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Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex

By Katie Herzog | Bari Weiss’ Substack | July 27, 2021

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.

The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.

In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.

Professors Running Scared of Students

To Dana Beyer, a trans activist in Maryland who is also a retired surgeon, such stories illustrate how vital it is that sex, not just gender identity — how someone perceives their gender — is taken into consideration in medicine. “The practice of medicine is based in scientific reality, which includes sex, but not gender,” Beyer says. “The more honest a patient is with their physician, the better the odds for a positive outcome.”

The denial of sex doesn’t help anyone, perhaps least of all transgender patients who require special treatment. But, Lauren says, instructors who discuss sex risk complaints from their students — which is why, she thinks, many don’t. “I think there’s a small percentage of instructors who are true believers. But most of them are probably just scared of their students,” she says.

And for good reason. Her medical school hosts an online forum in which students correct their instructors for using terms like “male” and “female” or “breastfeed” instead of “chestfeed.” Students can lodge their complaints in real time during lectures. After one class, Lauren says, she heard that a professor was so upset by students calling her out for using “male” and “female” that she started crying.

Then there are the petitions. At the beginning of the year, students circulated a number of petitions designed to, as Lauren puts it, “name and shame” instructors for “wrongspeak.”

One was delivered after a lecture on chromosomal disorders in which the professor used the pronouns “she” and “her” as well as the terms “father” and “son,” all of which, according to the students, are “cisnormative.” After the petition was delivered, the instructor emailed the class, noting that while she had consulted with a member of the school’s LGBTQ Committee prior to the lecture, she was sorry for using such “binary” language. Another petition was delivered after an instructor referred to “a man changing into a woman,” which, according to the students, incorrectly assumed that the trans woman wasn’t always a woman. But, as Lauren points out, “if trans women were born women, why would they need to transition?”

This phenomenon — of students policing teachers; of students being treated as the authorities over and above their teachers — has had consequences.

“Since the petitions were sent out, instructors have been far more proactive about ‘correcting’ their slides in advance or sending out emails to the school listserv if any upcoming material has ‘outdated’ terminology,” Lauren tells me. “At first, compliance is demanded from outside, and eventually the instructors become trained to police their own language proactively.”

In one point in the semester, a faculty member sent out a preemptive email warning students about forthcoming lectures containing language that doesn’t align with the school’s “approach to gender inclusivity and gender/sex antioppression.” That language included the term “premenopausal women.” In the future, the professor promised, this would be updated to “premenopausal people.”

Lauren also says young doctors are being taught to declare their pronouns upon meeting patients and ask for patients’ pronouns in return. This was echoed by a recent graduate of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. “Everything was about pronouns,” the student said. The student objected to this, thinking most patients would be confused or offended by a doctor asking them what their pronouns were, but she never said so — at least not publicly. “It was impossible to push back without worrying about getting expelled,” she told me.

This hypersensitivity is undermining medical training. And many of these students are likely not even aware that their education is being informed by ideology.

“Take abdominal aortic aneurysms,” Lauren says. “These are four times as likely to occur in males than females, but this very significant difference wasn’t emphasized. I had to look it up, and I don’t have the time to look up the sex predominance for the hundreds of diseases I’m expected to know. I’m not even sure what I’m not being taught, and unless my classmates are as skeptical as I am, they probably aren’t aware either.”

Other conditions that present differently and at different rates in males and females include hernias, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and asthma, among many others. Males and females also have different normal ranges for kidney function, which impacts drug dosage. They have different symptoms during heart attacks: males complain of chest pain, while women experience fatigue, dizziness, and indigestion. In other words: biological sex is a hugely important factor in knowing what ails patients and how to properly treat them.

Carole Hooven is the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us and a professor at Harvard who focuses on behavioral endocrinology. I discussed Lauren’s story with her and Hooven found it deeply troubling. “Today’s students will go on to hold professional positions that give them a great deal of power over others’ bodies and minds. These young people are our future doctors, educators, researchers, statisticians, psychologists. To ignore or downplay the reality of sex and sex-based differences is to perversely handicap our understanding and our ability to increase human health and thriving.”

A former dean of a leading medical school agrees: “I don’t know the extent to which the stories you relate are now widespread in medical education, but to the extent that they are — and I hear some of this is popping up at my own institution — they are a serious departure from the expectation that medical education and practice should be based on science and be free from imposition of ideology and ideology-based intimidation.”

He added: “How male and female members of our species develop, how they differ genetically, anatomically, physiologically, and with respect to diseases and their treatment are foundational to clinical medicine and research. Efforts to erase or diminish these foundations should be unacceptable to responsible professional leaders.”

