It’s difficult for us to appreciate just how incredible it was for those who first witnessed communication from a distance with a disembodied electric ghost. In fact, it was almost impossible for people to understand this type of communication in anything but spiritual terms. Even the word “medium” evokes the specter of contact with the spirit world. . . .
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TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I’m James Corbett of The Corbett Report, and I’m not here right now. . . . I mean, there. With you.
Confused? Well, take a look at this . . .
[Steps aside to reveal James in screen] See? But, in truth, I’m not here either. What you are watching are the ghostly reflections of someone far away. I am not in the room with you, but you can see me. You can hear me. You might not think much about this, but . . . [Snaps fingers, revealing green screen set in studio] . . . it is one of the wonders of our era, and it has shaped the world in ways we can barely comprehend.
VOICEOVER: Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
PART 2 – WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT
There’s a story about the famous Battle of Waterloo in 1815 that is not usually included in the history textbooks.
The story is that John Roworth—a trusted employee of Nathan Rothschild, the English heir of the infamous Rothschild banking family—was at the battlefield that day and, when the battle was decided and it was apparent that Napoleon had been defeated, he raced off on horseback, bearing the news across the English channel. The messenger arrived at his employers’s London office a full 24 hours before the official government courier and Rothschild, always looking for a way to turn a profit, decided to use the news to his advantage. He made a show of selling his shares at the London Stock Exchange and the public, believing the famed stockbroker had received word that Napoleon had won the battle, began selling as well. The stock market plummeted and Rothschild secretly bought up the shares at rock-bottom prices. By the time the news finally reached Londoners that Wellington—not Napoleon—was the victor at Waterloo, the coup was complete: Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in the realm.
This story, like so many historical adventure yarns, has been much decorated in the retelling: John Roworth was not at Waterloo, for one thing, and there was no great market sell-off in the hours before the official news of the battle reached London. But the central part of the tale is true: Nathan Rothschild did receive early news of Napoleon’s defeat and he did “do well” by that information, as Roworth admitted in a letter the month after the incident.
But whatever this story tells us about the world of finance, it tells us something more fundamental about something far more important: power. Knowledge is power, and, as we saw in Part 1 of this series, Gutenberg had brought that power to the masses. With the printing press, knowledge could be copied and spread to the far corners of the globe faster and easier and cheaper than it ever had before . . .
. . . but it still had to be carried. On horseback, on foot, by train, by carrier pigeon. Information was still a physical thing and even the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo had to be physically transported from one place to another. But did it have to be this way? What if information could be communicated directly by electric current and sent across wires or through the air at the speed of light?
Enter Samuel Morse.
Morse was not a scientist or an experimenter, but a painter. He claimed that the idea for sending messages through electrical wires came to him in a flash of genius on a lengthy ship journey from Europe to America in 1832, and thus that he deserved credit as the sole inventor of the telegraph.
In reality, research along these lines had been going on for nearly a century. The idea of sending electrical messages through wires was first proposed in Scots Magazine in 1753 and it was demonstrated numerous times over the years—most memorably by Francisco Salvá, who in 1795 connected wires to human test subjects, assigned each of them a letter, and instructed them to shout their letter out when they received a shock.
Ignorant of this history, Morse had to rely on real scientists and inventors for his important breakthroughs. Like Professor Leonard Gale, who helped develop the technique of using relays to help the messages travel further than a few hundred yards. And Alfred Vail, a bright young machinist whose improvements to Morse’s crude prototype brought the idea into reality. Many even contend that it was Vail, not Morse, who invented the system of dots and dashes that we know as Morse Code.
Nonetheless, history is written by the winners, and Morse proved to be the winner. Getting the credit, the glory and, more to the point, the patent for the telegraph, Morse received a congressional appropriation of $30,000 to build the first telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. He sent the first official telegraph message from the US Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore. The message had been selected by Anne Ellsworth, the daughter of the Patent Commissioner with whom Morse was lodging while he was stationed in Washington. She chose a passage from the Bible fitting of the momentous occasion: “What hath God wrought!”
The passage, from the book of Numbers, is one of praise—rejoicing at the wonders that God had wrought for Israel—and ends with an exclamation mark. But the telegraph message didn’t contain punctuation, and so the press misreported the phrase with a question mark at the end: “What hath God wrought?” The medium had already begun to change the message.
It’s difficult for us to appreciate just how incredible it was for those who first witnessed communication from a distance with a disembodied electric ghost. In fact, it was almost impossible for people to understand this type of communication in anything but spiritual terms. Even the word “medium” evokes the specter of contact with the spirit world.
When the radio was introduced to Saudi Arabia, the country’s conservative Islamic clerics declared it “the devil hiding in a box” and demanded that King Abdulaziz ban the infernal contraption. The king saw the potential use of the radio for the development of the country, but, relying on the clerics for support, he couldn’t outright reject their council.
Instead, the crafty monarch proposed a test: the radio would be brought before him the next day and he would listen to it himself. If what the clerics said was true, then he would ban the devil’s device and behead those responsible for bringing it into the country.
The next day, the radio was brought before the king at the appointed time. But the king had secretly arranged with the radio engineers to make sure the Quran was being read at the hour of the test. Sure enough, when he switched it on and passages from the Quran were heard.
“Can it be that the devil is saying the Quran?” he asked. “Or is it perhaps true that this is not an evil box?” The clerics conceded defeat and the radio was allowed into Saudi Arabia.
We may laugh, but the Saudis were not the first or the last to mistake media technology for devilry. In 1449, Johann Fust—the scion of a wealthy and powerful family in Mainz—lent Gutenberg an enormous sum of money to start producing his famed Bible and confiscated the books from the printer when he couldn’t afford to repay the loan. When Fust later appeared on the streets of Paris, selling multiple copies of Gutenberg’s Bible, the bewildered Parisians—who had never seen printed books before and so couldn’t imagine how so many strangely identical copies of a manuscript could be produced so quickly—arrested him for witchcraft.
The essence of the mass media—its ability to project the voices of people who aren’t there using electronic gadgets and wireless networks—is the essence of magic, bringing to life the scrying mirrors and palantirs of lore. But is this media technology a dark art, or can its powers be used for good?
As the new medium of commercial radio rose in the early decades of the 20th century, listeners had cause to side with the Saudi clerics in their determination that it was, in fact, a devil in a box. Listeners like those who tuned into a strange news report on the Columbia Broadcasting System on the evening of Sunday, October 30, 1938.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of Ramón Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.
Of course, this wasn’t a news broadcast at all. It was the infamous “Halloween Scare,” Orson Wells’ radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which infamously caused panic among some members of the listening audience who were flipping through the dial and mistook the dramatized news “interruptions” for actual reports of a Martian invasion.
It’s become fashionable in recent years to downplay the incident as a myth. There was no real scare, only a few dimwits who got frightened. The newspapers—looking for any excuse to belittle radio, its fast-rising competition for the public’s attention and corporate advertising dollars—ginned up the story and sold the public on a panic that never was.
But there was something to the Halloween Scare. The City Manager of Trenton, New Jersey—mentioned by name in the broadcast—even wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to demand an immediate investigation into the stunt. In response, a team of researchers fanned out, collecting information, conducting interviews and studying reports about the panic to better understand what had happened and what could be learned about this new medium’s ability to influence the public.
The team was from the Princeton Radio Project—a research group founded with a two-year, $67,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the effect of radio through the lens of social psychology. The team was led by Hadley Cantril, the old Dartmouth College roommate of Nelson Rockefeller who had written in 1935 that “[r]adio is an altogether novel medium of communication, preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
Cantril’s report on Wells’ Halloween broadcast, The Invasion from Mars, concluded that such a large-scale media-induced frenzy could happen again “and even on a much more extensive scale.” This was important information for the funders of the Princeton Radio Project; their next major research project was a study of how radio could be used for spreading war propaganda, an increasingly important subject as the world slipped into the maw of World War II.
The question of electronic media’s ability to influence the public became even more important as the radio revolution of the early twentieth century flowed into the television revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Television had actually been ready to roll out as a commercial medium in the 1930s, but the Depression and then the war delayed the mass production of television sets. The first mass-produced commercial television hit the market in 1946, and it soon became one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history to that point, finding its way into the majority of American homes within a decade.
Strangely, as sociologist Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 bestseller, Bowling Alone, the era of television adoption precisely coincides with a severe drop-off in civic engagement among the American public. Could there be a relation? If so, what could it be?
One intriguing possibility comes from research conducted by Herbert Krugman in 1969. Krugman—who would go on to become manager of public opinion research at General Electric in the 1970s—was interested to discover what happens physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV. He taped a single electrode to the back of his test subject’s head and ran the wire to a Grass Model 7 Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT 400B computer. He turned on the TV and began monitoring the brain waves of his subject. He found through repeated testing that “within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness.”
Krugman’s initial findings were confirmed by more extensive and accurate testing: TV rapidly induces an alpha-state consciousness in its viewers, putting them in a daydream state that leaves them less actively focused on their activities and more receptive to suggestion. This dream state combines with the nature of the medium itself to create a perfect tool for disengaging the viewers intellectually, removing them from active participation in their environment and substituting real experience with the simulacrum of experience.
In a word, TV hypnotizes its viewers.
NEIL POSTMAN: To begin with, television is essentially non-linguistic. It presents information mostly in visual images. Although human speech is heard on television and sometimes assumes importance, people mostly watch television. And what they watch are rapidly changing visual images, as many as 1200 different shots every hour. The average length of a shot on network television is 3.5 seconds. The average in a commercial is 2.5 seconds.
Now, this requires very little analytic decoding. In America, television watching is almost wholly a matter of what we would call pattern recognition. What I’m saying here is that the symbolic form of television—its form—does not require any special instruction or learning.
In America, television viewing begins at about the age of 18 months and by 36 months, children begin to understand and respond to television’s imagery. They have favorite characters, sing jingles they hear and ask for products they see advertised.
There’s no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television. It needs no analog to the McGuffey Reader. Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills and that is why there is no such thing as remedial television watching.
As we have seen, it was only a matter of years from the advent of commercial radio as a medium of communication until monopolistic financial interests were funding studies to determine how best to use it to mould the public consciousness. And, it seems, the television—with its brain wave-altering, hypnosis-inducing, cognitive impairment abilities—was designed from the very get-go to be a weapon of control deployed against the viewing public.
But if these media are weapons, if they are being used to direct and shape the public’s attention and, ultimately, their thoughts, it begs some questions: Who is wielding these weapons? And for what purpose?
