Four hundred ninety-eight electric vehicles (EVs) and over 3,200 other vehicles, including 350 Mercedes Benzes, were bound for Egypt on the Fremantle Highwaywhen one or more of the EVs caught fire, costing at least one seaman his life and injuring several others. Curiously, the Dutch coast guard had initially reported that only 25 of the vehicles were battery-electric models.
At last report, the Dutch coast guard admitted that it has been unable to put out the fire and that the ship has taken on water and is “listing” and on a trajectory toward a capsize. Should the ship sink, the total loss would also threaten the Frisian island of Ameland, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to over 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species and located near one of the world’s most important migratory-bird habitats.
On a global scale, of course, 3,000 vehicles are but a drop in the bucket, and in insurance terms, the loss of one 18,500–ton transport ship and one human life (all the wounded are expected to survive, despite broken bones, burns, and respiratory problems) is only so much. To compute a total cost, the ecological devastation would also have to be factored in, along with the cost of rescue, firefighting, and salvage operations.
But all in all, this was a freak accident, a one-off. This stuff never happens. Right?
Actually, it does. Just a year ago, the “Felicity Ace” sank as it was being towed from the site where 13 days earlier a fire had broken out on board. That ship, too, was transporting EVs and internal-combustion vehicles – including 15 Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultimae supercars valued at half a million dollars apiece. Also lost were 1,117 Porches, 1,944 Audis, 561 Volkswagens, 189 Bentleys, and 70 other Lamborghinis.
And just a month ago, two firefighters died battling flames that broke out on another roll-on, roll-off (RORO) cargo ship docked at Port Newark in New Jersey. Firefighters arrived at the scene when just five to seven vehicles on the 10th floor of the ship were on fire, but the fire quickly spread to the 11th and 12th floors.
One commenter explained that on a RORO ship, vehicles are chain-shackled on all four wheels to the deck, creating trip hazards for firefighters. There are multiple decks, ramps, ladders, confined spaces, low overhead, and solid metal all around (like a gigantic oven). Fighting such fires is a very dangerous challenge, even if the deck plan of the ship is well known.
The port authority assured reporters that no EVs numbered among the 5,000 vehicles (bound for Africa) on board, but just imagine if the fire had begun with the ship far out at sea. Or imagine the horror should an EV fire break out on a ferry boat carrying hundreds of vehicles and thousands of passengers? Or in an underground parking garage in a New York high-rise?
Olivia Murray notes that automakers have largely replaced steel and metal with plastic, and that a huge fire could unleash immeasurable quantities of synthetic chemicals into the atmosphere from the burning plastic. A total capsize would send millions of pounds of debris and spilled motor oil (from the non-EV autos) to the sea floor along with any toxic flame retardants. The impact on sensitive marine life would not be known for years.
Even at $80,000 per vehicle (a low number, perhaps), the insurance loss for the nearly 4,000 vehicles on the “Felicity Ace” alone would be $320 million – and this does not include the loss to end-buyers of the opportunity to drive a vehicle that they may have already purchased.
But massive fires are not the only insurance concern with EVs. The New York Timesrecently reported the sad story of a Rivian owner whose electric pickup truck was involved in what would normally be considered “a minor fender bender.” The owner’s insurance company gladly offered to pay about $1,600 for the repairs, but the certified repair shop produced a bill for $42,000 – about half the cost of the vehicle.
The Times reporter explained: “A key reason is that the accident damaged a sleek panel that extends from the truck’s rear to front roof pillars.” To repair and repaint the vehicle, mechanics had to remove the interior ceiling material (the headliner) and the front windshield. Indeed, the State of New York’s consumer guide for auto insurance lists many models as “difficult-to-insure vehicles” simply because they are electric.
But that’s still better than the news reported in March that insurance companies are having to write off EVs with just a few miles – leading to higher premiums – because of the many EVs for which there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents. EV battery packs are ending up in junkyards in multiple countries.
According to the Agent Support Network of America, the intense impact of a crash can be much more devastating to EVs, increasing the likelihood of a totaled versus repairable car. EVs, according toConsumer Reports, may not withstand an accident as well as traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. EV batteries are vulnerable to damage, and with any indication of a compromised battery, insurance companies will likely declare an EV crash a total loss.
An overlooked insurance cost for EVs involves towing, which many insurance customers (and AAA members) take for granted as an inexpensive add-on to their policies. But EVs can be safely towed only on a flatbed truck with enough load capacity to handle the extra weight of the vehicle. Drivers are warned not to allow anyone to try to tow their EV with its wheels on the ground. Improper towing can damage, even total, the vehicle.
The higher costs for auto insurance only add to the already-higher costs of purchasing an EV, then procuring a personal charging station and spending more money to upgrade home wiring boxes (especially for older homes). The inconvenience of having your nearly new vehicle totaled – and then having to wait perhaps months for a replacement – further adds to the “buyer avoidance” that has frustrated those who demand an immediate end to the traditional gasoline-powered vehicles that most people around the world rely upon.