There is no doubt the rules are changing. According to the American Psychological Association, the terms “natal sex” and “birth sex,” for example, are now considered “disparaging”; the preferred term is “assigned sex at birth.” The National Institutes of Health, the CDC, and Harvard Medical School have all made efforts to divorce sex from medicine and emphasize gender identity.

When Asking Questions Can Destroy Your Career

While it’s unclear if this trend will remain limited to some medical schools, what is perfectly clear is that activism, specifically around issues of sex, gender, and race, is impacting scientific research and progress.

One of the most notorious examples is that of a physician and former associate professor at Brown University, Lisa Littman.

Around 2014, Littman began to notice a sudden uptick in female adolescents in her social network who were coming out as transgender boys. Until recently, the incidence of gender dysphoria was thought to be rare, affecting an estimated one in 10,000 people in the U.S. While the exact number of trans-identifying adolescents (or adults, for that matter) is unknown, in the last decade or so, the number of youth seeking treatment for gender dysphoria has spiked by over 1,000 percent in the U.S.; in the U.K., it’s jumped by 4,000 percent. The largest youth gender clinic in Los Angeles reportedly saw 1,000 patients in 2019. That same clinic, in 2009, saw about 80.

Curious about what was happening, Littman surveyed about 250 parents whose adolescent children had announced they were transgender — after never before exhibiting the symptoms of gender dysphoria. Over 80 percent of cases involved girls; many were part of friend groups in which half or more of the members had come out as trans. Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to describe this phenomenon. She posited that it might be a sort of social contagion, not unlike cutting or anorexia, both of which were endemic among teenage girls when I was in high school in the ’90s.

In August 2018, Littman published her results in a paper called “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports” in the journal PLOS One. Littman, the journal, and Brown University were pummeled with accusations of transphobia in the press and on social media. In response, the journal announced an investigation into Littman’s work. Several hours later, Brown University issued a press release denouncing the professor’s paper.

Littman’s paper was republished in March 2019 with an amended title and other minor, mostly cosmetic changes. The journal has since confirmed that, while the paper was “corrected,” the original version contained no false information.

But Littman’s career was forever altered. She no longer teaches at Brown. And her contract at the Rhode Island State Health Department wasn’t renewed.

Littman is hardly alone. Trans activists have also targeted Ray Blanchard and Ken Zucker in Toronto, Michael Bailey at Northwestern, and Stephen Gliske at the University of Michigan for publishing findings they deemed transphobic. In a recent case, trans activists shut down research that was to be conducted by UCLA psychiatrist Jamie Feusner, who had hoped to explore the physiological underpinnings of gender dysphoria.

Nor is this limited to academia. Journalists who question the new ideological orthodoxy, like Abigail Shrier and Jesse Singal (with whom I co-host a podcast), have also been smeared for their work. After the American Booksellers Association included Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, in a promotional mailing to bookstores, activists went ballistic, prompting the ABA’s CEO to apologize for having done “horrific harm” that “traumatized and endangered members of the trans community” and “caused violence and pain.”

I had a similar experience in 2017 after writing about de-transitioners — people who transition to a different gender and then transition back — for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger. After the piece came out, people put up flyers and stickers around Seattle calling me transphobic; someone burned stacks of the newspaper and sent me a video of it. I lost many friends, and later ended up moving out of the city in part because of the turmoil.

But far more concerning than the treatment of journalists chronicling this story is the treatment of patients themselves.

Patients Are Suffering

Julia Mason is a pediatrician in the Portland suburbs who, unlike most doctors I spoke to, allowed me to use her name. Mason explained that she works at a small private practice and her boss is a libertarian. In other words: she won’t get fired for being honest.

Mason has been practicing for over 25 years, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she saw her first transgender patient: a 15-year-old trans boy who Mason referred to a gender clinic, where the patient was prescribed testosterone.

Since that first patient, she says there have been about 10 more requests for referrals to gender clinics. As this number increased, Mason started wondering about the advice her patients are getting at these clinics.

“A 12-year-old female came to see me, and the dad told me that they went to a therapist, and in the first five minutes, the therapist was like, ‘Yep. He’s trans,’” she told me. “And then they went to a pediatric endocrinologist who recommended puberty blockers on the first visit.”

Mason generally avoids prescribing puberty blockers, which inhibit the development of secondary sex characteristics like breasts or facial hair. The reason, she says, is that because there have been no controlled studies on the use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric youth, the long term effects are still unknown. (In the U.K., a recent review of existing studies found that the quality of the evidence that puberty blockers are effective in relieving gender dysphoria and improving mental health is “very low.”)