This is no secret conspiracy. The answer is not difficult to find. TimeWarner and Disney and Comcast NBC Universal and News Corp and Sony and Universal Music Group and the handful of other companies that have consolidated control over the “mediaopoly” of the electronic media are the ones wielding the media weapon. Their boards of directors are public information. Their major shareholders are well known. A tight-knit network of wealthy and powerful people control what is broadcast by the corporate media, and, by extension, wield the media weapon to shape society in their interest.
In Part 1 of this series, we noted how technological advancements in the printing press and the development of new business models for the publishing industry had taken Gutenberg’s revolutionary technology out of the hands of the public and put it into the hands of the few rich industrialists with the capital to afford their own newspaper or book publisher. The Gutenberg conspiracy had led, seemingly inevitably, to the Morgan conspiracy. But that process didn’t end with the electrification of the media; it accelerated.
By the end of the twentieth century, a handful of media companies controlled the vast majority of what Americans read, saw and heard. That this situation was used to control what the public thought about important topics is, by now, obvious to all.
NEWSCASTERS: The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories — stories that simply aren’t true — without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this media oligopoly had cemented its control over the public mind. Combined, newspapers, television, movies and radio had the ability to direct people’s thoughts on any given topic, or even what they thought about. The zenith of that era was reached on September 11, 2001, when billions across the globe watched the dramatic events of 9/11 play out on their television screens like a big-budget Hollywood production.
But the media was not done evolving. Technologies were already being rolled out that would once again change the public’s relationship to the media. Technologies that would once again leave people questioning whether the media was a devil hiding in a box, wondering whether this new media was a tool of empowerment or control, and asking the question: What hath God wrought?
This past week, both the U.S. and Europe have had significant localized heatwaves. The one in Europe is particularly bothersome for the media, since the area is not prepared for temperatures that exceed 100°F like areas in the in the United States in places like California, Texas, and Oklahoma, where air conditioners are the norm, regularly experience. The mainstream media has uniformly blamed the heatwaves on human caused climate change. This attribution is wrong.
The headlines have been truly apoplectic, and absolutely wrong. For example:
Every summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it gets hot; that’s what summers do. Also, every year, a localized heatwave occurs somewhere in the world.
The error that is common to all of these news articles is the fact that weather is not climate.
Weather is an event that might last for minutes to a few days. A heatwave is a weather event that is typically linked to large scale weather patterns, such as a high-pressure cell which can create heat-domes in the summer. Climate is an average of weather over a thirty-year period as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. Note my highlights:
Each of these stories trying to link climate change to the heat wave does so without any proof whatsoever. They are nothing more than speculative fearmongering.
And, it isn’t limited to print and Internet media, the TV stations are overhyping it as well to make it seem like a crisis with the use of color. Figure 1 is a comparison of TV graphics on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Summer 2012, versus Summer 2022.
Figure 1: Comparison of TV weather Maps from the BBC in summer 2012, left, and summer 2022 right. Source: BBC
Note that in 2012, some of the temperatures were actually higher, and they didn’t need to fill in areas with red to make it look worse than it actually is.
Another thing that you won’t find reported in the BBC on in the newspapers/Internet media is the fact that while record heat was going on in Western Europe, Eastern Europe was experiencing well below average temperatures. Figure 2 below shows the juxtaposition of heat in the UK and Europe compared to the below normal temperatures in Eastern Europe, which the press has ignored.
Figure 2: Surface Temperature map for UK and Europe on July 19, 2022. Image from ECMWF output via WeatherBell Inc.
That dramatic regional temperature difference seen in Figure 2 is a sure sign of this being a weather pattern, and not global scale climate change aka global warming as the media would have you believe. The same applies to the heat wave in the U.S. as seen in Figure 3. It is regional in its scope, not global.
Figure 3: Maximum Temperature for the Contiguous United States July 21, 2022. Source NOAA
… in recent decades in the United States, heat waves have been far less frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s.
The all-time high temperature records set in most states occurred in the first half of the twentieth century.
The heat wave of 1936 was far deadlier. To their credit, The Washington Post got it right in this report:
The killer U.S. heat wave of 1936 spread as far north as Canada, led to the heat-related deaths of an estimated 5,000 people, sent thermometers to a record 121 degrees Fahrenheit in Steele, N.D., and made that July the warmest month ever recorded in the United States.
But the real issue is that extended high temperatures like the U.S. and Europe have experienced this month have happened before climate change became the universal go-to for blame. It only takes a small amount of research to discover these facts.
A search of the term heatwaves, on Wikipedia, for instance, finds that a heatwave and drought in 1540 in Europe lasted for 11 months, and that a heatwave in 1757 was the hottest in the past 500 years until 2003. Also, Netweather Community TV, called the 1906 heatwave in the U.K during August and September, “one of the most exceptional heatwaves to ever occurred in the UK.” A 1911 heatwave in France contributed to more than 41,000 premature deaths. More recently, in Europe, there was a massive months-long heat wave in 1976. This came at a time when the Earth was experiencing a 30 year cooling trend, that led many scientists to warn the next ice age was looming. Wikipedia’s entry on the 1976 event reports:
The summer of 1976 was considered to be the hottest summer in Europe, and especially the United Kingdom, during the 20th century. A large high-pressure area dominated most of Europe for all of the summer months. The pressure system moved into place in late May 1976 and remained until the first traces of rain were recorded on 27 August.
. . .
For the entire period much of Europe was bathed in continual sunshine with the United Kingdom seeing an average of more than 14 hours of sunshine per day. 1976 was dubbed “the year of the ladybird” in that country due to the rise in the mass numbers of the insect brought on by the long hot period. In the United Kingdom, the summer coincided with a 16-week dry spell, the longest recorded over England and Wales since 1727.
That high pressure pattern is almost identical to what has been seen in UK and Europe today. The difference is that the media today immediately goes to blame climate change rather than weather patterns, and in the case of this article in TheNew York Times, they even try to convince you that comparisons between the hot summers of 1976 and 2022 are somehow “misleading.”
“Yet the comparison to 1976 is misleading. The highest recorded temperature then was 35.9 degrees Celsius, whereas on Tuesday it surpassed 40 degrees.”
“Thermometers hit 40.3C at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, while 33 other locations went past the UK’s previous highest temperature of 38.7C, set in 2019.”
Figure 4. Graph of Temperature at RAF Base Coningsby for July 19th, 2022 showing a max temp of 104°F, Source: WeatherUndergroud.com
What the BBC and the NYT don’t tell you is that the 40 degree Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) was set at a Royal Air Force (RAF) base next to the heat absorbing sea of runway asphalt and tarmac. Figure 4 shows the temperature hour-by-hour that day and where it was recorded.
By contrast, the BBC reports “… the [previous] highest temperature ever recorded in the United Kingdom was 101.7 degrees, observed in Cambridge [at Cambridge University Botanic Garden] in July 2019.“
A botanical garden is an entirely different environment than an RAF air base. The latter would be expected to be much warmer due to the lack of shade, the heat absorbing materials present, and the hot air expelled from jet engines. So, the “misleading” claim of the NYT is really about the lack of solid journalism in reporting the environment under which these temperatures were recorded.
It is well-known that the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect can contribute to warmer high temperatures, and given the UK went from 56 million people in 1976 to 67 million in 2020, it isn’t the least bit surprising that the UHI increased as infrastructure to support that 11 million extra people was added to that island nation.
The truth and overwhelming scientific evidence provide a different story: the recent European heatwave is mainly the result of natural processes but was enhanced modestly by human-caused global warming.
The situation is very much like the [Pacific] Northwest heatwave of last summer; with many of the same elements.
…
The bottom line is that the recent European heat wave was caused by an amplification of the northern hemisphere wave pattern, with global warming contributing perhaps 5-10% of the warmth. Natural variability of the atmosphere was the proximate cause of the warmth and does not represent an existential threat to the population of Europe.
Clearly, there’s no cause for alarm, no matter what the media says. But the media won’t tell you any of that, because it ruins their narrative of being able to blame the heatwave on climate change, while hoping you don’t notice their distortion of the truth about ordinary weather events we see every summer.
ONE thing I will say about Wednesday night’s BBC programme Unvaccinated is that it had to be seen to believed. It managed to be patronising, ignorant, selective and abusive all at the same time. I doubt if even my extraordinary talents can quite convey the level of vaccine propaganda that the national broadcaster engaged in.
If you did not see it, Unvaccinated (available on iPlayer) was a programme whereby the BBC picked a group of people who have exercised their right to medical choice and bodily autonomy and decided not to be injected with an mNRA ‘vaccine’, and got them together, Big Brother-style, in an attempt to change their minds. They were subject to a regime of gaslighting, ‘heated debate’ and an odd jelly-bean experiment. Along the way to help these poor ignoramuses see the error of their ways were a presenter, The Scientists and some bloke from Full Fact, ‘the UK’s independent fact checking organisation’.
The low point was when a young participant explained how a friend started having seizures days after her first jab. This has devastated her life. Unsurprisingly this made the attendee ‘hesitant’ about receiving the Covid vaccine. The response from the presenter was, How can you be sure it was the vaccine that caused the seizures? Maybe it was something else? Just how is a young girl supposed to prove that a serious side-effect such as a seizure was not caused by the vaccine taken only days earlier? As she rightly pointed out, given the age of the victim, it is highly unlikely that this would have occurred naturally. But it’s not impossible, replied the presenter. Sure, it is not impossible, just like pigs might indeed sprout wings and fly.
This gaslighting came after a lengthy session on how mild side-effects are often imagined. Placebo side-effects were real – namely if you thought you would get a side-effect then you were more likely to experience this side-effect. So, you just imagined that blood clot.
Then there was a discussion on myocarditis – this was when the jelly-beans came out to demonstrate how unlikely it is one would suffer such a side-effect after the vaccine. You are more likely to suffer myocarditis from Covid, we were told. The jelly-bean experiment didn’t seem to convince anyone, and positively enraged one attendee.
Then the Unvaccinated met The Scientists, who explained how they were able to develop the mNRA vaccine in an ‘unprecedented’ time scale: ‘The vaccines that we are using in this country at the moment are quite different from vaccines that we have used in the past.’ (They certainly are.)
