Attenborough and his climate cohorts are scaring the young into mental illness
By David Seedhouse | TCW Defending Freedom | November 10, 2021
THE BBC last week re-published yet another video article – Climate Change: The Facts – featuring David Attenborough. It shows scenes of calamity and collapse and has a single main message: ‘Act now or we are all doomed.’
Despite its title, there is no attempt whatsoever at a balanced analysis of ‘the facts’. The video includes a comment from the discredited Michael Mann, whose faulty algorithm created the famous ‘hockey stick‘ chart of supposed global warming that so exercised Al Gore and Greta Thunberg – who has no scientific credentials, or arguably any right at all to be included in a ‘fact-based’ video.
Towards the end of his presentation, Attenborough declares: ‘We now stand at a unique point in our planet’s history, one where we must all share responsibility both for our present wellbeing and for the future of life.’
Hyperbole, hubris, hysteria … but no humility. We have apparently become the gods of ancient Greece, able to control all aspects of life, including the planet.
It is unclear how we all have responsibility for ‘the future of life’, which managed very well before humans existed and, according to experts of Attenborough’s ilk, will inevitably change according to the laws of evolution in any case.
However, we surely do have responsibility towards each other, especially not to cause unwarranted alarm, and to support the mental health of our young people, which according to many reports is at a nadir.
One large survey found that nearly 60 per cent of young people approached said they felt very worried or extremely worried about the climate issue.
More than 45 per cent said such feelings affected their daily lives. Some 75 per cent thought the future was frightening, while 56 per cent think humanity is doomed.
Take a minute to digest this. The survey, led by Bath University in collaboration with five other universities, spanned ten countries. It amassed responses from 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25 and found that a staggering majority are so scared and depressed that they feel they have no future.
This devastating situation has not happened spontaneously. Nor is it a rational response to the actual evidence. Rather it is the result of years of uninhibited scaremongering by older people who prefer to be part of a lucrative alarmist club than set a decent example of balanced reasoning.
Most traditional societies revere and respect their elders, for their life experience and wisdom. And in return the elders quietly and calmly protect the young, beneficently pointing to the good things in life that may come.
This seemingly timeless human – and indeed animal – circle of life has come close to breaking with astonishing speed. Many of our prominent elders, who should be sage, measured and knowing, are behaving like reckless toddlers in a sandpit they think is all theirs.
They spent 2020 and much of 2021 locking young people away from their schools, their friends, and their elderly relatives, terrifying them with useless masks and distancing to ‘protect’ them from a virus that poses hardly any risk to them.
These thoughtless adults constantly say how much they care for the future of humanity but show, with every poorly-researched exaggeration, that they don’t give two hoots for the psychological wellbeing of the young who actually are the future.
Whether through guilt, ignorance, psychological bias or just the misplaced desire to show how powerful they are, such infantile elders display little awareness of the damage they are causing. And if they have even an inkling of how they are harming the young, they show no restraint.
Their imagined certainties do not exist. We do not know everything there is to know about viruses and we certainly do not know everything about the climate of a vast and complex planet. We cannot possibly say with any confidence what will happen to us, and we cannot control Nature. Nor should we try.
Young people do not need to be saved by anyone, not least these false prophets of doom. They need the wherewithal to live fulfilled lives – with knowledge, curiosity, social support, friendships, honesty and, above all, the modesty to accept human limitations, without self-righteous hectoring from older adults who have lived most of their own lives in circumstances where the future held promise rather than terror.
Those such as David Attenborough and the rest of the climate establishment presumably have the best of intentions. But their obsession with controlling the uncontrollable has completely blinded them to the awful damage their blinkered obsessiveness has caused our young.
They have abjectly failed to provide sensible information and an inquisitive, questioning environment. They should be setting an example of gentle wisdom, where problems are solved by open minds. Instead, they have caused a huge avoidable mental health crisis, and have barely noticed what they have done.
The first “climate change” diagnosis is here. It will not be the last.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | November 9, 2021
Doctor Kyle Merritt, an attending physician at an emergency department in Nelson BC, added “climate change” as a contributing factor to the medical issues of one of his patients. And, in so doing, has achieved a remarkable and troubling world first.
The first-ever medical diagnosis of “climate change”.
Dr Merritt said in an interview with Glacier Media:
If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” the emergency room doctor told Glacier Media. […] It’s me trying to just… process what I’m seeing.”
The entire situation raises some interesting questions.
DOES IT MAKE MEDICAL SENSE?
Of course it doesn’t.
He diagnosed her as “suffering from climate change”. You can’t do that, it is insane.
That’s like diagnosing someone who was struck by lightning as “suffering from the effects of rain” or a person having a heart attack as “suffering from the effects of Mcdonald’s”.
… actually, it’s worse than that. At least my examples have a distinct cause-and-effect relationship, and there are no scientific papers suggesting Mcdonald’s doesn’t actually exist.
The patient in question is over 70, asthmatic, diabetic and suffering from heart failure. She’s very, very sick… no matter the climate.
Even if Dr Merritt can somehow trace a decline in her health due to the weather (and there’s no evidence at all that he can), actually diagnosing it is completely bonkers.
