ‘warp speed’ science despite, as noted, the knowledge that there was already a crisis of scientific integrity.

Hence we suddenly see the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ditching its credibility by giving unprecedented licenced approval-to-market of a vaccine still undergoing clinical trials, trials which themselves have been short-cut (such as no blinded control group).

There is much commercial incentive and political pressure now to do novel science, such as novel testing methods and novel vaccines. And there is much disincentive to publish experiments and data on treating Covid-19 with existing treatments. Experts advocating treatments such as ivermectin and asthma inhalers are easily hidden from public view by the mainstream media and by the social media barons.

In the data wars, each side picks its experts. For instance, in the last week of August one could have picked a Japanese report claiming that the Delta variant will acquire complete resistance to the mRNA vaccines, or an Oxford University report telling you that the vaccines are effective against the Delta variant.

Powerful tyrants and sophists in the governments of Canada, USA, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Israel etc, have agreed with the most powerful media on which data are to prevail in the new and internationalist political movement sloganised ‘Build Back Better’.

Politicians know they need the approval of the social media barons, who are internationalist, secularist and woke, convinced that the meaning of life is climate change and utopian science, including, in the words of the UK government, ‘genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces’.

Israel is one of several highly vaccinated nations – with Iceland, Gibraltar and Seychelles – that, despite initial claims of success, now rank amongst the most diseased nations. Common sense, therefore, informs us that the vaccines don’t work, and have not achieved what the vaccine designers, manufacturers and promoters said they would achieve a year ago (including herd immunity). We do not need sophisticated data to make the point. It is obvious that the situation today in Israel is unexpected, and contrary to what Big Pharma and the world’s political leaders told us to expect. We have the right to start asking whether mass vaccination has caused augmented virulence of the virus in their society.

In the meantime, Israeli scientists, politicians and journalists blindly offer data insisting the vaccines are working. We are told that people simply need to be ‘topped up’ with more of the synthetic spike-protein toxin. According to Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, the double-jabbed are now considered unvaccinated (and denied the Green Pass). Worse, Bennett blames ‘vaccine refusers’ for endangering the whole nation. And as the triple-jabbed Israelis find themselves hospitalised with Covid-19, the plan now is quadruple jabbing.

Denial of the obvious in politics and the media typically begins, ‘We always knew the vaccinations were not 100 per cent effective, but . . .’ Then public figures of science – such as the UK’s Jonathan Van-Tam – make spurious, implausible and wildly inconsistent claims such as that the vaccines have saved 100,000 lives, and 60,000 lives, and 10,000 lives. Even the implausible data are inconsistent!

In many advanced nations, we are now witnessing extreme political and intellectual face-saving. Expect more lies. This lack of truth, honour and honesty in public life is extremely dangerous, as I wrote here for TCW Defending Freedom. Science and medicine have lost their integrity. Health authorities have lost their integrity. Politics has lost its integrity. Trust between doctors and patients has become very fragile.

Over the next few months I expect the UK government and its henchmen at Sage to produce data to prove that we need triple jabs, then quadruple jabs . . .

I suggest that it is time for everyone, regardless of profession and expertise, to challenge all this scientific nonsense with truth and common sense.

September 9, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

“Big increase in weather disasters over the past five decades” – Claim BBC

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 6, 2021

This is another fairy tale to scare the kids which comes around once a year without fail:

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The number of weather-related disasters to hit the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years, says the World Meteorological Organization. … Full article

In fact, according to the BBC’s own chart, the number of disasters has declined in the last decade, hardly supporting their story.

But why do disasters seem much more common now than in the 1970s, when even the IPCC says there is no evidence that weather is getting more extreme? Simple- better reporting systems mean that we record weather events now that would have been missed in the past.

We have, of course, been down this road before! The WMO data comes from Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) database EM-DAT. CRED, who only began publishing data in 1998, themselves warned in 2004 that earlier data was incomplete:

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https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/the-international-disaster-database/

Despite this warning, false claims that weather disasters are on the increase keep being made. Last year, it was the UN, and the before it was the left wing IPPR. And as surely as night follows day, their claims are faithfully trumpeted by the BBC and the rest of the gullible [alarmist] media.

