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NYT Smears Dr. Mercola Again With Classic Orwellian Doublespeak

Video link
By Dr. Mercola | August 18, 2022

In July 2021, The New York Times (NYT) published the hit piece,1 “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online,” in which they made several blatantly false claims about me. Now, the NYT is upping the ante with an entire documentary dedicated to yours truly, titled “Superspreader.”

Ever since my book “The Truth About COVID-19” came out, the global cabal seems to have lost their collective minds. The New York Times has printed demonstrably false information about me on multiple occasions, CNN reporters have invaded my office and pursued me on my bicycle with unmarked vehicles, the president of the United States has utilized his federal agencies to target me — and my personal and business bank accounts were closed.

Twitter has banned anyone from sharing any link to my website, YouTube banned my account with over 15 years of content, while Facebook and Google have done everything possible to make me disappear. It certainly would be much easier to cave under the pressure, but if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom now — when will it be too late? I will continue ‘superspreading’ truth and health until my last days.

NYT Hit Parade Continues With ‘Superspreader’

In an August 5, 2022, TV review, Alex Reif writes:2

“News can spread like a virus. In our fast-paced world, it doesn’t take long for either to spread around, which is why it’s so important to get your information from a good source.

In the latest installment of the FX series The New York Times Presents, viewers will get a perfect example of this with ‘Superspreader,’ which takes a look at one doctor with a massive following, who is credited as being the top spreader of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 and vaccine in the wellness industry …

One of the pre-credit notes at the end of the documentary states that FDA Commissioner Robert Califf considers misinformation to be the leading cause of death in the country and because of this …

[A]nother highlight of the film is an interview with Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Encountering Digital Hate who ranked Mercola at the top of ‘The Disinformation Dozen,’ a numbers-based list of the twelve most influential people leading the COVID-19 anti-vaccination effort.

We also see how Mercola was de-platformed by several social media companies and how that hasn’t done all that much to stop the spread of misinformation.

At face value, The New York Times Presents ‘Superspreader’ is about Dr. Joseph Mercola, the empire he built, and the people who believe everything he says without question. But what viewers ultimately walk away with is a reminder that if something seems too good to be true, it most surely is.”

The NYT documentary premieres Friday, August 19, 2022, at 10 p.m. Eastern and 10 p.m. Pacific time, on FX and Hulu.

Truth Tellers Are Being Vindicated Every Day

In the NYT’s July 2021 hit piece, the author, Sheera Frenkel, cited an article I’d published in which she says I questioned “the legal definition of vaccines” and declared the COVID shots were “a medical fraud,” for the simple reason that they don’t prevent infections, they don’t provide immunity and don’t stop transmission of the infection.

According to Frenkel, that was misinformation. According to the U.S. government and its “experts,” the COVID jabs worked like any other vaccine. Check out the short video for a sampling of what Bill Gates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mainstream media, Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Biden were saying about the shots in early 2021.

The clear message — the promise — was that if you got the shots, you would not get COVID and you would not transmit it to others. Getting the population “vaccinated” would end the pandemic, for sure. Fast-forward to today, and the reality of the situation is beyond self-evident.

Biden, fully vaxxed and boosted has had COVID twice. Ditto for Fauci and a long list of government officials around the world. Outbreaks have repeatedly occurred at events where every single person present was fully vaxxed. So, the reality is that, back in February 2021, I warned that a medical fraud was being committed, and today, evidence from around the world show I was correct.

The shots do not prevent you from being infected, and they don’t prevent you from spreading it to others. As such, the COVID shots do not function as a vaccine at all, and mass vaccination cannot end the pandemic because you’re just as infectious if you get the shot and contract COVID as you would be if you were unjabbed.

Yet, despite the fact that time has vindicated me, the NYT has decided to double down and put out an entire documentary to cement the “superspreader of misinformation” label to my name when it really should be permanently attached to their own. It probably is important to note that they started their efforts on this video last year, in 2021.

‘Easily Disprovable’ Assertions Are in Fact True

In her 2021 hit piece, Frenkel also highlighted my comments about the COVID shots’ ability to “alter your genetic coding, essentially turning you into a bioweapon spike protein factory that has no off-switch.” According to Frenkel, these assertions “were easily disprovable.”

But did she disprove them? No. Here’s the reality: mRNA vaccines are by definition a genetic instruction set. That’s what messenger RNA (mRNA) is. And the mRNA created by Pfizer or Moderna are synthetic instructions that have never before existed in humans.

This is true for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is the substitution of pseudouridine for uridine to prevent the mRNA from being degraded. Natural mRNA is normally rapidly destroyed and this is by design as your body is very precise about producing proteins and does not produce them willy-nilly.

So is there an off switch? Absolutely not. There’s no off-switch programmed into these jabs. They are relying on your body’s normal degradation systems. The biotech industry has even referred to this reprogramming of your body as turning you into a “human bioreactor.”3

If an off-switch existed, the manufacturers would have assured us of that fact by now. In fact, they probably would have used the existence of a timed off-switch as the justification for boosters, but that has never come up. We know for sure that the mRNA jabs last at least 60 days and that is all we have for hard data. They more than likely last for six months and in some cases could last for years.

Asking Pointed, Nuanced Questions Is Bad?

Next, Frenkel went on to state that:4

“When the coronavirus hit last year, Dr. Mercola jumped on the news, with posts questioning the origins of the disease. In December, he used a study that examined mask-wearing by doctors to argue that masks did not stop the spread of the virus …

[R]ather than directly stating online that vaccines don’t work, Dr. Mercola’s posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance …”

So, I not only committed the “sin” of correctly warning people about the vaccine fraud committed, and had the audacity to follow science and reference published research, but I was also guilty of the “crime” of asking pointed, nuanced questions?

When merely asking questions is deemed a dangerous, if not criminal, act, you know you’re living under an authoritarian regime. It’s certainly far outside the accepted norms of “democracy” and “freedom” that the United States has been a beacon of since its inception.

Ineptitude at Its Finest

Further on in her hit piece, Frenkel makes a truly crucial error that no respectable journalist would ever dare make:

“In an email, Dr. Mercola said it was ‘quite peculiar to me that I am named as the #1 superspreader of misinformation.’ Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand ‘how the relatively small number of shares could possibly cause such calamity to Biden’s multibillion dollar vaccination campaign.’

The efforts against him are political, Dr. Mercola added, and he accused the White House of ‘illegal censorship by colluding with social media companies.’ He did not address whether his coronavirus claims were factual.

‘I am the lead author of a peer reviewed publication regarding vitamin D and the risk of COVID-19 and I have every right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,’ he said. He did not identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his claim.”

The problem with Frenkel’s assertion is that I did identify the publication. In fact, I emailed her the direct link. So, she lied. Secondly, my paper is beyond easy to locate. Just put my name into PubMed and you’ll find it. Believe it or not, you can even find it using the most biased search engine on earth, Google.

