If we ignore all of the alarmist rhetoric in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers, the real nitty gritty lies in these four sections:
1) Extreme Rainfall
In fact there are only two areas with sufficient data:
a) Central North America
It is certainly true that rainfall has increased there during recent decades, but that is in comparison with the devastating droughts which used to affect the region up to the 1960s.
In other words, heavy rainfall there has been greatly beneficial.
b) Northern Europe (ie Scandinavia)
Where I strongly suspect it would make any real difference!
As for floods, this is what the as yet unpublished Full Report has to say:
So, some areas are experiencing more floods, and others less!
2) Droughts
Again, there are just two areas with sufficient data:
a) West North America
Since the mid 20thC, rainfall appears to have declined, but since the start of records in 1895, there is actually a slightly increasing trend in precipitation:
b) Mediterranean
This appears to be the only region where there is any confidence of a long term trend, and only medium confidence at that.
What is apparent is that the widespread drought shown in this section is at odds with the increased precipitation in the first section. It is also plainly nonsense to claim that drought is increasing in India, for instance, where we know monsoon rainfall has increased significantly since the disastrous droughts of the 1960s and 70s.
3) Tropical Cyclones
The strengthening of hurricanes in the last four decades is an effect of the AMO, as NOAA explain:
As the IPCC admit, they cannot find any longer term trends. Equally there is no actual evidence to back up claims of the heavier rainfall, which attribution studies allege is happening.
4) Sea Level Rise
I think the IPCC’s own chart highlights what a nonsense their projections are!
Conclusion
The reality is that our weather is no worse now than it was 150 years ago. Indeed I would strongly suggest that governments all around the world would be terrified if they were told we were going back to the climate Little Ice Age.
Think I’m kidding? This was exactly what scientists thought was going to happen during the global cooldown in the 1970s, and governments were genuinely alarmed.
All that is left in the IPCC report is a host of highly subjective projections of what might happen in the future.
The medical and scientific community and the world have known for 20 years that vaccines which only treat symptoms without terminating the virus result in more infectious and dangerous disease and higher overall deaths.
Abstract:
… Here we show that vaccines designed to reduce pathogen growth rate and/or toxicity diminish selection against virulent pathogens. The subsequent evolution leads to higher levels of intrinsic virulence and hence to more severe disease in unvaccinated individuals. This evolution can erode any population-wide benefits such that overall mortality rates are unaffected, or even increase, with the level of vaccination coverage. These findings have policy implications for the development and use of vaccines that are not expected to provide full immunity, such as candidate vaccines for malaria. …
~S Gandon 1 , M J Mackinnon, S Nee, A F Read, Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK.
In other words, this is the Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) and immune escape described by brave doctors and scientists who are being blocked by social and mainstream media and ignored by governments and others with sworn duty to protect public health.
You are not alone! As of 28 July 2021, 29% of Canadians have not received a COVID-19 vaccine, and an additional 14% have received one shot. In the US and in the European Union, less than half the population is fully vaccinated, and even in Israel, the “world’s lab” according to Pfizer, one third of people remain completely unvaccinated. Politicians and the media have taken a uniform view, scapegoating the unvaccinated for the troubles that have ensued after eighteen months of fearmongering and lockdowns. It’s time to set the record straight.
It is entirely reasonable and legitimate to say ‘no’ to insufficiently tested vaccines for which there is no reliable science. You have a right to assert guardianship of your body and to refuse medical treatments if you see fit. You are right to say ‘no’ to a violation of your dignity, your integrity and your bodily autonomy. It is your body, and you have the right to choose. You are right to fight for your children against their mass vaccination in school.
You are right to question whether free and informed consent is at all possible under present circumstances. Long-term effects are unknown. Transgenerational effects are unknown. Vaccine-induced deregulation of natural immunity is unknown. Potential harm is unknown as the adverse event reporting is delayed, incomplete and inconsistent between jurisdictions.
You are being targeted by mainstream media, government social engineering campaigns, unjust rules and policies, collaborating employers, and the social-media mob. You are being told that you are now the problem and that the world cannot get back to normal unless you get vaccinated. You are being viciously scapegoated by propaganda and pressured by others around you. Remember; there is nothing wrong with you.
You are inaccurately accused of being a factory for new SARS-CoV-2 variants, when in fact, according to leading scientists, your natural immune system generates immunity to multiple components of the virus. This will promote your protection against a vast range of viral variants and abrogates further spread to anyone else.
You are justified in demanding independent peer-reviewed studies, not funded by multinational pharmaceutical companies. All the peer-reviewed studies of short-term safety and short-term efficacy have been funded, organized, coordinated, and supported by these for-profit corporations; and none of the study data have been made public or available to researchers who don’t work for these companies.
You are right to question the preliminary vaccine trial results. The claimed high values of relative efficacy rely on small numbers of tenuously determined “infections.” The studies were also not blind, where people giving the injections admittedly knew or could deduce whether they were injecting the experimental vaccine or the placebo. This is not acceptable scientific methodology for vaccine trials.
You are correct in your calls for a diversity of scientific opinions. Like in nature, we need a polyculture of information and its interpretations. And we don’t have that right now. Choosing not to take the vaccine is holding space for reason, transparency and accountability to emerge. You are right to ask, ‘What comes next when we give away authority over our own bodies?’
Do not be intimidated. You are showing resilience, integrity and grit. You are coming together in your communities, making plans to help one another and standing for scientific accountability and free speech, which are required for society to thrive. We are among many who stand with you.
Angela Durante, PhD
Denis Rancourt, PhD
Claus Rinner, PhD
Laurent Leduc, PhD
Donald Welsh, PhD
John Zwaagstra, PhD
Jan Vrbik, PhD
Valentina Capurri, PhD
Despite all the heavy dissemination of narratives and talking points about a “climate emergency” and the “energy transition” during 2021, the ongoing economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic proves that the world still heavily relies on fossil fuels to provide its constantly growing energy needs. Indeed, as the pushers of Peak Oil demand theory try in vain to revive their own always-wrong narrative, it now appears that the world has yet to even meet the peak of demand for the least environmentally friendly fuel of all, coal.
This is especially true in China, India and much of Asia, where thousands of coal-fired power plants have seen record usage levels in the face of a major heat wave this summer. … Read more
Just to add to the fun, talking about peak oil and peak coal as if they are different targets is fundamentally wrong.