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Greenland’s Ice Cap Above Average This Year

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 5, 2021

You will no doubt recall the Greenland meltdown scare a few weeks ago, when the media went mental after a few sunny days there:

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It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the ice sheet actually finished the summer with an above average volume of ice, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute:

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The Greenland Icesheet Surface Mass Balance excl Glacier Calving
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

 

As I pointed out at the time, this year’s summer melt has been one of the shortest on record, beginning a month late. Indeed last year’s summer melt was also truncated, but you won’t see this reported anywhere in the media.

When glacial calving is added into the figures, Greenland is still losing ice, but at a much lower rate in recent years than a decade ago, mainly due to glaciers becoming more stable.

In the last ten years, 2403 Gt has been lost. This may sound a lot, but equates to only 6.7mm of sea level rise. A giga-tonne, by the way, is 1 Billion tonnes, and Greenland sits under 2.6 million of these. At the current rate, it would take 10,000 years for the ice sheet to melt, by which time we will probably in the middle of the next ice age!!

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https://podaac-tools.jpl.nasa.gov/drive/files/allData/tellus/L4/ice_mass/RL06/v02/mascon_CRI/greenland_mass_200204_202106.txt

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

The Collapse of Climate-Related Deaths

Climate-related deaths have fallen over 99 percent since 1920

By Gale Pooley | HumanProgress | September 3, 2021

Hurricane Ida has devastated the Gulf Coast. CNBC reports that “Ida made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 miles per hour, one of the strongest storms to hit the region since Hurricane Katrina.” The property damage will be significant. Nineteen deaths have been confirmed, and more will likely follow. Those deaths are tragic, but thanks to enhanced preparation and flood defenses, they are a small fraction of the 1,833 deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Compare Ida to the Great Galveston Hurricane that made landfall on September 9th, 1900. The storm killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people. In 1915, another storm similar in strength struck Galveston. The 1915 storm resulted in only 53 deaths. How did Galveston reduce hurricane fatalities by 99 percent in 15 years? In a word, adaptation. In 1902, the residents of Galveston funded a 10-mile-long seawall, dredged sand from the shipping channel, and raised many buildings, some by as much as 17 feet.

Thankfully, the rest of the world is following Galveston’s example. Even the most dangerous storms kill fewer people than in the past. The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed between 22,000 and 27,000 people, making it the deadliest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The second deadliest hurricane (Mitch) occurred in 1998 and killed just over 11,000.

Average deaths are declining as well. The Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has reported that climate-related deaths averaged 485,000 a year in the 1920s. Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 18,362 annual climate-related deaths. In 2020, the death rate dropped to 14,893. Based on what has been reported, there have been 5,569 climate-related deaths in 2021 so far.

So, adjusted for population, we went from 255.3 deaths per million in 1920 to 1.9 per million in 2020, a 99.25 percent decrease. In other words, for every climate-related death in 2020, we had 133.6 deaths in 1920.

The above numbers suggest that between 1920 and 2020, the world has become 13,260 percent safer from climate-related death (i.e., around 5 percent safer a year). Lomborg notes:

This is clearly the opposite of what you hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events are increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds, and better accessibility (the CNN effect).

To avoid falling for the CNN effect, look at the number of dead per year as reported by the most respected global database, the International Disaster Database (https://public.emdat.be/). You can also read more from Lomborg’s peer-reviewed article here.

Will there continue to be dangerous weather and climate-related deaths? Yes, but we must put these catastrophes into context. Over the last 100 years, humanity has shown that we can adapt and thrive under varying climate conditions. Let facts, rather than advertising dollars, inform your thinking.

Professor Gale L. Pooley teaches economics at Brigham Young University, Hawaii. He is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member of HumanProgress.org

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

This Week in the New Normal #5

OffGuardian | September 5, 2021

This Week in the New Normal  is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

1. MANDATORY VACCINES FOR NHS WORKERS?

The UK’s health secretary Sajid Javid is said to be considering mandatory Covid “vaccines” for all NHS employees. Such a move could be disastrous, and likely intentionally so.

The UK already has mandatory vaccinations for carehome workers, a policy which is predicted to cause 10,000s of posts to be emptied. Almost every care facility and old person’s home in the country already has a sign out front almost begging for staff.