In girls, Mason says, blockers inhibit breast development, but “you end up shorter, and the last thing a female who wants to look male needs is to be shorter.” Other side effects may include a loss of bone density, headache, fatigue, joint pain, hot flashes, mood swings and something called “brain fog.” In boys, blockers inhibit penis growth, which can make it harder for them to achieve orgasm and for surgeons to later construct those penises into “neo-vaginas,” a procedure known as vaginoplasty.

Trans activists often claim the effects of puberty blockers are fully reversible, but this remains unproven, and studies show that the overwhelming majority of teens who start on puberty blockers later take cross-sex hormones (testosterone for females and estrogen for males) to complete their transition. The combination of puberty blockers followed by hormones can cause sterility and other health problems, including sexual dysfunction, and the hormones must be taken for life — or until detransition. Little is known about their long-term effects. While the line that blockers are “fully reversible” is oft-repeated by activists and the media, last year, England’s National Health Service back-tracked this unsubstantiated claim on its website.

Mason is one of several doctors who voiced concerns about the fast-tracking of adolescents seeking to transition — and the new normal in the medical establishment, which seems to encourage that fast-tracking.

In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that pediatricians “affirm” their patients’ chosen gender without taking into account mental health, family history, trauma, or fears of puberty. The AAP recommendations say nothing about the many consequences, physical and psychological, of transitioning. So perhaps it is not surprising that surgeons are performing double mastectomies, or “top surgery,” on patients as young as 13.

One leading clinician, Diane Ehrensaft, has said that children as young as three have the cognitive ability to come out as transgender. And the University of California San Francisco Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic, where Ehrensaft is the mental health director, has helped kids of that age transition socially.

But not all clinicians have cheered these developments. In a paper responding to the AAP guidelines, James Cantor, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, noted that “every follow-up study of [gender dysphoric] children, without exception, found the same thing: By puberty, the majority of GD children ceased to want to transition.” Other studies of gender-clinic patients, stretching back to the 1970s, have found that 60 to 90 percent of patients eventually grow out of their gender dysphoria; most come out as gay or lesbian.

In an email to me, Cantor said: “The deafening silence from AAP when asked about the evidence allegedly supporting their trans policy is hard to interpret as anything other than their ‘pleading the 5th,’ as you in the U.S. put it.”

Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic and a trans woman herself, also voiced skepticism about the AAP’s approach to would-be transitioners. Unlike Mason, Anderson says withholding puberty blockers from dysphoric children is “cruel.” But she is suspicious of the sharp spike in young people, and especially young women. While she doesn’t like phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “social contagion,” she said something is definitely going on.

“What makes us think that gender is the one exception to peer influence?” she told me. “For 100 years, psychology has acknowledged that adolescence is a time of experimentation and exploration. It’s normal. I’m not alarmed by that. What I’m alarmed by is some medical and psychological professionals rushing kids into taking blockers or hormones.”

Because Anderson has been so vocal, including a recent 60 Minutes appearance in which she discussed detransitioners, she regularly gets calls from frantic parents. She told me she’d gotten off the phone with the parents of a 17-year-old who had announced that they were trans and wanted hormones. “It’s alarming to these parents,” Anderson said.

Anderson isn’t opposed to pediatric transition when patients are properly diagnosed, but she wants to see more individualized care rather than the activist-driven, one-size-fits-all approach. That, however, goes against current AAP guidelines.

Will Science Prevail?

Medicine is not impervious to trends.

“In the 90s, when I was training, everything was about controlling pain,” said a pediatrician in the Midwest who declined to be named for fear of repercussions. “We were taught that it was really hard to become addicted to narcotics. Look where that got us.”

Around the same time, she says, there was a rash of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, something we now know is exceedingly rare in children. Before that, there was the recovered memory craze, multiple personality disorder, and rebirthing therapy, a bizarre treatment for attachment disorders that lead to the deaths of several children in the U.S. So how does this happen?

“Some idea will get picked up by major medical associations that put out reports and their members turn to those instead of the actual literature,” this pediatrician said. “And when you get too far ahead of the research, that’s when you get into trouble. That’s what’s happening now.”

For her part, Lauren, the medical student in California, is both hopeful for the future — and not. “On the one hand, I have this idea that the truth will eventually come out and science will ultimately prevail,” she said.

But the difference between things like rebirthing therapy or multiple personality disorder and the new gender ideology is that the latter is portrayed as a civil rights movement. “It seems virtuous. It seems like the right thing to do,” she said. “So how can you fight against something that’s being marketed as a fight for human rights?”

August 2, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

What do we want? South-facing windows!