As the NAZIs proved in WW2, when they lost access to good oil fields, you can run an economy on coal liquefaction technologies, well proven technologies for converting coal into oil.
The only holdup is liquefied coal is more expensive than conventional oil, it doesn’t become economical until oil prices exceed $100 ($145 / barrel according to one estimate I saw). Though China runs a significant volume of coal liquefaction plants, those plants are likely more for high value added chemical synthesis than fuel oil.
The threat of cheaper coal liquefaction technologies is likely the real reason OPEC tries to keep oil prices low. OPEC are terrified of “demand destruction”, the possibility that high oil prices will stimulate a switchover to EVs, or more investment in developing non-OPEC oil resources, but they are also concerned it will stimulate research into cutting the cost of coal liquefaction. A coal liquefaction research breakthrough could permanently cap OPEC’s conventional oil at an uncomfortably low price.
So the reality is, there is zero chance we shall see peak oil supply in our lifetime, or even our grandchildren’s lifetime, not only because there are vast reserves of oil, but because there are centuries worth of coal reserves just sitting in the ground waiting to be mined. We shall all have a plentiful supply of oil at an affordable price, for as long as we need it.
All doctors (and probably most non-doctors) have heard of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a type of cancer found primarily in children living in malaria-endemic areas in Africa. Denis Burkitt was the first person to describe the disease, and also the first person to propose that there was an environmental cause (now known to be simultaneous infection by both malaria and Epstein-Barr virus).
Most doctors probably don’t know that Denis Burkitt is also almost single-handedly responsible for the now widespread belief that dietary fibre is an important part of a healthy diet. Interestingly, Burkitt developed his ideas about dietary fibre after corresponding with a less well known doctor called Thomas Cleave (who hasn’t been allowed to give his name to any diseases).
Cleave was interested in the connection between diet and disease, and had noticed how the transition from a traditional diet to a modern diet, rich in refined carbohydrates, was associated with a massive increase in a large number of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. He even wrote a book on the subject. Burkitt was introduced to Cleave in the late 1960’s by epidemiologist Richard Doll (himself famous for discovering that smoking causes lung cancer).
Burkitt was deeply affected by Cleave’s ideas, and in particular his conception that all the “diseases of civilization” had a single underlying cause, but he took the data and went off in a different direction with it. While Cleave believed that it was the refined carbohydrates in the modern diet that were causing harm, Burkitt came to believe instead that it was the absence of dietary fibre that was responsible. Since refined carbohydrates are by definition low in dietary fibre, the two things track together perfectly, and it becomes almost impossible to say from observational data which is the causative factor and which is the confounder.
There was a big fly in the ointment of Burkitt’s hypothesis from the start, however, and that was the fact that the Maasai tribespeople in Kenya and Tanzania, who lived on a diet consisting almost entirely of meat, milk, and blood, showed none of the diseases of modern civilization, even though they had virtually no fibre in their diet. Burkitt, who spent much of his career in Africa, was well aware of this fact, but seemingly chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit his hypothesis.
The world of nutrition was at this time (the late 1970’s) focusing increasingly on dietary fat as the cause of modern diseases (based on atrociously low quality evidence and forceful lobbying by diet-heart hypothesis originator Ancel Keys), and Cleave’s hypothesis was inconvenient, because telling people to cut down on both fats and carbohydrates wouldn’t work – people had to eat something. Burkitt’s fibre hypothesis could however be made to fit together with the diet-heart hypothesis without too much trouble. The two were thus wedded and came to dominate dietary advice for the next couple of decades.
That is how breakfast cereals came to be considered a health food, and why we’ve all been told to increase our intake of dietary fibre. Anyway, it’s now a couple of decades later. One would think that by now there would be plenty of data from actual randomized trials to tell us whether we should be eating more dietary fibre or not. Unfortunately we’re still to a large extent stuck with crappy and confounder-riddled observational studies that cannot separate the presence of refined carbohydrates from the absence of dietary fibre, and that therefore cannot actually say anything about what causes what.
The Cochrane Collaboration tried to do a systematic review and meta-analysis in 2016 to look at the state of the evidence when it comes to the ability of dietary fibre to prevent cardiovascular disease. They found 23 randomized controlled trials with a total of only 1,513 participants. Most of the studies ran for only 12 weeks (the minimum length of time the reviewers had set for inclusion in the review, since short term effects are meaningless from a public health standpoint), and the longest ran for only six months. That’s why I say they tried – there simply isn’t enough data to draw any firm conclusions about what effect dietary fibre has on cardiovascular disease risk. 1,513 people followed for a few months provides far too little data to be able to say anything certain.
With that being the case, the reviewers decided to look at surrogate markers for cardiovascular risk instead of looking at hard outcomes like heart attacks and deaths. In other words, they looked at blood lipids and blood pressure. They included trials of both dietary interventions (i.e. that had people eat more food rich in dietary fibre) and trials of fibre containing supplements. I prefer the fibre supplement trials, since the dietary intervention trials have the same confounding issue that the observational studies have – i.e. that an increase in intake of foods rich in dietary fibre virtually always also means a decrease in intake of foods rich in refined carbohydrates. The supplement trials are also at lower risk of bias, since they can be placebo-controlled and thereby blinded. But I’ll report what the diet modification studies showed too, for the sake of completeness. In total, there were fifteen fibre supplement trials and eight diet modification trials.
Let’s get to the results. The fibre supplements were associated with a marginal 0.04 mmol/L reduction in LDL (“bad cholesterol” – yes I know that description is dumb and technically incorrect) that was just about statistically significant. The effect was similar (0.03 mmol/L) in the diet modification trials. For an average person with an LDL of 4 mmol/L this would represent a reduction of just 1%, in other words nowhere near enough to be expected to have any noticeable impact on cardiovascular disease risk.
And LDL is anyway a poor predictor of risk of cardiovascular disease. A much better predictor is triglycerides. The fibre supplements were associated with a 0,03 mmol/L reduction in triglycerides (not statistically significant), while diet modification was associated with a 0,02 mmol/L increase in triglycerides (also not statistically significant). Considering that the average person has a triglyceride level of around 2 mmol/L, this amounts to no noticeable effect on triglycerides whatsoever (and when the supplement and diet modification trials were meta-analyzed together, the difference between high-fibre and low-fibre was exactly zero mmol/L).