… SO WHY DO IT?
It’s a staged PR move. A very obvious one, when you think about it.
For one thing, there’s the question of how the media ever found out it happened, since medical records and diagnoses are completely private.
Clearly Dr Merritt didn’t just diagnose his patient with “climate change”, he then immediately called up the local media to tell them he had done it.
Throw in the fact that this happened to occur during the COP26 conference in Glasgow, which only today warned of “climate-linked health risks” rising, and that the move has already spawned a new NGO, “Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health”, and you have a textbook example of a stage-managed media rollout.
WHY NOW?
In simple terms, because Covid worked and climate didn’t.
They have been stoking up public fear of “a new ice age” and acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer and myriad other supposedly incipient climate disasters for literal decades, and never touched one-tenth of the level of hysteria created by the Covid19 “pandemic”.
Somewhere, some not especially bright public relations executive has decided that the way to push the “pivot from Covid to climate” is to try and turn the long-predicted environmental disaster into a public health issue.
It’s hamfisted, a little funny, and probably won’t work, but it does open up some troubling possibilities going forward.
LIKE WHAT?
Well, for starters, this may be the first “climate change diagnosis”, but do you honestly believe it will be the last?
Don’t be surprised if we see a huge spike in “climate diagnoses” in the next few months.
There are already widespread academic efforts to create a causal link between “climate change” and common illnesses.
A few days ago, the Independent headlined The climate crisis is not just about the environment – it’s about health too.
As I mentioned earlier, just today the COP26 panel warned that “climate-linked health risks” are going to rise.
Only last week the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published a paper titled “Climate Change and Global Issues in Allergy and Immunology” which argues climate change is already making asthma and some allergies worse.
It’s not hard to put together a list of other common afflictions that are already being linked back to climate change.
Cancer, pneumonia, heatstroke, diabetes, heart disease and essentially all lung conditions.
There’s also all diseases spread by mosquitos or other zoonotic agents, plus every waterborne illness.
And that’s without even severely stretching logic, which Covid has shown our medical and scientific institutions have no trouble doing.
They are already discussing “climate-related” mental health issues such as stress, anxiety and depression. These could easily become further types of “climate-related diagnoses” too.
Now, allow me to speculate for a few paragraphs…
The practice of “climate-related diagnosis” is likely going to expand. When questions about the science behind this are raised by sceptics, they will naturally be accused of “climate denial”.
Opinion pieces will appear torturing reason to defend the practice of diagnosing “climate illness”. So-called journalists, or mercenary experts in made-up fields like “climate ethics”, will crochet strands of reason into positions so full of holes they barely exist.
We’ll be told that even if the practice is technically inaccurate, it’s serving a greater truth. That people might not literally be sick due to climate change, but we are all figuratively dying of it.
“Covid has shown us people only do what’s right when they’re scared: We need to make them feel climate fear.”
“Climate change diagnoses are on the rise. And that’s a good thing.”
“Healthcare workers take stand on climate with new diagnosis trend.”
“NHS workers saved us from Covid, and now want to take on climate.”
… you don’t have to read the Guardian as much as I have to feel those headlines, or ones very like them, in our future.
Then the deaths can start happening. Covid has demonstrated that you can create a “mass casualty” scare by essentially just adding an extra line on a death certificate. They can do that for climate too. The headlines will carry on…
“Physicians see spike in “climate deaths” as people suddenly feel the consequences of inaction”
When people point out the flaws in reasoning the papers will argue that, even if people aren’t really dying of climate change, symbolically putting it on death certificates is the best way to illustrate how much danger we’re in.
They’ll backhandedly admit the statistic isn’t real, but then use it as an excuse to call for action anyway:
“Weekly climate deaths are outstripping Covid – we need to address the “climate pandemic.”
… it will go on and on.
Climate change will start being listed as an “underlying cause of death” for more and more diseases. I already mentioned cancer, lung disease and heart disease. They’ll all be “climate-related”.
The press spent the last year telling us that climate change “makes pandemics more likely”, so any future “pandemic” can be linked to climate and boom, a few hundred thousand climate deaths.
Climate change is allegedly bad for unborn babies, so stillbirths and miscarriages can all be “climate deaths”.
They can do a study finding “higher levels of solar radiation” can “increase the risk of cancer”, and then start saying anyone who dies of cancer also died of climate.
They don’t even have to limit it to natural causes.
Drowned in a flash flood? That’s a climate death.
Starved due to drought? Climate death.
Committed suicide? “he was pretty upset about the climate”.
Attacked by a polar bear? Well, climate change forced it out of its natural habitat.
I’m not being funny. This is not satire, I wish it were. Believe me, they could easily actually say it, or something like it, eventually.
If the past twenty months have done nothing else, they should at least have taught you this valuable lesson: There is nothing – NOTHING – too dishonest, too cynical or even too insane for the establishment to sell.
It doesn’t matter if it’s unlikely, or self-contradictory or irrational – it doesn’t even matter if it’s literally physically impossible – they will say it, and they will expect you to believe it.