By Ivor Williams | The Conservative Woman | August 2, 2021

YOU may have read recently that ‘Britain is failing to protect its vulnerable citizens. Thousands of preventable deaths could be triggered every year.’ You may have supposed that some road safety organisation was at it again, worried about silent electric cars. Or maybe it was the RNLI having a go about inflatables on the beach. Possibly the opposition playing safe and attacking the crime rate or the NHS?

There’s a clue in the next sentence. ‘As global heating worsens and heatwaves become more frequent, the problem is likely to worsen significantly.’ This is Baroness Brown of Cambridge, a member of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), and she goes on to claim that by 2050 there could be three times as many heat-related deaths as there are today.

This is a Guardian piece about the CCC’s comments on a Met Office warning about hotter summers, so let’s stop here and take a deep breath of reality.

The number of heat-related summer deaths are monitored by Public Health England. The three years 2017-19 averaged 847, but in 2020 there were 2,556, in line with 2003 (2,334) and 2006 (2,323). Let’s be fair and assume global warming will continue, so over the next few years we may have a yearly average of 2,500, then (according to the CCC) on to 7,500 by 2050.

Back in Wonderland there’s apparently no need to worry. The Telegraph has reassuring news from its Environment Editor, Emma Gatten. The CCC, she says, ‘called for the introduction of new regulations to ensure developers were not building homes that are uninhabitable as temperatures rise  . . . Measures that can easily be incorporated when building new homes include avoiding large south-facing windows, including external shutters, trickle vents, green roofs, and green walls covered in vegetation.’

There we are, then, problem solved. However, the world that you and I live in has a season called winter when it gets cold even here in the UK, and there is, of course, an opposite effect. Again Public Health England has the data: ‘Cold-related deaths represent the biggest weather-related source of mortality in England, and on average, there are approximately 35,000 excess winter deaths each year in England and Wales.’

Being kind and using the CCC’s figure for 2050, there are still over four and a half times as many excess deaths in winter as in summer. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation looked at the problem some time ago. Not surprisingly, they found that ‘the magnitude of the winter excess was greater in people living in dwellings that appear to be poorly heated. The percentage rise in deaths in winter was greater in those dwellings with low energy-efficiency ratings, and those predicted to have low indoor temperatures during cold periods’.

There are wide variations on recommended indoor warmth in winter. The Met Office must employ all young, hot-blooded people, because they say ‘you should heat your home to the temperature of at least 18°C. This is particularly important if you have reduced mobility, are 65 or over, or have a health condition, such as heart or lung disease.’

For the last twenty years I have been cold from October to March, and have recently become a nonagenarian so will probably be even colder this winter. The figure of 18 is ridiculous. I live in a reasonably well-insulated house with gas central heating; the winter thermostat setting is 21 or above and even then the winter clothing level is four layers.

The heat pump threat has receded by five years, but these things are notorious for their inability to warm a house properly. The CCC want smaller south-facing windows but the cheapest source of additional heat even in winter is the sun. Any day that it’s available let it shine in through south-facing windows. Have shutters for summer.

The CCC say possibly 7,500 excess summer deaths by 2050. But they seem to be relying on our climate warming unbelievably quickly to save 35,000 of us going shivering to our doom every winter.

August 2, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

US nuclear tests killed far more civilians than we knew

By Tim Fernholz | Quartz | December 21, 2017

When the US entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.

The study, performed by University of Arizona economist Keith Meyers, uses a novel method (pdf) to trace the deadly effects of this radiation, which was often consumed by Americans drinking milk far from the site of atomic tests.

From 1951 to 1963, the US tested nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada. Weapons researchers, not understanding the risks—or simply ignoring them—exposed thousands of workers to radioactive fallout. The emissions from nuclear reactions are deadly to humans in high doses, and can cause cancer even in low doses. At one point, researchers had volunteers stand underneath an airburst nuclear weapon to prove how safe it was:

The emissions, however, did not just stay at the test site, and drifted in the atmosphere. Cancer rates spiked in nearby communities, and the US government could no longer pretend that fallout was anything but a silent killer.

The cost in dollars and lives

Congress eventually paid more than $2 billion to residents of nearby areas that were particularly exposed to radiation, as well as uranium miners. But attempts to measure the full extent of the test fallout were very uncertain, since they relied on extrapolating effects from the hardest-hit communities to the national level. One national estimate found the testing caused 49,000 cancer deaths.

Those measurements, however, did not capture the full range of effects over time and geography. Meyers created a broader picture by way of a macabre insight: When cows consumed radioactive fallout spread by atmospheric winds, their milk became a key channel to transmit radiation sickness to humans. Most milk production during this time was local, with cows eating at pasture and their milk being delivered to nearby communities, giving Meyers a way to trace radioactivity across the country.