When analyzing blood lipids, the final piece of the puzzle is HDL (“good cholesterol”). While you want LDL and triglycerides to be low, you want HDL to be high. Unfortunately, fibre was associated with a reduction in HDL – 0,04 mmol/L in the supplement trials and 0,03 mmol/L in the diet modification trials. Fortunately, that difference was again so small as to be utterly inconsequential.
Ok, so the overall picture is that fibre doesn’t meaningfully impact blood lipids one way or the other. What about blood pressure?
Both the supplement studies and the diet modification studies reported a 2 mmHg reduction in systolic blod pressure and a 2 mmHg reduction in diastolic blood pressure. Considering that the average person has a systolic blood pressure of around 130 and a diastolic blood pressure of 80, this again amounts to such a marginal difference that it’s not going to have any noticeable impact whatsoever on an individual’s risk of cardiovascular disease (in other words, the story when it comes to fibre is the same as the story when it comes to salt – the impact of diet change is far too small to have any noticeable impact on an individual’s heart disease risk).
So the evidence to support the notion that fibre is “heart healthy” is weak. Kellogg’s should definitely stop marketing bran flakes as a “heart healthy” food.
Fifty years ago, when Denis Burkitt started researching fibre and it’s possible health benefits, the first thing he focused on was it’s potential to prevent colon cancer. The notion that fibre might have a role in preventing colon cancer makes a lot more intuitive sense than the notion that it might prevent heart disease, for the simple reason that fibre doesn’t move from the intestine into the body proper (technically the contents of the intestine are considered to be outside the body), but fibre does have various effects on the intestine, not least of which is the fact that it interacts with the bacteria that reside in the colon.
Colon cancer is thus a good test case for the many claims made about dietary fibre’s health benefits. The Cochrane Collaboration carried out a systematic review in 2017 that looked at the ability of dietary fibre to prevent colon cancer. The review included randomized trials of people who had had polyps removed and that then followed them over time to see if they developed new polyps and/or colon cancer.
Colon cancer usually progresses in an orderly fashion, beginning as a polyp that over time (if you’re unlucky) progresses to full blown cancer, so studies that want to determine risk of colon cancer progression can usually get away with looking at whether new polyps develop rather than having to wait and see whether the participants develop cancer (which saves time and allows for shorter, smaller studies).
Five trials were identified, with a total of 4,798 participants. The average age of the participants was around 60 years at the start of the studies, and they were followed for two to four years. As with the heart disease studies, there was quite a bit of variation in terms of the intervention used, with four trials providing dietary supplements while one attempted diet modification. The trials were for the most part able to at least double people’s fibre intake.
Ok, let’s take a look at the results.
Over the course of follow-up, participants in the high fibre group were 4% more likely to develop at least one new polyp in their colon than participants in the control group, although the difference wasn’t statistically significant. Hmm. Odd. We’d have expected at least some signal of benefit. The trend definitely shouldn’t be towards harm.
But polyps are really just a surrogate marker, like blood pressure is when it comes to heart disease. What we really want to know is whether the high fibre diet protects against colon cancer. Two of the studies were big enough to provide data on this more meaningful outcome.
In these two studies, participants in the high fibre group were 170% more likely to develop colon cancer than participants in the control group. Yes, more. Not less. That difference was statistically significant. So… that’s strange. Admittedly, this result is based on a few thousand participants followed for a few years. It could be wrong. But what it means is that the highest quality evidence currently available suggests that a high fibre diet might actually increase your risk of colon cancer, not decrease it.
How do we square this finding with the observational data that shows a decrease in colon cancer risk with a high fibre diet? As mentioned, the observational data is heavily affected by confounding variables, not least of which is the fact that a high fibre diet usually means a diet low in refined carbohydrates. These results support the notion that Burkitt was wrong and Cleave was right – that the harms associated with a diet rich in refined carbohydrates are due to the presence of refined carbohydrates, not due to the absence of fibre.
So, what can we conclude from all this? Does fibre prevent the so-called “diseases of civilization”?
Well, maybe. That is certainly the impression you would get if you look at the observational data, which find a correlation between a low fibre diet and pretty much any chronic disease you care to look at. The randomized trials that have been done have however for the most part failed to show evidence of a benefit of increasing intake of dietary fibre.
Soon after World War II ended, the US military began building massive military bases in Europe and shipped families to Europe to accompany servicemen. These bases grew into American cities that are great fun, but very costly and reduce the readiness of units. Should war occur in Europe, military units there will remain dysfunctional for weeks until their families are safely back in the United States. This assumes children are not killed or maimed by missile or commando attacks since these bases would be the main enemy target during a war. Generals know this, but European tours are too much fun and those who profit from this racket have political clout to derail efforts at reform.
“Germany spent far less than other major allies on cost-sharing for US bases last year”; John Vandiver; Stars and Stripes; March 12, 2021; https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/g…
“Milley is right – the U.S. should reevaluate its military commitments”; Dan DePetris; Defense News; December 10, 2020; https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2…
It’s just two weeks. It’s just staying three feet apart. It’s just staying six feet apart. It’s just not going outside. It’s just not giving handshakes. It’s just working from home. It is just non-essential businesses that are closed.
It’s just bars. It’s just restaurants. It’s just theaters. It’s just concerts. It’s just dancing. It’s just intramural sports. It’s just choir.
It’s just non-essential medical services that you have to give up. It is just non-essential items that you are not allowed to buy. It’s just not being able to exercise. It’s just gyms. It is just the closure of your business for a while. It is just not making money for a while. It is just not being able to pay your bills for a little while.
It’s just a minor inconvenience. It’s just not being allowed to carpool. It’s just not socializing for a while. It’s just a mask. It’s just not traveling for a while. It’s just not hugging people for a while. It’s just missionary sex that is risky.
It is just not seeing your family and friends for a while. It’s just not visiting your grandparents temporarily. It’s just your grandparents not having visitors for their safety. It’s just one birthday you have to sacrifice. It’s just one Thanksgiving alone. It’s just one Christmas without your family. It’s just two birthdays you had to sacrifice. It is just not celebrating any milestones for a year and a half.
It’s just temporary. It’s just a safety measure. It is just your ability to pay cash. It is just contact tracing. It is just a health screening. It is just a temperature check. It is just a scan of your face. It’s just a minor loss of privacy.
It is just one semester. It is just two semesters. It is just one year out of your child’s life. It is just one more semester. It is just a high school graduation.