As automakers continue to lose money on EVs and consumers worldwide continue to prefer the vehicles they have learned to trust over decades, will EV mandates fall by the wayside – or will elites again double down, believing that “resistance is futile”?
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and a frequent writer on public policy issues.
Traditionally, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were Chemical, Biological, Radiologic and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—they are cheap ways to kill and maim lots of people at once. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (sometimes) and use. First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, so we believed we were not bound by it.
The US used chemical weapons subsequently. The US probably used biological weapons in the Korean War, and perhaps in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and possibly other chemical weapons led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968, a young Seymour Hersh wrotea book about the US chemical and biological warfare program. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy wrote the book “Ultimate Folly” about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand, ” has sprayed anti-plant chemi-
cals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over
10 per cent of it cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with
the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become
a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in
order to facilitate our aerial reconnaisance. Our use of “super tear
gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally
announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the
full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs
to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame
weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough
to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many
nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion
that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view
shared by M cCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, in November 1969 President Nixon announced to the world we were going to end the US biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). In February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons (snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations, etc.). Furthermore, Nixon said the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did: the 1972 Convention on the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons and on their destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
The BWC established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the Convention. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations did not comply with the treaty. However, the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone knows that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. A clear BWC violation. US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
In 1997 a Chemical Weapons Convention came into force. It took over 20 years, but all official stocks of chemical weapons have been destroyed by the USA and by Russia and the other 193 member nation signatories.
Pandemics or Biological Warfare?
So here we are. It is 2023 and the WHO Director General has declared 2 pandemics (the current terminology is ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’) over the past 3 and a half years: COVID-19 and monkeypox, which was renamed MPOX to “avoid stigma.” I am sure the monkeys were relieved by the name change.
I have previously (in my substack) described why I believe both SARS-CoV-2 and MPOX were bioengineered pathogens that came from labs. I do not know if they leaked or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward deliberately released for both of them, based on where they appeared, how they spread, and in particular the official responses to each—neither of which was explained accurately to the public, and yet we never changed course, even when the lack of efficacy with masks, social distancing, EUA drugs and vaccines had become clear.
Vaccines: the Chicken or the Egg?
Both the monkeypox vaccines (there are two, Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do the two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial in Australia. I have written about all this previously on substack.
How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. We do not know the number for Jynneos, but there was some degree of elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10% and 18% of recipients in two small prelicensure studies. My guess for the mRNA vaccines is that they are somewhere in this range. I don’t know about Novavax’ vaccine.
Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work — Jynneos didn’t on the monkeys in whom it was tested. And CDC has clammed up about the 2,000 Congolese healthcare workers on whom CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. (I have detailed this too in earlier substacks.)
The health authorities could have just been ignorant—that could explain the first 8 months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did they still push it on low risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect?
Once this is acknowledged, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. I’m not sure. But I’m suspicious. And the fact that multiple countries contracted for 10 doses per person makes me even more suspicious—for vaccines whose safety and efficacy had not been established. WHY would you want ten doses apiece? Three maybe. But ten?
Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport aka digital ID aka justification to convert to all-electronic money unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the pathway to getting our vaccinations, health records, official documents and financial transactions all online—as Ukraine has already done?
A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to you by the same people who mismanaged the past 3 years, to save us from themselves?
The same US government and western governments that imposed draconian measures on their citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs and withheld the good drugs, decided in 2021 we needed a pandemic treaty to prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer as we did with the COVID pandemic.
Except COVID was a disaster due to its mismanagement (or should I say dismanagement or malmanagement?) by our nations’ rulers, their bosses and the WHO. Hundreds of millions of our fellow human being were slammed into extreme poverty—by nations following guidelines issued by the WHO, whose main job it was to protect exactly those people. Tens of millions died from starvation as a result. Yet the WHO blathers on about equity, diversity and solidarity—having itself caused the worst (manmade) food crisis in our lifetimes. Have you heard any apology or explanation?
How can anyone with a brain believe the public health officials who messed up COVID so badly want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster, after they imposed the last one on us? And the fact that no governments or health officials will admit their mistakes — especially how they made it nearly impossible to obtain the cheap and safe drugs that effectively treat COVID — why would we let them plan anything, let alone an international treaty that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates? How thoughtful of these officials to want to spend a king’s ransom of our money to prevent the next government-caused disaster.
We are fed up with secret vaccine contracts, waivers of liability for junk medical products, and spikes in sudden deaths and chronic disabilities. No more secret negotiations. Please shove your pandemic planning where the sun…
The Gain of Function farce
Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding “Gain of Function”* research, and get rid of what has already been funded and created. Let all the nations make big bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.