The same policy in the NHS would see the same results… but worse. The NHS is the biggest single employer in Europe, with over 1.3 million full-time staff. A mass exodus of even 1-5% of them would mean tens of thousands of newly unemployed. Not to mention the effect on logistics and standard of care.

To enforce this policy in the autumn, just before the winter flu surge which cripples the NHS every single year, would be an intentionally destructive act. As staff leave rather than face forced injections, patient care will suffer, people will die… and the deaths will be blamed on Covid, and the unvaccinated, despite being the predictable result of bureaucratic mismanagement.

If it goes forward, this will not be incompetence, but deliberate sabotage.

2. THE TWO FACES OF JENNIFER

Jennifer Rubin is a warmonger who writes for the Washington Post, but I repeat myself. Her out put, from Syria to Ukraine to vaccines to Trump is exactly what you’d expect from the CIA’s paper of choice.

She’s also got a beautiful example of media “liberal” doublethink for us this week.

Here is Jennifer on abortion rights in 2019:

… and here is Jennifer suggesting vague legal repercussions for refusing the Covid “vaccine”.

Yup.

Oh, and be sure to out her latest for the WaPo too, where she extolls the virtue of fear as a tool of public manipulation, demands legal mandates for vaccines for everyone, insists that funding should be cut for schools who don’t force their pupils to wear masks, and says “If eligible people insist on remaining unvaccinated, it should be increasingly difficult for them to interact with others.”

In short, she’s a monster.

3. THE DANGEROUS ILLUSION OF PARENTAL RIGHTS … continue reading

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

CDC Gives Incoming Refugees Nobel Prize-Winning Ivermectin

By Kelen McBreen | InfoWars | September 3, 2021

All Middle Eastern, Asian, North African, Latin American, and Caribbean refugees entering the U.S. since 2019 have been prescribed ivermectin.

The CDC recommendation advises doctors working for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), who screen refugees in their home countries, and American doctors who treat them when they arrive to prescribe both ivermectin and albendazole.

Since the CDC guidance was released pre-Covid, naysayers will point out the ivermectin was prescribed for parasites and not for Covid-19, and presume the drug probably doesn’t work against viral infections.

Ivermectin’s creators won a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for the drug’s ability to battle infections caused by roundworm parasites.

As Tokyo, Japan’s top health official Dr. Haruo Ozaki recently explained, “In Africa, if we compare countries distributing ivermectin once a year with countries which do not give ivermectin… I mean, they don’t give ivermectin to prevent Covid, but to prevent parasitic diseases… but anyway, if we look at Covid numbers in countries that give ivermectin, the number of cases is 134.4 per 100,000, and the number of death is 2.2 in 100,000.”

He continued, “Now, African countries which do not distribute ivermectin: 950.6 cases per 100,000 and 29.3 deaths per 100,000. I believe the difference is clear.”

Several studies show ivermectin actually is effective at treating Covid-19, but what this information truly exposes is the current media and government demonization campaign against it.

Despite media cries of “people eating horse paste” and several stories about an increase in poison control calls from people misusing the drug, the CDC has been giving it to refugees for at least two years.

By the way, a Fox 9 Minnesota story lists possible symptoms of an ivermectin “overdose” as “nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, decreased consciousness, hallucinations, seizures, coma, and death.”

However, not a single person in the United States has died from a Covid-related ivermectin overdose.

Plus, the majority of people resorting to the horse version of ivermectin are doing so because the attacks on the drug have convinced many doctors and pharmacies not to prescribe or carry it.

The establishment is even upset that celebrities like top podcast host Joe Rogan and “Cheers” star Kirstie Alley have touted the drug as helping them defeat Covid.

The CDC is obviously aware that the drug is safe for people to use as its physicians prescribe it to refugees just as tens of thousands of doctors across the U.S. are now giving it to patients for Covid.

So, why is mainstream media and a government agency like the FDA scaring Americans out of a treatment that could help them with the virus?

The FDA’s website explains, “Certain animal formulations of ivermectin such as pour-on, injectable, paste, and ‘drench,’ are approved in the U.S. to treat or prevent parasites in animals. For humans, ivermectin tablets are approved at very specific doses to treat some parasitic worms, and there are topical (on the skin) formulations for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea.”

Well, no doctors are prescribing ivermectin animal formulations to their patients, and the government and media both know this.