It’s just the birth of your grandchild that you missed. It is just not being able to be there for your relatives when they are ill or dying. It is just not having a funeral. It is just in person that you cannot grieve with your loved ones. It is just not getting to attend religious service. It is just not getting to practice some parts of your religion.
It is just misinformation that is being censored. It is just conservatives that are being censored. It is just some of the science that is being censored. It is just the people who have the opposing opinions that are banned online. It is just the opposition that the White House is targeting for censorship. It is just bad opinions that are being censored.
It’s just the economy. It is just small business owners who are suffering financially. It is just poor people who are suffering financially. It is just people of color who are suffering financially. It is just financial suffering. It is just a few small businesses that had to close permanently. It is just a few big businesses that closed.
It is just not going farther than a few kilometers from your house. It is just a curfew. It is just a permission slip. It is just being alone for two weeks. It is just being socially isolated for one year.
It is just one vaccine. It is just one set of booster shots. It is just regular booster shots every six months. It is just another two weeks. It is just one more lock-down. It is just once a week—twice tops—that you will have to prove that you are fit to participate in society. It is just the unvaccinated that will be segregated from society. It is just a medical test.
Pretty simple, no?
Just fucking do it.
But when you add up all the “justs,” it amounts to our entire lives.
For over a year and a half and counting, we have been robbed of the ability to live our lives fully, to make meaningful choices for ourselves, and to express our values the way we see fit.
It is “just” the inability to express our humanity and the total negation of our very selves. All of these measures have served as a prohibition of expressing outwardly one’s valid and complex internal reality. This kind of suppression of self does violence to one’s very soul.
All of these supposedly little and supposedly short-lived “justs” have transformed us into totalitarian states from which there appears to be no endpoint.
In New York City, California, Australia, etc., the people have permitted government such control over our daily lives that we have to ask it for permission to control our bodies, to move freely, to practice religion, to educate our children ourselves, to protest, etc.
Soon Biden, Trudeau, and other world leaders are going to clamp down on our ability to express ourselves and to associate with each other online so that we can no longer question, object to, or organize against government action. It is the destruction of democracy.
It astounds me that my Progressive friends — the same ones who claim to support “social justice” — are welcoming a fascist society in which government crushes any opposition and individuals cannot make choices about their own lives.
I will not comply because I do not want to live in the society that is being created by extraordinary submissiveness to government. I do not want to be complicit in this era’s atrocities.
What is the point of living if one merely exists to obey the elite to one’s own detriment? Is it even living if one lacks the agency to direct one’s life? I’ve already submitted in contradiction of my values to a shameful extent. One might say, “Well, what’s one more compromise,” but it won’t be just one more compromise. It will be just the next cut in a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Submitting only validates tyrannical displays of power and ensures that there will be more such displays in the future.
And what does one get for compromising? Merely your continued membership in a society that will only have you if you immolate yourself and become nothing more than a reflection of the desires of the ruling class.
If you cannot be truly yourself in a society, is that society worth clinging to? I think not. As much as leaving the stability of my comfort zone terrifies me, staying in it means continuing to silence and shrink myself for a disingenuous feeling of acceptance. In that way, it is more of a discomfort zone.
Each time I expressed my fears about the future direction of society, my friends said “it won’t happen.” Each time it did happen, they shrugged their shoulders and reminded me that compliance was an option.
At this point, if the government were to cart me away to an internment camp (which is not a completely far-fetched notion and which has happened in the past) for being a dangerous dissident I am certain that my friends and family would watch it happen and say it was my fault for not complying.
They are no longer capable of recognizing the humanity of the opposition or of questioning government.
I will not submit because I don’t want to live in a world in which my supposed allies would happily see me persecuted by the government.
I will not comply because the political climate has become so censorial, authoritarian, and generally toxic that my viewpoints will never be represented in the political process here. Without representation, my values and beliefs will be violated again and again by a polity that sees any deviation from itself as invalid. Thus, my compliance will provide zero assurance of any better treatment in the future.
I will not bend because I am not a conformist.
I will not give in because I do not want to reward government manipulation and coercion.
I will not surrender because I could die at any moment, and I do not want my final memories to be ones of craven submission to tyranny and the resultant misery and self-loathing.
I will not comply because it is not the government’s first intrusion on my body, mind, and spirit; and if we comply, it will definitely not be the last. All I will accomplish by my compliance is validating the government’s claim on my body and life.
I am not submitting because this is war, and I am not handing the enemy its victories.
I will not comply because the reward for compliance will still be being treated as a second class-citizen by society.
I won’t acquiesce because I am a conscientious objector.
I will not cede because the measures are unnecessary and the only practical effect will be to increase government power.
I don’t comply because I do not want to be a mere slave in the future version of the world they are creating, doing only what I am told to do and having to beg for access to the necessities of life that I am entitled to as a living being on this earth.
I will not yield because their religion is not my religion, and I refuse to worship a false idol.
I will not capitulate because I do not want to betray my ancestors and predecessors who fought for me to be free.
I will not surrender because freedom is more important than convenience and ease.
I will not comply because if I did I would be filled with rage against society, resentment towards my friends and family, and self-loathing that would eat me alive. I would become bitter and closed-hearted, and I don’t want that for myself.
All of this is why I won’t “just fucking do it.”.
Addison Reeves is a lawyer, political scientist, philosopher, and civil rights and civil liberties advocate based in New York. Addison critiques modern culture from a radical, leftist perspective at ModernHeretic.com or you can follow him on Telegram
Now that we’re more than a year into the pandemic, it’s crystal clear that the panic that ensued was unnecessary and the draconian measures put into place for public health were unwarranted and harmful.
John Tierney, a former reporter for The New York Times, looked back over the pandemic, providing a timeline of the media-induced viral panic that led to censorship and suppression of scientific research on an unprecedented scale.
In his article for City Journal, where he is a contributing editor, he explained that the “moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions” during the pandemic was far more catastrophic than the viral pandemic itself.
Media-induced panic set off in March 2020
The panic was started by journalists beginning in March 2020, when the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team released “Report 9” on the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPSs) to reduce deaths and health care demand from COVID-19.
The report’s computer model projected that intensive care units in the U.S. would be overrun, with 30 COVID-19 patients for every available bed, and 2.2 million dead by summer. They concluded that “epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time,” which led to lockdowns, business and school closures and population-wide social distancing. But as Tierney noted:
“What had originally been a limited lockdown — ‘15 days to slow the spread’ — became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world.
“A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?”