But the WHO in its Bureau Text of the draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s world, which almost all nations’ rulers have bought into, all the governments will share any and all viruses and bacteria they come up with that have “pandemic potential” — share them with all the other governments. They are supposed to sequence them and then put the sequence online. No kidding. Then the WHO and all the Faucis of the world would gain access to every Frankenstein virus, at once. Presumably a bunch of hackers would also gain access to the sequences. Does this make you feel more secure?
The WHO Treaty draft incentivizes Gain Of Function research
At least this plan makes clear whose side everyone is on. Fauci, Tedros and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to even more biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.
This crazy plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. But it is their plan. Governments will all share the weapons. And they are to put a lot more money into biolabs, and especially into genomic sequencing. Presumably so they can make even better weapons, and maybe they will even get around to cures or antidotes. But who will get the cures? It wasn’t us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is where you can read the current Treaty draft:
What else is in the Treaty? Gain of Function research (designed to make pathogens more transmissible or more virulent) is explicitly incentivized. Administrative hurdles to it must be minimized, while unintended consequences (pandemics) should be prevented: (page 14)
Vaccines will be rolled out speedily under future testing protocols
Just in case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out, the WHO has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way Africa, for example?). And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.” (page 14)
Manufacturer and government liability will be “managed”
Nations are supposed to use existing models as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal. The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated 4 (yes, FOUR) people as of July 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines fall into this program (monoclonal antibodies, early remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines). There have been nearly 12,000 claims made to the CICP related to a COVID product. Slightly over 1,000 have been adjudicated while 10,886 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and are waiting to see whether they can collect. A total of 983 people, or 98% had their claims denied. About 90% of all claimants filed for a vaccine injury.
The treaty draft also demands weakening the regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies under the rubric of Regulatory Strengthening. As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25)
Why would any developed country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?
The WHO did sweeten the pot, however. Remember how the need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” was removed in the WHO’s draft IHR Amendments that are being negotiated? Well, WHO apparently did not like us pointing that out—so the old human rights language that was removed from the International Health Regulations draft has been added to this newest version of the Treaty.
There is much more I could say about problems with this draft of the Treaty, but I will save them for another time.
Please share this brief analysis of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. We must EXIT the WHO.
*Gain of Function is a euphemism for biological warfare reserch or germ warfare research. It is so foolhardy that it was banned in the US for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses from 2014-2017 due to public outcry by scientists. Then in 2017 Fauci and Collins lifted the moratorium, claimed they were putting safeguards in place, which were just a handwaving exercise, and off we were to the races: creating new bioweapons. Fauci and Collins had the nerve to publish their opinion that the risk was ‘worth it.’
The annual Paul Homewood review of the BBC’s climate howlers is always an enjoyable read, even for those keen students who follow his investigative work during the year. But with the consensus starting to crumble for the insane Net Zero collectivist project, this latest instalment of Tall Climate Tales from the BBC seems to have attracted a wider audience. Talk TV and the Daily Express have both given extensive coverage to the latest set of BBC bloopers.
How we laughed when Julia Hartley-Brewer read from the list on her TalkTV morning show. Such as the report from the Norfolk village of Happisburgh where “extreme weather linked to climate change” has eroded the soft sand cliff rock. No mention of the finding of the British Geological Society that it is likely the Norfolk cliffs have been “eroding at the present rate for about the last 5,000 years”.
Or the report that the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most active on record. Nothing of the sort, of course, with Homewood observing that since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count of hurricanes. There was also an evidence-free claim in September 2022 on the BBC Verify that hurricanes were getting more powerful. The U.S. weather service NOAA states in its latest review that “there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity”.
Your own correspondent’s personal favourite made the list with news that bee-eaters had turned up in Norfolk to the delight of local twitchers. But the BBC was worried, reporting that rare ‘rainbow birds’ trying to breed in the UK was a worrying sign of how our climate is changing. It was an “unmissable sign”, no less, that the climate emergency had reached our shores. As any half-knowledgeable bird watcher could have told the BBC, bee-eaters have frequently visited England in the past. One archive alone lists 80 sightings between 1793 and 1957. Then there’s a story about trees in British cities that a study said were at risk of drought due to climate change. There is no evidence that the areas were getting drier, nor is there any evidence they will. “Once again, the BBC is uncritically presenting a controversial study as factual,” commented Homewood.
It is the common practice of the BBC to reproduce the most extreme climate claims without challenge, without providing supporting data, and without reporting on the views of scientists who disagree, writes Homewood. In fact, the practice continues almost daily. In March, the BBC said that Antarctica ocean currents were heading for collapse – “a new report warns”. The article proceeded to go into full Day After Tomorrow mode with “previous research” suggesting a slowdown in the North Atlantic current causing Europe to become colder.