Perhaps it’s because the FDA, which is “virtually controlled by Pfizer” according to President Trump, is currently developing their own Covid drug to be taken twice a day alongside their vaccine.

Merck, the company that produces ivermectin, is also developing a drug to treat Covid which will make them much more money than the cheap antiviral ivermectin.

On June 9, Merck revealed that the U.S. government is paying the company $1.2 billion to supply 1.7 million courses of the new drug to federal government agencies.

Or, it could be that the Covid vaccines still being used under Emergency Use Authorization would no longer have that emergency approval if a legitimate low-risk treatment were available.

Follow the money and stop paying attention to establishment media.

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

On child vaccines, the experts are suddenly reluctant to follow ‘the science’

By Jonathan Cook | September 4, 2021

In some of these blogs I have been trying to gently highlight what should be a very obvious fact: that “the science” we are being constantly told to follow is not quite as scientific as is being claimed.

That is inevitable in the context of a new virus about which much is still not known. And it is all the more so given that our main response to the pandemic – vaccination – while being a relatively effective tool against the worst disease outcomes is nonetheless an exceedingly blunt one. Vaccines are the epitome of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern medicine.

Into the void between our scientific knowledge and our fear of mortality has rushed politics. It is a refusal to admit that “the science” is necessarily compromised by political and commercial considerations that has led to an increasingly polarised – and unreasonable – confrontation between what have become two sides of the Covid divide. Doubt and curiosity have been squeezed out by the bogus certainties of each faction.

All of this has been underscored by the latest decision of the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations. Unexpectedly, it has defied political pressure and demurred, for the time being at least, on extending the vaccination programme to children aged between 12 and 15.

The British government appears to be furious. Ministers who have been constantly demanding that we “follow the science” are reportedly ready to ignore the advice – or more likely, bully the JCVI into hastily changing its mind over the coming days.

And liberal media outlets like the Guardian, which have been so careful until now to avoid giving a platform to “dissident” scientists, are suddenly subjecting the great and the good of the vaccination establishment to harsh criticism from doctors who want children vaccinated as quickly as possible.

Watching this confected “row” unfold, one thing is clear: “the science” is getting another political pummelling.

Peek behind the curtain

There are a few revealing snippets buried in the media reports of the JCVI’s reasons for delaying child vaccinations – information that challenges other parts of the vaccination narrative that have been unassailable till now.

One concerns long Covid, fear of which has probably been the main factor driving parents to push for their children to be vaccinated – given that Covid poses little immediate threat of serious illness to the vast majority of children. Of long Covid in children, the JCVI argues, according to the Guardian, that “the impact of the symptoms may be no worse than those seen in children who have not actually had Covid”.

What to make of that? We know that over the past few decades a small but growing proportion of children have been suffering from long-term chronic fatigue syndromes – often following a viral infection. This may relate to more general immunity problems in children that, like other chronic disease, doctors have been largely baffled by – and may even be contributing to.

Is long Covid another fatigue syndrome, and one that many of these children would have suffered from if they had been infected with a different virus, like flu? Don’t hold your breath waiting for a debate on that question, let alone an answer, any time soon.

Then there is this. The Guardian reports that the JCVI was concerned about “the unknown longer-term consequences of a rare side-effect [myocarditis – heart inflammation] seen with mRNA vaccines such as the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots. … What makes the JCVI uneasy is that there is little long-term follow-up on vaccinated children.”

“Unknown longer-term consequences”? A lack of “follow-up” on vaccinated children? These sound more like the criticisms of the tin-foil hat-wearers than the cautious advice of vaccination experts.

Or is it just that we have been given a fleeting peek behind the curtain of official medical debate to see an uncertainty that has been actively concealed from us. “The science” is not quite as solid as the scientists or politicians would have us believe, it seems.

Piling on the pressure

What sensible view should we, the public, take when that “scientific” consensus suddenly solidifies – possibly as soon as next week – behind exactly what the politicians are demanding.

The government and parts of the media are clearly going to keep piling the pressure on the JCVI. The committee’s efforts to avoid being drawn into a highly charged and politicised debate about vaccinating children is written all over the caveats and get-out clauses in its decision on Friday.

The government’s stated aim in wanting to vaccinate children is to avoid “disruption” to children’s education, as though this is about the well-being of pupils. But we need to be honest: the disruptions were imposed on schools by politicians and educators not for the sake of children but for the sake of adults, frightened by our own vulnerability to Covid.

