Japan Outraged Over US Release of Toxic Water in Okinawa
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 04.09.2021
In April, Japan’s neighbours expressed outrage in over Tokyo’s plans to release 1.23 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater from a storage facility at destroyed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean. Japanese authorities have insisted that the wastewater is safe, but environmental groups have contested such claims.
China Global Television Network (CGTN), a Beijing-based English-language TV news service, has poked fun at Japanese authorities over the apparent hypocrisy shown by Tokyo when it comes to the dumping of hazardous wastewater.
In recent weeks, Japanese media, government officials and environmental activists have been up in arms over plans by US forces in Okinawa to dump potentially dangerous chemicals into the local sewage system.
The scandal began to gather steam in June, when the Pentagon reported the leakage of water containing toxic materials from a US Army storage facility in Uruma and other locations across the strategically situated islands. In July, the US military informed Okinawa authorities of plans to release treated but potentially hazardous wastewater to prevent the danger of another leak.
The US military insisted that the wastewater was treated to Japanese government standards and safe to drink, and began dumping it into the local sewage system on 26 August. The water was known to contain trace concentrations of organofluorine compounds, including perfluorooctanesulfonic acid and perfluorooctanoic acid. Scientific studies have indicated that these chemicals can affect the health of wildlife, with the potential to cause reduced immunoglobulin levels and brain asymmetry in offspring, and to result in increased risk of chronic kidney disease and other ailments among humans. The chemicals’ resistance to natural breakup and tendency to accumulate in organisms have led them to be dubbed “forever chemicals.” Japan banned the production of the acids in 2010, and established strict guidelines on safe levels of the substances of less than 50 nanograms per liter of water last year.
The US military informed Japanese authorities of their plans to dump the chemical-laced water less than an hour before starting, and insisted that their wastewater contained less than 2.7 nanograms of the acids.
Okinawa authorities had asked for an immediate halt to the dumping, but the US military apparently ignored their protest, releasing at least 64,000 liters of the potentially toxic wastewater into the sewage system, with the water then dumped into the ocean due to the system’s inability to treat it. Before proceeding with the dump, US forces turned down a local company’s offer to treat the water, deeming it prohibitively expensive.
At a news conference organized on the day the water was dumped, Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki expressed outrage over the release of the contaminated water. “I feel strong outrage that the US military unilaterally dumped the water even while they knew that discussions were proceeding between Japan and the United States on how to handle the contaminated water,” he said.
Last week, Japan’s national authorities formally intervened, with Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi issuing a strong protest and saying that US Marines’ decision to dump the water was “extremely regrettable.”
“Local residents are feeling very anxious,” Koizumi complained, while promising to work with the relevant ministries and Okinawa authorities “to ensure this is handled in an appropriate manner, as well as reconfirm the details with the United States.”
In a separate statement, Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi said that he had asked US forces to please stop dumping any more contaminated water.
Environment Ministry and Defence Ministry officials visited Okinawa this past week to discuss the problem, offering a rare public apology to Masanori Matsugawa, the mayor of Ginowan, Okinawa, the city potentially most heavily affected by the dumping. “We extend our deepest apology,” Makoto Ikeda, the head of the Defence Ministry’s environmental policy division told Matsugawa. “We also consider it extremely regrettable that the water was dumped so suddenly,” he added.
Chinese Media: ‘What goes around comes around’
China’s CGTN poked fun at the Japanese government over the calamity on Saturday, tweeting a political cartoon showing a Japanese man nonchalantly dumping nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, and then complaining as a Marine is pictured dumping hazardous water into Okinawa’s sewage system.
No Animal Studies for the Vaccines
By Martin Armstrong | ArmstrongEconomics | September 2, 2021
I find it extremely unbelievable that nobody will investigate this entire scam for what it is. The people behind the vaccines should be dragged in to testify what is going on. Moderna has admitted it took them only 2 days to create the vaccine. In Texas, they are trying to launch a criminal investigation. The FDA is no longer trustworthy, for the normal time to get anything approved is 12 years. What has been released in less than one year with no animal studies? There has been NO TESTING to determine side effects on pregnancy, fertility, or lactation.