Modern climate science/activism is awash with clickbait predictions looking for a suitable home in useful idiot mainstream media. As recent research from the Clintel Foundation revealed, about 42% of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate impact statements are based on a computer model that assumes temperatures will climb by 5°C in less than 80 years. Even the IPCC itself admits this is of “low likelihood”. About half the published climate papers are thought to use this 5°C input, leading to a festival of misinformation for gainfully employed journalists content to append “scientists say” to fanciful copy. The latest giant of modern science to rain on this parade is last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics Dr John Clauser, who calls the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption” of science that threatens the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”, he observes.
The state broadcaster has followed this path of eco-extremism for over 20 years, providing covering fire for politicians to promote a Net Zero project. As audiences continue to decline, the BBC increasingly operates as a club of eco-fanatics intent on signally their virtue to fellow members of the cult. It fails to cover the scientific process at almost every level, discounting the views of any scientists that don’t adhere to the party political line. As with Covid, there seems to be an irrational belief in the output of computer models. Such belief leads to a preposterous acceptance that ‘attribution‘ models can link individual weather events to supposed human involvement.
As we have noted, large areas of science are now closed for debate for fear that any competing views will cast doubt on the unproven but ‘settled’ hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change. Natural variation in the climate is largely ignored, while stories of once fanatical interest suddenly disappear from the carefully constructed catastrophe playlist. These include polar bears – more than you can shake a stick at these days – the recovery in Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and spectacular coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef.
In Homewood’s view, the BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues such as energy “has long been of serious and widespread concern”. In his latest review, Homewood notes that all of the BBC’s factual errors could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. And he asks, who is editing all this “fake reporting”? Where are the highly paid executives who let all this continue? “It is apparent that nothing has changed in the last 12 months,” he says.
One more for the road – another personal favourite of mine. It was dry in February this year, despite an average amount of rainfall over the winter. Banging the drum for drought, the BBC produced a picture of an empty reservoir labelled “water levels in rivers, reservoirs and groundwater levels were abnormally low in February”. Alas, the picture showed trees in full leaf, which wasn’t surprising since it was taken in September 2021, a time when reservoirs can be seasonably low. “There’s nothing like a fake image to fool the public,” comments Homewood.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Paul Homewood has produced a summary of his latest report about the BBC’s climate howlers for the Express.
America’s 9th/10th March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo was the single most destructive air raid in military history, with over 100,000 murdered and more than a million made homeless. Along with the Americans’ carpet bombing campaigns in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it remains one of the most egregious war crimes in human history, not least because Imperial Japan was already a beaten docket.
Even as the last of their kamikaze fighters prepared to repel the Americans from the Japanese mainland in those first days of August 1945, Japan’s government was frantically searching for a way out of the morass. Knowing that the Soviet Red Army would soon descend on Manchuria, they knew that time was of the essence if the Americans were to be stopped raping and slaughtering yet more defenceless Japanese women and children, like they had previously done in Guam, Saipan and Okinawa.
Though the Japanese were at a loss to understand why the Americans would not accept their surrender, that answer came shortly afterwards in the form of two mushroom clouds, one in Hiroshima and the other in Nagasaki, the centre of Catholicism in The Land of the Rising Sun. Those two war crimes were accompanied by the Red Army cutting a swathe through the remnants of Japan’s once-mighty but now much-depleted Kmantung Army.
With McArthur gloating on the USS Missouri that Japan was defeated, the Yanks colonised not only Japan and the Pacific Basin, but also South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan before setting their sights on ridding South East Asia of the Dutch and especially the French. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bomb war crimes were done to tell the Soviets that all of Asia was now under the Yankee jackboot and that, in contravention to the Yalta and other treaties, only the Yanks would rule there.
America’s Pacific War was a racist war of annihilation both before and after Japan’s surrender. The American and British media — the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Time, and Life being among the more prominent — painted their Japanese foes out as subhumans, as monkey men fit only for extermination. Buoyed by such propaganda, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) went on monkey hunts; in the main, they took no prisoners. Even Percival’s craven capitulation in Singapore was depicted as being the work of armed monkeys, not of a hopelessly outnumbered foe that deserved respect for the most pragmatic of self-survival reasons.
The Marines, America’s greatest generation mutilated, as a matter of course, Japanese war dead for souvenirs, they attacked and sank hospital ships, they shot, tortured and executed their prisoners. They harvested gold teeth from both the living and the dead, they urinated both on their prisoners and on the corpses of those they had killed. In their idle moments, they carved the bones of their Japanese prisoners into little forget-me-nots and sent them home to their loved ones. President Roosevelt got a letter opener made from the bones of a captured Japanese officer but returned it to the sender — if not the rightful owner — for his own reasons.
Rationality in the Pacific was so rare during WWII that, ironically, it required as a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. to blow the whistle on the barbarities America’s greatest generation were routinely committing. Repelled by what he saw and heard of U.S. treatment of the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, the aviator spoke out. His sentiments are summed up in the following journal entry: “It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.” When Lindbergh left the Pacific and arrived at customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any Japanese bones in his baggage. It was, by then, a routine question.
Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, wrote of his comrades harvesting gold teeth from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed a Marine officer, one of America’s greatest generation of Goodfellas, stand over a Japanese corpse and urinate into its mouth.
Perhaps Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
Churchill and MacArthur ordered their troops to summarily execute any Japanese combatants who tried to surrender. They spread rumours of the Kyoto ear mound, where the Japanese, cannibal fashion, supposedly stored 40,000 pickled ears and noses that they collected following the 1598 Japanese invasion of Korea. Kyoto, for some perverse humanitarian desire on behalf of America’s leaders to preserve Japan’s imperial culture, her mounds of Korean noses included, was spared the blanket bombing Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka suffered. Kyoto was, unlike the good, human people of Nagasaki and Tokyo, of cultural importance and both its architecture and its ear mound had therefore to be preservedi. Meanwhile, the marines made their own inhumane mound. They spliced off the ears and noses of their captives and engaged in wide scale scalping as well. In Okinawa, America’s Greatest Generation also proved themselves to be the world’s most accomplished serial rapists.
Although John Pilger’s excellent documentaries tell us how the 4th Psychological Operations Group and the 101st Airborne (Tiger Force) made their own ear necklaces in Vietnam where they routinely beheaded Vietnamese babies to teach the locals who ruled the roost, Pilger, for a good half century now, has been a bad man, as he doesn’t sing from the NATO hymn sheet.
Pilger looks for shades of grey. He incorporates into his analysis the psychological insights of sociopaths like Edward Bernays, who taught the Yanks how to sell their self-serving wars more effectively than Goebbels or his pale Japanese imitators ever could. As he also always makes sure to mention the collateral damage of Yankee war crimes in places like Falluja, Vietnam, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not least because civilians now form far in excess of 90% of all American kills, and as he seldom goes easy on the media’s hypocrites he is, to repeat, a bad man.
To see how bad, just read this FBI inspired EU notice lambasting Russia Today and Sputnik because they “gravely distorted and manipulated facts and have repeatedly and consistently targeted European political parties, especially during election periods, as well as civil society, asylum seekers, Russian ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and the functioning of democratic institutions in the [European] Union and its Member States”. Because such outlets would be as harmful to us as would have been regarding the “Simian” Japanese or Vietnamese as humans when the USMC was exterminating them, our fragile minds must be protected by the Google search engines of today’s Edward Bernays, who are here to tell us that only unelected war-mongers like Ursula von der Leyen or her morally challenged minions can spout the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Because John Pilger is now in his 80s, he is given a pass, as long as he does not stray into the rump Zelensky Reich or into rebel-held Syria, where he would be quickly dispatched. But woe betide anyone younger like Gonzalo Lira, Julian Assange, Gary Webb or Alina Lipp who might try to divine the truth about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, MI6 agent Zelensky, the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons or any of America’s other organised crime families for, in their regurgitating of Russian propaganda, they are playing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Russian Roulette and that, as countless corpses attest, never ends well for NATO’ beleaguered truth tellers.
Oppenheimer is part of the cultural zeitgeist at the moment and is receiving a lot of attention from the establishment media hype machine. But what is being left out of Hollywood’s latest piece of historical revisionism? Joining James today is Patrick MacFarlane of VitalDissent.com, whose new documentary, The Truth About Oppenheimer, purports to answer that question.
In 2013 The Guardian wrote an article saying that the Arctic would be ice-free in two years. Does anybody remember the ice-free Arctic in 2015?
Professor Peter Wadhams was heralding a methane catastrophe. I guess after such a terrible prediction, Wadhams retired? Of course not, he is still a professor at Cambridge University and he’s still writing books and recording videos in which he tries to terrify everyone about the impending ice free Arctic (in another two years of course).
In 2018, Jeff McMahon wrote an article in Forbes claiming that “We have five years to save ourselves from climate change, Harvard Scientist Says”.
The Harvard scientist was a chap called James G. Anderson. He said “the chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero”. Don’t tell Anderson but it’s 2023 and there is plenty of ice left in the Arctic.
When the article was written, Anderson prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change. “I don’t understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids because they’re not stupid people”, he said.
I don’t understand how end-of-the-world doomsters such as Anderson sleep at night. Climate anxiety is a major mental illness in the young, all because of failed predictions such as his. I know lecturers at my local university who have to give climate counselling before and after each lecture, just in case something they talk about triggers an anxiety attack in their students – bonkers.
Furthermore, young adults are deciding not to have children because of climate change and instead gluing themselves to runways, begging their governments to impoverish them further. The only global catastrophe there will be is when there aren’t enough humans being born.
I guess Anderson must have retired now, after so many failed predictions. Once again, of course not, he is still a professor at Harvard. And the Forbes reporter, Jeff McMahon, is still at Forbes, still telling us the world is going to end.