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, was an early critic of the response, who argued that long-term lockdowns could cause more harm than good. Ioannidis came under intense fire after he and colleagues revealed that the COVID-19 fatality rate for those under the age of 45 is “almost zero,” and between the ages of 45 and 70, it’s somewhere between 0.05% and 0.3%.
In Santa Clara County, in particular, he and colleagues estimated that in late March 2020, the local COVID infection fatality rate was just 0.17%. “But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets,” Tierney explained. “… Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns.”
Journals refused to publish solid, anti-narrative research
The discrediting and censorship of researchers who spoke out against the official narrative — even if they included supportive data — became a common and alarming theme over the last year, one that extended to virtually every aspect of pandemic-related policy, including masks.
The “Danmask-19 Trial,” published Nov. 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that among mask wearers 1.8% (42 participants) ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% (53) among controls. When they removed the people who reported not adhering to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8% (40 people), which suggests adherence makes no significant difference.
Initially, numerous research journals refused to publish the results, which called widespread mask mandates into question. Tierney said:
“When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against COVID, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as ‘as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.’
“After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.”
A similar experience was had by Dr. Stefan Baral, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist with 350 publications, who wanted to publish a critique of lockdowns. It became the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he told Tierney.
Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff also wrote a paper against lockdowns and couldn’t get it published, noting that most other scientists he spoke to were also against them but were afraid to speak up.
Kulldorff and colleagues soon banded together to write the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for “focused protection” of the elderly and those in nursing homes and hospitals, while allowing businesses and schools to remain open. Soon after, they too were attacked:
“They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly ‘let it rip’ strategy and an ‘ethical nightmare’ from ‘COVID deniers’ and ‘agents of misinformation.’”
Physicians targeted, labeled heretics
Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford’s Hoover Institution was another common target, as he also suggested that protections should be focused on nursing homes and lockdowns would take more lives than COVID-19. According to Tierney:
“When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as ‘this Stanford guy with no background’ promoting ‘crackpot theories.’ Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his ‘falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,’ and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.
“The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as ‘anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.’”
Similarly, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, which regulates the practice of medicine in Ontario, issued a statement in May prohibiting physicians from making comments or providing advice that goes against the official narrative.
Actor Clifton Duncan shared the Orwellian message on Twitter, urging his followers to “Read this. Now. And then share it as much as you can.”
Because, equally as disturbing as the notion of publicly dictating to physicians what they’re allowed to say, is the fact that, as Duncan said, the statement has a glaring omission, “The health and well-being of the patient.”
Florida’s mortality rate from COVID lower than average
Certain states have stood out for their refusal to buy into the draconian public health measures that were adopted throughout much of the U.S. Florida is chief among them. After a spring 2020 lockdown, Florida business, schools and restaurants reopened, while mask mandates were rejected.
“If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy,” Tierney said, noting that the state acted as the control group in a natural experiment. The results speak for themselves:
“Florida’s mortality rate from COVID is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted COVID mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of ‘excess mortality’ (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average.
“Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from COVID but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.”
The crisis crisis
It defies reason how so many government, academic and policy leaders could support rampant censorship and suppress scientific debate for so long, all while propagating panic. One of Tierney’s explanations is what he calls “the crisis crisis,” or the “incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”:
“It’s a longstanding problem — humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the ‘population crisis’ and the ‘energy crisis’ — that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks and retweets.
“To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding and power during a crisis.
“Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded.”
The politicization of research is another major issue that contributes to groupthink and the suppression of scientific debate in order to support one agenda. Meanwhile, while the media advertised that we’re all in this pandemic together, some were clearly more affected than others — namely the poor and less educated, who lost jobs while professionals were mostly able to keep working from the “safety” of their homes.
Children from disadvantaged families also suffered the most from year-long school closures. “The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world,” Tierney wrote, while many of the elitegot richer. The reality is, lockdowns have caused a great deal of harm, from delays in medical treatment and disrupted education to joblessness and drug overdoses, and for little, if any, benefit.
Data compiled by Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics (PANDA) also found no relationship between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths per million people. The disease followed a trajectory of linear decline regardless of whether or not lockdowns were imposed. Yet, this is the type of information that has been censored from the beginning. As Tierney put it:
“This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow ‘the science’ to know what they’re talking about.”
Fauci is asked about his ideal drug for Covid. And he lists these characteristics as his “Optimal Profile:”
a pill that blocks a viral function
oral, not injected
minimal drug-drug interactions
use for 7–10 days
low toxicity
He points out you should:
“take it early in the disease” and
“if you can keep that virus from going down into the lungs and to other organ systems, you can change that disease to a common cold type approach. We only need to knock out that virus for 7-10 days.”
Folks, the ship is turning. Sad to say, too many died waiting. And Fauci the money man is not going to shill for a drug his agency can’t patent. He’ll instead extract more taxpayer money in a vain attempt to find this perfect drug–which a pharmacist just refused to dispense to a patient of mine, no doubt in part due to Fauci’s criminal machinations.
But what will happen is that the concept of early treatment–not waiting it out–will enter the public consciousness. And some people will realize there is already a drug out there that can be used early.
While now Israel is saying 85-90% of those hospitalized with Covid (in a huge wave) were vaccinated. And 95% of those with severe disease are vaccinated. Israeli TV yesterday:
Should we trust people who claim to be speaking in the name of science?
Someone on Twitter just posted this, thinking himself profound:
“If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.”
Saifedean Ammous, a great friend of the Tom Woods Show, wasn’t about to let this stand.
Before going any further, let me add this: after the past 18 months, I think the dangers and absurdities of scientism have become clear enough.
“Science” does not and is not intended to have the answers to all questions. It does not and cannot tell us what we should value, what our priorities should be, whether certain behaviors are morally acceptable or indeed required, etc.
Staring longingly at men in white coats, seeking the meaning of life, is superstition of the worst kind.
Not to mention: the standard story of how science progresses is completely wrong. We do not move forward because government-subsidized men in lab coats play around in laboratories doing “basic science” untainted by mundane concerns.
It is generally men of action who actually do the work.
Now for Saifedean:
The Wright brothers and a century of airplane builders were engineers. Scientists first dismissed flight as impossible even after it happened, then made up a bunch of irrelevant equations to pretend to explain how it happened.
Everything that matters to our modern life was built by engineers and workers who got their hands dirty. Scientists sat in cushy universities writing textbooks after the fact indoctrinating generations to think it was their post-hoc explanations that built things.