The JCVI has embarrassed the government by reminding us of this fact in relation to child vaccinations. Not only have we deprived children of a proper education over a year or more and opportunities to develop physically, mentally and emotionally through their school life, clubs, trips and sport, but now, suggests the JCVI, we want to inject them with a new drug whose long-term consequences are not fully understood or, it seems, being properly investigated.

All of this will be unmentionable again as soon as the JCVI can be arm-twisted into agreeing to the government’s demands. We will be told once again to blindly “follow the science”, to obey these political dictates as we were once required to obey the spiritual dictates of our clerics.

Censoring testimony

“Follow the science” is a mantra designed to shut down all critical thinking about how we respond to the pandemic – and to justify censorship of even well-qualified dissenting scientists by corporate media and their social media equivalents.

For example, YouTube has excised the testimony of medical experts to the US Congress who have been trying to bring attention to the potential benefits of ivermectin, a safe, long-out-of-patent medicine. Instead the corporate media is derisively describing it as a “horse drug” to forestall any discussion of its use as a cheap therapeutic alternative to endless, expensive vaccine booster shots.

(And by the way, before the “follow the science” crowd work themselves into a lather, I have no particular view on the usefulness of ivermectin, I simply want experts to be allowed to discuss it in public. Watch, for example, this farcical segment below from the Hill in which the presenters are forced, while discussing the media furore about podcast star Joe Rogan’s use of ivermectin to treat his Covid, to avoid actually naming the drug at the centre of the furore for fear of YouTube censorship.)

To want more open debate, not less, about where we head next, especially as western states have vaccinated significant majorities of their populations, is often being treated as the equivalent of “Covid denial”.

Where this new authoritarian climate leads is apparent in the shaming of anyone who tries to highlight that our responses to Covid are following a familiar big-business-friendly pattern: focus all attention on expensive, short-term, resource-hungry quick fixes (in this case, vaccines) and ignore important, long-term, sustainable solutions such as improving the population’s health and immunity to this pandemic and the ones likely to follow.

An obesity epidemic – obesity is a key factor in susceptibility to severe Covid, though you would hardly know it from the media coverage – is still not being tackled, even though the obesity epidemic, unlike Covid, has been growing as a public health threat for many decades. Why? Because the corporate food industry, and more especially the fast-food and sugar industries, and the corporate health industries are financially invested in it never being tackled.

There is no serious media debate about the role of health in tackling Covid because the corporate media are invested in exactly the same consumption model as the food and health corporations – not least, they heavily depend on corporate advertising.

Which is why the media hurried to amplify attacks on Jonathan Neman, head of the salad fast-food restaurant chain Sweetgreen, for supposedly “downplaying the importance of vaccines”, as soon as he pointed out the statistical fact that 78 per cent of people admitted to hospital for Covid are obese and overweight. He asked quite reasonably:

What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal? What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic? What if we incentivized health?

Politicians, of course, have no interest in taking action against the corporate food industry both because they depend on campaign donations from those same corporations and because they want good press from the corporate media.

Studies on immunity

Another topic that has been made all but taboo is the issue of natural immunity. A series of recent studies suggest that those who have caught and recovered from Covid have a better response to the delta variant than those who have been vaccinated only.

Those who have recovered appear to be many times less likely to get reinfected, suggesting natural immunity confers stronger and longer-lasting protection against Covid than vaccines, including preventing hospitalisation and transmission to others.

That may have significant implications for our reliance on vaccines. For instance, vaccines may be playing a part in creating new, more aggressive variants, given that the vaccinated have been wrongly encouraged to see themselves as at less risk of catching Covid but are in fact more likely than those who have recovered to transmit the disease.

If that is the case, the current orthodoxy preferring vaccines has turned reality on its head.

Perhaps, not surprisingly, these studies have received almost no coverage. They conflict with every single message the politicians, media and “follow the science” crowd have been promulgating for months.

How much that narrative has been engineered can be seen in the role the World Health Organisation played early on, as the vaccines were being rolled out, in secretly trying to rewrite medical history. Uniquely in the case of Covid, they pretended that herd immunity could only be achieved through vaccination, as though natural immunity did not count.