These people expect us to take them seriously and listen to their dire warnings. ‘But but this time I am 100% definitely right, my models were not adjusted correctly last time, you need to listen to me now’. It seems that if you are part of the climate death cult, you can make as many false predictions as you like and you still keep your job. Just as long as you keep making scary predictions to control the masses.
Americans hear about a new “information war” strategy, formally known as wartime propaganda. Most don’t realize that it is a disinformation war, and they are the target. Most Americans don’t understand that the corporate media does not exist to inform them, but to mislead them. The US military has formed huge propaganda units, with each service training thousands of military personnel and paying contractors to influence social media. They post information on-line and make comments as regular anonymous folks to support the official government narrative. They demean truth tellers, target them with complaints that they violate comment guidelines, and pressure websites to censor comments.
Last week was the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. In a low-key commemoration, the White House Press Office issued a statement from President Biden calling to “renew our commitment to the democratic values for which [American troops] served and sacrificed.” In reality, almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict to buttress the principle that presidents could deceive the nation and intervene wherever they damn well chose.
If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army across the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War Two. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, founder of antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military: “From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do — where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after Gen. Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border between the two Koreas, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces — a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States — more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
While the Friends of Leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean war as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”
On last year’s armistice anniversary, President Biden proclaimed, “During the Korean War, nearly 1.8 million Americans answered the call to serve and defend the freedoms and universal values that the people of South Korea enjoy today.” The “call to serve” mostly came from summons from draft boards for military conscription. American media commemorations of the Korean War have almost entirely ignored perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the war, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements that the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent Korean civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. militarily intervened.
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purporting to prove that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In an interview, he was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high-enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high-enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the Government was responsible.”
But the atrocities against civilians had been common knowledge among U.S. troops 50 years earlier. As Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza noted in their 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon in 1952 “withdrew official endorsement from RKO’s One Minute to Zero, a Korean War movie in which an Army colonel played by actor Robert Mitchum orders artillery fire on a column of refugees.” The Pentagon fretted that “this sequence could be utilized for anti-American propaganda” and banned the film from being shown on U.S. military bases.
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators had never seen Muccio’s letter. Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001, declared, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.” But Muccio’s letter was in the specific research file used for the official exoneration report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted, “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’ — were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed that “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” Gen. Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea … and some in South Korea, too.” Yet, despite the hit-anything-still-standing bombing policy, most Americans believed the U.S. military acted humanely in Korea. Historian Conway-Lanz noted: “The issue of intention, and not the question of whose weapons literally killed civilians or destroyed their homes, became the morally significant one for many Americans.”
A million civilians may have been killed during the war. A South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities and concluded that “American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War,” the New York Times reported.
Truth delayed is truth defused. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left facts to the historians, not the policymakers. The truth about No Gun Ri finally slipped out — ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up for four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees (or anyone who “moved at night”) had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. warring has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the 9/11 hijackers (15 of 19 whom were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks exposed them in 2010.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the United States into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. Governments that recklessly slay masses of civilians won’t honestly investigate and announce their guilt to the world. Self-government is a mirage if Americans do not receive enough information to judge killings committed in their name.
A video of Klaus Schwab’s daughter, Nicole, giving a talk in June of 2020, is getting a lot of attention. Nicole is co-director of the Platform to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions & 1t.org, at the World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
In the video, she can be seen and heard saying the following:
This [Covid] crisis has shown us how, first of all, things can shift very rapidly when we put our minds to it and when we feel the immediate emergency to our livelihood. And second, that clearly the system—I mean you mentioned it earlier—that we had before is clearly not sustainable. So, I see it as a tremendous opportunity to really have this Great Reset, and to use this, you know, huge flows of money, to use the increased levers that policymakers have today in a way that was not possible before to create a change that is not incremental, but that we can look back and we can say that this is the moment where we really started to position, you know, nature at the core of the economy.
Note the elements of her assertion:
1). The Covid Crisis and response provide a model response for the Climate Crisis.
2). Both crises are emergencies that provide tremendous opportunities for the Great Reset agenda.
3). The huge flows of money resulting from the Covid emergency may flow again in response to the Climate emergency.
4). Both emergencies produce increased levers that policymakers can use to force immediate and dramatic change instead of the sort of incremental change that is less disruptive to the economic lives of ordinary citizens.
In other words, with the “tremendous opportunity” of the Covid Crisis now a thing of the past, it appears that the Olympians at Davos and their well-positioned friends are making arrangements for the Climate Crisis and the huge flows of money that will go to them for their “solutions” to the crisis.
Get ready for a coming propaganda blitz, an Emergency Declaration, and huge money flows from public coffers for Emergency Countermeasures to deal with the Climate Emergency.