It is just stunning that we have politicians REFUSING to look at anything, probably because they are too busy counting their bribes. The White House said under NO condition would they ever fire Fauci, meaning under NO condition will they investigate anyone.
Meanwhile, even the notorious corrupt Snopes had to admit this is TRUE. Despite demanding everyone gets vaccinated, the White House said its own staff DOES NOT need to be vaccinated provided they are routinely checked. So why is the White House the entire exception? Even the military is demanding 100% compliance. Meanwhile, the White House has demanded everyone else receive vaccinations or lose their job.
The fact that they have skipped animal trials is very disturbing. When the government is part of the conspiracy against the public, we will NEVER know the truth about anything. Jack Dorsey has been especially protective of the narrative. Nobody is allowed to question the government no matter what.
Then there are studies revealing that natural immunity to COVID is 13 times better than the vaccines. They try to bury such studies, and they also try to ensure that they are not peer-reviewed in order to discredit them. The Science journalist Alex Berenson was permanently suspended from Twitter one day after his tweets that reported an Israeli study that making this finding that natural immunity from a prior Covid-19 infection is 13 times more effective than vaccines against the delta variant. Twitter is now acting against the very basis of free speech, which is threatening people’s lives. I would love to see Twitter taken down, for they are clearly now responsible for the deaths of many people from vaccine injuries.
To show that this is one giant cover-up, OSHA has instructed employers NOT TO REPORT vaccine injuries suffered by employees if they only “recommend” the shots. Many employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Nobody should volunteer to be vaccinated to satisfy an employer, for you will not be covered for any injury or loss of pay, and you could be fired for not showing up to work for a period of time. However, if employers mandate vaccines to work, then the vaccine injuries should become subject to reporting, lawsuits, and workman’s comp claims.
Putin doesn’t have online accounts & thinks there are better uses of his time than posting on Twitter or Facebook
RT | September 2, 2021
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin isn’t active online because he doesn’t have enough time to post, scroll and click, the Kremlin has revealed, saying he has rejected the idea of having an aide manage public profiles on his behalf.
Speaking to journalists at the Eastern Economic Forum on Thursday, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, revealed the Russian leader thinks there are better uses of his time than setting up an account on Twitter or Facebook. “Putin himself does not use social networks,” the Kremlin official said, chalking the decision up to pressures on his diary.
However, there is apparently no question about deputizing the job to an adviser. “He does not want anyone to do it for him,” Peskov said. “He considers it wrong.”
In 2017, taking questions at a meeting with especially-gifted children, Putin said there was no slot in his day for social media. “My working days are so busy and finish so late at night that I am not in the mood for Instagram,” he said. “All I think about is to get to bed to sleep,” the president added.
However, he warned that there are numerous satirical and fake accounts set up in his name. “I have nothing to do with any of them. Just beware of that. So, everything that is written on my behalf is not me,” Putin said.
A prolific social media user, Former President Donald Trump is estimated to have tweeted more than 25,000 times during his presidency, before tech giants, including Twitter, banned him from the service in the wake of protesters storming Washington’s Capitol building in January.
Top Misinformation Article Attributed to Chicago Tribune
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 2, 2021
According to Facebook’s content transparency report for the first quarter of 2021, released in mid-August 2021, the most popular article shared on the platform between January 2021 and March 2021 was about a 56-year-old Miami, Florida, obstetrician who died two weeks after his first Pfizer injection.1
The story initially ran in the South Florida Sun Sentinel 2 April 8, 2021, and was republished by the Chicago Tribune that same day.3 The doctor, Dr. Gregory Michael, received his first dose December 18, 2020.