The National Cancer Institute has records of the amount of Iodine 131—a dangerous isotope released in the Nevada tests—in milk, as well as broader data about radiation exposure. By comparing this data with county-level mortality records, Meyers came across a significant finding: “Exposure to fallout through milk leads to immediate and sustained increases in the crude death rate.” What’s more, these results were sustained over time. US nuclear testing likely killed seven to 14 times more people than we had thought, mostly in the midwest and northeast.

A weapon against its own people

When the US used nuclear weapons during World War II, bombing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conservative estimates suggest 250,000 people died in immediate aftermath. Even those horrified by the bombing didn’t realize that the US would deploy similar weapons against its own people, accidentally, and on a comparable scale.

And the cessation of nuclear testing helped save US lives—”the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty might have saved between 11.7 and 24.0 million American lives,” Meyers estimates. There was also some blind luck involved in reducing the number of poisoned people: The Nevada Test Site, compared to other potential testing facilities the US government considered at the time, produced the lowest atmospheric dispersal.

The lingering effects of these tests remain, as silent and as troublesome as the isotopes themselves. Millions of Americans who were exposed to fallout likely suffer illnesses related to these tests even today, as they retire and rely on the US government to fund their health care.

“This paper reveals that there are more casualties of the Cold War than previously thought, but the extent to which society still bears the costs of the Cold War remains an open question,” Meyers concludes.

August 1, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Haniyeh re-elected as chief of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas

MEMO | August 1, 2021

Ismail Haniyeh has been elected to a second term as head of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, two Palestinian officials told Reuters on Sunday.

“Brother Ismail Haniyeh was re-elected as the head of the movement’s political office for a second time,” one official told Reuters. His term will last four years.

Haniyeh, the group’s leader since 2017, has controlled its political activities throughout several armed confrontations with Israel – including an 11-day conflict in May that leftover 250 in Gaza and 13 in Israel dead.

He was the right-hand man to Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza, before the wheelchair-bound cleric was assassinated in 2004.

Haniyeh, 58, led Hamas’ entry into politics in 2006 when they were surprisingly won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating a divided Fatah party led by President Mahmoud Abbas.

Haniyeh became prime minister shortly after the January 2006 victory, but Hamas – which is deemed a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel, and the European Union – was shunned by the international community.

Following a brief civil war, Hamas seized Gaza from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 2007. Israel has led a blockade of Gaza since then, citing threats from Hamas.

August 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Whatever politicians are, they aren’t rational

By Paul Collits | The Conservative Woman | July 31, 2021

THERE are two sources of support for those who find conspiracies behind the creation of the Covid State, who believe that it must all be about ‘something else’.

One is the ‘they know they are lying’ argument of former Pfizer executive and research scientist Mike Yeadon and others, who suggest that even if the politicians don’t fully realise that the Wuhan virus is not a global threat, their public health advisers surely do. They therefore MUST know that they are telling lies, day after day. If they are lying, why?  Who or what is behind the Covid State’s lies? On this view, there must be something hidden and menacing in play.

The second source of support for seeing Covid conspiracies is the fact that so many of the decisions taken by democratic governments are so patently stupid and pointless. So much of what has passed for rational decision-making – ‘we are simply following the science’ – is risible. Locking up the healthy rather than protecting the vulnerable? Making people wear masks that, for decades, we have known not to work? Allowing people with life-threatening illnesses to die for want of attention from supposedly stretched hospitals and doctors? Wrecking the economy? Changing the rules every other day on a whim? Spending billions on contact-trace technology that achieves nothing save spreading further needless panic? The very idea that governments can control, let alone eliminate, rapidly spreading viruses?

Now, there are a number of explanations other than the two obvious ones – conspiracy or stuff-up – that seek to explain the flight from rationality of our politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers these past eighteen months. Elementary political science tells us that there are several models of decision-making seeking to explain why politicians do the things they do.

One theory is called ‘the rational actor model’, and it might well sum up what the ordinary punter believes to be abilities and motivations of governments. This model assumes that well-informed politicians with a clear understanding of the problem to be solved think through the options and make the best choice. Perhaps even use some cost-benefit analysis. Clarify the problem, list the options, weigh the issues carefully, consider likely outcomes, recognise the downsides of any actions taken, be consistent, measure success (evaluate) with standardised and agreed methods.

I know – try not to laugh. But the rational actor model probably best described how the bureaucracy used to work. Frank, fearless advice based on research and understanding of issues was offered to elected officials by disinterested public servants. That proposition is now as naïve as believing that their political masters are rational actors.