They were developed at such breakneck, too-good-to-be-true, never-before-done-in-the-history-of-mankind speed because they got critical information from China. The Scientist explains, ‘We were able to get the code for the spike protein on the virus within a matter of weeks from China, and that code was enough to make the spike protein.’ (I am sure you are fully reassured now, dear reader. The code for the spike protein came from China. So you’re all good.) That didn’t really fill me with confidence, I have to say. (For some very real worries about this rushed vaccine, turn to Paula Jardine’s disturbing report for TCW here.)
The other reason for the high-speed development and rollout was, according to the presenter, who heard it from an academic, good old ‘bureaucracy’, or at least the lack of it. Allegedly, all The Scientists were able to clear their diaries so they could make meetings immediately instead of three months down the line and, ta-dah – the vaccine appears! ‘They got rid of everything else in their diary and this was the priority.’ Praise be.
The gang at Full Fact got a slot to explain all about the trouble with ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ and all the rest of it.
The biggest elephant in the room was the fact that the virus presents little if any threat to the attendees, who were all young. If the risk of the virus to the attendees isn’t analysed then there is no point in talking about how likely mild or serious the side-effects of the vaccine are.
Much of the programme came down to emotion v The Science and the manipulation of statistics, in particular confusing causation with correlation. It is right we should always be careful of statistics. Ultimately, however, I believe the attendees’ gut instinct is against this vaccine but these days, emotion or instinct is routinely dismissed. Nothing can come above The Science, and The Charts and The Technocrats and The Experts. Sir Roger Scruton defended instinct as an entirely appropriate way upon which to make a decision. It is another word for wisdom and common sense built up over a lifetime of experience. One can apply common sense and wisdom when considering the advice given by an expert, but that advice should not trump the commonsense decision which has to be made by the ordinary person.
Experience tells me that in the face of a virus which presents a tiny risk to me, or indeed anyone, it is best not to be injected with a vaccine developed in record time using an entirely new method and relying on information from communist-run China.
My life experience tells me I have an immune system and I trust that more that the government, Big Pharma, China or indeed the BBC. In fact, when a jury consider a verdict in a criminal trial they are directed to apply their common sense and life experience when considering the evidence and coming to a verdict. If common sense is good enough to convict someone of a criminal offence, it should be good enough when considering whether to have a vaccine.
One of the attendees observed that you have only one life and one body, so you have to be careful what you put into it. That really sums it up. Despite the BBC’s best efforts, I doubt that they will have changed any minds with this programme.
The medical establishment professes to know an awful lot. A few days before lockdown in March 2020, it knew that covid was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease and downgraded it accordingly. Exhibiting an Orwellian capacity for doublethink, it also knew that societies ought to be bludgeoned with lockdowns to prevent the spread of the not so highly consequential, and therefore downgraded, pathogen. In addition, it somehow just knew, without being able to explain why, that a cost-benefit analysis would be superfluous, so none was done. Until July 2020, it knew, based on decades of established science, that masking in community settings was useless in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses. Then, with no new science to support a 180-degree turn, it just knew that masks had to be mandated.
It was so certain that mass vaccination with the experimental injections was the only course of action to take in the face of the not so highly consequential covid disease that it suppressed alternative cheap, safe and effective treatments. It was also quite sure that it had to censor and threaten doctors like Sam White with debarment because he expressed concerns about mass vaccination with the shoddily tested and hastily marketed novel ‘vaccines’. It somehow reasoned that doctors expressing genuine concern for patient safety was a threat to patient safety and that the only way to guarantee patient safety was for every single doctor, journalist and media outlet to sing from the same Big Pharma-sponsored hymn sheet.
Granted, the medical establishment’s stance during covid has not been underpinned by rational considerations, but that is precisely what has given it so much latitude to respond to ‘the crisis’. There is no limit to what you can know and do when you don’t have to prove rationally how you came to know it. Life is a never-ending carousel of trade-offs. You can either plod through things methodically and get it right or you can blast ahead at Warp Speed with the misplaced confidence of Joe Biden on a bicycle.
So, given the medical establishment’s boundless knowledge in times of crisis, it’s more than a little odd that it does not know why young and apparently healthy adults all over the world are dying in unprecedentedly large numbers. It is uncharacteristically stumped: it professes that there are simply no clues whatsoever to this disturbing phenomenon.
It is in the grip of such uncharacteristic knowledge paralysis that it seems incapable of exploring obvious lines of enquiry, such as asking questions like: when was the last time that governments all over world put a jackboot on the neck of every adult citizen to inject them with novel ‘vaccines’ employing an experimental gene-based technology tested under quality control conditions that would have run-of-the-mill crack dealers shaking their heads in disbelief?
What’s in a name?
Once you unlock the mystery of the medical establishment’s peculiar brand of epistemology, you begin to understand that how it comes to ‘know’ things is directly related to how it defines the problems it is trying to solve. For people who think in straitjackets, the problem of young people dying inexplicably is a medical problem. But, for the unbounded thinkers in charge of the medical establishment, it is a Public Relations problem. Through that lens, the obvious line of enquiry into experimental mass vaccination gets ruled out because it is too rational, too much of a threat to its reputation and too unprofitable.
The solution to this PR problem is to repackage it in such a way that it is seen as an insoluble medical mystery, as insoluble as the mystery of life itself – a mystery that one can debate in philosophical terms but never get to grips with in any practical way. The most insoluble mysteries are those that have been around since the dawn of time and yet continue to evade unravelling. This is axiomatic to the quality of insolubility – Plato, Seneca, Aquinas, Voltaire and Heidegger will have all given it their best shot and yet here we are today, none the wiser. The seed must be sown in the public mind that this is not a new problem that arose coterminously with mass global experimental covid vaccination but has been ‘a thing’ since the dawn of medical things.
The key to all successful narrative management is naming the problem. When Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, was tasked by the tobacco industry in the early 20th century with breaking the taboo against women smoking cigarettes, he didn’t call them cancer sticks. He called them torches of freedom. With one ingenious stroke of the naming pen, the tobacco industry doubled its market overnight and women won the right to lung cancer.
In a similar vein, society must understand that young adults inexplicably dying before their time is the result of a bona fide disease of unfathomable cause – a mysterious and yet proper medical thing – and not a possible crime against humanity.
At first glance, the name they’ve hit on does not fill you with confidence that the best medical minds were enlisted in the brainstorming session. But it certainly has an air of does-what-it-says-on-the-tin. It is partly for that reason that Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (“SADS”) is a stroke of marketing genius. It’s got an easy acronym that chimes flippantly with the tragic outcome and yet is also readily accessible to authoritative tones after three pints in the pub. This is 90 per cent of the battle in getting the public to understand in no uncertain terms that SADS is ‘a thing’. A serious thing. It trips off the tongue very easily and yet is not so silly that it sounds like the lead-in to a crazy story developed by a contestant in an episode of BBC One’s Would I Lie to You.
As far as the medical establishment is concerned, the perception that SADS on this scale is a recent global phenomenon must be resisted on the grounds that it could become associated with a big new event – like mass global experimental covid vaccination. So no, SADS is not new. It’s been a thing for eons. And for sure, a Google search seems to suggest that SADS has been around for as long as cancer. But Allan Stevo’s investigation using his “8.6 pound Webster’s Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language from 1992” – which is impervious to algorithmic re-engineering – reveals that the term did not exist in 1992. But who are you going to trust – the colourful, digital pages of Google or the crumbling ancient parchments of Webster’s Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language?
I’m not saying there have never been mysterious unexplained deaths of young and apparently healthy adults. They were just so rare that they weren’t on the radar, even of dictionaries whose job it is to define all things known to the vast bulk of humanity. Surely this merits delving into a little deeper?
Whatever you do, don’t solve the problem – autopsies die a sudden death
One way to solve the apparently insoluble problem of sudden adult death would be to conduct autopsies on as many sudden adult deaths as resources will allow. It turns out that the Chief Pathologist at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Peter Schirmacher, was doing just that very thing. In the summer of 2021, his team had just finished conducting 40 autopsies on people who had died within two weeks of vaccination and concluded that 30-40% of them died from the vaccine. He was pushing for many more autopsies of vaccinated people.
His claims were naturally dismissed by the German Government. From Dr. Schirmacher’s perspective, the dismissal by bureaucrats of his professional autopsy findings must have felt like being an army private in the battlefield reporting by radio to a lieutenant that he’d just been shot in the leg, only to have the lieutenant ask, “How can you be sure?”. But the powerful bureaucrats must have had good reason to dismiss his professional work although these reasons weren’t made clear.
Calls by the Federal Association of German Pathologists pushing for more autopsies of vaccinated people were also treated with disdain. No other autopsies have been performed apart from 15 done by Dr. Arne Burkhardt towards the end of 2021, which found “clear evidence of vaccine-induced autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs” in 14 of 15 cases, all of which were ignored by all health authorities and mainstream media. No further autopsies have been reported and Dr. Schirmacher and his colleagues have gone quiet, after being so emphatic about the risks and the need for as many autopsies as possible.
On the face of it, the only way to prove what is causing the uptick in mysterious sudden deaths has died a sudden death. But the sensible and mature conclusion to draw from the silence of the autopsy doctors is that they have realised they were wrong and that the powerful bureaucrats and MSM journalists, who know nothing about autopsies, were right. Only a ‘conspiracy theorist’ would think there was a cover-up going on, right?
Public Relations – The Mail Online takes a proper gander at SADS
In any case, why bother with autopsies when, according to this article in the Mail Online, the best medical minds in Australia are getting to grips with the problem by “opening up a new national register”. Yes, that’s right, they’re at the cutting edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in which all our problems will be solved by data, algorithms, AI and registers. We’re leaving behind the grime of autopsies, post-mortems and diagnosing diseased patients by prodding them with stethoscopes and asking them time-wasting questions. We’ve got registers now.
Now, at first glance it might seem that the article would not be out of place in The Onion or the Babylon Bee because of idiotic tautologies like this one:
But pointing out that SADS, a death syndrome, is fatal is not cheap satire. It is a reminder that contained in SADS is both the disease and its inescapable prognosis of death.
Another reason why SADS is more of a thing than any other medical thing is that a diagnosis of SADS can never be wrong. It can only be given after death has occurred and only three boxes need to be ticked – did the deceased die without warning; was the deceased an adult in the prime of life and, crucially; do we intend to follow 4IR protocols to establish cause of death by doing nothing other than entering some data in a register? Yes, to all three? Job done. The clever cardiologist who is quoted extensively in the article jokes that SADS is a “diagnosis of nothing” but, once she has taken her tongue out of her cheek, I’m sure she is only too aware of how clever a diagnosis this is.