Three days later, he developed small spots on his hands and feet, which prompted him to go to the emergency room, where they found he had an abnormally low blood count. Platelets stop bleeding by clotting, and when platelets drop too low, internal bleeding can occur, resulting in what looks like blood blisters on the skin.
Michael remained in intensive care for two weeks, but no matter what they did, his platelet count refused to budge. During the night of January 3, 2021, he died of a massive stroke. According to the coroner, the COVID injection could not be ruled out as a contributing or causative factor.
In a Facebook post, Michael’s widow stated he’d been “very healthy” and that he’d been a COVID-19 vaccine advocate. His death caused her to question the safety of the shot, however.
“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happen, that the vaccine is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family and has affected so many people in this community.” she wrote. “Please do not let his death be in vain please save more lives my making this information news.”4
Even Viral Content Has Minor Reach
According to The New York Times,5 Facebook held off on publishing the first-quarter report for fear the findings might “look bad for the company.” Executives decided they wanted to make some “key fixes to the system” before releasing it. That’s why it wasn’t published until August.
Interestingly, the report reveals that even when something goes viral, the total number of views is still a tiny fraction of the overall content. Even the biggest accounts make up but a small portion of overall content views. Combined, the top 20 accounts with the most views during the first quarter — which included UNICEF, The Dodo and LADbible — accounted for only 1.18% of all U.S. content views.
As noted in the report, this “shows that, even though it may seem like a page or post has extensive reach on the platform, that isn’t the case when measured against the total amount of content available on the platform.”
Facebook Calls Out CCDH for Manufacturing ‘Faulty Narrative’
As you may know, an obscure one-man organization funded by dark money called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has published several reports, including “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,”6 “The Disinformation Dozen”7 and “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”8 in which the founder, Imran Ahmed — an unregistered foreign agent — claims to have identified the top most influential “anti-vaxxers” in the U.S.
In a completely unexpected turn of events, Facebook is now calling out the CCDH for having manufactured a faulty narrative without evidence against the 12 individuals targeted in its reports (myself included).9
This is important, seeing how the CCDH reports have been the primary “reference” source of authority used by media and government officials to smear, threaten and infringe on American citizens’ right to free speech.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security even lists promulgating “false narratives” around COVID-19 as a top national security threat, which basically puts a “domestic terrorist” target on the backs of those of us who have been identified by the CCDH as the most prolific “superspreaders” of COVID misinformation.
As reported by GreenMed Info :10
“Google now shows an astounding 84,700 search results for CCDH’s defamatory phrase ‘disinformation dozen. ’Amazingly, this includes 16,000 news stories within the international press, approximately 100% of which are word-for-word amplifications of CCDH’s claims/defamatory statements and reported uncritically as fact.
In addition, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and president Biden all used CCDH’s report as the sole source for their own defamatory accusations, reaching a dangerous rhetorical climax on July 20th when Biden stated that these 12 individuals are literally “killing people” [by spreading misinformation].”
No Evidence to Support ‘Misinfo Superspreader’ Claim
In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, sets the record straight, and in the process, demolishes the CCDH’s claims:11
“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 …
That said, any amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards — and we have removed over three dozen Pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts linked to these 12 people, including at least one linked to each of the 12 people, for violating our policies.
We have also imposed penalties on nearly two dozen additional Pages, groups or accounts linked to these 12 people, like moving their posts lower in News Feed so fewer people see them or not recommending them to others. We’ve applied penalties to some of their website domains as well so any posts including their website content are moved lower in News Feed.
The remaining accounts associated with these individuals are not posting content that breaks our rules, have only posted a small amount of violating content, which we’ve removed, or are simply inactive.
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.”
It’s worth restating the key point in this quote: Combined, the top 12 individuals and organizations identified by the CCDH as being responsible for a whopping 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, are in fact only responsible for 0.05% of vaccine-related content — 1,460 times lower than the CCDH’s outrageous claim. That’s no small discrepancy.
CCDH Claims Blasted as Unjustified and Biased
Bickert goes on to refer directly to the CCDH report “The Disinformation Dozen,”12 stating:
“The report13 upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.