But you would like to think that politicians should aspire to be well-motivated, well-informed and determined to achieve the best outcome possible for the good of the country or state over which they preside.

Yet we seem to be falling very, very short of the ideal. Politicians are nowadays greedy, motivated by career, factionalised, prone to lying, controlled by outside interests, fearful of losing their power and seemingly willing to do anything to get off the hook. They are patently driven by the enjoyment of power, accessing the perks of office, protecting their mates, setting up post-political career opportunities and settling scores. There is little evidence that they are focused on problem solving (as per the rational actor model), even remotely interested in it or equipped to do it.

A second model of decision-making has been called ‘bounded rationality’. This is the idea that time-poor politicians facing complex problems do not seek the best policy, but are satisfied with an ‘acceptable’ solution, achieving as good an outcome as can be expected under the circumstances.

A third model of decision-making is called ‘incrementalism’. This suggests that no political decision is made in isolation. Every decision builds on what is already there. Its chief advocate (an American called Charles Lindblom) calls the approach ‘muddling through’.

A fourth model is that democracies consist of interest groups all vying for influence over decision-making, and that politicians simply respond to these interest groups in the decisions they make. They especially respond to loud, persistent, clever, monied interest groups. Like Big Pharma, perhaps? Or Big Tech? If this sounds corrupt, it is.

A fifth model of politics – public choice theory – suggests that politicians and bureaucrats have selfish interests like voters and like sellers and buyers in the marketplace that is the economy, and that they make decisions according to this self-interest. Leaders look out for number one. This is getting very warm, and isn’t remotely surprising. Nothing has been so clear during the Covid affair as the self-interest of politicians.

So, we have an array of theories trying to explain how politicians make decisions.  But nothing, nothing, in the study of politics or of decision-making explains fully why governments all over the world simultaneously threw sanity out the window in seeking to deal with a middling, flu-like virus.

Two conclusions can confidently be reached, however. One is that to date there hasn’t been a sliver of very thin paper between the major parties on Covid policy. Right, left or centre, they are all equally panicked, all pandering to the fear in the community that they themselves have created, all scared witless – in the age of the social media pile-on – of instant electoral retribution. All are ignoring science, all are either crushing dissent or ridiculing those (few) who question their approach, and none are remotely able or willing to ask their advisers hard questions, and in doing so to act as our representatives in a quest for the truth.

The second conclusion relates to something called the ‘Overton Window’, which explains what governments are willing and unwilling to do when making decisions. How far they feel comfortable going. It is their window of opportunity (named after the guy who thought this model up), their area of safety, the constraints that stop them doing anything too ‘courageous’, as the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said.

Another name for this is the ‘meerkat theory of politics’. Meerkats emerge from their hidey-holes and look around to see what dangers there are and what possibilities are open to them. Our Covid politicians are like meerkats. They see what they might be able to get away with. They venture a little farther from the hidey-hole, but still look over their shoulders for electoral danger.

What the political class has done since March 2020 is massively to expand the Overton Window. The political science textbook has been thrown out and a new set of theories is needed to explain why freedom and economies have been destroyed.

We-the-people have allowed them to do this. We have let them throw away the rule book. Like the slowly boiling frog, we have sat there doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, while our freedoms have been trashed. Now we are willing to stay locked in our home for no good reason, to bump elbows with friends, to dob in our neighbours for doing nothing remotely wrong or dangerous, to watch breathlessly every new announcement by a health bureaucrat, to tell the Government our whereabouts, to bow before the violent actions of thug-police, to have experimental, yet-to-be-approved drugs injected into our bodies, and to abuse anyone who won’t do these things.

Whatever else they are, our leaders are not being remotely rational. And yes, as Mike Yeadon says, they ARE lying and they must know their decisions are stupid and, on balance, massively harmful.

What on earth is the rule book for that?

July 31, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Face it, we are not immortal

By Manfred Horst | The Conservative Woman | July 30, 2021

WHEN Boris Johnson said in October 2020 that the median age of Covid fatalities was above life expectancy, he was clearly on to something. It is a pity, and a terrible mistake of historical dimensions, that he – and so many others – did not drive their reasoning to the logical conclusions, let alone act on them.

The following is a translation and adaptation of an article which appeared on the German blog Achse des Guten (Axis of the Good) a few days before Johnson’s remarks were made public through his former adviser Dominic Cummings. The numbers are from official German statistics; the percentage distributions derived from those numbers are remarkably similar across the whole Western world.