We now have our first climate “case”. The first death “with climate” probably won’t be far behind. Thousands more will likely follow.
That’s when talk of “climate lockdowns” will come back.
The old saying was right: kill your television
(and your smartphone)
By Richard Hugus | November 8, 2021
A month ago, illegal and criminal coercion toward covid injections in the workplace was announced by the Biden Administration. Many have lost their jobs for rightly refusing this unsafe, ineffective, and possibly life-changing medical procedure. Now it has been announced by the pharma-owned FDA and CDC that children 5 to 11 years old may be given the shot. Comments from the public and renowned doctors and scientists were overwhelmingly against this, but as with so may other boards across the country, the officials at the table voted unanimously in favor, as if they never heard a thing. This shot will now be mandated in spite of the fact that older children who have already been injected have experienced heart problems and other serious reactions, including death. Neither of these age groups have ever been in danger, and the shots can only hurt them. Next it will be children newborn to 4. What are we to make of a government willing to sacrifice children to pharmaceutical company profits, or ends even worse?
Coerced injections, worthless for their stated purpose, and now provably harmful, are clearly a means to some end. This might include social control through digital passports, totalitarian surveillance, the re-engineering of humanity through genetic manipulation, the reduction of the world’s population (a longtime dream of eugenicists), hooking people up to the “internet of bodies”, or all of the above. One thing is certain — none of this was ever about public health. That lie is impossible to believe as we watch health care workers being fired, leaving hospitals understaffed; as news of injection injuries is censored; as ER doctors ignore injection injuries and fail to report them; as the medical establishment is seen to be under the obvious control of politics and corporations; as goalposts are moved, new rules invented, and definitions changed; as sanitation workers are let go and garbage piles up in the streets; as fire fighters and first responders are put on “leave without pay;” as workers across the country lose their jobs and can no longer provide for themselves or their families; as mental health declines from isolation, fear, and stress; as natural immunity is suddenly no longer recognized; and as effective medicines are withheld while harmful medicines are protocol. The goal is apparently not to promote public health, or indeed social order, but to destroy it. One might think that government would respond to the obvious deterioration of society, but the last two years have shown that this is actually what governments want. This is a war from the inside out. Our own government is trying to kill us.
We have been fed a string of lies 20 months long, but lies over time have a way of wearing thin. In the attempt to explain contradictory evidence, official explanations become more and more elaborate, and the more this happens the easier it is for us to see both the lies and the liars. Our great advantage is that the truth doesn’t need the vast resources of states and corporate media to be told. When it came to the point where the state was forced to just censor the truth outright, this was just another lesson for us. The bigger the coverup, the more obvious the crime. Clarity grows every day.
The tyranny we are facing didn’t just start in March 2020. We are in the midst of a system that had already surrounded us when the “pandemic” operation began. This is why such an obvious hoax gained so much territory so quickly across the world. The operation itself was carefully planned, but it was built on an established foundation. For almost 60 years — counting back to the John F. Kennedy assassination — the world has been subjected to a long list of planned attacks in which black operators created a traumatic public event, manipulated the public into believing the event was carried out by a selected patsy, and made desired institutional changes on the basis of that event. The September 11, 2001 attack seemed the pinnacle of any ambition these operators could possibly have, until covid 19 came along and somehow struck 193 countries with the same catastrophic results all at the same time. Manufactured case and death statistics then started rolling in, videos of people dying in the streets were produced, and the narrative of a terrible, unprecedented public health emergency was everywhere around us. The real event was seasonal respiratory illness hyped as a “pandemic”, with maybe a dash of real bioweapon thrown in. The patsy was bats in China spreading a mysterious deadly virus. And the deep institutional change looks like a wholesale re-organization of national economies, resources, and populations to suit the one-world-government fantasy of Vanguard investment bankers, secret cabals, and the openly conniving Davos elite. Far more people were immediately killed by health care policy and medical malpractice in the early days of the covid operation — for example, the elderly sent to die in nursing homes, the ventilator murders — than the 3,000 who died on September 11. Without death and gore, there is no trauma, and the scale of this op required plenty of trauma. As intended in the 9-11 operation, the US proceeded with a series of wars against the enemies of Israel. As intended in the Covid 19 operation, the oligarchs have proceeded to destroy economies worldwide. 9-11 led to millions of deaths; covid 19 (the operation) will bring many more.
Dark actors with evil schemes have been honing their craft throughout history, but have never been able to fool more people than in the age of Edward Bernays, mass media, and social engineering. Today, a world-shaking falsity can be created out of thin air. The 1969 “moon landing” is a good example. Fortunately that psy-op was carried out without mass murder. It was an astounding feat. From the battleship Maine to the Reichstag fire to the Gulf of Tonkin, to “weapons of mass destruction”, to the 7-7 London bus bombing, to 9-11, to the Boston Marathon bombing, to the Las Vegas hotel shooter massacre, to the January 6 “insurrection”, and scores of other entrapments, fakes, and shootings; served by a veritable industry of crisis actors, informants, patsies, undercover police, agents, infiltrators, provocateurs, assassins, and spies; huge lies have been relentlessly sprung upon an unwitting, crisis-weary public, and the lies have succeeded for the most part because people can’t believe anyone would commit crimes of such magnitude.