They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook.
Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”
CCDH Meets Definition of ‘Hateful Extremists’
Ironically, while the CCDH claims to “counter hate” online, and Ahmed sits on the Steering Committee of the U.K. Commission on Countering Extremism, CCDH itself actually meets the Commission’s definition of hateful extremists.14 In the 2019 Commission document, “Challenging Hateful Extremism,” the term is defined as:15
“Behaviours that can incite and amplify hate, or engage in persistent hatred, or equivocate about and make the moral case for violence; And that draw on hateful, hostile or supremacist beliefs directed at an out-group who are perceived as a threat to the wellbeing, survival or success of an in-group; And that cause, or are likely to cause, harm to individuals, communities or wider society.”
In addition, in the forward of the report, lead commissioner Sara Khan notes that “Hateful extremists seek to restrict individual liberties and curtail the fundamental freedoms that define our country.”
All of these definitions and clarifications of what hateful extremism is fit the CCDH to a T. Ahmed manufactured data to create a false narrative that 12 individuals pose a threat to the well-being and survival of the whole world, and then used that narrative to incite hate against us and curtail our freedom of speech.
Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers?
In related news, the self-appointed arbiter of factual truths, NewsGuard, has had to backpedal in recent months and issue dozens of corrections to “fact checks” in which they’ve labeled the Wuhan lab leak theory as a debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.
Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, NewsGuard has wrongly down-rated 225 websites for articles mentioning the lab leak theory.16 In reality, there’s far more evidence to support the lab leak theory than any other theory, but it took over a year before the weight of this evidence became too obvious for the media to ignore.
NewsGuard’s erroneous fact checks were recently highlighted in an August 11, 2021, report by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).17
AIER decided to take a closer look at NewsGuard after receiving a request for comments on a NewsGuard fact check article regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration — a statement written by public health experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford that calls on government to implement focused protection rather than lockdowns and self-isolation. AIERS investigation found that:18
“… NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate.
NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary — particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic — reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content.
Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites … NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as ‘experts’ on the subject in question.
Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word … many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods.
By selectively curating cherry-picked political authorities rather than evaluating evidence directly, NewsGuard’s approach to fact-checking effectively sidesteps the scientific method. This strategy is rendered even more problematic by the general lack of scientific expertise within NewsGuard’s team of writers.
We examined the educational credentials, including the highest degree listed, for 28 publicly identified staff members on NewsGuard’s website. The company’s staff page reveals shockingly little expertise in either the hard sciences such as medicine or social sciences such as public policy, economics, and related fields …
Most NewsGuard articles on Covid-19 topics and policies are written by [NewsGuard Deputy Editor for Health, John] Gregory, whose only identified qualification is a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts … Gregory would not qualify as an expert in most of the fields he is responsible for fact-checking …
Of course, non-experts have every right to offer opinions on scientific and social-scientific matters. Whether or not they should be taken seriously as fact checkers or act as arbiters of scientific disputes is another question entirely.”
NewsGuard Staff by Field and Highest Degree Attained
NewsGuard Apologizes for Erroneous Fact Checks
After being confronted about its erroneous fact checks on the lab leak theory, NewsGuard offered the following apology in a statement sent to AIER:19
“NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false.
NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”
AIER commented on the apology:20
“Gregory and his colleagues appear to have simply decided that their own premature dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis equated to ‘fact’ and proceeded to penalize other sites not for factual errors, but rather for diverging from NewsGuard’s own editorial position on the same subject.
When this position turned out to be mistaken, NewsGuard pivoted to remove the errors — albeit in non-transparent ways that downplay the significance or pervasiveness of their mistake.”
NewsGuard Fails to Fulfill Its Own Credibility Criteria
In their report, AIER goes on to apply the criteria NewsGuard uses to evaluate a website’s credibility to NewsGuard itself. It’s ranking? A paltry 36.25 out of 100. According to AIER:21
“This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate …
When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags.”