***

In the course of the last 150 years, mankind has landed many notable successes in its fight against disease and death, against infant and maternal mortality. It has thus raised the average age of death in the Western world from 35 years to around 80 years. (1)

Some people still die at a younger age, but fortunately far fewer than in earlier times. A total of 939,520 people died in Germany in 2019, with the following distribution in age groups: (2)

Mortality Table Germany 2019

With the ageing of our population, the total number of deaths has been increasing steadily in recent years. (3) However, the mean age of death and the percentage distribution among age groups have remained relatively constant ; (4,5) they are also fundamentally similar across all countries of the Western world. (6)

For almost one and a half years now, we have been kept in anxiety and fear with the daily cumulative figures of ‘corona deaths’. (7) The age distribution of these deaths ‘with coronavirus’ (the official denomination, i.e. death of a person with a positive test, not necessarily from a viral pneumonia) in Germany up to June 29, 2021, looks as follows: (8)

Mortality table ‘with coronavirus’, Germany 2020/21 :

One may compare the percentage age distribution of these ‘corona deaths’ with the one of the general population and ask the following questions :

– How do the ‘corona deaths’ differ from the natural mortality table ?

– For which subgroups, if any, would it make sense to explore life-prolonging measures?

– Which age groups should be considered in such a discussion about possible life-prolonging measures?

Don’t the deaths ‘with coronavirus’ (i.e. with a positive PCR test) look as though they are part of the normal and unpreventable death pattern in Germany? Is this not the basic hypothesis that every statistician or epidemiologist worth his or her salt would have enounced if it weren’t for the fact that we have entered an era of extraordinary public hysteria? Also, these figures are remarkably similar everywhere in the world – no matter which measures had been taken against the Coronavirus, see for example in Sweden. (9)

Since the virus does nothing to neonates, children and adolescents – or perhaps because they have so far been submitted to fewer tests – people ‘with corona’ actually reach an average age which is a little higher than that of the rest of the population.

In statistical terms, the coronavirus (or rather the positive PCR test) is a ‘random variable’ with regards to the result ‘death’ – like athlete’s foot or wearing red socks. Of course, severe forms of respiratory infections caused by / with SARS-CoV-2 do exist. Of course, medicine is obliged to help and support each and every one of the people affected. Of course, individual cases can be heartbreaking. Of course, NHS capacities may be stretched during the winter (they generally are). On average, however, the ‘corona deaths’ would have left this world at the same time, with corona or from (or with) another virus or another disease.

All those calculations of allegedly lost lifetime (10) claim that the cohort (group) of people who had died ‘with corona’ would have reached an average age of well beyond 90 years, had it not been for the virus. This is statistical nonsense. One cannot and must not transfer the remaining life expectancy of a person alive at age 80 to a cohort of dead people. Following this methodology, it would be possible to declare any random variable (red socks for example) to be a mortal danger. (11)

Some authors (12) have put forward the hypothesis that the mortality risk due to (or with) corona is equal in its age distribution to, but (largely) additional to the normal mortality risk: so the virus acts like a terrorist who kills 100,000 people with the same age distribution as the mortality table in the general population. If this were true, if this were even possible, we would have had to see a corresponding increase in general mortality across all countries – which we have not. (13) As we are talking of people killed by (or with) a respiratory disease which is mild in the majority of cases, not of people killed by a terrorist, we would furthermore again have to ask the essential question: Why should they have lived significantly longer than the rest of the population, what would have pre-destined this particular cohort (of corona test-positives) to a longer than average lifespan? No, this assertion is not tenable either.

People in the 50-70 age groups also die of (or “with”) Corona? Is it normal to die at age 60 the reader may ask. No, it’s not, of course not, every single case is tragic (and deserves medicine’s full and best attention). But our politicians should know that it inevitably happens sometimes, and that you need to compare and analyse numbers on a population level, instead of being swayed by emotion about individual cases. Specifically in answer to that question, in every population, there are always some 50-70 year olds who unfortunately die – this is inevitable in the human condition. Some of these 50-70 year-olds have always died of (or with) a viral respiratory infection (like the one caused by the Coronavirus). The essential question is whether more people of these age groups die because of the Coronavirus than previously. The answer is no because:

1) We have not observed and are not observing a significant excess mortality in these age groups.

2) The percentage of Corona mortality in these age groups is not only not higher, but effectively lower (!) than the one in the general population.

The conclusion is – the Coronavirus has no influence on the mortality of the 50-70 age groups. And that very conclusion is the same for all groups below 80 years of age. As 80 is the average age of death in the population, the general conclusion therefore is that the Coronavirus has no influence on population mortality.

Science and virology have certainly progressed over the last 16 months, and perhaps humanity will benefit from this in the future. Nevertheless, in 2020 and in 2021, the ‘corona deaths’ would have died, on average (not in every individual case), at roughly the same time. We are not immortal. On average, we die at our average age of death.