Daniel Engber, senior editor at the typically highly progressive mainstream media outlet, The Atlantic, commented on Frenkel’s clear ineptitude or malicious prevarication in a tweet:5

“A truly bizarre moment in the NYT piece on Joseph Mercola … you can literally verify the existence of this peer-reviewed publication in one second via googling. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33142828/“

Legal Notice Sent to NYT

July 26, 2021, my attorneys sent the following legal notice to Frenkel at the NYT, demanding a retraction of her false statements:6

“Dear Ms. Frenkel,

The undersigned law firm represents Dr. Joseph Mercola in connection with the attached article that was widely published on July 24, 2021. We are providing notice that you have made several false and defamatory statements in this article:

1.You identified that you could not validate that Dr. Mercola published a peer reviewed study on Vitamin D in the severity of COVID-19. Dr. Mercola provided the direct link in response to you (attached) and any journalist or fact checker would simply find the study by searching “Mercola” in PubMed.

2.Your article falsely states Dr. Mercola has been fined “millions” by the FDA. This is completely fabricated, Dr. Mercola has never been fined by the FDA.

… On behalf of Dr. Mercola, we hereby demand you immediately retract the article. We also request that you preserve all communications and documents that relate to Dr. Mercola.”

Where’s the Proof That I Am the ‘No. 1’ Misinformant?

To this day, the NYT insists I’m the No.1 spreader of misinformation online, based on the fabrications of a group called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a “foreign dark money group,” to quote Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley,7 which sprang out of nowhere to create lists of people to be censored into oblivion.

The CCDH’s data gathering is so questionable, even ultra-biased Facebook ended up publicly criticizing it. In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, set the record straight:8

“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …

In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”

At the time that Frenkel made her accusations, a Crowdtangle search for Facebook posts about the COVID jabs, from mid-June to mid-July 2021, also confirmed that my online reach was negligible. Topping the list of top performing Facebook posts expressing negative views about the COVID jabs was Candace Owens, followed by the mainstream news outlet ABC World News Tonight.9

The befuddling reality here is that most of the people identified as “top spreaders of misinformation” actually have negligible reach — at least compared to the people on this Crowdtangle list. None of the CCDH’s “top vaccine misinformants” are on the list above, and our reach certainly has not improved or expanded since then.

If You’re Targeted, You’re On-Target

This naturally raises the question, why were we targeted in the first place? Is it because we have high credibility from being one of the first natural health sites on the web with the most followers? Is it because we’ve spent a quarter of a century gaining people’s trust by mostly being correct about the health care system and criminal Big Pharma behavior?

Is it because we, more than others, have well-established credibility and are directly over the target? Is it because we have the experience and know-how to make accurate predictions? Is it because we see and explain the bigger picture?

Or is it some other reason entirely? It’s a mystery, really, but what is clear is that we’ve been deemed a threat to the official propaganda narrative, and I, for whatever reason, am at the very top of that threat identification list. Well, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I’m beyond truly honored to have been widely disparaged by one of the arms of the U.S. military and intelligence operations.

Being targeted in this fashion — tedious as it may be — is in fact a badge of honor. It tells me I’m doing the right thing, and that I’ve not misinterpreted the intentions behind the COVID machinations. More so than any intuition, it tells me I’m on target.

In the bright light of undeniable reality — as it is, a year later — it’s clear that Frenkel’s hit piece has not aged well. I doubt the NYT’s “Superspreader” documentary will fare much better. In the final analysis, if you want any hope of controlling your health, and that of your family, you’d be wise to understand legacy media speaks in Orwellian Doublespeak and reality is the opposite of virtually everything they are telling you.

Sources and References

August 20, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Climate change is not making children obese

BY MARY HARRINGTON | UNHERD | AUGUST 15, 2022

If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you’re a media ecosystem with a fixation on hammers, you will do your best to make anything look like a nail.

This is the inescapable conclusion from the reporting around a recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Temperature, which looked at the relationship between climate change and children’s fitness — and reported the findings entirely backwards to fit a pre-existing political narrative.

The study pointed out that children’s aerobic physical fitness is 30% lower than that of their parents at the same age, arguing that this is a problem because aerobic physical fitness is vital for tolerating higher temperatures. This in turn means that where climate change is causing temperatures to increase, obese individuals will find it harder to cope.

This is sensible stuff — but the study was reported as stating that climate change had caused reduced fitness in children. The study itself pointed to Covid lockdown measures, among many other factors, as having exacerbated an already-existing issue of poor fitness in children. But headlines suggested children are staying indoors because it’s too hot and that this is why they’re less fit than their parents.

You don’t have to be a scientist to know that reduced aerobic fitness in this generation of children long precedes measurably rising outdoor temperatures of the kind that could be attributed to climate change. Here’s a report from 2013 on the topic, for example, that describes aerobic fitness in children decreasing every decade from 1975 onward.

Nor do you have to be a scientist to come up with multiple factors that are plausibly contributing to this unhappy situation. Anyone with young children, or just rudimentary powers of observation, needs only a moment’s reflection to think of multiple ways in which 21st-century life militates against physically active childhood, compared to the world just a few decades ago. But we mustn’t let minor considerations like the patent absurdity of a claim, or its rampant misreading of an actual scientific paper, get in the way of a clickbait mass-media narrative on a much-hyped topic.

A sensible paper discussing the importance of physical fitness in ensuring resilience in the face of changing climate has been reported entirely backwards. Obesity, discussed as a cause of difficulty in adapting to climate change, is reported as the effect of climate change itself, while ignoring politically inconvenient factors cited in the paper itself as contributing to poor fitness.

But this is only an especially egregious example of how even supposedly respectable media can’t be relied on to read even the abstract of a research paper, before editorialising on it in terms that align with established political narratives. And arguably whether or not such specious editorialising qualifies as “misinformation” mostly depends on your political priors.

Given this, the now-widespread cynicism that increasingly greets “expert” opinion in the press is perhaps understandable. It’s all very well saying “follow the science” – but the average Joe may be forgiven for concluding that “the science” is not so much a reliable source of truth as a pick n’mix array of talking-points for a pre-determined political agenda.

August 18, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

‘Call to Boost Arm Supplies to Kiev by Former US Officials Violates UN Charter, US Laws’

By Ekaterina Blunova – Samizdat – 18.08.2022

Nearly 20 national security officers and former diplomats have claimed that Washington must further arm Kiev in an open letter to US President Joe Biden. According to them, the US’ “vital interests are at stake” as the Russian special operation in Ukraine allegedly poses “a clear danger to US security and prosperity.”

“The United States has no interest in Ukraine other than to avoid war with Russia,” explained Michael Springmann, a political analyst and former US diplomat with postings in Germany, India and Saudi Arabia. “That country is the holder of half the supply of atomic bombs in the world. This is extremely unprofessional, extremely dangerous, and shows the horrible ties between the military, big business and the American government. They all control the government rather than the politicians or the people.”

According to Springmann, it is especially troubling that former diplomats, national security professionals and State Department officials openly called to intensify weapons supplies to a third country.

“It’s a violation of the UN Charter and America’s own regulations and laws,” he said. “This is an absolute outrage (…) It’s dangerous nonsense.”

Among the open letter signatories are 17th Supreme Allied Commander for Europe General Philip Breedlove, former State and Defense Department official Debra Cagan, 12th Supreme Allied Commander for Europe General (Ret.) Wesley K. Clark, former Ambassador to Finland and Turkey Eric Edelman, and former Ambassador to Ukraine, Uzbekistan and others John Herbst.

The former officials urged the US president to provide Kiev with more ammunition, spare parts, short- and medium-range air defense systems and, most notably, ATACMS munitions fired by High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) “with the 300km range necessary to strike Russian military targets anywhere in Ukraine” as well as in Crimea. Previously, the Biden administration ruled out delivering long-range munitions for HIMARS.