After correctly informing the reader that this particular death syndrome is fatal, the article recounts how a typical sudden death unfolds. The victim doesn’t come down for breakfast, but no one is concerned because we (white-collar workers at least) all work from home these days so having a lie-in is par for the course. The whole tone of the description of the tragic death of a young person in the peak of life is bizarrely deadpan. Again, you would be wrong to interpret this apparently tasteless approach as cheap satire. The banal tone is deliberately intended to drive home the point that SADS is just another puzzle in the countless puzzles that the universe, with its twisted sense of humour, flings at humanity on a regular basis.
The article contains pictures of very young actors clutching at their hearts with distressed expressions. Again, you would be wrong to think this is cheap and tasteless. How else are we to understand that SADS really is a thing? I think the visual message here is that if you’re under 40 and find yourself clutching at your heart while out jogging, be appropriately but not overly distressed because, while your heart may stop beating and no-one will ever know exactly why, SADS is definitely a thing. And the national register will never forget you.
Because the article is intended to be as informative as possible, it shares some very helpful warning ‘signs’ of SADS. Top warning sign number one is a family history of a SADS diagnosis. The happy smiley cardiologist who was selected to educate the public about SADS advises that your SADS clock might be silently ticking down if any of the following things have happened to you: fainting from exercise, over-excitement or just being ‘startled’. If you are one of those people who faints at the mere thought of exercise, you would have obviously been on the SADS register a very long time ago, had it been in operation. Your continued existence is actually more of a mystery than SADS itself, but let’s not complicate things any further. Suffice to say your clock is ticking down and your housemates should not be too surprised if you don’t come down for breakfast in the next couple of weeks. At least the Mail Online has prepared them. And you, come to think of it.
If you are wondering why I refer to the cardiologist as “the happy smiley doctor”, click the link to the article and it will be as clear to you as her sparkling eyes and teeth. There is a photo of her beaming as though she has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine when in fact, she is being quizzed about the grizzly business of young people dying for reasons that cannot be fathomed by the best brains in medicine. Why is she happy and smiley instead of sombre and uneasy? Is this another tactless error by the Mail Online inadvertently making the whole article look like cheap satire? Not at all. World War II propaganda used the very same technique to placate the masses in times of great uncertainty. Here is a WWII poster of a woman exuding the same brand of devil-may-care insouciance in the face of adversity:
Ok, so I’ve chosen a Nazi propaganda poster to compare with the happy smiley Australian doctor. Is this in bad taste? Personally, I don’t think so. Today’s brave new world of forced masking, forced lockdowns and forced medical experimentation must be met head-on with bold comparisons. Yesterday’s Nazis weren’t big on bodily autonomy and nor are today’s Australians (or Canadians, or Austrians, or French for that matter). Am I saying, rather unsubtly, that the Western world is becoming the very thing it fought 75 years ago? Only if you believe that people were robbed of the human right to voluntary informed consent by being coerced into taking the ‘vaccines’. ‘Vaccines’ which, let’s be clear, have absolutely nothing to do with the current spate of sudden adult deaths all over the world.
Am I unsubtly hinting that the Mail Online’s proper gander at SADS is actually propaganda for the medical establishment? Only if you believe that the responsible thing to do would be to show a picture of a doctor holding her head in her hands, tears of shame flowing from her eyes for failing to at least consider one potential and obvious cause of the mysterious deaths. I think we’re all in agreement here – that would not be responsible journalism. Far better to show a happy beaming doctor exuding the confidence of someone who is certain that SADS really is a thing, that it’s been a big thing for quite some time and that, while getting a ‘diagnosis’ of SADS is indeed the end of the world for you, you will die knowing that we are getting on top of this very real thing because we’re fighting it with a register and not with futile autopsies.
There’s a mention in the article about the role of genes because you can’t have a totally mysterious and fatal death syndrome (if the Mail Online can get away with this clever tautology, why can’t I?) without genes playing a role. Of course they haven’t, and never will, find a SADS gene, but that’s beside the point when proffering genes causality. Genes are the building blocks of life; your life ends suddenly without warning, ergo there must have been something wrong with your building blocks.
The ‘best advice’ the happy smiley cardiologist can give is: if you’re related to anyone who’s had an unexplained death, ‘it’s extremely recommended you see a cardiologist.’ Which seems pointless because a SADS diagnosis rests entirely on you having no detectable condition right up to the point you clutch your heart in desperation and keel over. If the condition was a recognised detectable one, mitigation strategies would likely kick in pre-heart clutching and, even if you ended up dying from that condition, your death would be labelled something other than SADS by virtue of its having been detected. SADS is the ultimate catch-22 – the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with the patient before they die and there’s no way of knowing afterwards (autopsies now being off the table) so the patient gets a posthumous SADS ‘diagnosis’, and is successfully entered on a register.
The Mail Online article is perfect except for that flawed bit of advice which seems to fail to recognise the complex circular nature of SADS. Telling people to have a thorough check-up before SADS threatens the very existence of SADS. Being cynical, I would say this advice is a ruse to give a boost to the happy smiley doctor’s billings.
WASHINGTON – The Pulitzer Prize Board has rejected former US President Donald Trump’s appeal to revoke awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their reporting on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” the Pulitzer Prize Board said in a Monday statement, explaining that it had received several inquiries, including from Trump, about The New York Times and The Washington Post reporting, but independent reviews have found nothing to discredit the prize entries.
“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the Pulitzer Prize Board said.
In October of last year, Trump sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board demanding that it rescind the prizes given to over a dozen articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post, arguing that the publications engaged in “false reporting.”
Russia has repeatedly denied claims of its meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
In the beginning, there was the word. The spoken word, that is.
This word, the written word, didn’t come along for countless generations.
And this word, the printed word, didn’t come along for thousands of years after that.
In fact, we’ve only had the movable type printing press for about 600 years, but without it our world would be unrecognizable.
From the Renaissance to the Reformation, from the fall of feudalism to the rise of capitalism, from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, from the way we order our thoughts to what we choose to think about, nothing survived the printing revolution intact.
Our world is the world that the printing press has created.
And that world started with this. [Holds up mirror.]
VOICEOVER: Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
PART ONE: THE GUTENBERG CONSPIRACY
You see, in the Middle Ages, mirrors—especially curved mirrors—were fiendishly difficult to make.
And pilgrim badges—elaborately designed lead or pewter plates with a curved mirror in the middle—were even more difficult to make. But in fifteenth-century Germany, they were in hot demand.
It all goes back to the year 800, when Emperor Charlemagne gifted four holy relics from Jerusalem to the Cathedral in Aachen in modern-day Germany: the swaddling clothes and loin cloth of Jesus, Mary’s robe, and the cloth that held John the Baptist’s decapitated head. The relics were thought to have miraculous restorative powers. And so, after the Black Death of 1349, they were removed from the Cathedral’s golden shrine and put on display for the public once every seven years, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims from across Christendom.
Soon, the belief developed that a curved mirror could be held up to the relics to capture their miraculous powers and bring them back to the pilgrims’ home in whatever far-flung land they hailed from.
Now, the mirror was not a mirror like the ones we’re used to today. It was a pilgrim badge and it was one of the few mass-manufactured items of the Middle Ages. They were lucrative products to make. So lucrative, in fact, that the goldsmiths and stamp cutters of Aachen couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Enter Johannes Gutenberg. Born around the turn of the fifteenth-century to a wealthy family in Mainz, in modern-day Germany, Gutenberg—whose father was a companion of the ecclesiastical mint—had a background in goldsmithing, coinmaking and metalwork.
Arriving in Strasbourg in 1434, he thought to put his skills to work on a profitable venture: creating badges for the next Aachen Pilgrimage in 1439. There was only one problem: he didn’t have the capital to make the badges himself. So he entered into a cooperative with three business partners, each of whom ponied up a portion of the money required for Gutenberg to start producing the mirrors.
But just as the pilgrimage approached and it looked like the inventor was going to make a tidy profit for himself and his business partners, the Black Death struck again. An outbreak of the plague ravaged the Upper Rhine Valley in 1438, postponing the pilgrimage by a year. Gutenberg had already produced a number of the mirrors, but his capital was running out. And so he set his sights on a new venture—one so audacious, so revolutionary that he made his partners sign a contract swearing them to secrecy before he would let them in on it.
In fact, so secret was this project that the only reason we know anything at all about it is because one of the business partners died and his brother tried to take his place in the cooperative. But after the surviving partners refused to let him in on the plot, the would-be co-conspirator sued Gutenberg in Strasbourg court.
The court documents that survive are themselves cryptic—referring to the “adventure and art” of “the work” that Gutenberg and his partners were engaged in, but never specifying what that work was, exactly. We know that it involved presses fastened with screws and engraved “forms” supplied by a local goldsmith, that some quantity of metal had been purchased for the venture, that the work was expected to take five years and—above all—that the object of this undertaking be kept a secret.
Gutenberg and his partners had quite literally entered into a conspiracy.
And that conspiracy, resulted in this. Now this may not look like much to you . . . and you’d be right. This is a pencil sharpener. But the Gutenberg movable type printing press that it’s modeled after? Now that truly was a work of art. In fact, there’s a solid argument to be made that it was one of the most important inventions in human history.
There were many existing ideas and technologies that went into Gutenberg’s creation: the screw press, the manufacture of paper, the idea of woodblock printing, the development of ink. But it took years of careful experimentation to solve the puzzle of how to create a perfect print every time.
At first glance, it seems straightforward. The type is arranged in a rectangular container and then beaten with ink balls. The paper is placed in a leather-covered frame called a “tympan” and covered by a frisket. The tympan is then laid on the type and fed into a screw press, which is turned to press the type onto the paper.
Simple, right? Hardly.
In fact, every part of the printing process involved years of laborious experimentation: finding the right paper to print on, finding the right moisture levels for the paper to absorb the ink, finding the right way to dry the paper, finding an ink that wouldn’t run off the metal type, finding the right alloy for casting the type, and on and on and on. Each problem tested the limits of medieval technology and the limits of Gutenberg’s own skill and ingenuity.
And the result was nothing short of a revolution.
How so?
Here, look at this manuscript. What do you see?
If you lived before Gutenberg, you saw a page of text. A totality. A clump of information. But Gutenberg saw something different. His core insight was that a page of text was not a thing in itself, but a collection of letters that could be broken apart and rearranged into any other collection of letters.