The NewsGuard ratings are meant to influence the reader, instructing them to disregard content with cautionary colors and cautions. That it would serve as the thought police of the technocratic establishment that seeks to silence dissent and bury information that doesn’t help move the Great Reset agenda forward is no surprise.
Especially considering its primary startup capital came from Publicis Groupe,22 a PR group that represents most of Big Pharma, including vaccine makers, and Big Tech. NewsGuard is also backed by Microsoft23 and Google.
The Publicis Groupe has been manipulating what people think about commercial products for nearly a century. Over that century, this advertising and communications firm bought or partnered with targeted advertising avenues, beginning with newspapers, followed by radio, TV, cinema and the internet.
With revenue avenues secured, Publicis’ clients and partners built a global presence that dominated the advertising world. Be it tobacco or sugar, Publicis Groupe found a way to promote and strengthen big industries. Publicis was recently sued24 for its deadly and illegal marketing of Purdue Pharma’s opioid products.
When you consider that Publicis describes its business model approach as putting clients and their needs and objectives at the center of all they do so their clients can “win and grow,” it’s easy to see what’s driving NewsGuard.
Overall, NewsGuard is just another big business aimed at keeping the chemical, drug and food industries, as well as mainstream media, intact by discrediting and eliminating unwanted competitors and analysts who empower you with information that runs counter to any given industry’s agenda.
If you’re as disturbed by censorship as I am, be sure to contact your local library today to find out if they’re one of the more than 700 libraries using NewsGuard. If they are, then ask them if they’re aware of NewsGuard’s censorship of truthful news that is now encroaching on scientific freedom and threatening the very roots of our democracy.
If your local library is using NewsGuard, it would be helpful to start a campaign to get it removed. Contact your neighbors and let them know what is happening so they can kick out this public health threat. Likewise, whenever you see someone referencing reports by the CCDH, call them out on it.
Sources and References
- 1 USA Today August 23, 2021
- 2 Sun Sentinel April 8, 2021
- 3 Facebook Heidi Neckelmann
- 4 Chicago Tribune April 8, 2021
- 5 New York Times August 20, 2021 (Archived)
- 6 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF)
- 7, 12, 13 CCDH, The Disinformation Dozen
- 8 Misinformation Dozen: The Sequel
- 9, 11 Facebook August 18, 2021
- 10 GreenMed Info August 19, 2021
- 14 Greenmed Info March 25, 2021
- 15 Challenging Hateful Extremism 2019
- 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 AIER August 11, 2021
- 22 Washington Post March 3, 2018
- 23 axios.com August 23, 2018, NewsGuard Launches First Product With Help From Microsoft
- 24 Reuters May 6, 2021
Supporting Doctors’ Rights To Speak, Free From Censorship
doctors4covidethics.org
Dr. Paul Oosterhuis is an Australian anaesthetist with over thirty years experience, including in critical care and resuscitation, who urgently needs your support.
He is facing a hearing by the Medical Board of NSW for posting information on social media regarding COVID-19. His posts related to early treatment and prophylaxis, PCR tests, and risk-benefit calculations regarding COVID-19 vaccination and lockdowns (scroll down for details). His hearing is on September 3rd. Please help him by signing and sharing this petition.
We are practicing doctors and allied health professionals and/or scientists and academics and/or members of the public and/or represent professional organisations. We support the right of Dr Oosterhuis, and that of all doctors, to offer informed medical opinions on COVID-19 and to discuss the available evidence on COVID-19 interventions.
As doctors we too have advised and continue to advise patients and the general public about the medical management of COVID-19 disease and vaccination on the basis of good science. As members of the public we reserve the right to receive honest information, opinion and advice from our doctors, free from government interference.
From Dr Oosterhuis:
Dear colleagues and concerned citizens,
Thank you for taking the time to read this petition.