If you are in the business of providing emergency countermeasures to the climate crisis, you will do well. If not, you will probably be tormented and burdened with onerous and arbitrary restrictions that do nothing for the environment but that make your life more expensive and difficult.
Last week, a senior member of Parliament for the UK’s Labour Party went on television demanding the UK – maybe even the entire world – be on a “war-like footing” to combat climate change.
“… if this were a war we wouldn’t be arguing about whether the Labour strategy or the Tory strategy were better, we would be working together to try and win […] Well, it is a war. It is a war for survival and climate change threatens everything […] So actually instead of playing party political games about who is up, who is down, what we need to be doing is saying let’s get together, let’s mobilise on a war footing and that is what is needed…”
Two days later, the exact same thoughts were expressed in a Financial Times column by Camilla Cavendish, former head of David Cameron’s Downing Street policy unit and Kennedy School of Government alumnus:
The answer is surely to invoke a wartime spirit, and make the fight against climate change a joint endeavour against a common enemy. If the public and political will is there, human ingenuity can prevail, with remarkable speed. In the second world war, America transformed its manufacturing base to produce tanks and ammunition. The Covid pandemic resulted in the discovery and development of vaccines at scale, saving millions of lives.
It’s interesting to note the comparison to Covid, but we’ll come back that.
Biden and his aides need to grab that metaphorical bullhorn and call the TV networks to announce a prime-time address from the Oval Office that will declare a national emergency — in essence, a state of war — to fight climate change.
The invocation of metaphorical war is of course nothing new.
“War” is a very important word in the world of politics and propaganda. It has – or is assumed to have – an immediate effect on the collective public mind; an instant connection to generations of shared memories, that promotes feelings of conformity and solidarity.
Some psychological study or focus group clearly figured this out decades ago, and as such the word “war” is frequently used to control narratives.
In Western “democracies” the deployment of the W word is code for bi-partisan agreement, attempting to breed faux solidarity between the same people they encourage to hate each other 90% of the time, whilst branding any dissenters as outsiders who are a threat to the safety of the group.
More pragmatically, being “at war” creates an “emergency” which justifies “temporary” suppression of human rights and freedoms and permits increases in the powers assumed by the state.
OffG – and others – have discussed this ad infinitum, past a certain point any authoritarian government needs to exist in a state of war in order to avoid collapse, and so enemies are created that, by their nature, can remain forever never undefeated.
See: “The War on Drugs”, “The War on Terror”, “The War on Covid”
… and, now, the war on climate change.
Or, more properly, “the war on climate change… again”.
Because neither Barry Gardiner nor Camilla Cavendish are the first person to express this thought. Not even close.
They were, in fact, echoing a University College London report from May 2021.
CNN warned we were “losing the war on climate change” in April 2019, plagiarizing the exact same headline in The Economist from a year earlier in August 2018.
Bill McKibben wrote “We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII” for the New Republic in August 2016.
(Ah, remember when Climate Change hadn’t yet received it’s unfalsifiability makeover and was still just known as “global warming”?)
Essentially, every few months they trot out this idea of “declaring war on climate change”, get almost no engagement from the public, and then go back to spouting alarmism and fear porn for a while before trying again.
They have been doing this for years. So far it has not worked.
… but this time might be a little different.
Why? Because we now live in a post-Covid society.
Consider, with the exception of the vaccines, everything brought on by Covid – the lockdowns, the financial collapse, all of the “Great Reset” – was originally meant to be a “response” to climate change.
They had a package of “solutions” ready and waiting for a public “reaction” that never came. People were simply never scared enough at the idea the world might get a bit warmer.
It could be argued that global warming’s repeated failure to spark a global panic is the very reason they resorted to “Covid” in the first place, but whatever the cause-and-effect relationship the fact of the matter is that Covid has laid a foundation for the “war on climate change” that never existed before.
“anti-Covid measures” provide precedent both for the use of extreme ‘responses’ and their apparent “effectiveness”
Covid created enough fear that they can increase climate hysteria by linking environmentalism to future potential “pandemics”
Covid (allegedly) “inspired global cooperation” and “demonstrated what we can achieve when we all work together”
Covid lockdowns (allegedly) “showed how the world can heal” by cutting emissions.
And, most vitally, the roll out of the Covid narrative demonstrated that once people have invested their virtue or personality in a story you can tell them almost anything relating to that story and they’ll be incentivised to believe you – NO MATTER HOW ABSURD IT MIGHT BE.
We noted earlier that several recent articles “declaring war on climate change” reference Covid, almost always as a global success story.
What the Coronavirus Pandemic Teaches Us About Fighting Climate Change
Perhaps the most blatant example of using Covid imagery to sell climate change and globalism is the call to create a “Global Climate Organization”, from Dr David King in the Independent a few days ago (our emphasis):
“In terms of a health crisis, such as the Covid crisis, we have a World Health Organisation and it’s based in Geneva and is part of the United Nations. We don’t have a world climate crisis organisation. That’s what we need, so that all countries of the world could come together through a body of this kind, as we do when there’s a health crisis, we all contribute to the cost of the WHO. We need a global system that pulls us all together to battle with this external threat to our manageable future.”