From that deceptively simple observation came this. The printed page. Mechanically produced, perfectly identical characters that could be arranged into any configuration the printer desires to create any text imaginable.
And that insight birthed the modern world.
It birthed the era of mass communication. Pre-Gutenberg, there were no books, no pamphlets, no newspapers. In fact, in the 50 years before Gutenberg, all the scribes in all of Europe struggled to produce 20,000 laboriously hand-copied manuscripts. In the 50 years after Gutenberg? The printers that sprung up around the continent churned out 12 million printed books.
It birthed mass manufacture. Beyond pilgrim badges, there were very few mass-produced items in medieval life. Clothes, tools, shelter, manuscripts—everything was handmade. The book accustomed the medieval mind to the idea of identical, mechanically produced objects. And the printing press—with its mechanically perfect type—prefigured the advances of industrial production.
It birthed the Scientific Revolution. The widespread publication of data, the collection of knowledge in widely available reference books, the ability to exactly reproduce illustrations—things that we take completely for granted today—were a revelation when they appeared in the fifteenth-century and created the conditions for the rise of the empirical method.
It birthed the Reformation. We all know it was Luther and his 95 theses nailed to the church door that launched the Reformation, but it was the printing press that allowed Luther’s ideas to spread so far, so fast. (And, bonus fact: Those theses were addressed to the Archbishop of Mainz, birthplace of Gutenberg’s press.)
The printing press even birthed the nation-state.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, now how would you describe the the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of this
MARSHALL MCLUHAN: It created almost overnight what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that print was able to do. Unified, homogeneous reading publics.
Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of individualism, separatism and of a unique point of view and private judgment; all those factors are highly favored by the printed word and not really favored by other forms of culture like radio or earlier even by manuscript.
But this stepping up of the fragmented, the private—the individual, the private judgment, the point of view—all in fact our whole vocabularies underwent huge change with the arrival of such technology.
The world that Gutenberg was born into was this world: the real world. If you learned anything at all about this world, you probably learned it from experience, or at least from someone who had that experience.
But the world that Gutenberg left behind was a world of mass communication. Books were no longer a rare and valuable thing, and it was increasingly likely that your information about the world came from someone you never met, someone who may have been long dead.
The movable type printing press didn’t just change the way people communicated; it changed what they communicated about.
In a very real sense, the printing press invented “the news.”
Before Gutenberg, “the news” was whatever you managed to gather from your neighbours, what you learned from travelers passing through your village, what you heard the town crier yelling through the streets or, at best, what you yourself read in the occasional proclamation or edict from the authorities.
But after the printing press, the news was for the first time collected, organized, printed on a regular basis and distributed far and wide.
In 1605, the world’s first newspaper was published in Strasbourg—the same city where Gutenberg was making his mirrors for the Aachen pilgrimage a century-and-a-half prior—and soon everyone and their dog was printing a newsletter or a pamphlet or a newspaper or a tract. And these ideas were spreading around the world like they never had before.
For the first time, someone could be reading the exact same news as someone in the next town over . . .
JAMES EVAN PILATO OF MEDIAMONARCHY.COM: . . . or someone on the other side of the planet . . .
. . . at the exact same time.
The printing press united people like never before and the result was an explosion in the spread of ideas, the likes of which would not be experienced again for centuries.
But not everyone was excited about this free flow of information. Entrenched power structures of medieval society—the crown, the church, the feudal lords—had persisted for centuries by controlling information and suppressing dissent. But as the barriers to new ideas collapsed, so did the old feudal order.
It’s no surprise, then, that wherever the printing press traveled, wherever the new cadre of printers and booksellers set up shop, the censors were not far behind. When Lutheran books began appearing in England in 1520, Cardinal Wolsey was quick to declare that anyone caught with the texts would be subject to heresy laws. Not to be outdone, King Henry VIII’s proclamation “Prohibiting Erroneous Books and Bible Translations” of 1530 afforded him the power to try readers of these “blasphemous and pestiferous” books in his own dreaded Star Chamber.
Parliament dissolved the Star Chamber in 1641, but they weren’t about to give up censorship of the press. They just wanted to take the power for themselves, and that’s exactly what they did. The Licensing Order of 1643 outlawed the printing, binding, or sale of books, except by persons licensed under authority of Parliament.
This prompted John Milton to write the Areopagitica, still recognized today as one of the most influential and passionate defenses of freedom of speech in history:
“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”
But even the loftiest language of Milton had little effect in swaying the censors. The Licensing Order was not overturned for half-a-century, when the Parliament chose not to renew the act.
Those in positions of power had good reason to fear the printing press. Gutenberg’s invention turned their world on its head. Suddenly, people who had been kept apart and largely in ignorance of the world around them had been brought into a community of readers; a gigantic societal conversation began, empowering radicals who sought to overturn the order that had existed for centuries and helping them to spread their dangerous new ideas faster and farther than they ever could have with pen and paper.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that these new ideas would come to their dramatic fruition in one of the most literate places on the planet: colonial America.
By the end of the 18th century, literacy rates in the colonies were upwards of ninety percent, and there were 180 newspapers being published on the Eastern Seaboard, twice as many as in England, a country with twice the population.
The colonists’ appetite for books and learning was celebrated far and wide. In 1772, the Reverend Jacob Duché wrote of the colonies: “Almost every man is a reader. [. . .] The poorest laborer upon the shores of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentlemen or scholar [. . .] such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind.”
Just four years later, in 1776, Thomas Paine would publish Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet that was to take those colonies by storm. In the first three months of its publication, a staggering 120,000 copies of the book had been sold; by the end of the year, it had sold 500,000 copies, or one pamphlet for every five men, women and children in the colonies. To put that in perspective, adjusted for population, Common Sense would be the thirteenth best-selling book of all time.
But this wasn’t any ordinary bestseller. This was a revolution.
At the beginning of 1776, before Common Sense, the average colonists believed themselves to be Englishmen engaged in a civil war; after Common Sense, they were revolutionaries engaged in a War for Independence. And that war was waged on the power of the printed word. That is the power of print.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the printing press is mightier than entire armies.
By the end of the nineteenth century, a new creature had emerged to capitalize on this new instrument of power: the press baron.
In America, William Randolph Hearst . . . that is, William Randolph Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his wealthy father, built it up into the biggest paper in town and plowed the profits into the purchase of the New York Journal. With the Journal and a growing number of dailies across the country under his belt, Hearst became a full-fledged press baron, taking on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in a circulation war, pioneering the eye-catching layouts and sensational stories that would come to define his brand of yellow journalism, and helping to gin up support for the Spanish-American War, among many other dubious causes.
In England, Alfred Harmsworth picked up the yellow journalism idea from Hearst and Pulitzer and used it to build his own press empire around The Daily Mail. From a lower caste of British society, Harmsworth found himself in the center of political power in Britain, using his influence to gin up public hatred of the Huns ahead of World War I, becoming director of propaganda for the government in 1918 and earning himself the title of Lord Northcliffe in the process.
In a sense, the Lord Northcliffes and the William Randolph Hearsts and the other press barons of that era were the end stage of the Gutenberg Revolution. The invention that had given a voice to the masses and started a conversation that would topple institutions, dethrone monarchs and reorder empires had now catapulted people at the fringes of power into its very heart. With the power of the press, these men were able to sway the minds of entire nations of people.
Naturally, the old tension between the ruling elite and the masses, empowered by the press, was still there. But censorship hadn’t proven to be an effective tool for keeping the masses in ignorance. There had to be another way.
That way, it turned out, was another conspiracy.
On February 9, 1917, Oscar Callaway, a US Representative from Texas’ 12th District, exposed that conspiracy in the Congressional record:
“In March, 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship-building, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. [. . .] They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
The news was extraordinary, but it almost didn’t get reported at all. Callaway had not been given time to make his charges on the floor of the House; instead, they were “buried in the Record.” It wasn’t until another congressman demanded a full congressional investigation into the charges that the newspapers even bothered to cover the story at all.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the Gutenberg conspiracy ended up here, at the Morgan conspiracy. That a revolutionary step toward freeing man from the bonds of ignorance was met with a revolutionary counteraction designed to place those chains around him all the more tightly. That, at the zenith of the print revolution, the oligarchy finally found a way to control the free flow of information.
Ironic, then, that within the space of a few short years, the print revolution that Gutenberg had started was about to be overturned by another technology.
The BBC is either the worst media organisation on Earth or the best, depending upon your perspective. On the one hand it is a truly world-class propaganda machine. On the other it is completely incapable of challenging government narratives or power because it is effectively a branch of the UK government and is itself beholden to power.
As an agency of the state, the BBC has actively sought to destabilise overseas governments around the world. It is a master of propaganda and frequently lies to the public, either overtly or by omission, with the goal of convincing the people to accept whatever falsehood or agenda it has been tasked to sell.
From top to bottom, the BBC’s commitment to journalistic integrity is missing. It is simply a mouthpiece for the ruling cartel. It comprehensively fails to deliver the most crucial social function of journalism: holding power to account.
According to the corporation’s published values, “trust is the foundation of the BBC.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers a pejorative meaning of the word “trust”: “acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation.”
This definition of “trust” seems appropriate for the BBC. While it declares itself to be “independent, impartial and truthful,” it routinely trots out claimed “facts” that lack supporting evidence and produces investigative reports absent any real investigation. Indeed, the BBC broadcasts appalling lies as a matter of course.
And so it is with a certain degree of mirth that we now learn from the BBC that it intends to air a “documentary” about a phenomenon it has already opted to call “vaccine hesitancy.” (Bear in mind: A “documentary” is “a film or television or radio programme that gives facts and information about a subject.”)
The producer of the upcoming programme, due to air on the 20th of July, Craig Hunter, explains:
Moving beyond the often misrepresented debate, this programme reveals why some people remain vaccine hesitant.
The deprecatory word “hesitant” means “tentative, unsure, or slow in acting.” There is no room in the programme-maker’s minds for the possibility that people who chose to remain “unvaccinated” have considered the risk-benefit of these shots, have looked at the available evidence and have decisively concluded that they don’t want a COVID-19 jab.
Hunter’s statement absolutely “misrepresents” the debate. As Craig is the producer of the forthcoming BBC documentary, it seems the chance of the programme delivering a balanced exploration of the issue is remote to non-existent. There is little reason to expect the BBC to provide anything that is “independent, impartial and truthful.”