Moreover, the authors of the open letter also cited the nuclear card as a possible option.

“The US is also a nuclear power, and it is a strategic mistake to suggest that nuclear deterrence no longer works. Nuclear deterrence still works,” they argued.

US Record of Subversive Actions Against Russia

If the letter’s signatories think that they can win a war against the Russian Federation, they are completely detached from reality, argued Springmann. Still, the letter’s agenda does not surprise him: the crux of the matter is that the US has a long record of subversive actions against Russia, he explained.

“The United States has been at war with first the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation for the past century,” he said. “In 1919, Peace President Woodrow Wilson sent 13,000 American soldiers to fight the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, and in 1940s and 50s and really into the 60s and 70s, the CIA worked closely with Nazi collaborators such as [Ukrainian nationalist leaders] Stepan Bandera and Micola Lebed, who had engaged in murder, war crimes and human rights violations.”

Much in the same vein, the former diplomat claimed that the United States staged a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and “had done their best to ensure that former CIA officials had gone to Ukraine to help set up NGOs and other government agencies.” He warned that the Biden administration is currently arming Kiev and neo-Nazi battalions, thus prolonging the conflict.

“Biden and his predecessors had advanced NATO up to the very frontier of the Russian Federation and now has NATO members stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans,” Springmann said. “They have American bases in these countries and there are other American bases encircling the Russian Federation and other countries.”

Who Benefits From Ramping Up the Russo-Ukraine Conflict?

While US military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon have benefitted from Biden’s arming of Ukraine, US and European economies have already suffered from the anti-Russia strategy, according to Springmann. Anti-Russia sanctions and the energy embargo have backfired on the US and Europe by sending food and gasoline prices higher and accelerating already soaring inflation.

“The result, of course, has been a collapse of the American economy, a collapse of the European economy,” said the former diplomat. “I’ve seen articles in Germany about how the country is cutting back its lighting systems, telling people not to use hot water for showers and not to use the heating system in their homes and apartments. What Biden and his neocon crazies have done is essentially destroy the European and the American economies.”

According to Business Insider, the US has already provided Kiev with roughly $10 billion in security assistance under Joe Biden. The aid packages included HIMARS, Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-armor systems, drones, small arms, and attack helicopters, among other systems.

On August 8, the Pentagon detailed the content of a $1 billion assistance package for Ukraine provided under presidential drawdown authority, the 18th drawdown so far. According to the DoD’s official website, among the items included in the latest package are additional ammunition for HIMARS; 75,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition; twenty 120 mm mortar systems and 20,000 rounds of 120 mm mortar ammunition; munitions for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS; and 1,000 Javelin and hundreds of AT4 anti-armor systems.

August 18, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Monkeypox Vaccine Insanity — Too Many Risks and Now, Liability-Free

The Defender | August 17, 2022

For totalitarians and technocrats bent on shredding constitutional protections and wresting control from ordinary people over personal decision-making in areas ranging from health to finances, the events of the past two-and-a-half years were a proving ground — showing that promises of safety via injection could persuade many people to act against their own best interests, often with disastrous results.

But with the public growing increasingly ho-hum about the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. discarding tens of millions of COVID-19 vaccines — including over a quarter of some states’ doses — tyrants wanting to “further advance draconian biosecurity policies and global power grabs” needed a new emergency to keep the injection scam going.

In May 2022, right on cue, entered monkeypox, with (echoes of decades past) cases reported “predominantly … in networks of men who have sex with men.”

Just like the coronavirus Event 201, the reported monkeypox outbreak was prefigured by a “tabletop simulation” one year prior and by “suspiciously” timed, before-the-fact clinical trials of monkeypox treatments and vaccines.

With the “outbreak” thus positioned in the headlines, what happened next?

  • After allowing suspense to build for a couple of months but with fewer than a dozen deaths worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in late July “side-stepped” his own advisors to pronounce monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern,” the WHO’s first such ruling since SARS-CoV-2.
  • With no U.S. deaths, the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) followed suit, declaring a public health emergency.
  • Around the same time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf soothingly told Americans, “We understand … an emerging disease may leave people feeling concerned and uncertain, but it’s important to note that we already have medical products in place …”

One of the “products in place” was the Jynneos smallpox vaccine (brand names Imvanex or Imvamune), which the FDA licensed for adults in September 2019, conveniently approving it not only for smallpox but for “prevention” of monkeypox — even though in primate studies, pox lesions developed just the same.

At the time of licensure, the CEO of Bavarian Nordic — the Danish biotech company that developed the smallpox jab in partnership with the U.S. government, funneling millions of doses into America’s Strategic National Stockpile — crowed that the green light for monkeypox would create “new commercial opportunities.”

At present, a suddenly woke WHO is “accepting proposals” to rebrand monkeypox so as to “avoid offense,” but with the historically loaded “pox” word planted in the public’s subconscious — a word that calls to mind not only unsightly skin eruptions but social stigma and Shakespearean curses — the damage has been done.

Officials no doubt expect the latest “pox” — which also has exotic associations with prairie dogs and African rodents — to stoke the types of fears that will send people running straight into the arms of the nearest vaccinator.

In cities like San Francisco — where long lines of “mostly men” reportedly have been queuing up in the wee hours of the morning for a chance at a shot — the drum-beating about a “rapid rise in cases” already appears to be working.

What’s the big deal?

The same fallacious PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology used to conjure up large numbers of COVID-19 “cases” out of thin air — a technology that inventor Kary Mullis warned should never be used for diagnosis — is once again the WHO’s preferred laboratory test for monkeypox.

Setting aside the thorny PCR issue, there are many other questions one could ask about monkeypox and its supposed discovery in humans in 1970, including why, after half a century in which the condition labeled monkeypox “never really [got] off the ground outside of a couple of countries in Africa,” it is “suddenly in every Western nation and being hyped up by public health authorities, the mainstream media and the World Health Organization.”

Other than the skin lesions, the symptoms of so-called monkeypox “could describe hundreds of millions of cases of simple flu-like illness or even the common cold.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) characterizes monkeypox as “generally a mild disease,” involving little more than rashes, fevers and chills that typically require “no specific treatment.”

A public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said, “Monkeypox is not likely to kill anybody in the United States,” with short-lived pain being about the worst that it might do.

In the 2021 pandemic tabletop exercise focused on monkeypox, one of the features of the “fictional” scenario under discussion was that an “unusual strain” of monkeypox would come along to wreak global havoc.

Obligingly, media accounts in 2022 are evoking a monkeypox that “seems to have changed,” though reporters are issuing mixed messages.

In a conversation on NPR, for example, a science reporter described “very localized” and “extremely subtle” monkeypox symptoms not “matching up” to the “horrible rash” depicted in medical textbooks, prompting the interviewer to remark on the “good news” of a milder disease — at which point the reporter felt compelled to correct the benign impression, adding, “it can also be really severe and really painful” and “make you sick for, like, up to four weeks.”

Skin reactions of all kinds are well-documented adverse consequences of vaccination. In Israel, a renowned vaccine scientist has been making the case that the immune system breakdown caused by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines is the culprit responsible for the current monkeypox situation.