The “Great Reset” has made a good start, but they still have a raft of fun policies they want to introduce (eg. rationing food). In a post Covid world, they are hoping to finally make “climate change” frightening enough that people will beg them to completely reshape the world as they see fit.
The amusing part is that it still doesn’t feel like it’s landing, to be honest.
Unfortunate for them, because they’ve set themselves a deadline. Every year that passes without catastrophic climate breakdown, every summer the ice caps don’t disappear, every unseasonably cold or wet July is another nail in the coffin of their narrative, a few more normies disengaging from the story.
Which is probably why the coverage of “heatwave cerberus” and “global boiling” is fervid verging on feverish. There is an element of sweaty-palmed desperation seeping into every tweet, every headline.
They are running out of time.
The dark corollary of that is that someday soon they may well give up trying to persuade people, and start trying to force them.
The 22-year-old Belgian defender Lars Dendoncker announced last week that he was retiring from football due to a heart condition, thus making him the second Brighton player to retire because of heart problems in less than a year.
Dendoncker, the younger brother of Leander Dendoncker of Aston Villa and the Belgian national team, announced his retirement on Instagram, saying “this was and will be the hardest decision ever in my life” and that it “really hurts”. He was signed by Brighton & Hove Albion on a two-year contract in 2020 and played for the Scottish side St Johnstone for a year on loan.
Although Dendoncker has only now made his retirement official, he in fact already stopped playing football over a year ago after being diagnosed with myocarditis. In an Instagram post from last December, he wrote:
I have been through tough times the past few months. Six months ago I was about to make a transfer to a new club. I did my medical and something wasn’t right with my heart condition. I suffered from myocarditis.
Six months earlier will have been in May, not long before the unfortunate Dendoncker’s contract with Brighton was set to expire.
Last October, the Brighton midfielder Enock Mwepu was also forced into retirement by a heart condition. At the time, the condition was described as congenital. But when Mwepu first started feeling unwell and was rushed to the hospital just two weeks earlier while on a trip to Mali, the problem did not sound congenital. Thus, in his own September 26th Instagram post, he noted cryptically that doctors, and presumably he himself, were not at liberty to disclose the details of “what really happened”.
Mwepu’s words are reminiscent of remarks made by the American basketball player Brandon Goodwin. In mid-2021, while playing for the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA, Goodwin fell ill after being vaccinated against COVID-19 and was subsequently diagnosed with blood clots.
Goodwin himself attributed his condition “1000%” to the vaccine. But in a Twitch video, he described how while in the hospital a team official told him “Don’t say anything about it, don’t tell anyone” – to which he responded, “Bruh, what?” (The video appears to have been removed from Goodwin’s Twitch account, but relevant excerpts are still available on the Daily Callerhere.)
Brighton is not the only major football club to have had multiple players stricken by cardiac problems in the last two years. So too did German powerhouse Bayern Munich, though the Bayern players have since returned to action: French winger Kinsley Coman after undergoing heart surgery in September 2021 and Canadian defender Alphonso Davies after being diagnosed with myocarditis in January 2022.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter.
When ACIP panel added the experimental mRNA vaccines for infants age 6 months and older, it triggered concerns that ACIP may not have ever had adequate intent for risk mitigation or re-evaluation of the ever expanding vaccine schedule. Many have had reservations for a long time and have felt drowned out by the medical orthodoxy of “more vaccines are better.” Now an analysis by Miller, et al, suggests the entire program of hyper vaccination may be backfiring.
The two main independent variables in this analysis restricted to developed countries at two time points 2019 and 2021 (check for internal validity) were the number of vaccines given in the 28 day neonatal period (none, hepatitis B, Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) for tuberculosis) and then the overall number of shots given before age 1 year. The outcome variable was all cause mortality at age 1 and 5 years.
As you can see this does not look good for vaccines. In every analysis the children who went “natural” with no shots did the best and there was a trend for the fewest number of injections to be associated with the lowest mortality. I was born in 1962, so I received zero shots in the neonatal period and a total of 6 doses for four diseases (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio) before the age of 1 years. As you can see the optimal number of infant doses in the vaccine schedule is <14. The current US ACIP schedule is ~23 doses by year one—a proxy for national intent for hyper vaccination.
This paper has all the limitations of an ecological analysis where individual child record information is not available. The exact configuration of specific vaccines and causes of death are not specified. Thus we can only conclude from this study that “less is more” and countries should consider a risk stratified approach. The two main neonatal vaccines, hepatitis B and BCG should be reconsidered altogether according to individual risk of hepatitis B and tuberculosis, respectively.
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
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• The War You Don’t See: Why Propaganda… 
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