Highlighting this new study does not mean that letting Covid rip through the population is the best strategy, or that vaccinations do not help prevent illness and the spread of Covid.

But it does undermine the simple-minded, and novel, insistence that vaccination is the only safe way to protect against a virus, or even the best.

It does undermine the case increasingly being promoted by politicians and the media that the unvaccinated should be treated as a threat to society and accorded second-class status (watch the video below).

It does undermine the demand for vaccine passports as a prerequisite for “normal life” being restored.

And it hints at an additional reason the JCVI may have been reluctant to rush into testing a new generation of vaccines on children for a disease that is rarely serious for them and to which they will have stronger immunity if they catch it rather than being vaccinated against it.

Glaring vacuum

What these studies and others suggest is that we need a more open, honest debate about the best way forward, a more inclusive debate rather than what we have at the moment: accusations, arrogance and contempt – from both sides.

The left should not be siding with media corporations to shut down debate, even Covid denial; they should be pushing for more persuasive arguments. And the left should not be cheering on the bullying or stigmatising of people who are hesitant about taking the vaccines, either for themselves or their children.

Enforce a glaring vacuum in the public discourse, as has happened with Covid, and two things are guaranteed: that politicians and corporations will exploit that vacuum to increase their power and profits; and a significant section of the public will attribute the worst, most cynical motives to those enforcing the vacuum.

The very act of gagging anyone – but most especially experts – from conducting certain kind of conversations is bound to increase political alienation, cynicism and social polarisation. It creates no kind of consensus or solidarity. It creates only division and bitterness. Which, putting my cynic’s hat on for a moment, may be the very reason why it seems to be our leaders’ preferred course of action.

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Why all the fuss about Ivermectin?

By Brian C. Joondeph | American Thinker | September 3, 2021

First hydroxychloroquine, now ivermectin, is the hated deadly drug de jour, castigated by the medical establishment and regulatory authorities. Both drugs have been around for a long time as FDA-approved prescription medications. Yet now we are told they are as deadly as arsenic.

As a physician, I am certainly aware of ivermectin but don’t recall ever writing a prescription for it in my 30+ years’ medical career. Ivermectin is an anthelmintic, meaning it cures parasitic infections. In my world of ophthalmology, it is used on occasion for rare parasitic or worm infections in the eye.

Ivermectin was FDA approved in 1998 under the brand name Stromectol, produced by pharmaceutical giant Merck, approved for several parasitic infections. The product label described it as having a “unique mode of action,” which “leads to an increase in the permeability of the cell membrane to chloride ions.” This suggests that ivermectin acts as an ionophore, making cell membranes permeable to ions that enter the cell for therapeutic effect.

Ivermectin is one of several ionophores, others including hydroxychloroquine, quercetin, and resveratrol, the latter two available over the counter. These ionophores simply open a cellular door, allowing zinc to enter the cell, where it then interferes with viral replication, providing potential therapeutic benefit in viral and other infections.

This scientific paper reviews and references other studies demonstrating antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer properties of ivermectin. This explains the interest in this drug as having potential use in treating COVID.

Does ivermectin work in COVID? I am not attempting to answer that question, instead looking at readily available information because this drug has been the focus of much recent media attention. For the benefit of any reader eager to report this article and author to the medical licensing boards for pushing misleading information, I am not offering medical advice or prescribing anything. Rather, I am only offering commentary on this newsworthy and controversial drug.

What’s newsworthy about ivermectin? A simple Google search of most medications describes uses and side effects. A similar search of ivermectin provides headlines of why it shouldn’t be taken and how dangerous it is.

YouTube screen grab

The Guardian describes ivermectin as horse medicine reminding readers considering taking the drug, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow”, saying it’s a medicine meant for farm animals. The FDA echoed that sentiment in a recent tweet, adding “Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” their word choice making it obvious who the tweet was directed to.

Perhaps the FDA didn’t realize that Barack and Michelle Obama often used the term “y’all” and that some might construe the FDA tweet as racist.

The FDA says ivermectin “can be dangerous and even lethal,” yet they approved it in 1998 and have not pulled it from the market despite it being “dangerous and lethal.” Any medication can be “dangerous and lethal” if misused. People have even overdosed on water.