Why else, others are asking, would symptoms appear simultaneously in multiple countries and continents that just happen to correspond to the locations that deployed Pfizer’s COVID-19 jab?

Atrocious smallpox vaccine track record

From their earliest days through today, smallpox vaccines had a dreadful track record — and this fact is not even particularly controversial.

In 2003, researchers openly characterized the smallpox vaccine available at the time, Wyeth’s Dryvax, as “less safe than other vaccines,” describing “known adverse events that range from mild to severe,” including death, brain swelling, lesions and other skin problems.

They concluded the “net harm would result if smallpox vaccine were made available to the general public on a voluntary basis” and that some individuals would be “unable to weigh the risks and benefits for true informed consent.”

Although Dryvax fell out of favor in the mid-1980s, it continued to be used to vaccinate groups such as military personnel, lab workers and others deemed “high risk.”

In 2007, the FDA approved Acambis’s ACAM2000, made with a “clone” of Dryvax and grown in lab cultures of African green monkey kidney (Vero) cells.

Right after Acambis won a 10-year contract to supply the U.S. government with the vaccine, the company was gobbled up by Sanofi Pasteur.

The U.S. military, which by then had given Dryvax to more than 1.4 million military personnel and contractors, immediately switched to ACAM2000, albeit with a first-ever, FDA-imposed requirement that each person vaccinated receive a “medication guide.”

ACAM2000’s “unwieldy” method of administration involves using a two-pronged needle to make “a series of tiny jabs at the skin” designed to elicit a “kind of gnarly pustule” which, if it doesn’t show up a week later, necessitates yet another attempt.

In an article published by The Defender in November 2020, Pam Long, an Army veteran, described smallpox vaccination (whether Dryvax or ACAM2000) as one of “four horsemen of pharma” destroying veterans’ health.

Long highlighted cardiac risks, in particular.

Back in 2003, CDC authors described adverse reactions from Dryvax ranging from “benign, if frightening in appearance” to “life-threatening,” conceding that myopericarditis was “truly” an adverse outcome but admitting to not knowing about long-term consequences.

In 2021, when the Military Vaccine Agency published a study involving monthly surveillance of clinically “adjudicated” cardiac and neurological adverse events experienced in temporal association with ACAM2000 vaccination, it reported a significantly higher rate of myopericarditis in younger men (under age 40), and overall rates of “any cardiovascular event” of 1.14 per 1,000.

As Long noted, the FDA documented a much higher incidence of 6.9 cardiac events per 1,000 for ACAM2000, and one study reported myocarditis in one in every 175 recipients.

New kid on the block

By June 2022, the media build-up promoting monkeypox vaccination and the Jynneos injection in particular was on full display, with headlines playing up the idea of hordes eager for jabs that are in short supply.

To tee up demand for the “newer generation” — and largely unfamiliar — Jynneos vaccine, CNBC classified its competitor, ACAM2000, as practically a dinosaur, an “older generation smallpox vaccine that can have serious side effects.”

In late July, Vox agreed there would be “trade-offs” if the U.S. were to tap into its “100 million-odd doses” of ACAM2000 “currently sitting on the shelves at the Strategic National Stockpile, largely untouched” — trade-offs such as “potentially concerning side effects, the complex way it has to be administered, and limits on who can safely receive the vaccine” (no immunocompromised individuals, no pregnant women, no one with eczema and no babies).

While ACAM2000’s “cumbersome” mode of administration does not lend itself to “assembly-line” distribution, Jynneos, Vox assured us, “can be given in public venues, like festivals and even bathhouses.”

However, we know very little about Jynneos, other than the serious adverse events listed in the package insert — Crohn’s disease, sarcoidosis (an inflammatory disease affecting multiple organs, notably the lungs), eye weakness and throat tightness (a potential sign of anaphylaxis).

A higher proportion of Jynneos recipients (1.3%) also experienced cardiac adverse events compared to placebo recipients (0.2%) who received saline.

A CDC scientist who led a clinical trial that was supposed to provide information about efficacy and side effects — a trial that recruited subjects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2017 to 2020 — gave a monkeypox briefing to CDC advisors in late June but, according to Dr. Meryl Nass, scientific advisor to Children’s Health Defense, he was “coy” about sharing the study’s results.

Liability-free yet again

Nass also pointed out that although Jynneos is licensed and, under ordinary circumstances, would be susceptible to vaccine injury lawsuits, the FDA and HHS pulled a fast one yet again that effectively shields Bavarian Nordic and the U.S. government from liability.

Using vaccine “shortages” as their excuse, they arranged the liability shield by putting Jynneos under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) umbrella that shifts the U.S. over to administering “fractional doses” and using a different mode of administration (injection into the skin rather than between skin and muscle).

The EUA also permits administration of Jynneos to children if they are deemed “high risk.”

After the EUA announcement, Bavarian Nordic’s CEO expressed “reservations” about the altered dosing and mode of administration, stating further studies would have been a “prudent” step “before overhauling the nation’s monkeypox vaccine strategy.”

The Biden administration’s rejoinder was that Bavarian Nordic was just voicing sour grapes about “a potential loss in profits.”

The company needn’t worry — its stock has gone up by more than 150% since the announcement of a “moneypox” outbreak.

As for Americans, we have a choice: We can join the crowds supposedly clamoring for yet another vaccine that doesn’t prevent anything.

Or we can “just say no,” recognizing that there just might be something “unusual about a global pandemic occurring just months after a simulation of a global pandemic of exactly that kind, followed shortly after by the first-ever global outbreak of an even-more-obscure virus just months after a simulation of an outbreak of exactly that kind.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

August 17, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

A Drought In Germany Gets The Media Overexcited

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | August 14, 2022

There is a drought in Germany, and naturally the media has gone into hyperdrive to link it to global warming:

Drought hits Germany’s Rhine River: ‘We have 30cm of water left’

This report is all over the media, and all with virtually the same wording, suggesting a carefully coordinated, manufactured story, almost certainly from one of the well funded, climate misinformation organisations.

The BBC headline is grossly misleading, as the 30cm is the water under the boat; As Captain Kempl comments, the river depth is actually 1.5m.

The river gauge measurement of 42cm at Kaub is also widely reported, but is equally misleading, as this measurement is taken near the river bank, rather than at the deepest part of the stream.

In none of the dozens of reports I have read is there any actual historical data to compare against this event, whether rainfall or water level data. We are told this is the lowest water level since 2018, as if this means anything at all. There is no evidence presented to show that this drought is in any way unprecedented, or that droughts are becoming more extreme; merely this claim that appears in most of the articles:

“HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a “new normal” in which low water levels become more common as global warming makes droughts more severe, sapping water along the length of the Rhine from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.

“There’s no denying climate change and the industry is adjusting to it,”

However, annual rainfall trends at Mainz, which is just upstream of Kalb, show that while recent years have been drier than the 1980s and 90s, they are no drier than the 1950s. We also see exactly the same trends with April to September rainfall:

And finally, WUWT offers an insight to some of the megadroughts in Germany in the past, notably in 1540.

There is therefore nothing to suggest that this is not just another weather event.