My name is Dr Paul Oosterhuis. I am an anaesthetist from Australia. I have been called before the NSW Medical Board for a hearing on September 3rd 2021 following anonymous complaints about my social media posts on Facebook regarding COVID-19. I have been advised by the Medical Council that:
“The Medical Council of NSW received two anonymous notifications regarding your activity on social media.
Due to the concerns outlined in the notifications the Council has resolved to convene proceedings under section 150 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (NSW) to consider whether any action is required for the protection of the health and safety of the public or in the public interest.”
Ahead of the hearing I am seeking signatures from my medical and scientific colleagues and members of the public to help me defend my own and all doctors’ rights to offer our informed medical opinions, share our expertise, and engage in open discussion regarding COVID-19.
I am a Sydney University trained medical graduate. I undertook my internship and residency at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, followed by postgraduate training in Anaesthesia at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. I have more than 30 years of practice, the first 20 years involving hands-on critical care and resuscitation, and the last 10-plus years as a senior Visiting Medical Officer working in the Sydney Local Health District.
In the social media posts for which I face a Medical Board hearing, I discussed issues such as early treatment and prophylaxis against COVID-19, evidence for government measures such as lockdowns and PCR tests, and evidence regarding risk-benefit analyses of COVID-19 vaccines.
For example:
“I wish you could just add EARLY TREATMENT and drug PROPHYLAXIS …..Tell everyone to take Vit D, Zinc, and EARLY TREATMENT with IVM/ HCQ as evidence based medicine alternatives.”
I provided a link to a presentation by Dr Paul Marik on prophylaxis in support of the post, highlighting a chart of vitamin D versus risk of COVID from Dr Marik’s presentation, to illuminate the low hanging fruit of prophylaxis.
In other posts I questioned the evidence base for the government’s policies of lockdowns and mask mandates, and pointed out that there is evidence of vaccines having low effectiveness and real risks and harms (which are being suppressed), along with harms from the totalitarian lockdowns causing massive damage society-wide.
The risk of Antibody Dependent enhancement of disease, predicted by Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, driven by immune escape from the selective evolutionary pressure of vaccinating with a non sterilising agent is a real and present danger and needs to be discussed. The danger to millions is distressing to me, and discussing that danger is, I believe, unarguably in the public interest.
Early in 2020, I was active in criticising my medical administrators for failure to prepare for an outbreak such as COVID-19 when it was apparent that PPE was being rationed (P95’s were in short supply). I urged my colleagues to perform quantitative fit testing of our available P95 masks in early 2020 during which we found a surprising number of staff failed quantitative fit testing with the hospital issued PPE. This was something I had hypothesised after looking at the number of healthcare workers in Northern Italy catching the disease.
I withdrew from clinical practice last year out of concerns about the increasing incompetence of the health administrators and the rapidly reduced autonomy of doctors to just be able to be a doctor.
Over the last 18 months I have been increasingly concerned about the misinformation and censorship creeping into science and medicine. Fellow physicians were saving lives with early treatment and medication/supplement approaches to prevention but it was THIS that was attacked and censored! People like Dr Paul Marik, Dr Pierre Kory of the FLCCC Alliance, Dr Robert Malone, Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr Michael Yeadon, Dr Vlad Zelenko, Dr Chris Martensen, Dr Eric Weinstein and others are making credible and serious warnings about the gene therapy being coerced upon our populations.
Censoring their work, and the research of experts like Dr Tess Lawrie, Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Sucharit Bhakdi and America’s Frontline Doctors is dangerous.
The Medical Board of NSW is now using intimidation, threatening doctors like myself, who share data which questions the official narrative. I don’t believe that censorship is compatible with good science and good medicine, and I believe that it needs to stop now, in the name of public health and public interest.
I would be very grateful if you could help to support me in my effort to inform as many as possible about their true health choices. My hearing is in a matter of days.
While I wish I did not have to defend my right to speak truthfully as a doctor, the song and video below captures my attitude to fighting for that right. I hope you enjoy it.