Lord Kelvin was one of the world’s most important scientists when airplanes were invented. This is what he thought:
“I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning, or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we heard of.”
Astronomer and polymath Simon Newcomb in 1903:
“Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.”
This was the same year in which the Wright Brothers, two bicycle shop owner high school dropouts, built the first working airplane.
Three years after the Wright Brothers flew, The London Times dismissed their claims of flight as fake, and was instead writing:
“All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.”
The first commercial steam engine was invented by Simon Newcomen, a barely literate ironmonger who had never come in contact with a scientist. James Watt was a technician, not a scientist, and explicitly denied that any scientific theories influenced his invention.
The scientific method is practiced by engineers building things, experimenting to see what works. Professional science consists mostly of nerds quibbling over each other’s irrelevant papers and agreeing they all need more funding.
Nothing in science needs trust. I don’t trust anyone to get in an airplane. I look at the track record of airplanes and decide the risks are acceptable given the benefits. “Trust science” is how you end up with billions of lives destroyed over virus hysteria.
I love Saifedean.
The real story of science, again, is something like the opposite of what we’ve been told. Not to mention: countries that heavily subsidized science in the nineteenth century lagged behind the UK, which spent no government money.
I tell the story in my 2011 book Rollback, but the classic treatment is Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.
At Liberty Classroom, my dashboard university, we don’t go in for cutesy myths about how the world works. We tell the un-p.c. truth, every time.
Since the Government of Quebec under Premier François Legault decided to jump the gun today and announced the coming of “vaccine” certification on September 1st, possibly in response to the opposition’s demand for always harsher measures, I decided to post these extracts from my larger work earlier than planned. As always, the imitation of Americans is instant in Canada—this comes in the same week that New York City imposed its own “vaccine” certification system. In fact the Liberal Party in opposition added a cruel and perverse twist to the naming of the vaccine passport, calling it a “Freedom Passport”. Without the passport, no freedom, hence the indefinite suspension of the constitutional rights of a select group of Canadians, discriminated against on the basis of their health status. This must also mean that workers in “non-essential services” (does that include political parties?) will be mandated to get injected, or else be fired. A “vaccine passport” is thus also mandatory “vaccination” at the same time. Bruised by many months of lockdowns, private businesses are required to not only collaborate with the state, and agree to reduce their revenue by refusing customers, they also agree to be effectively deputized as the state’s auxiliary police service. Where under Canadian law it is stated that citizens are required to involuntarily divulge their private health information to strangers, it is not known, nor did Legault at any point cite any legal support (let alone scientific support) for this measure. We need to further analyze this obvious slide into full-fledged dictatorship, which uses a “pandemic” as a convenient cover and as a gold mine for imposing always more authoritarian measures.
Health Discrimination in Quebec
The Government of Quebec began planning to penalize the “vaccine hesitant,” by removing from them the freedom to access “non-essential services,” as defined by the government (Manitoba is also following). This is clearly a case of shaming and stigmatizing, and the invention of a threat from those who are officially libelled as a dangerous Other. Having invented a vaccine passport (in the works for several months), for which at first the government claimed there was no use, now the government reveals its intended use: to segregate the public and pressure people to allow themselves to be injected, preemptively blaming them for any rise in “cases” given spreading variants (to which the vaccinated are also clearly vulnerable, and which they can spread). The passports, using QR codes, were easily hacked in a trial, thus the system would further breach person’s private data. The federal government of Canada has not gone so far—since vaccine passports are discriminatory, divisive, and force people to reveal their personal health data—but is reportedly considering mandatory vaccination for all federal employees. Quebec Premier Legault, citing the flimsiest of evidence of increased infections (blamed on the unvaccinated, without any evidence) announced on August 5, 2021, that “vaccine passports” would indeed go into effect on September 1st. The “science” behind this, needless to say, is more akin to magic.
There has also been resistance to vaccine passports internationally, not just on the streets of Europe in massive weekly protests that the media refuse to cover, but also from the WHO. In the UK a parliamentary committee concluded that the scientific case for certification has not been made, that passports are discriminatory on prohibited grounds for discrimination, that there are valid concerns for privacy and data protection, and that such passports have “the potential to cause great damage socially and economically”. However, as noted by the Security and Policing Subgroup that advises the UK government, “Once the majority of the population is vaccinated, the exclusion of individuals who refuse vaccination may have public support” (SPI-B, “Lifting Restrictions: Security and Policing Implications,” February 10, 2021, p. 7)—thus one ostensible aim of mass vaccination is precisely to facilitate discrimination against the resistant. One report from France painted a complete picture of devastation wrought by the introduction of this certification regime, where citizens now have to qualify to enjoy inalienable human rights.
Vaccine certification is coercive, placing people under duress and violating free and informed consent; it is also entirely redundant and unnecessary if public health is really the issue. To be clear: vaccine certification is not a health or medical issue, it is political. Anything concerning inclusion/exclusion, controlling population mobility, borders, and passports, is by definition part of the political domain of the state. Highlighting the politics of vaccine passports, even the acute partisanship of the politics involved, witness Democrats in the US who applaud the entry of unvaccinated migrants from Central America, and yet simultaneously call for the exclusion of unvaccinated Americans from universities, schools, workplaces, and entertainment venues.
What is usually overlooked is that such a system of vaccine certification means the removal of basic rights for everyone in Quebec who is required to furnish proof of official approval to enter whichever establishment (a minor change in the app can change the range of access immediately): the right to participate in civic life is thus abrogated, rendering citizenship provisional and tentative. At a very minimum, this expands the already vastly expansive range of regulations that exist at all levels of government in Quebec, a multiplication of powers of oversight and surveillance that render personal autonomy fictitious. When people comply with this, they agree that all aspects of their everyday behaviour are now subject to licensing.
Testing the Logic of the Passport
Examine the logic of the Quebec government’s decision. For this purpose I will use a semi-fictionalized example based on elements of my own routine, and for this purpose the reader will need to assume that the person in question has not been vaccinated. Let’s begin: schools are declared essential services, so there will be no vaccine discrimination when accessing them. Professor X teaches at a university in Montreal, but does not live in the city. To get to that university, Professor X spends 1.5 hours on a heavily packed train. In the train station itself in Montreal, there is a sandwich and coffee bar, in the middle of masses of people swirling around it—there is no feasible way of barring entry, since it has no walls and no door. After the train station, Professor X switches to a crowded Metro system. He arrives at his campus’ Metro stop, and shuffles in a massive throng of people to go up escalators. Then he squeezes into a packed elevator. He arrives at a packed classroom with no windows and poor ventilation. Class lasts three hours. That is just part of the work for that day. After all is done, on his way out of Montreal, he decides to stop at a restaurant near the campus, to have a bite alone—and it is there where he is barred entry.