Perhaps it’s time to rethink our relationship to the source of much of this manipulation — the TV screen. We literally are not seeing something real when it comes to us through this medium. The image on the screen is not reality. It may easily show us what someone else wants us to believe. The format is a wide open field for propagandists. Our personal experience is limited. TV makes our experience seem almost unlimited and we come to believe this expanded experience is authentic. We have been seduced by media and technology to such an extent that today much of our “reality” is not even real — it is virtual. It all comes down to epistemology — what is real and what we actually know is one of the central questions of philosophy. But as a practical matter, gaining knowledge through our own direct experience, dealing with people face to face, being there in person, interacting with the natural world in our immediate (non-mediated) surroundings, is overwhelmed by the simulacra that we get from electronic media. Like junk food, electronic media is pervasive and addictive. We are not physically or psychologically prepared to deal with it. We are simply not capable of ‘knowing’ all the people, places, ideas, and events brought to us in the avalanche of content on the internet. The hosts of the virtual world, like Facebook and Google, are happy to see us occupied on smart phones and social media with a previously unimaginable circle of hundreds of “friends.” We may even organize with our hundred friends to break Facebook and Google into a thousand pieces, but silicon valley doesn’t care because they gain so much more from collecting and selling our data. Technology once seemed to be there to make life easier, but then it quietly enslaved us. To fight technocracy — that is, government which derives its power from technology — we have only to look at the technocrats’ means of control — QR codes, data bases, surveillance cameras, license plate readers, algorithms, artificial intelligence, body scanners, microchips, video games, blockbuster movies, cable TV, smartphones, and credit scores — and get them one by one out of our lives. It is certainly within our means to get rid of the devices we ourselves carry. Are you opposed to “vaccine passports”? Then don’t carry or own the smartphone that makes them possible.
Facebook recently announced it wants to change its name to “Meta”, the Latin word for ‘beyond.’ To the forward-thinking predators running Facebook, the “metaverse” is the next frontier in the attempt to capture and control human minds. With a VR (virtual reality) headset, one actually believes he’s in a given program, and may even believe he’s interacting with the program. The next step will be a no-headset, or wireless, VR platform. Since the oligarchs want to use those of us who survive the Frankenshots as slave labor, they would want us to be more than just passive batteries in a pod with cables stuck to our heads, as in The Matrix. Mobile humans having reality fed to them wirelessly would be a huge improvement. Perhaps the technology for that is contained in the “vaccines”, with their strange magnetic effects, so far unacknowledged and unexplained. Indeed, this may be why Bill Gates said that “unfortunately everyone on the planet will have to be vaccinated.” Obviously, the privileged few can’t have unauthorized humans walking around in their own reality!
The ongoing operation for the digital enslavement of humanity is insane. We are not a Frankenstein experiment. We are not software programs. We are not computers. We are not ones and zeros. We are not transhuman. We are miracles created by God, not to be tampered with. It is time to de-digitize the world around us and return to our spiritual connections and our humanity. Like government, technology is there to serve us, not the other way around. Like government, technology is not to be trusted. When government and technology are working together, the potential for abuse increases exponentially. To save ourselves, both of these forces must be permanently put in their place.
These days many of us are in the streets protesting. The benefit of this is not that we might attract the attention of politicians who hold us in contempt, but that we see and talk to each other in person, and give those on the sidelines strength in seeing healthy and strong opposition to the madness. When it comes time to actually confront the authorities, they will have no choice but to listen, and they aren’t going to like it. On the way to that day, and perhaps in order to reach it, we have to get 60 years of very sophisticated, highly manipulative media programming well out of our heads. Hoaxes and false flags will then be immediately obvious, and will no longer be used against us. The “pandemic” and the cast of characters fomenting this two year atrocity will disappear like a bad dream. It’s as if we can beat this monstrosity simply by evolving.
NHS accused of ‘lying’ about Covid stats to promote vaccination
RT | November 8, 2021
NHS chief Amanda Pritchard claimed that 14 times as many Covid-19 patients are in Britain’s hospitals as this time last year. However, even the NHS itself has admitted that Pritchard’s claim uses misleading figures.
Multiple news reports on Monday told the same story: Britain’s hospitals are seeing “14 times more coronavirus patients than this time last year,” and the country faces a “difficult winter,” as people gather indoors, where the virus is more likely to spread.
The source of the “14 times” figure is Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of NHS England. Pritchard used the apparently alarming surge in hospitalisations to encourage the 4.5 million Britons who still haven’t gotten vaccinated to roll up their sleeves, and those eligible to take their third shot of the vaccine.
However, NHS data shows that Pritchard’s figures are false. According to the health service, a 7-day average of 9,331 Covid-19 patients were in hospital at the beginning of November, compared to 12,654 a year earlier. Just over 1,000 people per day were being admitted to hospital at the end of October, compared to 1,500 last year.
Pritchard was swiftly accused of peddling fake news, with commentators warning that such misleading figures were straying into “resignation territory.”