With my most sincere thanks,
Dr Paul Oosterhuis
Australia
See also:
NZ Doctors Speaking Out with Science (petition)
The optimal diet for longevity and weight loss?
By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | August 29, 2021
It started with an experiment on locusts in 1991. David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson, two zoologists who were at the time doing research at Oxford University, wanted to know what would happen to locusts if they varied the relative proportions of protein and carbohydrate in their diets. They therefore conducted an experiment in which they fed locusts pellets containing varying proportions of protein and carbohydrate, and the results astounded them so much that they ended up determining the course of their research over the next thirty years, which they’ve chronicled in their book, Eat like the animals.
What Raubenheimer and Simpson found was that the locusts were not eating until they’d satisfied their overall need for calories. Rather they ate until they’d satisfied their need for protein, so that overall, all the locusts were consuming the same total amount of protein. This meant that the locusts on the high protein diet were consuming much less food overall than the locusts on the low protein diet. Consequently, the locusts on the high protein diet became extremely lean, while the locusts on the low protein diet became fat (which they describe in their book as equivalent to an overweight knight squeezing in to a suit of armour that is a few sizes too small).
This led Raubenheimer and Simpson to conclude that protein is the dominant macronutrient in terms of determining how much we eat – At least if we’re locusts. They wanted to see if the same pattern would be seen in other species. They started off with flies, and the results were similar, which was encouraging. But flies and locusts are relatively closely related, at least in the sense that they’re both insects. What Raubenheimer and Simpson really wanted to know was whether they’d stumbled on a general dietary principle, that could be applied to all animals.
For reasons of practicality, they next chose mice. Unlike locusts and flies, which subsist pretty much entirely on protein and carbs, mice also eat fat, so in order to get a full understanding of how macronutrients impact body composition, this variable also needed to be part of the experiment. Additionally, Raubenheimer and Simpson wanted to increase the scope of their research, to look not just at the effect of various macronutrient combinations on body composition, but also on longevity. They were also curious to see what effect differing levels of dietary fibre would have on the mice.
The experiment took five years to carry out. 856 mice were sorted in to 25 different groups, that were fed identical pellets but with varying compositions of protein, fat, carbs, and fibre. They were followed from birth to death. In terms of body composition, the results were largely as expected. The mice fed a high protein diet all became lean and muscular. When it came to the mice fed a high carb diet, however, there was more variation. Those on a high carb diet that was low in fibre grew fat, while those on a high carb diet that was high in fibre remained slim.
The fact that fibre mattered so much to the body composition of the mice on a high carb diet is interesting. It provides a reasonable explanation for why people in traditional agrarian societies usually aren’t fat, even though their diets are very high in carbohydrates, and for why the current obesity epidemic coincided with a massive increase in intake of processed foods that were rich in carbs but lacking in fibre. It also provides an explanation for why people are able to lose weight both on a paleo/carnivore/keto diet that is low in carbs, and on a vegan diet that is high in carbs but also high in fibre. Fibre appears to provide a kind of “get out of jail free” card that lets you consume lots of carbs without becoming fat.
What about fat? Fat was found to be neutral in terms of it’s effect on how much the mice ate. In other words, fat intake didn’t have any limiting effect on appetite, so the mice on a high fat low protein diet grew fat, just like the mice on a high carb low protein diet that was low in fibre. If this result were to apply also to humans (which is, of course, not necessarily the case), it would suggest that LCHF/keto diets don’t work because people are replacing carbs with fat, but rather because they’re replacing carbs with protein.
Ok, so we know how the various macronutrient combinations affected body composition. What about the effect on life span? Here, the results as presented in Eat like the animals surprised me. Alot. The longest lived mice, according to Raubenheimer and Simpson, were the ones following a high carb low protein diet. Whether they ate a high or low fibre diet didn’t seem to matter. So the fat high carb mice were actually living longer than the lean, muscular high protein mice!