(Not only that: within the very same building where Professor X teaches and has his office, there are two cafes and a pub—one of the cafes has only two walls—presumably, he will be denied access to services within the same building and among the same people to which he delivers his service.)
Everywhere else, he has been inside of crowds, for many hours, but suddenly when it comes to having a burger off campus, no, that is just too much. Why? Because the “vaccinated,” benefiting from a “vaccine” that keeps them “safe,” still need to be protected from the unvaccinated. Never has such a low bar of immunity been set for a “vaccine”. The vaccinated ought to be wondering exactly what was squirted into their veins that fails to make them immune to the unvaccinated. As for the unvaccinated, they will be protected from dangerous restaurants, but somehow they will also be safe among thousands of people in buildings that are like stacks of cruise ships. The vaccinated will be protected both inside the restaurant, and inside the train station, yet Professor X cannot have a burger in the restaurant, but he can have a sandwich in the train station. The virus understands these nuanced differences and respects the government’s finicky little dividing lines.
What is to be done to people working in “non-essential services,” who are themselves unvaccinated? Are they to be laid off? How is access regulated to establishments that offer a mix of both “essential” and “non-essential”? Will guards with QR code scanners be posted in each aisle? Meanwhile, all “non-essential services” will presumably need to dedicate personnel to stand guard at entrances and scan the QR code of each single person seeking entry to the establishment. There will be lines of people—people lining up like compliant little toddlers, shifting from foot to foot, and repeating this for each store they visit. The security theatre we found in airports all these years, will now be everywhere: every “non-essential” store will have to become a security clearance point, like in an airport.
If the Quebec government’s aim was to increase exasperation, add to confusion, multiply divisions among people, expand bureaucracy, violate the right to privacy, securitize daily life, openly signal politicians’ lust for total power, effectively suspend civil rights and nullify the defining rights of citizenship, and to maximize distrust of the authorities, then this strategy is refined beyond measure. Success is assured, unquestionably.
Medical Apartheid
It’s an “exotic” word, so of course “educated” Canadians working in the media will struggle with it. Some in the Canadian media take umbrage at anyone calling such a pass-based system of discrimination, “apartheid”. They think that “apartheid” is a holy word, that is racially exclusive property belonging to a specific people. To call one act of discrimination by the same word used for another act of discrimination, somehow “cheapens” and “diminishes” that other discrimination. In other words, there is “good discrimination” which is to be applauded (“vaccine passports”) and then “bad discrimination” (which only became bad in Canada when it was politically convenient). Yet, what is the essence of apartheid? Two of the three definitions listed by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language state: “A policy or practice of separating or segregating groups” and “The condition of being separated from others; segregation”. Separation, segregation, discrimination—linking “vaccine passports” with apartheid is all the more warranted when we recognize the fact that targeted Others are forced to contain their movements within what is allowed by a pass. In both cases, the pass is associated with a certain biological property, whether it is skin colour or one’s health status.
Canada, at an official level, likes to celebrate itself as place where diversity and inclusivity reign, and where we face the injustices of the colonial past. This is very convenient, as a distraction. It is a stance that distracts from the new injustices being perpetrated in the immediate present, right under everyone’s nose.
Medical apartheid is precisely the kind of regime we would expect in a Health Security State as discussed extensively by Giorgio Agamben. Writing specifically about “vaccine passports” (or the Green Pass in the case of Italy) in a recent article which, translated from Italian, is titled “Second-Class Citizens,” he explains:
As happens every time a despotic emergency regime is established and constitutional guarantees are suspended, the result is, as happened with the Jews under fascism, the discrimination of a category of humans, who automatically become second-class citizens. This is the aim of the creation of the so-called green pass. That it is a discrimination based on personal beliefs and not an objective scientific certainty is proved by the fact that in the scientific field the debate is still ongoing on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, which, according to the opinion of doctors and scientists who there is no reason to ignore, they were produced quickly and without adequate testing.
Despite this, those who stick to their free and well-founded belief and refuse to be vaccinated will be excluded from social life. That the vaccine is thus transformed into a sort of political-religious symbol aimed at creating discrimination among citizens is evident in the irresponsible declaration of a politician, who, referring to those who do not get vaccinated, he said, without realizing that he was using a fascist jargon: “we will purge them with the green pass”. The “green card” constitutes those who do not have it in bearers of a virtual yellow star.
This is a fact whose political gravity cannot be overstated. What does a country become in which a discriminated class is created? How can one accept living with second-class citizens? The need to discriminate is as old as society and certainly forms of discrimination were also present in our so-called democratic societies; but that these factual discriminations are sanctioned by law is a barbarism that we cannot accept.
Such a certification regime—let us be absolutely clear about this—is authoritarian for everyone. It is not authoritarian just for the “unvaccinated” alone. Everyone who abides by such a system, agrees to furnish documentary proof to gain access to what was previously free and open to them. They thus agree to concede access, on grounds arbitrarily decided by the state. What was previously taken for granted, is now the focus of heightened securitization. This is effectively the abolition of the very concept of everyday life, for everyone.
To end on a personal note, this is an exceptionally depressing time in which I find myself. From the start, I suspected that our summer here of lessened restrictions was just a brief interim period, the carrot dangled in front of the mule before the stick struck our hindquarters again. Never have I personally witnessed such a dark curtain of fascism pulled across a society, and with such insignificant protest, and to the cheers of fake opposition parties and even faker media. Nobody will see this, thanks to ever widening censorship. I knew this was just the beginning of much worse to come, and this newest measure is itself an open door to a permanent “pandemic” of authoritarianism, fear, and the abolition of anything that can meaningfully be called society. It has come to pass, things have finally fallen apart.
For the first time, the US military’s central office for dealing with Hollywood has re-leased internal reports on its operations, revealing how the Department of Defense strong-armed the industry to achieve its propaganda goals.