August 14, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Mainstream Media is Gaslighting Us About Climate Change

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 12, 2022

In 2013, the CNN presenter Deborah Feyerick asked if asteroids falling to earth were caused by climate change. Earlier this year, CBS anchor Nate Burleson commented on the Tonga earthquake by saying: “We talk about climate change… these stories are a harsh reality of what we are going through. We have to do our part because these are more frequent.” Last week, the academic networking blog The Conversation discussed the Fagradalsfjall volcano eruption in Iceland and asked: “Is climate change causing more eruptions?”, adding that it had the potential to increase volcanic eruptions and affect their size.

Dear God – they’ll be telling us that climate change causes lightning next. Wait, hang on – “Washington DC lightning strike that killed two serves as climate warning” – Reuters, August 5th.

In the climate change show, jumping the shark is now a daily occurrence, particularly in the mainstream media. Gaslighting on a global scale is evident as the media push the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Bad weather incidents and natural disasters are catastrophised to promote this increasingly hard-left political agenda. But the distinguished atmospheric scientist Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT recently voiced the views of an increasing number of people when he said the current climate narrative was “absurd”. Yet he acknowledged that it had universal acceptance, despite the fact that in a normal world the counter-arguments would be compelling. “Perhaps it is the trillions of dollars being diverted into every green project under the sun, and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists, along with the political control offered to elite groups in society by Net Zero, that currently says it is not absurd,” he speculated.

The Daily Sceptic has written numerous articles presenting evidence that global warming started to run out of steam over 20 years ago, despite the frequent, back-dated and upward temperature adjustments made by state-funded weather services. No science paper exists that proves conclusively that humans cause noticeable changes in the climate by burning fossil fuel. Despite years of research, scientists are no nearer knowing how much temperatures will rise if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere. No link has been shown directly connecting temperatures and CO2 rises (and falls) over the entire paleoclimatic record. Countless natural processes play a part in determining climate conditions. And attempts to link individual weather events to long-term changes in the climate are produced by climate modellers and green activists giving vent to wishful thinking.

In the absence of credible science, there has been a resort to the name-calling, shaming and appeals to authority, common in previous ages. The recent news that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) had returned to blooming health, and was showing record growth, was a disaster for most mainstream media outlets. All parts had reported for years that the coral was on its last legs due to human-induced climate change. During this time, the GBR observer Professor Peter Ridd was vilified for stating that the reef was a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. He was fired from his post at James Cook University for pointing out the deficiencies in the output of reef science institutions.

In August 2019, the Guardian reported that the former Australian chief scientist Ian Chubb had accused Ridd of “misrepresenting robust science” about the plight of the GBR. Shamefully, it repeated without comment Chubb’s slur that Ridd was relying on the “strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubts about the impact of smoking”.

Professor Ridd emerges from the whole sorry affair with his reputation restored and an acknowledgement that true scientists report their findings without fear of the mob, or seeking the favour of the Establishment.

Just days before the news was confirmed that the GBR was continuing to grow back in record amounts, the Guardian ran a long article saying that scientists had demonstrated “beyond any doubt” that humanity is forcing the climate to disastrous new extremes, They hadn’t, of course, and “beyond any doubt” is a phrase borrowed from the criminal law, not science. Professor Terry Hughes from the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce estimated that close to 50% of the GBR coral is already dead. Attribution science is said to show that the hot March weather in 2016 that caused a “catastrophic die-off” in 2016 was made “at least 175 times more likely” by the human influence on the climate. A more realistic explanation, invariably ignored in mainstream media, is that the powerful El Nino experienced in that year warmed sea waters temporarily, and led to a natural burst of bleaching. Full reef health was quickly restored when the effect of the natural oscillation was removed.

The global media gaslighting over political climate change is easier to understand if you follow the money. Earlier this year, the Daily Sceptic reported that the Associated Press was adding two dozen journalists to cover “climate issues”. Five billionaire foundations, including the left-wing Rockefeller operation, supplied $8 million. AP now says over 50 jobs are funded from these sources. The BBC and the Guardian regularly receive multi-million dollar contributions from the trusts of wealthy donors. It is estimated that Bill Gates has given more than $300 million over the past decade to a wide variety of media outlets. Democrat power couple James and Kathryn Murdoch also help pay the staff’s wages at AP. On their Foundation web site, it is noted that there is an investment in Climate Central, where meteorologists are used as “trusted messengers” of the links between extreme weather and climate change.

Meanwhile, the foundation of the green technology-funding Spanish bank BBVA hands out annual €100,000 payments. Last year the cash went to Marlow Hood of Agence France-Presse, who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”, the latter being a political renaming of the current Holocene era. In 2019 Matt McGrath of the BBC took home the annual prize, while in 2020 it ended up in the coffers of the Guardian.

The White Queen tried to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. It’s a shame climate change wasn’t around in Alice’s day.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor

August 13, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

US accuses Iran of plot to kill John Bolton

By Lucas Leiroz | August 12, 2022

New tensions are growing between Iran and the US. Recently, Washington said Tehran plotted to kill White House Advisor John Bolton. The plan would be a retaliation for Trump Administration’s terrorist-like assassination of Iranian Top General Qasem Soleimani, in 2020. The Iranian government denied any involvement in such a plan, considering the accusation absolutely baseless. Indeed, the Americans have not presented any convincing evidence so far, but, being the narrative accurate or not, frictions are likely to escalate.

On August 10, US government’s spokespersons commented on an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate John Bolton, which would have been organized last year and would involve Iranian agents and a US citizen. The case became the topic of an official note from the US Department of Justice, where the alleged plot is narrated. The narrative is built on the testimony of an American who would have been possibly hired by an Iranian to commit the crime. The reward would be a sum of 300,000 dollars, to be paid by an Iranian named Mehdi Rezayi.

The American citizen allegedly involved in the case claims to have been advised to create a cryptocurrency account in order to receive the money safely. Then he would have received assistance from Iranian intelligence on where to find Bolton. The Iranians reportedly told him to photograph the Advisor before murdering him and evading him – possibly as a way of “proving” that the operation was successful. The contact between the American and the Iranians would have taken place for a few months between October 2021 and April 2022. The conversations were carried out through encrypted messages in a safe platform.

US officials also mentioned the detail that the plot would be a retaliatory measure by Tehran against the US operation to kill Qasem Soleimani. Supposedly, the Iranian authorities would have been “pressured” by people to respond to the American terrorist actions against Soleimani – and Bolton would have been the chosen target for this response.

However, now, the situation is partially reversing: with the alleged plot coming to light, it is the US authorities who are mobilizing to “respond” to Iran and punish those involved. Assistant Director in Charge Steven M. D’Antuono of the FBI Washington Field Office commented on the topic: “An attempted assassination of a former U.S. Government official on U.S. soil is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated (…) The FBI will continue to identify and disrupt any efforts by Iran or any hostile government seeking to bring harm or death to U.S. persons at home or abroad. This should serve as a warning to any others attempting to do the same – the FBI will be relentless in our efforts to identify, stop, and bring to justice those who would threaten our people and violate our laws”.

Tehran for its part denies absolutely any involvement in this type of plot. Iran’s Foreign Ministry Nasser Kanaani comments that “the spinning of these threadbare and baseless myths is becoming a recurring custom in the American judicial and propaganda system”. Washington’s objective with such lies, according to him, would be to legitimize anti-Iranian policies and divert attention from crimes committed by the US government itself, such as the murder of Iranian officials and support for terrorist groups in the Middle East.