It is true that ivermectin is also used in animals, as are many drugs approved for human use. This is a list of veterinary drugs with many familiar names of antibiotics, antihypertensives, and anesthetics commonly used by humans. Since these drugs are used in farm animals, should humans stop taking them? That seems a rather unscientific argument against ivermectin, especially coming from the FDA.

And healthcare professionals are not recommending or prescribing animal versions of ivermectin as there is an FDA-approved human formulation.

Does ivermectin work against COVID? That is the bigger question and worthy of investigation, rather than reminding people that they are not cows.

A study published several months ago in the American Journal of Therapeutics concluded,

Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.

To my knowledge, these 18 studies have not been retracted, unlike previous studies critical of hydroxychloroquine which were ignominiously retracted by prestigious medical journals like The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Yet the medical establishment refuses to even entertain the possibility of some benefit from ivermectin, castigating physicians who want to try it in their patients. 18 studies found benefit. Are they all wrong?

Podcaster Joe Rogan recently contracted COVID and recovered within days of taking a drug cocktail including ivermectin. Was it his drug cocktail, his fitness, or just good luck? Impossible to know but his experience will keep ivermectin in the news.

Highly unvaccinated India had a surge in COVID cases earlier this year which abruptly ended following the widespread use of ivermectin, over the objections and criticism of the WHO. In the one state, Tamil Nadu, that did not use ivermectin, cases tripled instead of dropping by 97 percent as in the rest of the country.

This is anecdotal and could have other explanations but the discovery of penicillin was also anecdotal and observational. Good science should investigate rather than ignore such observations.

The Japanese Medical Association recently endorsed ivermectin for COVID. The US CDC cautioned against it.

There is legal pushback as an Ohio judge ordered a hospital to treat a ventilated COVID patient with ivermectin. After a month on the ventilator, this patient is likely COVID free and ivermectin now will have no benefit, allowing the medical establishment to say “see I told you so” that it wouldn’t help.

By this point, active COVID infection is not the issue; instead, it is weaning off and recovery from long-term life support. The early hydroxychloroquine studies had the same flaw, treating patients too late in the disease course to provide or demonstrate benefit.

These drugs have been proposed for early outpatient treatment, not when patients are seriously ill and near death. Looking for treatment benefits in the wrong patient population will yield expected negative results.

Given how devastating COVID can be and how, despite high levels of vaccination in countries like the US, UK, and Israel, we are seeing surging cases and hospitalizations among the vaccinated, we should be pulling out all the stops in treating this virus.

Medical treatment involves balancing risks and benefits. When FDA-approved medications are used in appropriate doses for appropriate patients, prescribed by competent physicians, the risks tend to be low, and any benefit should be celebrated. Instead, the medical establishment, media, and regulatory authorities are taking the opposite approach. One has to wonder why.

September 4, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Why Do Journalists Hate 9-11 Truthers?

BY PHILIP KRASKE • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 4, 2021

It seems that there are to be no dissenting voices on the twentieth anniversary of 9-11. Even film director Spike Lee was forced by media outcry to edit out of his documentary mini-series the half-hour dedicated to skeptics of the official version of the event. Thus the citizenry has been saved from “a bog of heinously dangerous ideas.”

This phrase comes from Slate.com columnist Jeremy Stahl, for whom the alternative theories of 9-11 are “arguments that have been debunked a thousand times.” This, of course, is nonsense. The debate rages to this day. But as with the issue of vaccination against coronavirus, the mainstream media will not brook the least opposition. Stahl puts great stock, for example, in the “three-year-long, $16 million investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” as if these numbers and a solemn-sounding agency title could not possibly be challenged. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the U.S. Government is itself the accused party here, and in similar circumstances has been caught fudging facts. The NIST report has actually taken heavy criticism from Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, the most important group pushing alternative theories of the attack.

Why do journalists favor the government version so fiercely? The sheer vitriol of their attacks on Truthers reflects deep personal anger; clearly no Deep State maven stands over them dictating their articles. In theory, the more onerous discoveries of 9-11 investigators — the presence of explosive material in the dust that spread through Manhattan, the dubious cell-phone calls made from the hijacked aircraft, the impossibly high speeds of low-altitude flight by three of the airplanes — should be red meat to reporters. But all of it is ignored, if not ridiculed. What has happened to this “fifth column” of democracy?