Indeed, objectively discussing any facet of the alleged pandemic is way beyond the reach of the BBC. As a state propaganda operation, all it can do is parrot the official narrative spouted by the government and its partners, who are, in this instance, the pharmaceutical corporations.
. . . confronting the latest science and statistics to emerge in the field and dissecting how misinformation spreads on social media.
The BBC cannot succeed in this task because the science and the statistics rarely support the disinformation it has been commissioned to spread. Consequently, it must deceive and misdirect its audience to make sure they believe its propagandist tripe. More to the point, the BBC is itself one of the most prolific distributors of online misinformation.
For example, in its press release the BBC says:
After multiple lockdowns and more than 197,000 deaths, experts are warning we’re now entering a fifth wave of the pandemic. So why are five million adults in the UK still yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine?
Putting aside for the moment that there are actually more than eleven million UK adults yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine and the fact that the BBC itself reported that there were just three million less than a week later, the rest of this claim assumes, without good reason, that there was a “pandemic” in the first place. We now know there is very little evidence that a genuine pandemic ever occurred, yet the BBC keeps up its charade by omitting key facts.
Here is one such key fact: In 2009 the World Health Organisation (WHO) suddenly and radically changed its long-time definition of the word “pandemic.” It removed the defining phrase “several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness,” replacing it with reference to a disease for which “most people do not have immunity.” Under this definition, practically any new disease can be declared a pandemic. But the BBC won’t inform its audience of the WHO’s changed definition nor the fact that under the original, and more valid, definition, COVID-19 disease could never have been described as a pandemic.
The BBC has left its audience in the dark about a number of other important facts: (1) as of the 19th of March 2020, UK public health authorities did not consider COVID-19 to be “a high-consequence infectious disease” due to its low mortality; (2) all-cause mortality (the overall death rate) in 2020, the year of the so-called “outbreak,” ranked as only the 9th highest death rate in the first two decades of the 21st century; (3) people with injured limbs and stomach pain were being admitted to hospital as registered COVID-19 patients, thus giving an entirely false impression of a severe pandemic disease; (4) there is no statistical evidence of any beneficial effect from any supposed COVID-19 vaccine; and (5) many deaths have been caused, not by any single disease, but by the policy response to an alleged pandemic.
In the press release for its upcoming “documentary,” the BBC refers to the figure of 197,000 UK deaths from COVID-19 as if that figure is scientifically or statistically indisputable. Not only can it be questioned, it has been! So why doesn’t the BBC mention this?
By deliberately using the largest possible figure, the BBC is attempting to elicit an emotional reaction to the highly questionable number of supposed COVID deaths. The BBC is playing on people’s emotions in order to avoid any objective analysis of the data. Its intention is to manipulate its audience into unquestioning acceptance of a story about a severe pandemic which does not stand up to scrutiny.
Let’s pause to make an important point: The collection, analysis and reporting of COVID-19 mortality data has been deliberately altered and manipulated by governments around the world, all of which worked and continue to work in partnership with the WHO. Nowhere has this manipulation been more pronounced than in the UK, where the engineering of COVID-19 mortality statistics has been quite remarkable.
Mainstream media outlets, especially the BBC, have perpetuated baseless fearmongering. For example, for the first time in the history of reporting deaths from a respiratory disease, propagandists like the BBC are reporting cumulative deaths instead of the annual mortality rates or the more common seasonal variation in these figures. If the same were done for, say, influenza, total flu deaths would be measured in millions, depending on the chosen start date for the accumulation of the mortality data.
Another example: The BBC has chosen to report what the government claims to be “deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate.” While some of these likely were genuine COVID-19 deaths, the expansive, all-encompassing methodology that the government and the WHO created to attribute as many deaths as possible to COVID-19 renders the bulk of these statistics virtually meaningless. In truth, we don’t know how many people in the UK have died as a direct consequence of COVID-19, though estimates in the region of 20,000 – 25,000 seem reasonable.
The BBC never questions the mortality statistics. It simply takes the figures from the government and reports them without any investigation or analysis. This is essentially the BBC’s purpose: to report whatever it is told to report.
In announcing its faux documentary, the BBC says:
In this timely, eye-opening investigation [. . .] Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why eight percent of the population remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
In reality, more than twenty percent of adults in the UK are “unvaccinated.” The BBC can’t even write a press release for its forthcoming documentary without publishing deceptive statistics. So it is safe to say the “documentary” itself will be little more than a marketing promotion for the jabs.
Statistics from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on vaccine coverage in England show that the actual percentage of the “unvaccinated” population is very close to thirty percent, not the eight percent the BBC alleges. The English figures are broadly representative of the UK as a whole and can be extrapolated.
Jab uptake increases with age. Thus, if we exclude children under 18, then more than twenty percent of the UK adult population are unvaccinated.
The subsequent uptake of booster jabs has declined markedly from the one-and-two dose uptake. Millions of Brits decided, for whatever reason, that two shots was their limit. Only fifty-two percent have elected to have the first booster (the third jab).
Speaking in December 2021, then-Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that, in order to be considered fully vaccinated for the proposed “covid pass,” one would need to have three jabs. If three becomes the definition of “fully vaccinated,” which seems unlikely given the lack of interest, then currently forty-eight percent of the total UK population, and more than thirty-five percent of the adult population, are not “fully vaccinated.”
The BBC launched its “documentary” by trying to deceive its audience into believing that there is only a tiny fringe minority of indecisive folk who don’t want the COVID jabs. In point of fact, it is nearly half of the UK population.
Not only has the BBC lied about the statistics in its press release, it has even misrepresented the debate it proposed to examine by calling the millions of people who made an informed decision not to have the jabs “hesitant.” But that’s because the BBC is all about propaganda, not journalism.
When some diligent independent researchers did what real journalists are supposed to do and picked up on the BBC’s deception, the BBC simply changed its press release. Since citing real statistics was a bit too tricky for the BBC—after all, it only has an annual budget of around £5 billion—the revisedweb page now reads:
In this timely, eye-opening investigation [. . .] Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why a portion of the population remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
Despite there being no reason to trust anything the BBC ever says, the broadcaster implores its viewers to “trust” it simply by pronouncing its own trustworthiness. For the BBC, your “trust” demonstrates your “faith,” allowing it to tell you stories without the need for investigative journalism or even supporting evidence. By contrast, the evidence invariably reveals that the BBC is completely untrustworthy.
According to BBC, its so-called “documentary” is going to be based on bombarding seven hapless unvaccinated lay people with a barrage of pro-vaccine “experts.” Once browbeaten into submission by these authoritative opinions, the victims will then be subject to the BBC’s logical fallacy tactic of appeal to authority. In other words, these high priests of “the science” will explain how the BBC’s seven victims have been misled by “anti-vaxxer” propaganda.
It is highly likely that even if the seven subjects cogently explain why they have decided not to be injected with experimental concoctions, the BBC will edit out any and all valid points they make—and/or deny whatever evidence they cite. We can make these predictions with relative ease, simply by noting the extraordinary level of deceit already present in the BBC’s press release announcing its “programme.”
We can make still further forecasts about the BBC’s alleged “investigation.” For one thing, it won’t honestly report on the current status of the vaccine trials.
Namely, it will neglect to inform its audience that the NCT04368728 trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab isn’t finished. And it will not reveal that neither the NCT04470427 trial of Moderna’s mRNA jab nor Johnson & Johnson’s NCT04614948 Jansen trials have posted any results, because these trials, too, are incomplete. Moreover, the BBC will strenuously avoid pointing out the implication of these facts—probably by not reporting them.
Unless the recipients of these drugs were told that the jabs they were about to receive were experimental, they couldn’t possibly have given their informed consent. Consequently, whenever they weren’t informed, administration of the jab contravened nearly every known medical ethic, including those outlined in the Nuremberg Code. But the BBC won’t mention this, either.
It is also safe to say that the BBC will not tell its audience that AstraZeneca concluded the NCT04516746 trial of its AZD1222 adenovirus jab more than a year before schedule by not bothering to conduct a quality control review, rendering its so-called vaccine trial results practically meaningless.
The BBC will not tell anyone that the British Medical Journal (BMJ)disclosed that both Moderna and Jansen (J&J) confirmed that they had given the jabs to their placebo control groups, ending any prospect of their trials ever meeting the basic standards for randomised controlled studies. When the BMJ asked Pfizer if it had done the same, Pfizer declined comment.
Instead, the BBC will almost certainly claim that the jabs have been through extensive clinical trials. It will just omit the part about them having failed to properly complete any.
The BBC will not acknowledge the freedom of information requests and subsequent court ruling in the US that overturned the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to delay release of Pfizer’s primary safety monitoring data for 75 years. The Federal Court forced the FDA to release the damning results of Pfizer’s own early monitoring of adverse reactions following the jab rollout in the US and Europe.
In the space of just a couple of months, there were approximately 42,000 adverse reactions to the Pfizer mRNA jab alone, with just over 25,000 of those confirmed by medical exam and the other 16,000+ unconfirmed. Of these, more than 1,200 injuries resulted in death. More than 11,000 of the injured had not recovered from their serious adverse event at the time of reporting.
The BBC certainly won’t report the Israeli study, the results of which indicate that the Pfizer jab prompts a marked decline in male fertility.
Nor will the BBC mention that Pfizer’s own research shows that, contrary to all of Pfizer’s marketing claims, the corporation knew during the trial phase that the lipid nanoparticles used in its jabs found their way into the liver, adrenal glands and spleen and, in particular, accumulated in female recipients’ ovaries.
The BBC may well have to acknowledge the more-than-38,000 possible vaccine deaths reported to the US VAERS system, the 2,200 deaths reported in the UK and the 46,000 deaths recorded by the European Medicines Agency. Its “experts” will point out that there is no evidence that these deaths are caused by the vaccines and will say that the risk of the disease COVID-19 is far higher than any known risks from the COVID-19 jabs.
The BBC will almost certainly make extraordinary and extremely silly claims about how many lives the jabs have allegedly saved. Again these claims will be based upon nothing but baseless assumptions about what could have happened according to some spurious “predictive model.” Rather like claiming your anti-unicorn spray has stopped a million unicorns from grazing your lawn because you don’t have any unicorns in your garden.
As we have just discussed, the risks of harm from COVID-19 claimed by the government and its propaganda outlets—the BBC foremost—are so implausible they verge on absurd. Yet the BBC will not inform its audience that, to date, not one of the regulators has produced a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis for any of the jabs. So the inevitable BBC claims that the jab benefits outweigh the risks will literally be based upon nothing at all.