Baffled by these results, I decided to go and take a look at the data, to confirm that they weren’t just trying to pull a fast one, as nutrition researchers so often do when presenting their research. Hidden away in the supplement to the published study, is this table:
Two things immediately jump out at me. The first is that the group with the longest median lifespan was on a 42% protein diet. Hardly low protein!
If instead of looking at the median lifespan, we look at the maximum, we get a different picture. We see that the extremely low protein mice did best. But their median lifespans were far more average. The authors have obviously based the claims in their book, and in their published research article, on the maximum lifespan, rather than the median. That is something I find very odd.
Personally, I assume I’m going to live an average amount of time for people like me, following my type of lifestyle. I don’t assume I’m going to be the outlier who lives to 120! The median provides a much better picture of the effect of a diet on a group than the maximum lifespan seen in a few individuals.
Apart from that, they’ve chosen an odd definition of maximum life span. They’ve defined it as the top 10% with the longest life span in each group. Which is suspicious. Why the top 10% rather than just the top individual, which would be the more common way to define “maximum”? And why not the top 20%? Or top 30%? The definition really seems to have been chosen specifically because it gave the desired result, which is what is usually referred to as “torturing the data”.
I can only imagine that they chose to base their claims on their odd definition of the maximum rather than on the more appropriate median because the maximum showed a picture more in line with their own biases, possibly shaped by an environmental or animal rights agenda, or by the fact that it’s easier to get research published if it feeds in to the dominant dogmas.
The second thing that jumps out from the table is that the mice eating a high fibre diet (i.e. with a low energy density) lived much shorter lives than the other mice. That is by far the biggest difference, much bigger than any difference induced by varying protein or carb concentrations. Does this mean fibre is deadly and should be avoided it like the plague?
Well, no. The pellets that the mice were fed only contained one fibre, cellulose, which is hardly representative of the full spectrum of fibres that exist in real food. So it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from this about the effects of fibre on longevity. What we can say is that cellulose appears to be toxic to mice.
Next, I took the data from the table and re-tabulated it in a form that would allow for easier analysis of the data, which you can see here:
So what we see is that the low protein mice do appear to live the longest, but the differences between the groups are small and hardly linear. The difference between the 5% protein mice and the 42% protein mice is only 2 weeks, equivalent to about a year and a half if translated to a human lifetime. Since there’s no evidence of a linear relationship between protein intake and life expectancy, it’s hard to say that that result isn’t just caused by chance.
If we move on to carbs, then it again isn’t clear that the high carb diet leads to a longer life. The longest lived group is actually the one consuming a moderate 29% carbs, and again, there is no evidence of a linear relationship. The same is also true for fats.
So overall, the claims the authors make about a high carb low protein diet resulting in the longest life expectancy don’t hold up to close inspection. They’ve tortured the data until they’ve gotten the result they want.
What can we conclude?
If you want to be lean, muscular, and beautiful, then you should eat a high protein diet. If you just want to lose weight and be slim, then you can either go high protein or high fiber, or do a combination of both.
Well, as long as you’re a lab mouse, that is. Whether all of this also applies to humans is harder to say for certain. The results from the experiments mentioned here and others have led Raubenheimer and Simpson to develop the “protein leverage hypothesis” of obesity, which basically states that the modern obesity epidemic is due to the fact that modern diets are lacking in protein and fibre. This has come to be one of three main hypotheses that try to explain the rise in obesity. The other two are the “carbohydrate-insulin model”, which argues that the rise in obesity is due to the high consumption of carbohydrates and their downstream effects on insulin levels and thus body fat storage, and the traditional “calories in vs calories out model”, which argues that the rise of obesity is due to the fact that modern foods taste too good and are too readily available while our lifestyles have become too sedentary. From my perspective, Raubenheimers and Simpson’s hypothesis is the one of the three that fits the known facts the best. Their book, Eat like the animals, is therefore well worth a read, even though the claims they make about diet and longevity are unsupported by the evidence they present.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
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