Amid a growing clamour online, NHS officials told reporters shortly afterwards that Pritchard was citing figures from August 2021 compared to August 2020. Hospital admissions were indeed 14 times higher this August than in 2020, but only for several days toward the end of the month. Since then, they have trended downwards and are now comparable to last year’s rate.
However, hospitalisations persist despite the fact that nine out of 10 people over the age of 12 in the UK have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to NHS statistics. Rising cases too have called into question the long-term efficacy of the jabs, but government officials still insist on vaccination as key to defeating the virus – and studies suggest those vaccinated patients still fare better if they catch the virus.
As Pritchard called on the population to get vaccinated or go in for booster jabs, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock called on Monday for the government to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers. “There is no respectable argument left not to force health and social care workers to get jabbed,” he wrote in The Telegraph, calling the vaccine “the only reason for the safe return of our liberty.”
No, Roanoke Times, Climate Change Is Not To Blame for Virginia Beach’s Flooding
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | November 5, 2021
A Google news search of the term “climate change” turns up a recent story in the Roanoke Times claiming human caused climate change is causing increased incidences of flooding in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This is false. Flooding may be worsening in Virginia Beach, and human activities may be contributing to it, but research indicates a climate change induced increase in the rate of sea level rise is not to blame.
A story, titled “Virginia Beach confronts inescapable costs of rising seas,” discusses a $568 million bond issue being proposed to improve infrastructure and lessen future damage from flooding in the region. If voters don’t approve the bond, the story warns “the city could lose billions of dollars in the next half-century as recurrent flooding inundates roads, businesses and homes.”
The Roanoke Times the proceeds to incorrectly attribute the danger of recurrent future flooding in Virginia Beach to climate change induced rising seas.
“The referendum underscores the mounting costs of adapting to climate change for U.S. cities,” writes the Roanoke Times. “The need for money to protect communities against climate change is growing across the globe ….”
Data show seas are not rising at an unusual rate in the Chesapeake Bay region where Virginia Beach is located.
As discussed in a recent Climate Realism article, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has maintained a tidal gauge at Sewell’s Point in Norfolk since the 1920s. The tidal records, as shown in the NOAA graph below, show the pace of sea-level rise remains the same now as it was 100 years ago – when there was minimal human-emitted carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
NOAA has maintained three other tidal gauges in the Norfolk region, dating back to the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s, respectively. None of the other three show any acceleration, either.
Each of these tide gauges is within 30 miles of Virginia Beach and none show unusual rates of sea level rise or an increasing rate in recent decades.
To the extent flooding has increased in the Chesapeake Bay region and Virginia Beach in particular, research shows it is due to localized land subsidence. According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report, titled “Land Subsidence and Relative Sea-Level Rise in the Southern Chesapeake Bay Region,” states:
Land subsidence has been observed since the 1940s in the southern Chesapeake Bay region at rates of 1.1 to 4.8 millimeters per year (mm/yr), and subsidence continues today.
This land subsidence helps explain why the region has the highest rates of sea-level rise on the Atlantic Coast of the United States. Data indicate that land subsidence has been responsible for more than half the relative sea-level rise measured in the region. Land subsidence increases the risk of flooding in low-lying areas, which in turn has important economic, environmental, and human health consequences for the heavily populated and ecologically important southern Chesapeake Bay region.
The aquifer system in the region has been compacted by extensive groundwater pumping in the region at rates of 1.5- to 3.7-mm/yr; this compaction accounts for more than half of observed land subsidence in the region.
The proposed bond issue may be needed to prevent increased incidences of flooding in Virginia Beach, but it will only work to prevent flooding if the “fixes” funded by it focus on the right causes of the problem. Local water withdrawals, wetlands conversion, and land compaction are to blame for Virginia Beach’s flooding woes, not climate change. Better land and water management, not fossil fuel use restrictions, are needed to reduce the incidences of homes and businesses in Virginia Beach flooding.
Media outlets campaign to get Facebook to censor climate “misinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 6, 2021
A series of articles have been appearing lately in Big Media, piling pressure on Facebook to step up censorship of what’s considered to be “climate misinformation” on the giant platform.
These reports published by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Verge – all citing and giving a lot of space to a study into climate-related content on Facebook produced by several fairly obscure advocacy groups – came shortly after Big Tech declared “climate misinformation” and “climate denial” to be its next censorship target.
One of these groups, “The Real Facebook Oversight Board,” announced on Twitter that it is publishing a quarterly report that documents “Facebook’s harms on climate change.”
The outfit, which states to be a part of the the-citizens.com site (that for now has a landing page and is funded, among others, by Luminate – an offshoot of billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s organization), said it was working with “Stop Funding Heat” and “Sum of Us” to produce the report.
The Verge bases its article on the “study” published on the Stop Funding Heat website, which accuses Facebook of “fact-checking” less than 4 percent of posts for climate misinformation, that is said to have increased by as much as 77% since January, to garner between about 800,000 and 1.3 million views.
“Facebook has been told over and over, through public reports and in private meetings, that its platform is a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” Stop Funding Heat’s Sean Buchan is cited as stating.