The BBC will not go anywhere near reporting the findings of a team of eminent German pathologists who performed autopsies on 40 corpses of people who died within two weeks of vaccination—and who identified the vaccine as the likely cause of death in one-third of the cases.
Nor will the BBC report statements like those from the UK regulator, the MHRA, that adverse reactions, including deaths, are significantly undereported, with just ten percent of serious reactions and between two percent and four percent of non-serious reactions recorded.
What the BBC will do instead is rely upon carefully cherry-picked scientific papers, a narrow band of selected “expert opinion,” speculative statistics and emotionally charged anecdotes to convince its audience that the seven victims of its hit piece, though well meaning, are all hopelessly deluded due to the scourge of online disinformation. It may well try to squeeze in reference to the proposed Online Safety Act and suggest that this government policy is essential to tackle the disinformation problem fabricated in its documentary.
Of course, if the BBC were serious about its professed wish to “fully explore this complex and deeply divisive debate,” it wouldn’t simply subject a group of ordinary men and women to a tirade of unchallenged claims from its hand-picked group of “experts.” If it really wanted to tackle the debate with any objectivity or journalistic integrity, it would also report the views of some of the many eminently qualified scientists and physicians who do question the COVID-19 narrative and the alleged safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
It would be genuinely interesting to see people like Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Mike Yeadon, Professor Carl Heneghan and Professor Arne Burkhardt explain some of their reservations. Perhaps other scientists, physicians and experts who have questioned the vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic could be heard.
Maybe the statistician and Nobel Laureate Professor Michael Levitt; epidemiologists like Professor John Ioannidis or Professor Knut Wittkowski; experts in clinical drug development such as Alexandra (Sasha) Latypova; or physicians such as Dr. Peter McCullough or Dr. Roger Hodkinson could be invited to challenge the BBC’s preferred experts.
The audience and the seven subjects of the BBC’s attack could then hear both sides of the argument. But that won’t happen.
Alas, many won’t get to see the BBC’s vaccine marketing programme because they have already decided that they will no longer pay for its propaganda to be beamed into their heads. These numbers are swelling all the time, hence the deceptive plan to allegedly end the BBC license fee while a desperate workaround is conjured up to make sure the BBC’s coffers remain stuffed with gargantuan amounts of public money.
Still, we might get to watch “Unvaccinated, with Professor Hannah Fry” when it finds its way on to Odysee, BitChute, Rumble or some other worthy video-sharing platform. If so, it will perhaps be interesting for some to see how accurate or inaccurate this article is.
In the meantime, let’s give the Beeb the benefit of the doubt and hope this post is way off the mark. Instead of the awful propagandist drivel we might expect, let’s hope the BBC proves that these suspicions are born of nothing but unfounded, anti-BBC bias.
MSNBC regular Malcolm Nance, who has spent 36+ years in US intelligence, told Zerlina Maxwell on Wednesday night that around 30% of the country are white extremists and they’re part of an “insurgency” that “we may have to fight.”
“Here is the United States — to characterize that to understand what kind of terrorism we might be dealing with, you have to label it as white extremism because we have 30% of the population of the United States who no longer believe in the democratic norms that we established in the founding of the country. Let’s just be honest about that. The January 6 uprising was an attempt to overthrow American democracy. And we have now learned from the hearing that Donald Trump intended to go there to march down to the well of the House of Representatives and essentially be crowned as a king,” [Nance said.]
Anchor Zerlina Maxwell asked, “You call what is happening an insurgency. We have heard that term in foreign wars recently in Iraq. Talk about why you apply the term insurgency to what you see here as a persistent and ongoing threat of domestic extremists?”
Nance said, “I was reading their forums. I was reading their own intelligence about what they intended to do. It was pretty clear at that point that they were going to try to either overthrow the government or they were going to settle in for a long-term series of destabilizing actions using a political party, the Republican party, as their political base and then using violence, threat of violent extremism as a way to manifest change in the street. So remove politics from the halls of power and change politics through violence on the street. This is called an insurgency. The insurrection that happened on January 6 that was one event. An insurgency is a chain of events. It’s common knowledge. A year and a half ago, when I was calling this an insurgency, people were saying, that’s crazy, this isn’t an insurgency, this isn’t like Iraq, it’s not like Libya, it’s not like Syria. Well, it is. And it’s well on its way. It’s closer to the beginnings of the Irish Republican Army. You know Irish Republicanism, where now the Republican Party is Sinn Fein, and it’s just a matter of seeing who comes up as the original Irish Republicans in this story and starts carrying out acts of violence to affect change. So we are well on our way to a multi-year campaign that we are already two years into this campaign where we may have to fight them. The ‘they’ in my title and the ‘they’ in my title is those who want to kill Americans are your neighbors.”
Here we have a US intelligence analyst, who has admitted previously to torturing hundreds of people on behalf of the DC regime, suggesting that white Americans who voted for Trump are part of a terrorist “insurgency” that needs to be put down with force and he’s preparing MSNBC viewers to fight (and presumably kill) their neighbors.
Back in April, Nance went over to western Ukraine to show his support for the Azov Battalion and joined the Ukrainian military’s foreign legion. He claimed he was fighting on the “frontlines.” He came back late last month and released his new book two weeks later.
“America is primed for a possible explosive wave of terrorist attacks and armed confrontations that aim to bring about a Donald Trump led dictatorship,” the description continues.
Dutch state broadcasters have come out swinging on behalf of the WEF and are attacking TCS Editor-in-Chief Keean Bexte’s coverage of the Dutch Uprising.
In a video entitled “The Great Reset: the recurring fabrications,” Nieuwsuur, a program produced by government broadcasters, claims that Bexte travelled to the Netherlands to perpetuate supposed conspiracy theories, saying that the WEF has “absolutely nothing” to do with the “nitrogen crisis” — by which they mean the nitrogen policy to cut emissions by 50% and destroy farmers’ livelihoods.
“These bloggers from far-right websites have travelled to the Netherlands especially to see that image confirmed,” the host says before playing a clip of Bexte talking about the WEF’s support for the career-destroying nitrogen policy being protested.
“But the WEF has absolutely nothing to do with the nitrogen crisis,” he continues. “It was the highest judge who ordered the Netherlands to comply with the nitrogen standards of the European Union.”
Yes, but where did the “nitrogen standards” of the European Union come from?
The nitrogen policy that was introduced is just one of many policies being brought forth by the EU to better align with the UN’s radical Sustainable Development Goals to cut all emissions, which is itself part of the UN’s Agenda 2030.
According to the European Commission’s website, “Sustainable development is a core principle of the Treaty on European Union and a priority objective for the Union’s internal and external policies. The United Nations 2030 Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) intended to apply universally to all countries.”
Moreover, in an EU briefing entitled “European policies on climate and energy towards 2020, 2030 and 2050,” the European Parliament states the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals will impact European policy, specifically regarding climate policy:
Within the framework of the commitments laid down in the Paris Agreement, in November 2018, the European Commission published a new long-term strategy which confirms Europe’s commitment to lead on global climate action and to achieving net-zero GHG emissions by 2050, through a socially fair transition in a cost-efficient manner… The strategy does not intend to launch new policies, nor does the European Commission intend to revise the 2030 targets. It is rather meant to set the direction of transition of EU climate and energy policy, and to frame what the EU considers as its long-term contribution to achieving the Paris Agreement temperature objectives, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which will further affect a wider set of EU policies.
Now, who has been a core contributor in shaping the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals? Why, the World Economic Forum, of course.
In 2019, the WEF and UN signed a strategic partnership “to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
“The new Strategic Partnership Framework between the United Nations and the World Economic Forum has great potential to advance our efforts on key global challenges and opportunities, from climate change, health and education to gender equality, digital cooperation and financing for sustainable development,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the time.
So, yes. If the Netherlands is abiding by the EU’s climate policies, and the EU’s climate policies are based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the WEF signed a partnership with the UN to control what these goals are, I think it’s safe to say that the WEF absolutely has something to do with the nitrogen policy being protested right now.
This should be obvious, as founder Klaus Schwab’s whole Great Reset book (which the host says he read) is all about utilizing the COVID pandemic to get countries to achieve the 2030 Agenda on time.
Besides licking Schwab’s boots, Nieuwsuur also goes after legal philosopher Eva Vlaardingerbroek andDutch politicians opposed to the WEF, specifically Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Forum for Democracy, lamenting the popularity of Baudet’s critical posts regarding the Great Reset.
The host also admits that Klaus Schwab didn’t have enough time to do an interview with him to talk about the Great Reset (embarrassing) before continuing to defend the World Economic Forum. He claims that everything negative that people say about the WEF is “sheer nonsense.”
Funnily enough, speaking at the WEF in 2020, Dutch PM Mark Rutte advised that governments and businesses around the world should start paying off journalists to control the narrative and bring the people honest coverage. It appears we are seeing the fruits of this initiative.
“You need the free press at these moments to be able to explain to the people what is really happening. But that costs money,” Rutte explains. “So, one of the pleas I have with big business here in Davos [is] don’t put all your money in the internet advertising. Make sure that our newspapers, our news outlets — also our TV stations — also in the future will be able to pay sensible and real salaries to our journalists to be able to do this.”
The globalists, of course, applauded the plea for more corruption, which the Dutch are now dealing with right now.
It’s been a busy two days for the monkeypox madness.
First, the World Health Organization announced their plans to hold a second “emergency meeting” on the monkeypox outbreak, to discuss if it merits being declared a “global emergency”.
As if trying to supply fuel for the WHO’s meeting next week, countries all around the world are reporting up ticks in cases.
Yesterday Global News reported that Canada’s monkeypox cases had “risen by 59% in just 9 days” (from 300 to 477 if you’re one of those people who likes hard figures in place of scary-sounding percentages).
Elsewhere in the UK press, one “expert” was “warning” that Monkeypox will become “endemic” if we don’t “take action”.
The “expert” also suggests that it would be wrong to “sit back and watch” monkeypox become endemic in “men who have sex with men”. Perhaps revealing the point of that part of the narrative – that if you reject monkeypox as anything to be worried about at all, you’re just being homophobic or speaking with “straight privilege”.
A similar angle is taken in this NPR piece, which claims that “the warning signs were there” with monkeypox for over a decade, and the only reason we never did anything about it is that it only affected poor African nations. Ergo, if you don’t care about monkeypox you’re a racist.