Before television came along, reporters were hacks: working-class guys who wore their suits poorly and smoked too much. Nowadays they are college grads with master’s degrees and big ambitions. Their role models are the millionaire voices of CNN and Eyewitness News anchorpersons. The Internet pipsqueaks who have to beg for donations every three months don’t have three-car garages and sweet vacations every summer. They may get closer to the truth of issues, but they don’t have source lunches on the company dime.

Journalists don’t take long to understand which side of the bread holds the butter. They jump at the well-paying jobs, and slowly the resistance to any type of “conspiracy theory” builds. They instinctively reject the work of armchair detectives, and on several levels.

First is the theoretical level: reporters ought to be able to ferret out the dirt wherever they see it. But they soon realize they can’t: some stories are simply out of bounds. Imagine the journalists — and there must be a great many of them, especially in the New York and Washington areas — who got great tips in the aftermath of 9-11 and saw Pulitzers for the taking. But their editors rubbed their necks and spiked the stories, telling them We are not in the conspiracy business. There is just some news that’s not fit to print, and reporters must stand at the fence and envy those allowed to cross it into the fertile fields beyond.

Next is the professional level: the armchair guys have scooped them. They are the ones who debunked the government’s first hypothesis that the Twin Towers “pancaked” down; who discovered that the Fox News helicopter had altered the image of the second plane hitting the South Tower; who called out reporters for saying that Building Seven had collapsed before it did.

Then the social level. Journalists, by the nature of their work, achieve a kind of fame. They are the kind of people that others like to brag about living next to. Television journalists are recognized in the supermarket, print ones publish their lofty opinions to thousands of readers. They get front-row seats at a political campaign, and now and then rub elbows with movie stars and billionaires. Reporters are not hacks anymore and would resent the suggestion that they are.

The patriotic level. War brings out the worst in journalists. Among many disheartening stories in Seymour Hersh’s memoir Reporter is that he alone reported in detail on the order by an American general to attack retreating Iraqis at the end of the Gulf War — this when the Iraqis had been promised safe passage back to their country from Kuwait. The result was a veritable massacre of unarmed men. “It was a reminder of the Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule,” Hersh wrote: “If it’s a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime.” Weeks before his article, the general got wind of Hersh’s investigation and impugned his integrity; his comments were published widely. Reporters rally both to the flag and the official narrative, and they don’t like seeing either wrinkled.

Even twenty years after 9-11, the patriotic media as one pounced on Spike Lee over his meager half-hour of skepticism, the basic points of which have long ago been circulated and digested by anyone with an interest in the subject. In his article, Stahl worries that the leader of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Richard Gage, “has never had the type of audience that HBO is offering.” He even sent a letter to HBO objecting to Gage’s appearance.

Which brings us to the top level, that of Thought Police; its symbol is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where pundits, reporters and movie stars alike chortle over the president’s insider humor. Journalists consider themselves a loose sort of club whose duty is to present a smooth narrative and steer the public away from “dangerous ideas.” And the idea that explosives, placed in the buildings weeks before 9-11, brought down the Twin Towers and Building Seven is very dangerous indeed.

So the journalist throws in his or her lot with the government, which itself enjoys the home-court advantage in foreign and security policy: Americans, rarely interested in either, easily accept the government version of events. The journalist does the math: if he or she opposes the official version, their stories will go straight on the spike and their jobs will quickly follow; or they can not oppose, keep their jobs and make useful contributions in other areas of particular interest to them. I would bet that Spike Lee made a similar calculation when he returned to his editing room.

Hence 9-11 truth, like a lot of other truths, falls by the wayside. And when somebody comes along and picks one up and begins a crusade, journalists loathe him. “Gage is responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks,” writes Stahl. Indeed, his article thunders with the rage typical of commentators who have made it big in America’s fraught journalistic landscape.

And having made it big, they are not about to say the system that has set them up with prestige, fame, and a fine lifestyle is full of compromises.

Journalists are conservatives. We cannot depend on them, as CNN reporters nauseatingly aver in their self-congratulatory ads, “to go beneath the surface of a story” and “peel away the layers.” In foreign and security issues, they are fixed like limpets to the story’s surface — and they hate, they despise those free to dig deeper, and who show them up as frauds.

Happy twentieth anniversary, everyone.

September 4, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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