“The Real Facebook Oversight Board” crops up again in a Guardian article dedicated to the same issue, which reveals that a majority of the 195 Facebook pages the activist groups analyzed mostly share memes ridiculing some politicians’ focus on climate change as a policy issue.
Facebook is singled out as being “among the world’s biggest purveyors of climate disinformation,” while the giant’s perceived inaction in censoring content skeptical of climate change is seen as harmful to the “the battle” led by the elites who gathered in Glasgow for UN’s COP26 summit.
The BBC also covered the topic of the allegedly rampant climate misinformation on Facebook, choosing to cite a study which said only 8% of the 7,000 posts they consider misleading were labeled as misinformation.
America’s dramatic rise in ‘hate crimes’ has a surprisingly logical explanation
By Frank Furedi | RT | November 3, 2021
The gubernatorial election in Virginia saw another example of a ‘racism hoax’ that caused media outrage before the truth emerged. It’s little wonder these stunts are becoming more common in a country fixated on identity politics.
At a time when the mere hint of a badly worded sentence invites accusations of racism, many race entrepreneurs feel incentivised to fabricate claims of incidents that can provoke howls of outrage.
This week’s election for the post of governor of Virginia saw just how the phenomenon of a race hoax works. Supporters of the Lincoln Project – an anti-Trump advocacy group – dressed up as Neo-Nazi white supremacists and, clutching tiki torches, photographed themselves next to the campaign bus of the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin. Chanting “we’re all in for Glenn,” they sought to promote the impression that a vote for Youngkin was a vote for racial hatred.
The hoax provoked the intended reaction of outrage. “To my fellow Virginia residents,” tweeted NBC’s legal analyst, Glenn Kirschner, “please vote against this blatant display of racism, hatred and intolerance. Please vote FOR a kind, welcoming, diverse Virginia. Please vote @TerryMcAuliffe for governor. Because #JusticeMatters.” The tweet was subsequently deleted.
The Lincoln Project’s dirty trick soon got the Jewish Democratic Council of America on board. It published a tweet – also subsequently deleted – demanding that Youngkin condemn the tiki torchbearers or risk being denounced for endorsing anti-Semitism.
More broadly, Democrats were quick to exploit the performance of the Lincoln Project as an illustration that their opponents’ political base was steeped in white supremacy. America’s cultural fixation with race means that they are primed to perceive episodes of racism in the most innocuous of settings. The race hoax perpetrated by the Lincoln Project was designed to feed the American media’s voracious appetite for sensational incidents of hate crimes.
In recent times, the most widely reported alleged race hoax involved the black American actor Jussie Smollett, who claimed he was assaulted in the early hours of the morning in Chicago by two men wearing MAGA hats. He insisted that he was subjected to homophobic and racial slurs and that some unknown chemical substance was poured on him and a noose tied around his neck.
Smollett’s account of this ‘lynching’ provoked anger, and numerous well-known public figures – including the now-Vice President Kamala Harris – lined up to demonstrate their support. Once the police discovered that Smollett apparently made up the attack – he is facing a criminal case – an embarrassed media moved on to find other instances of hate crime.
As it happens, the manufacturing of a race hoax is far from a rare event. Inventing victimhood is not uncommon, particularly within higher education. For example, in September 2017, five black students at the US Air Force Academy Preparatory School discovered racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students supposedly targeted was responsible for the vandalism.
In his book, ‘Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War’, published in 2019, Wilfred Reilly examined over 100 high-profile incidents of so-called hate crimes that never actually occurred. He pointed out that he was “able to rather easily assemble a data set of 409 hate hoax cases,” concentrated heavily in the previous five years. According to Reilly, his data set has since swelled to become a list of 608 unique hate hoax case studies, containing more than 800 individual incidents of hoaxes.
The fake reporting of hate crimes is encouraged by the singular focus of criminal justice agencies on this issue. In effect, hate crime has turned into a political weapon used to promote the dogma of systemic racism. The eagerness with which claims of hate crime are publicised to prove a point has created an incentive to present oneself as its victim. The proliferation of the phenomenon of race hoax is the inexorable consequence of cultural attitudes that perceive the world through the prism of racism.
The constant obsession with white privilege, whiteness, and systemic racism has created a cultural terrain that is hospitable to the flourishing of race hoaxes.
So, next time you hear that racism is on the rise and society is facing an epidemic of hate crime, take a reality check – because it may turn out that what is at issue is an epidemic of fake news.
Frank Furedi is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century.
The News is being Nudged
A joint report from Sky and the UK government’s Nudge Unit reveals a startling collaboration
By Laura Dodsworth | November 2, 2021
propaganda, n
The systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view.
– Oxford English Dictionary
Is the news still news when it is being nudged by the UK government’s behavioural scientists?
Sky announced this week that behaviour change on climate can be driven by TV. It released a video which opened with the lines, “We cannot understate the urgency. But faced with issues of such enormity, what role can we play?”