“Continuing their endless accusations, their failed Iranophobic policy, the American judicial authorities, in a new yarn spinning, have raised accusations without providing valid evidence and necessary documentation (…) Such baseless claims are made with political motives and aims and in fact amount to […] escaping the responsibility of responding to numerous terrorist crimes that the American government has either directly participated in, such as the cowardly assassination of General Martyr Soleimani, or like the terrorist crimes committed by the Zionist regime and terrorist groups like Daesh with the support of America”, Kanaani said.

This scenario significantly worsens tensions. Recently the US and Iran have intensified their diplomatic frictions. Amid the current global security crisis, the attempt at a new nuclear deal has failed and the US has provided Israel with broad support with military exercises to intimidate Tehran. So, it is likely that in fact the plot narrative was invented with the aim of serving as a “carte blanche” for coming measures against Iran.

In addition, it is notorious how the narrative seems weak and unconvincing. The US Department of Justice reports the alleged result of “investigations” but does not provide any evidence for its claims. And there are still inconsistent data in the description of the plot, such as the fact that it was planned more than a year after Soleimani’s death. It is also unclear why Bolton was chosen as a target, considering that there is a strong presence of American officials in the Middle East, both military and diplomats, who would certainly be “easier” targets to be hit than high-ranking state officials within the American territory.

In fact, the main problem is that, whether true or not, the narrative has served its purpose: it has boosted hostility between the US and Iran, worsening relations between them. Expectations for the near future are of escalating tensions.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

August 12, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Media Stopped Describing Targeting of Trump as “Raid” After Former FBI Agent Complained

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | August 11, 2022

The media stopped describing the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as a “raid” after a top former FBI agent complained about the wording during an appearance on MSNBC.

Federal agents ransacked Trump’s Florida home, even going through his wife Melania’s wardrobes, in a bid to find classified records Trump allegedly took from the White House.

Trump supporters assert that the boxes recovered during the raid contain files that were already declassified by the time Trump left office.

The raid was carried out after an FBI informant had infiltrated Mar-a-Lago and discovered the precise location of where the files were being kept.

Despite widespread anger at the raid from both Trump supporters and Republicans in general, one former FBI agent tried to language police by insisting that the raid, timed for when the feds knew Trump wouldn’t be home, was not in fact a raid.

“Agents, by the way, don’t like the word raid, they don’t like it,” former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC.

“It sounds like it’s some kind of, you know, extra judicial non legal thing. It’s the execution of a search warrant. It’s a court authorized search warrant,” he added.

Figliuzzi insisted that the FBI would want the incident described as them having “executed a search warrant” and that calling it a “raid” helped Trump define what happened as “prosecutorial misconduct.”

Almost instantly, the media followed orders.

“MSNBC changed their chyron, from “FBI Raids Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Home,” to “FBI Executes Search Warrant At Trump’s Mar-A-Lago,” moments after Figliuzzi’s appearance, notes Jack Hadfield.

The New York Times also changed the word “raid” to “search”.

Twitter’s trending tab description of the incident was also changed to omit the word “raid”.

Meanwhile, Trump himself said on Truth Social last night that the FBI had already visited Mar-a-Lago in June to view the records after they asked Trump to secure them with an extra lock.

“Then on Monday, without notification or warning, an army of agents broke into Mar-a-Lago, went to the same storage area, and ripped open the lock that they had asked to be installed,” wrote Trump.

August 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

‘Coup’ Means Whatever the Regime Wants It to Mean

 By Ryan McMaken – Ludwig von Mises Institute – August 10, 2022 

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, many pundits and politicians were eager to describe the events of that day a s a coup d’etat in which the nation was “this close” to having some sort of junta void the 2020 election and take power in Washington.

The headlines at the time were unambiguous in their assertions that the riot was a coup or attempted coup. For example, the riot was “A Very American Coup” according to a headline at the New Republic. “This Is a Coup” insists a writer at Foreign Policy. The Atlantic presented photos purported to be “Scenes from an American Coup.”

This general tactic has not changed since then. Just this month, for example, Vanity Fair referred to the January 6 riots as “Trump’s attempted coup” Last month, Vox called it “Trump’s cuckoo coup.” Moreover, anti-Trump politicians have repeatedly referred to the riot as a coup, and “attempted coup” has become the standard term of choice for the January 6 panel.

At the time, it was obvious that if the riot was a coup at all, it failed utterly. Thus, the debate is now over whether or not it was an attempted coup. On January 8, 2021, I argued the riot was not an attempted coup. Now, 18 months later, after months of “investigation” and testimony to the January 6 committee, we’ve learned new details about the events that occurred that day. And now I can say with even more confidence: the January 6 riot was not an attempted coup.

It was not an attempted coup because it simply wasn’t the sort of event that historians and political scientists—the people who actually study coups—generally define as a coup. Even the Justice Department admits that virtually all of the rioters were, at most, guilty only of crimes such as trespassing and disorderly conduct. Among the tiny minority of those charged with actual conspiracy—11 people—they lacked any sort of institutional backing or support that is necessary for a coup attempt to take place.

Nor is this just some meaningless debate over semantics. Words matter and definitions matter. This should be abundantly clear to anyone in our current age of debates over what terms like “recession” or “vaccine” or “woman” mean. In fact, the use of the term “coup” has been thoroughly weaponized in that outside academic circles it is employed largely as a pejorative to discredit political acts designed to register discontent with a ruling regime or to oppose a ruling coalition. For many, the term coup is now used increasingly to describe political acts one doesn’t like. But if the term “coup” ultimately means “political thing those bad guys did” then it ceases to have any precise meaning at all. But, the use of the term in this way does explain why so many pundits and politicians routinely use the term to label their opponents coup plotters. It’s basically name calling, and really only tells us about the user’s political leanings.

What Is a Coup?

In their article for the Journal of Peace Research, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010: A New Dataset,” authors Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne provide a definition:

A coup attempt includes illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.

Although the terms “military” and “coup” are routinely employed together, Powell and Thyne emphasize military involvement at early stages is not necessary:

[Other definitions] more broadly allow non-military elites, civilian groups, and even mercenaries to be included as coup perpetrators. This broad definition includes four sources, including [a definition stating that coup] perpetrators need only be ‘organized factions’. We take a middle ground. Coups may be undertaken by any elite who is part of the state apparatus. These can include non-civilian members of the military and security services, or civilian members of government.

Moreover, it is not necessary that violence actually be used. The presence of a threat issued by some organized group of elites is sufficient.

This definition is helpful because there are many types of political actions that are not coups, even if the intended outcome is a change in the ruling regime. The definition offered by Powell and Thyne is useful because it avoids “conflating coups with other forms of anti-regime activity, which is the primary problem with broader approaches.”

For example, popular uprisings that force ruling executives from power are not generally coups. Intervention by a foreign regime is not a coup. Civil wars initiated by non-elites or other outsiders are not coups.