The reports were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and offer a rare glimpse inside the DOD’s main entertainment liaison offices at the Pentagon, which oversees the individual branch offices in Los Angeles run by the Army, Navy, Air Force and others. The reports cover approximately two years of activities and illustrate just how aggressive the DOD can be when dealing with film and TV producers, as well as their involvement with some of the biggest-name filmmakers in Hollywood.
The sheer range of products mentioned in the documents as having gained assistance from the US military is staggering, from Navy-assisted episodes of Cake Boss and the Great Food Truck Race to the Disney sci-fi fantasy A Wrinkle in Time. Numerous other films are listed, including blockbusters like Captain Marvel, Top Gun: Maverick and Transformers: The Last Knight.
On Captain Marvel the DOD and US Air Force provided research trips to military bases, filming access at several military locations, and extensive promotional help including an Air Force recruitment campaign that tied into the film. The documents also reveal how the two co-directors of the movie, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, paid a visit to the Pentagon just before the film’s release.
One document notes, “During their visit they attended office calls and had lunch with Air Force leaders. They also participated in a professional development session” for Air Force and DOD public affairs officers, showing just how integrated the military-Hollywood relationship has become.
The files also confirm the military’s support on the final season of Homeland, though only after the “major problems noted in scripts” were resolved by the showrunner making “significant edits to the problematic areas.” The result was a show that preempted the false story that the Russian government had been funding Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and played up fears about what will happen when the US finally withdraws from the country.
The Pentagon also worked on smaller films such as The 15:17 to Paris, a Clint Eastwood-directed retelling of how three Americans, including two servicemen, tackled a gunman on a train from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015. One entry in the reports records how they received “a long list of things that the film makers hope to obtain from us” but the DOD only approved support after ensuring that they could “create enough military portrayal to justify use of our assets.”
Beefing up the military’s presence in films, and the role of military characters in the unfolding storylines, is a key aim of the DOD’s Hollywood offices, but they don’t always get what they want. Christopher Nolan approached them about providing Osprey and Chinook aircraft for use in Tenet, and the National Guard and Air Force “indicated interest if military characterizations are rewritten emphasizing military mission.”
A few weeks later, it seems that Nolan simply stopped responding to the military’s phone calls, with one update commenting, “Likely cause is that producer/director were reluctant to make changes needed to gain DOD support.” This echoes what happened on Interstellar, Nolan’s previous sci-fi epic. Reports from the Navy’s Hollywood office record how he approached them about potential support, but the relationship broke down after he refused to share his script with Navy officials, having clearly learned from the extensive rewrites the military demanded on Man of Steel.
At the other end of the Hollywood scale is Tom Hanks, who has worked with different US government agencies throughout his career, from the CIA on Charlie Wilson’s War to Homeland Security on The Terminal, as well as several military-supported productions. Hanks’ name comes up multiple times in the documents, as the DOD provided help to his historical war film Greyhound, as well as his forthcoming post-apocalyptic drama Finch.
The strict criteria that the military apply when deciding whether to support a production results in a high number of rejections, which can have the effect of killing a movie or TV show. Among the rejections detailed in the documents are “documentaries about Vladimir Putin and about the trials at Guantanamo Bay” and a film about the Bermuda Triangle, where the DOD were “Not impressed by the quality of the writing nor the story itself.” Neither the Bermuda Triangle film nor the Gitmo documentary appear to have been made.
Other movies that were turned down include Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse as well as Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe, in the latter case because “premise is how the WH & DoD (mainly the WH) claimed that Bin Laden and Hussein conspired to create the 9/11 attacks, and fabricated evidence of Saddam collecting materials to fabricate nuclear weapons to use against the U.S. and its allies.”
Likewise, a feature-length documentary about Operation Eagle Claw – the failed attempt by US special forces to rescue some of the hostages held in Iran – was turned down after their request was forwarded to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, highlighting how high-up policy wonks are sometimes part of the decision-making process. This documentary also appears to have fallen by the wayside, unable to be produced due to the Pentagon’s censorious approach to pop culture.
However, the most egregious censorship revealed by the new documents came on the 2019 CBS drama series The Code, about Marine Corps lawyers prosecuting and defending cases brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Code was initially made without any military input, because the producers wanted to explore topics of which the DOD wouldn’t approve.
In the opening episodes the cases handled by the lawyers include a Marine-turned-congressman who is accused of murdering an Iraqi civilian execution-style, and the fallout from a Marine killing a Spanish citizen while drunk driving. Meanwhile, the widow of a murdered Marine decides to sue the Corps and challenge the Ferris Doctrine – a law that prevents people from suing the US military based on events that happened while on active duty.
These are precisely the sort of storylines that the DOD routinely removes from scripts for shows they support, such as NCIS and Hawaii Five-0. The documents record how on an NCIS: New Orleans episode they “Took issue with the latest NCIS NOLA script, in which a team of former U.S. Army rangers are portrayed as ‘killers for hire’.” An update days later reports that, “Filmmakers responded by saying they are working to remove all references to killers having been affiliated with U.S. Army Rangers.”
But this wasn’t possible on The Code, because the producers resisted numerous efforts by the military to get involved and have influence over the scripts. As the reports detail, “The showrunner turned down several offers of assistance by the Marine Corps Entertainment office during production.” An investigation by Task & Purpose found that the Marines kept trying to insert themselves into the production of The Code, but as one official put it, they were “essentially told to f-ck off” by the showrunners.
The documents go on to note that – somehow – Marine Corps leadership got hold of the early episodes of The Code before they’d aired. They were “displeased enough that they communicated what they saw as serious shortcomings in the depiction of the Marines.” The Corps imposed themselves on the production, and as a result, “CBS Television has indicated a desire to correct the problems in future episodes by accepting DoD assistance.”
The upshot of this was that the show took a turn and abandoned the controversial storylines of its earlier episodes, including the lawsuit around the Ferris Doctrine – though the suit is abandoned not due to pressure from the military brass, but so that the widow can embark on a romantic relationship with one of the key witnesses.
A few months later The Code was cancelled, having given up on the only thing that made it stand out in a crowded marketplace of criminal and legal procedurals. In essence, the DOD sabotaged a TV show because they didn’t like its politics.
While the likes of Christopher Nolan are powerful enough to sometimes resist the military’s overtures and manipulations, the DOD’s hostile takeover of Hollywood is gathering pace due to these aggressive, domineering tactics.
Tom Secker is a British-based investigative journalist, author and podcaster. You can follow his work via his Spy Culture site and his podcast ClandesTime.
… 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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