It’s not actually a question, they have already decided their role. Sky announced that it was collaborating with the “independent Behavioural Insights Team”. That sounds more palatable than collaborating with the government doesn’t it? But the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is one third owned by the Cabinet Office and appears to be on permanent tenure at Downing Street. Can a company which is one third owned by the government be fairly described as “independent”?
BIT’s report The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles makes a number of startling admissions.
“Behaviour change via broadcasting and traditional media has historically been aimed at improving public health, boosting gender equality, and reducing violence. Imagine the potential for emissions reductions if the same methods were used to encourage sustainable behaviours!”
The key word is “historical”. If you have ever suspected that social and political issues were being confected somewhat artificially in TV programming, you were right. This is an admission of social engineering.
According to a joint survey by Sky and BIT, 70% of people across Europe are willing to change their behaviour to address the climate crisis and 80% support TV broadcasters ‘nudging’ viewers to think about the environment, whether that’s through documentaries, advertising or increasing the coverage of environmental issues in the news.
Climate policy is a tricky nut to crack – persuading us to have under-performing and expensive boilers, asking us to switch insects for meat, stop taking foreign holidays and drive our cars less is going to be a hard sell. So the nudgers are going to use the telly box to persuade the recalcitrant masses.
The survey itself uses ‘social conformity’. Ah, you are supposed to think, if 80% of people think TV programming should be used to ‘nudge’ us, then that’s what I think too. Notoriously, however, there is a gap between what people say they want in surveys and what they actually want. The ultimate proof will be in behaviour and ratings.
The report states that broadcasters and content creators have a “unique opportunity to make a difference for the planet”. (I wonder what difference it would make if Sky’s CEO stopped commuting transatlantically by private jet?)
According to the report, the British public are unwilling to take supposedly “high impact” actions, such as eating less meat and dairy, switching to electric vehicles, using public transport, and switching to green pensions.
The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles
The report is audaciously bossy about how broadcasters and content creators should change the British public’s behaviour.
Advice such as “Frequency of exposure to green themes could be enhanced by building ecological beliefs and traits into core characters within a show so that green issues can fluently be raised time and time again,” sounds potentially tedious.
You will see fewer characters “carelessly drinking from a plastic bottle”. But you will see more kids programming centre on green issues to influence you as well as the kids to promote “intergenerational spillover”.
Suggestions continue with “a family could discuss reducing their waste” in a comedy show. Making that funny is quite the gauntlet throw. News segments could “explore barriers to acting green and share stories for overcoming them,” which doesn’t sound particularly newsworthy. An episode of a drama could include references to buying an electric vehicle and, of course, characters should order vegetarian options in restaurants.
Plump the cushions, grab a cuppa and get ready for the green themes in your favourite psyopera, I mean soap opera. During COP26, storylines are converging on the environment. Soap ratings have diminished over the years and is it any wonder? People don’t want to be preached to. Creativity cannot be programmed and storytelling is an art. It is naïve arrogance to believe this sort of technocratic tinkering will engage viewers. We gravitate to good stories.
Mercifully, BIT suggests that broadcasters “avoid a negative tone” and warns that “fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, blaming, or preaching can be counter-productive.” (I wonder if a certain book had an impact?)
In addition to Sky, another eleven major UK media brands, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, RTE, Britbox and Discovery, have pledged to increase the amount and “quality” of their climate coverage. So expect the airwaves to be flooded with the techniques suggested in the BIT report. At the same time, expect very little media scrutiny of this astonishing collaboration between nudgers and newscasters. And in print and online, the BBC, The Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times have added specific climate sections to their news.
A few months after the publication of A State of Fear, a government advisor told me that the behavioural scientists are “very pleased with themselves” and “Britain is seen as leading the way in how to manipulate people. There is skipping in Whitehall corridors. The public have been proved to be incredibly sheepish, so there’s more nudge coming.” And so there is.
My book concluded that the UK government’s use of behavioural science during the Covid epidemic lacked transparency and was anti-democratic. BIT’s report might appear to rebut both accusations. Don’t be fooled. It rests upon a survey which says people want to be nudged through the media. But research conducted by biased and vested parties is not a substitute for a democratic mandate. The British public never voted for or consented to the creation of a Nudge Unit to subliminally influence them and then set the news agenda. Furthermore, when behavioural scientists – and by extension the government – influence the news, it risks the inquiry, debate and balance that the media owes the public.
Whatever you believe about climate, or Covid-19, or any other agenda, can any mental contortions justify the news being nudged? We would criticise such blatant propaganda if it happened in any other country and we should not tolerate here. We should switch it off.
Tech investor Peter Thiel criticizes “Ministry of Truth” and creation of “fake consensus”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 2, 2021
During the National Conservatism Conference, held on October 31, tech billionaire Peter Thiel warned against “centralized misinformation” because it creates a “fake consensus.”
Thiel asserted that the centralized misinformation problem is responsible for the silencing of debate on important issues such as inflation of the American economy, COVID-19, and the presence of US troops in Afghanistan.
In his speech, Thiel gave examples of what he described as the “incredible derangement of various forms of thought.” He referenced Stanford’s professor Jay Bhattacharya’s experience. Pictures of the professor were plastered all over the school because he spoke against masks.