Why the Jan 6 Riot Was Not a Coup

In the case of the January 6 riot, the rioters had no institutional backing, no promises of help from elites, and no reason to assume they had access to any coercive tools necessary to seize and hold control of a state’s executive apparatus. Nor was Donald Trump even in a position to promise such things. As noted by Elaine Kamarck at the Brookings Institution:

we now know that Trump did not even have the support of his own family and friends nor his handpicked White House staff. To pursue his plans, he had to rely on a close group of advisors known as “the clown show” led by Rudi Giuliani, a pillow manufacturer, and a dot-com millionaire—none of whom was in government and none of whom controlled the most important “assets” (guns, tanks, planes etc.) needed to take over a government. In contrast to most successful coups in history, Trump had no faction of the military, no faction of the National Guard, and no faction of the District of Colombia Metropolitan Police at his disposal.

In other words, the rioters had no avenue to calling upon any faction of the state or group of elites to secure backing. Kamarck continues:

As we learned in some of the most recent hearings, it was Vice President Mike Pence who was in contact with the military and the police, and most importantly, the military and the police were taking orders from Pence not Trump, the commander in chief!

Given that Trump didn’t actually attempt to secure any government agency to secure power for himself, we can guess Trump knew no branch of the federal government was about to step in to illegally secure an extension to his tenure as president. We can never know for sure what Trump was really thinking on that day, but even if Trump sought to encourage a group of protestors to somehow put pressure on Congress—even if by violent means—that’s not a coup. It’s a popular uprising.

The Bolivian “Coup”: The Anti-Morales Protestors in Bolivia 

The protests that followed the 2019 elections in Bolivia provide an interestingly similar case to the January 6 riot and demonstrate that it’s often quite debatable as to what constitutes a coup.

As the Bolivian election neared its end on October 24, sitting president Evo Morales began to claim victory. Numerous opponents, however, claimed Morales’s supporters had engaged in electoral fraud. Both sides refused to accept the results of the election, and protests and riots soon erupted across the nation. Morales and his supporters accused the opposition of staging a coup. The opposition accused Morales of the same. Or, more precisely, they accused Morales of attempting an “autocoup”—autogolpe in Spanish—in which Morales was attempting to hold on to power via illegal means.

Ultimately, Morales ended up resigning after he failed to maintain control over the police and military. High ranking officials from those institutions “recommended” Morales resign, and Morales did so soon after. Morales went into exile and Mexico and the opposition became the de facto governing coalition in Bolivia.

There remains no agreement, however, as to whether or not the actions of either side in Bolivia constituted a coup (or autocoup.) Morales’s supporters—mostly leftists—refer to the political crisis following the election as a coup. Those who are convinced Morales did indeed lose the election refer to his efforts as an autocoup. But many also refer to the events as a popular uprising.

For many, the situation in Bolivia in 2019 remains ambiguous, and we can see how it shares many elements in common with the events surrounding the January 6 riot at the Capitol. It began with claims of election fraud, and ended with a group of protestors attempting to pressure congress to change the outcome. This is not fundamentally different from the popular uprisings in Bolivia, except that in the US the outcome was never really dubious. There was never really any doubt as to whether the Pentagon would he helping Trump push through an autocoup. Trump never had any real reason to believe he could hold on to power, even with 900 mostly unarmed protestors trespassing in the Capitol.

“Coup” Now Means “Thing I Don’t Like”

The Bolivia situation also helps to illustrate how the term “coup” is used selectively for political effect. The fact that Morales’s leftist supporters are generally those who favor the use of the term to describe Morales’ removal from office is no coincidence. Those who support one side say it’s a coup, while the other side does not.

We see the same dynamic at work in the U.S., and we should not be surprised that the media has rushed to apply the term to the riot. This phenomenon was examined in a November 2019 article titled “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?,” by Leiv Marsteintredet and Andres Malamud. The authors note that as the incidence of real coups has declined, the word has become more commonly applied to political events that are generally not coups. But, as the authors note, this is no mere issue of splitting hairs, explaining that “The choice of how to conceptualize a coup is not to be taken lightly since it carries normative, analytical, and political implications.”

Increasingly, the term really means “this is a thing I don’t like.” It’s clear the January 6 panel in Congress, and countless anti-Trump pundits use the term in this way to express disapproval and also to justify regime crackdowns against pro-Trump opponents of the regime. It’s easier to justify harsh prison sentences for a disorganized group of vandals if their acts can be framed as a nearly successful coup and therefore a threat to “our democracy.” Moreover, if the situation were reversed, and if protestors invaded the Capitol to support a leftwing, pro-regime candidate, we can be sure that the vocabulary used to describe the event in the mainstream press would be quite different.

August 10, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

CBS Deletes Documentary Revealing That Just ‘30%’ of West’s ‘Aid’ to Ukraine Reached Frontlines

By Ilya Tsukanov | Samizdat | August 8, 2022

CBS News has curiously deleted a bombshell documentary which uncovered that just “30%” of the military assistance sent to Ukraine by Western countries during the first months of the conflict with Russia actually reached the front lines.

Upon clicking on the link to the documentary, called “Arming Ukraine,” users are greeted with a “The page cannot be found” error.

CBS News announced Monday that it had “removed a tweet promoting” the doc, assuring that since it was filmed, control over deliveries had improved. “Additionally, the US military has confirmed that defense attache Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kiev in August for arms control and monitoring. We are updating our documentary to reflect this new information and air at a later date,” the network explained.

Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba nevertheless declared that the US network had “misled a huge audience by sharing unsubstantiated claims and damaging trust in supplies of vital military aid to a nation resisting aggression and genocide.”

“There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why.”

In the documentary, Jonas Ohman, CEO of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based group involved in the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine, told CBS News correspondent Adam Yamaguchi that just one third of the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of support sent to Ukraine by the US and its NATO allies was reaching the Ukrainian military.

“You know all this stuff goes to the border, and then kind of like something happens and kind of like, 30 percent maybe reaches its final destinations,” Ohman told CBS News in a preview of the documentary.

Ohman offered hints about what happens to the rest of the equipment, saying that “there are like power lords, oligarchs, political players” operating in the country. “The system itself, it’s like, ‘we are the armed forces of Ukraine. If security forces want it, well, the Americans gave it to us.’ It’s kind of like power games all day long, so eventually people need the stuff, and they go to us.”

The CEO also offered a novel explanation for why the West needs to ensure that Ukraine “wins” in the conflict with Russia. “If we lose the war, if we have this kind of gray zone, semi-failed state scenario or something like that. If you do this – you funnel lots of lethal resources into a place and you lose – then you will have to face the consequences,” he said.

Blue-Yellow has been funneling everything from body armor to night vision equipment and light drones into Ukraine since 2014, when the country was thrust into a civil war sparked by a US- and EU-backed coup in Kiev. The coup led to civil unrest in eastern Ukraine after the new authorities announced a crackdown on the Russian language and began pulling the country into EU and NATO orbit, ultimately culminating in the February 22, 2022 Russian recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as independent states and the launching of a special operation to “demilitarize” Ukraine two days later.

The United States has committed over $23 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since February, on top of billions delivered to the country between 2014 and 2021. The UK, Germany, Poland, and other NATO members have committed over $7 billion more.

Andy Milburn, a retired US Marine colonel and founder of the Mozart Group, a US private military company engaged in the training of Ukrainian troops, suggested the problem with supplies not reaching the front was organizational, and that the West should be more involved in putting “people in place” on the ground to “supervise the country” to prevent pilfering.

“If you provide supplies, or a logistics pipeline, there has got to be some organization to it, right? If the ability to which you’re willing to be involved in that stops at the Ukrainian border, the surprise isn’t that, oh, all this stuff isn’t getting to where it needs to go – the surprise is that people actually expected it to,” he said.