New York is apparently experiencing “urgent” vaccine shortages amid “rising cases”… rising from 223 to 267.
The US generally has seen cases increase from 700 to over a thousand since Monday. Monday was also the day they started allowing private labs to begin running tests. It’s baffling, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, on the other side of Iron Curtain 2.0, Russia reported their first monkeypox case on Tuesday. A handy reminder of their current position on the great reset agenda.
So, given all this, will the WHO declare monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern”?
The smart money is very much on “yes”.
But there’s good news too… for biotech shareholders. China’s ZJ Biotech has seen its share prices increase by over 10% in just a day after the WHO announced a supply deal with the tech firm to manufacture Monkeypox test kits.
They still haven’t told us what they’re changing the name to, though. Maybe they can discuss that at the emergency meeting too.
What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.
Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door.
I could tell you I don’t intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers.
As Consortium News’s properly suspecting readers will recall, Vladimir Putin was clear when he told the world Russia’s intentions as it began its intervention. These were two: Russian forces went into Ukraine to “demilitarize and de–Nazify” it, a pair of limited, defined objectives.
An astute reader of these commentaries pointed out in a recent comment thread that the Russian president had once again proven, whatever else one may think of him, a focused statesman with an excellent grasp of history. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Control Council declared its postwar purpose in Germany as “the four D’s.” These were de–Nazification, demilitarization, democratization and decentralization.
Let’s give David Thompson, who brought this historical reference to my attention, a deserved byline here:
“Putin’s reiteration of the de–Nazification and demilitarization principles established from the Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and the United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid ….”
The Russian president, whose entire argument with the West is that a just and stable order in Europe must serve the security interests of all sides, was simply restating objectives the trans–Atlantic alliance had once signed on to accomplish. In other words, he was pointing out said alliance’s gross hypocrisy as it arms the ideological descendants of German Nazis.
I dwell on this matter because the imaginary war began with the Biden regime’s and the press’s quite irresponsible misrepresentations of the Russian Federation’s aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.
You remember: Russian forces were going to “conquer” the whole of the nation, wipe out the Kiev regime, install a puppet government and then drive on to Poland, the Baltic states, Transnistria and the rest of Moldova, and who could imagine what after that. De–Nazification, we can now read, is a phony Kremlin dodge.
Next Edition
Having lied outright on this score, the next edition of the comic went onto the market. Russia is failing to achieve its imaginary objectives. Low morale, desertions, poorly trained troops with not enough to eat, logistical failures, lousy artillery, inadequate ordnance, incompetent officers: The Russians were riding for a fall on Ukrainian soil.
The corollary here was the heroism, courage and battlefield grit of Ukrainian troops, least of all, the Azov Battalion, who were not any longer neo–Nazis. Never mind the Times, The Guardian, the BBC and various other mainstream publications and broadcasters had earlier told us about these ideological fanatics. That was then, this is now.
The problem at this point was there were no battlefield successes to report. The defeats, indeed, had begun. In May, roughly when the Azov Battalion, heroic and democratic as it is, was forced to surrender in Mariupol, it was time for — this just had to be — Russian atrocities.
We had the theater and the maternity hospital in Mariupol, we had the infamous slaughter in Bucha, the Kiev suburb; various others have followed. Just what happened in these cases has never been established by credible, disinterested investigators; plentiful evidence that Ukrainian forces bear responsibility is dismissed out of hand. But who needs investigations and evidence when the brutal, criminal, indiscriminately ruthless Rrrrusssians, must be culpable if the imaginary war is to proceed?
My unchallenged favorites in this line come courtesy of CNN, which went long this spring on allegations — Ukrainian allegations, of course — that Russian soldiers were raping young girls and young boys right down to months-old infants. Three such specimens are here, here and here.
The network abruptly dropped this line of inquiry after the senior Ukrainian official disseminating these allegations was removed from office because the charges are fabrications. A wise move on CNN’s part, I think: Propaganda does not have to be very subtle, as history shows, but it does have its limits.
Just after the atrocities narrative had ripened, the Russians-are-stealing-Ukrainian-grain theme began. The BBC offered an especially wonderful account of this. Look at this video and text presentation and tell me it isn’t the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, as many holes in it as my Irish grandma’s lace curtains.
But at this point, problems. Russian forces, with their desertions, antiquated guns, and dumb generals, were taking one city after another in eastern Ukraine. These were not — the fly in the ointment — imaginary victories.
Out with the war-is-going-well theme and in with the brutal Russians’ indiscriminate use of artillery. This was a “primitive strategy,” the Times wanted us to know. In the awfulness of war, you simply don’t shell an enemy position as a preliminary to taking it. Medieval.
Lately, there’s another problem for the conjurors of imaginary war. This is the death toll. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported May 10 that the casualty count to date was in excess of 3,380 civilian fatalities, bumped up in June to 4,509, and 3,680 civilians injured. (And both sides shoot and kill in a war.)
Goddamn it, they exclaimed on Eighth Avenue. That is nowhere near enough in the imaginary war. Desperate for a gruesomely high death toll, the Times, on June 18, published “Death in Ukraine: A Special Report.” What a read. There is nothing in it other than innuendo and weightless surmise. But the imaginary war must grind on.
The Times’s “special report”— dum-da-da-dum — rests on phrases such as “witness testimony and other evidence” and “the thousands believed killed.” The evidence, to be noted, derives almost entirely from Ukrainian officials — as does an inordinate amount of what the Times publishes.
There is a great quotation: “People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme or reason.” Wow. Is this damning or what?
But another problem. This observation comes from one Richard Kohn, who is emeritus at the University of North Carolina. I hope the professor is having a good summer down in Chapel Hill.
In late June, Sievierodonetsk fell — or rose, depending on your point of view — and in short order so did Lysychansk and the whole of Luhansk province. Now come the ’fessing up stories, here and there. The Ukrainian forces are so discombobulated they are shooting one another, we read. They can’t operate their radios and — an artful back flip here — they are running out of food and ammunition and morale. Untrained soldiers who signed up to patrol their neighborhoods are deserting the front lines.
Holdouts
There are the holdouts. The Times reported last week that the Ukrainians, done for in Luhansk, are planning a counteroffensive in the south to reclaim lost territory. We all need our dreams, I suppose.
To the surprise of many, Patrick Lang, the ordinarily astute observer of military matters, published “Unable to even fix its own tanks, Russia’s humiliation is now complete” on his Turcopolier last Friday. The retired colonel predicts the Russians are in for “a sudden reversal of fortunes.” No, I’m not holding my breath.
Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.
For the record, it is hard to tell exactly what occurs on Ukraine’s tragic fields of war. As noted previously in this space, we have very little coverage from professional, properly disinterested correspondents. But I offer here my surmise, and it is nothing more.
This war has proceeded, more or less inexorably, in one direction: In the real war, the Ukrainians have been on a slow march to defeat from the first. They are too corrupt, too mesmerized by their fanatical Russophobia to organize an effective force or even to see straight.
This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians. I put more faith in the U.N.’s numbers than in that silly, nothing-in-it “special report” the Times just published.
I do not know why Russian forces approached the outskirts of Kiev from the north early in the conflict and then withdrew, but there is no indication they intended to take the capital. There were battles, but they were certainly not “beaten back.” That is sheer nonsense.
I await proper investigations — admittedly unlikely — of the atrocities that have certainly occurred but without, so far, any conclusive indication of culpability.
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, remarked recently Russia’s objective remains to take most of Ukraine. In a speech at the end of June in Ashgabat, the Turkmenistan capital, Putin appeared notably at ease and asserted, “Everything is going according to plan. Nothing has changed.” The objective, he said, remained “to liberate Donbass, to protect these people, and to create conditions that would guarantee the safety of Russia itself. That’s it.”
Putting these two statements side by side, there is vastly more evidence supporting Putin’s than there is for Haines.
Intentionally or otherwise — and I often have the impression the Times does not grasp the implications of what it publishes — the paper put out a story Sunday headlined, “Ukraine and the Contest of Global Stamina.” The outcome of this conflict, it reported, now depends on “whether the United States and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia.”
Can they possibly not understand down on Eighth Avenue that they have just described Ukraine as a basket-case client? Do they know they have just announced that the imaginary war they have waged these past four and some months is ending in defeat, given there is no one in Ukraine to win it?
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
Moscow has dismissed American claims that it forced up to 1.6 million Ukrainians to move to Russia, was confiscating Ukrainian identification documents, and issuing Russian passports instead.
The accusations, which were made by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday, are “poor quality Western disinformation,” the Russian embassy in Washington said.
The top US diplomat accused Russia of abusing Ukrainian citizens in various ways. He cited estimates by sources that “indicate that Russian authorities have interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported [to Russia] between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children.”
He was apparently referring to the evacuation of civilians from Eastern Ukraine and Donbass republics. Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Russia before and during the ongoing military conflict. Kiev claimed that those refugees were Russian “hostages.”
Blinken further claimed that Russian forces were “separating families, in an apparent effort to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine.”
Moscow has offered Ukrainian citizens a simplified path to Russian citizenship, should they want it. Initially only residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which Russia recognized as sovereign states in February, were eligible for the scheme, but it was later extended to all Ukrainians.
The US also claimed that Russia was “deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents and abducting others from orphanages before putting them up for adoption inside Russia.” Blinken cited “eyewitnesses, survivors, and Ukraine’s General Prosecutor” as his source for these and other serious accusations.
Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, commented on Blinken’s remarks, suggesting that “a case like this must have been described” somewhere in a medical encyclopedia.
When she discussed the allegations on Thursday on Russian TV, she said they were meant for consumption by a US audience. Blinken’s claims were as “absurd” as Washington’s “mantra” that Russian President Vladimir Putin had imposed “a tax” and driven American gas prices up, she added.
… What is known about 9/11 is that there are many incredible facts that continue to be ignored by the government and the mainstream media. Here are fourteen.
An outline of what was to become the 9/11 Commission Report was produced before the investigation began. The outline was kept secret from the Commission’s staff and appears to have determined the outcome of the investigation.
The 9/11 Commission claimed sixty-three (63) times in its Report that it could find “no evidence” related to important aspects of the crimes.
One person, Shayna Steiger, issued 12 visas to the alleged hijackers in Saudi Arabia. Steiger issued some of the visas without interviewing the applicants and fought with another employee at the embassy who tried to prevent her lax approach.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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