He said: “When you have to call things science, you know they aren’t – like climate science or political science,” Epoch reported.
According to Thiel, such excessive dogmatism is the reason for the failed policies by the US government in Afghanistan for more than twenty years.
The PayPal co-founder went on to say that the US is currently experiencing a “runaway, non-transitory inflation” and the “complete bankruptcy of the Fed” because of the inability to tolerate differing ideas and opinions that are unpopular.
“If there’s a misinformation problem, it’s a centralized misinformation problem—and it’s the misinformation coming from the Ministry of Truth,” said Thiel.
American Academy of Pediatrics Shills for Big Pharma, Pushes COVID Vaccines for Kids
By David Marks | The Defender | October 28, 2021
The public relations campaign to push COVID vaccines on children is at full throttle, as evidenced by a telling opinion piece published Tuesday in the New York Times — the same day an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended granting Emergency Use Authorization for Pfizer’s shot for 5- to 11-year-olds.
In her op-ed, Dr. Lee Savio Beers — president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — bluntly dictated the requisite information under the headline: “Yes, You’ll Want to Vaccinate Your Kids Against Covid. An Expert Explains Why.”
Times readers might make wiser decisions if they had more information about the true risks to their children. Beers acknowledged the widely supported data demonstrating children are at very low risk for severe illness or death — then made an eloquent though unfounded case for why they should be vaccinated anyway.
Beers declared vaccinating children will help slow the spread of the disease — contradicting conclusive studies that show vaccines do not stop transmission.
Beers and the AAP might have some conflict of interest due to the close financial and professional relationship they have with Pfizer.
Yet no one blinks, as an expert comes forward to front a product, manufactured by his pharmaceutical pals, as the FDA prepares to make an important decision.
Beers’ attempt at persuasion is a classic snake-oil sales pitch, declaring the special qualities of his cure, albeit with no supporting data.
With unfounded confidence, she projects sacrosanct wisdom, even daring to say: “The expanded availability of vaccines should bring peace of mind to many families …”
The extremis of vaccine promotion has reached a ludicrous new level. However, the damage that is about to be inflicted on children is criminal.
Although the FDA heard concerns about the practicality and risks of vaccinating young children, it seemed members of the panel had already made up their minds.
U.S. government regulators and their colleagues at the AAP are complicit in devious criminality.
The AAP has a history of supporting the position of Big Pharma. It includes denying the dangers of mercury and thimerosal in vaccines, endorsing routine HPV vaccines and recommending Ritalin, a psychiatric drug, for 4-year-olds.
The academy also officially denied any dangers of GMO foods, including milk containing growth hormones — proven to have disease-inducing estrogen levels — suggesting there are no benefits to organic products.
Before trusting the latest sage advice from Beers and the AAP, parents should know the AAP was ambiguous for years, and certainly didn’t mount any campaign around the issue, even though they were aware of the evidence linking pesticides and cancer in children.
How many children’s lives could have been saved if there were opinion pieces in newspapers across the country warning about the risks of household chemicals?
The AAP’s failure to alert the public to the known risk of childhood leukemia from chemical exposure before birth and a child’s early years is negligent, yet the academy wasted no time in advising parents to inject a risky, experimental vaccine into healthy young children for a virus that poses little if any risk to them.
Severe illness and deaths among children are much greater than the repercussions of the COVID virus, yet the scare tactics are being ramped up to sell the vaccine.
In what is potentially the greatest historical instance of iatrogenesis, the youth of America are about to participate in an experiment promulgated by those who should be protecting them.
If the AAP is truly concerned about children’s health, we should be reading opinion pieces regarding the dangers of environmental toxins, the benefits of breastfeeding in reducing cancer, dietary risks of denatured foods and concerns for the immense pressure that children are under to conform to a society distorted by the pressure to consume at any cost.
David Marks is an investigative reporter and documentary producer. His new book, “The Way,” is an interpretation of the Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching, available at LaoTzu-TheWay.org.
© [Article Date] Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
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From the Archives
A Lesser “Grade” of Human
By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | January 3, 2024
Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not. Allied doctrine has it that the killing of Israeli or American civilians is a crime of cosmic proportions, while shedding the blood of “enemy” women and children is perfectly acceptable; indeed commendable.
The West does not memorialize the hundreds of thousands of civilians bombed by the U.S. in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and every major German city 1943-1945. America’s fire-bombing of the city of Tokyo by General Curtis LeMay in March 1945 was followed by Harry Truman’s atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. Truman never had a moment of doubt or regret over the murder of more than a 100,000 Asian children, mothers and non-combatant boys and men. It was business as usual for the “noble” Allies during the “Good War.”
In the West human rights signifies passionate concern only for civilians designated as truly human: Israelis first, then Americans and British, followed by their satraps.
This inhumanity is the legacy of Talmudic ideology, beginning with tractate Sanhedrin 57a from 400 A.D., concerning liability for capital punishment: “If a Jew murders a gentile, he is exempt.”
This teaching of contempt was reiterated in the dogma of Chabad Lubavitch founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman in the 18th century. … continue
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