Last week, Sputnik Arabic got an inside look into the nitty-gritty details of the arms smuggling operations taking place in Ukraine, contacting a Ukrainian weapons merchant on the dark web who expressed readiness to sell US-made M4S assault rifles, ammunition, and frag grenades hidden in barrels of motor oil to a Sputnik correspondent posing as a Yemeni arms buyer. The weapons dealer referred to middlemen “allies” in Poland and Portugal ready to assist in the shipment.

Russia has spent months warning the US and its allies about the dangers posed by the shipment of weapons to Ukraine and the threat that they could wind up on the international arms black market thanks to the corruption and instability which have wracked the country.

Washington and Brussels have ignored these warnings, with Kiev assuring them that the arms would not be transferred to third parties or countries. Last month, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) announced that it was “working closely” with Kiev to prevent weapons smuggling after discovering that there was evidence of firearms and military equipment from Ukraine appearing in EU countries.

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

The BBC’s “Big Oil vs The World” documentary failed to provide any evidence to support its alarmist claims

The Daily Sceptic | August 7, 2022

The BBC recently broadcast a three part series entitled “Big Oil vs The World“.

The theme of the three hour documentary was that the oil and gas industry discovered over forty years ago that their product produced large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane and that the increase in these greenhouse gases would lead to climate change.

The documentary alleges that the oil and gas industry deliberately disseminated misinformation in order to prevent or slow down any legislation that would hurt its profit margins.

Many interviews are shown of former employees of the oil and gas industry that have had damascene conversions and now see that they were part of a huge crime against humanity or at least humanity yet to come.

I watched all three hours of this documentary on BBC iPlayer. It was very well done with many clips of hurricane damage, floods, wildfires and industry pumping out pollution.

The music reinforced the sense of doom and horror that these oil and gas company executives put profit ahead of saving the planet.

The trouble is that even though so many people consider the subject of climate change ‘settled science’ not one shred of evidence was put forward in the whole three hours.

One of the climate change experts was asked what his reaction to his predictions coming true was. He said he was angry, yet his predictions were not offered and subsequently it was not demonstrated how they were true.

Graphs and documents with certain phrases highlighted were flashed up but there was no time to evaluate them.

A ‘methane hunter’ declared that she had provided overwhelming evidence to the U.S. regulators but to no avail. During this segment images from thermal cameras were shown which looked very scary but there was no explanation as to what to look for to determine that methane was present.

The Attorney General of Massachusetts was interviewed and it was detailed how Exxon Mobile was going to have to answer in court to the allegations. It was detailed exactly what they were going to accuse the company of and footage of the team discussing the wrongdoings was shown.

That segment finished with the fact that the New York State Attorney General had tried the same thing but Exxon Mobil had won that case. Nothing further was said, no reference to the court documents, nothing to suggest that the company had pulled the wool over the court’s eyes. Nothing.

I would imagine that if I had bothered to complain to the BBC I would receive a response along the lines of them not having to provide evidence because the science is settled, but you have to ask the question, why?

If there is so much evidence and they know that the oil and gas giants have had evidence for four decades, why, in a three hour documentary, can they not produce one single piece of evidence?

How many more decades will we have to live with this constant barrage of doom-mongering before they finally see that the climate changes and there isn’t much we can do about it but continue to adapt and mitigate as we have been?

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

‘Ukraine worst conflict since WW2’ narrative allows the West to forget horrific war which shook Europe

Samizdat | August 3, 2022

Europe had “77 years of almost uninterrupted peace” until Russia chose to end it by “invading” Ukraine, according to a peculiar “analysis” published by the Associated Press (AP) over the weekend. Having thus erased Yugoslavia’s bloody destruction in the 1990s, the author contradicts himself just two paragraphs later.

In a surreal opener, AP’s John Leicester argues that the conflict in Ukraine is the kind of world-changing event on the same level as the first nuclear bomb test in 1945 or the 1969 moon landing. Except the moon landing didn’t really change the world – the Apollo program arguably was NASA’s high water mark – so it’s puzzling why it would even get a mention. Perhaps to emotionally prime the reader for the following whopper, which is that on February 24 this year,. Russian President Vladimir Putin “chews up the world order and 77 years of almost uninterrupted peace in Europe by invading Ukraine.”

Come again? Leicester, who writes from Paris and has covered Europe for AP since 2002, clearly missed out on the Balkans Wars of the 1990s. Not to mention conflicts in the north of Ireland and Cyprus.

People who did not, and live with the consequences to this day, were predictably upset.

The war in Bosnia (1992-1995) certainly did not qualify as “uninterrupted peace” – unless this was considered Europe only on the maps. Nor did the 1999 “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, which had consequences that were on display on Sunday. The entire article basically hinges on that one word, “almost.”

It might be possible Leicester – and his AP editors – had forgotten all about these episodes. There is a curious lack of interest in the West in questioning the official narratives of the Yugoslav wars, after all. Except just two paragraphs later, Leicester cites an emotionally charged issue straight out of the Bosnian War – Srebrenica – to compare the Russians to Nazis.

Taking into consideration that his “analysis” is just dripping with emotionally charged language, this suggests that either Leicester and AP don’t consider the Balkans properly “Europe,” or chose to gloss over the conflicts there in order to bend reality to their preferred narrative – that of Russia upsetting Europe’s peaceful slumber.

Just look at this verbiage: “generations of Europeans who had grown up knowing only peace have been brutally awakened to both its value and its fragility.” Or this: “the need to take sides — for self-preservation and to stand for right against wrong.”

Or lamenting that the world was making such “progress, with speedy vaccines against the Covid-19 global pandemic and deals on climate change, before Russia’s all-powerful Putin made it his historical mission to force independent, Western-looking Ukraine at gunpoint back into the Kremlin’s orbit, as it had been during Soviet times, when he served as an intelligence officer for the feared KGB.” Just one trope after another, strung together for maximum emotional impact.

At this point it is tempting, as one online researcher did, to wonder “how quickly the once venerable AP descended into an all-out dumpster fire.” Not just when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine, either – the agency’s almost comical “don’t say recession” coverage of the US economy under President Joe Biden has prompted one pollster to describe them as “disgustingly dishonest” people who have been “shilling” for the Democrats for years.

Another example of this is on display in AP’s coverage of the House January 6 Committee, an unusual collection of Democrats “enriched” by two rabidly anti-Trump GOP representatives. In addition to the emotional undertones, the agency insists on calling the Capitol riot an “insurrection,” a loaded term preferred by the Democrats, in order to invoke the 14th Amendment and disenfranchise the opposition.

Compare that to AP bending over backwards not to describe the 2020 riots as “riots,” but literally anything else. Their explanation? The word “riot” would “stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s.”

Instead, the AP’s Stylebook – used by most English-speaking journalists around the world – advises using different euphemisms, depending on who the violence is directed at. In other words, the What matters less than Who is doing it to Whom.

If once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, and three times is enemy action, then this is a veritable onslaught on the very meaning of words, perpetrated by one of the world’s largest “news” agencies. This is about more than Ukraine, or the Balkans wars, or the Biden recession, or the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots – it’s about reality itself and the people who try to twist it, whatever their reasons.

August 3, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

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