Since March 2020, our societies have been treating this normality as if it were a catastrophe. However, no short-term political or social intervention can prevent general population mortality at an average age of currently about 80 years. Nor can it prevent our continuous (especially during the cold season) and immunising confrontation with freshly mutated respiratory viruses. We could have known this, many experts and politicians (perhaps Boris Johnson among them) certainly knew it at the latest on March 12, 2020, when the Italians publicly announced the data on their first 2,003 ‘corona deaths’ (largely from Bergamo and its surroundings): Average age 80.3 years, all (‘with two possible exceptions’) suffering from severe pre-existing conditions. (12)

Incidentally, no vaccination can prevent normal population mortality either, and I suppose many of my former colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry know this. As a pre-requisite for any marketing authorisation – even more so for such hasty and therefore risky ones – the regulatory authorities should have demanded mortality studies (i.e. proof of a lower total number of deaths in the vaccinated group compared with the placebo group).

Such a study would  have been very unlikely to produce a positive result though, as normal human mortality at the general average age of death cannot be prevented.

Instead, the evidence of a reduction in common cold symptoms with a positive test was declared a relevant clinical endpoint and published with great fanfare, (13) and the seasonal decrease in test-positive cases and deaths – which was already observed last summer – is being celebrated as a success of vaccination. German (and other) professional associations claim, against their better judgement, that the vaccines’ pivotal studies have proven that they prevent severe forms and deaths by almost 100 per cent. (14)

However, even if entire populations become vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, people will continue to catch common colds and flu, severe forms will continue to occur in the elderly and immunologically weakened, and a yearly fluctuating number of average 80-year-olds will leave us as always, with the coronavirus or with other mutated respiratory viruses and with their constantly mutating variants.

If the human consequences of the political and societal response to this one respiratory virus were not so horrific, we could almost watch and enjoy the whole thing as a grotesque farce. Perhaps in the not too distant future, a (hopefully still – or again!) free humanity may learn useful lessons from this dystopian episode. In particular, we need to develop a healthily sceptical distrust of a certain type of scientists who spread fear and anxiety with their model-based predictions, and of their political followers.

References:

(1) https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/185394/umfrage/entwicklung-der-lebenserwartung-nach-geschlecht/

(2) https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1013307/umfrage/sterbefaelle-in-deutschland-nach-alter/

(3) https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156902/umfrage/sterbefaelle-in-deutschland/

(4) Sonderauswertung – Sterbefälle 2016 bis 2021 (Stand: 05.07.2021) (destatis.de)

(5) 2_5251422028526783027_online.pdf (2020news.de)

(6) https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age-and-sex-in-the-us/

(7) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

(8) https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1104173/umfrage/todesfaelle-aufgrund-des-coronavirus-in-deutschland-nach-geschlecht/

(9) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-coronavirus-deaths-in-sweden-by-age-groups/

(10) https://fullfact.org/news/boris-johnson-whatsapp-covid-life-expectancy-cummings/

(11) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7646031/#eci13423-sec-0005title

(12) https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3259)

(13) https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Society/population_death.html

(14) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

(15) Coronavirus, Brusaferro (Iss): età media dei deceduti è 80,3 (today.it)

(16) https://www.dgi-net.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/20210323_COVID_Impfung_Stellungnahme.pdf

July 31, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

UK OFFICIAL ADMITS LOCKDOWNS FOR “SOCIAL CONTROL”

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | July 26, 2021

A U.K. member of Parliament has come forward writing a blistering op-ed for the Daily Mail. Part whistleblower, part human rights activist, Graham Brady is calling out his own government’s ill-advised Covid mitigation policies, originating from fear, rather than sound public health science.

July 31, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

And We Should Trust ‘The Science’ of the Pharma Industry?

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 29.07.2021

The forever-head of the US NIAID, Tony Fauci, has repeatedly demanded that the public “trust the science” as he shifts his own science opinion from one positon to another. What is never mentioned in mainstream media in the West or almost anywhere in the world is the scientific record of the major global vaccine making pharmaceutical giants. In short, it is abysmal and alarming in the extreme. That alone should prohibit governments from pushing radical untested experimental injections on their populations without extensive long-term animal and other testing to assure their safety.

This past April as the US vaccination program was in high gear, the Biden chief covid adviser, 80-year-old Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) since 1984, announced that the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had decided to order a “pause” on giving the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine in order to examine reports of blood clots. It turned out that there were six reported blood clot cases of some seven million who then had had the J&J covid jab. Fauci in his press remarks declared, “one of the things that’s, I think, such a good thing about our system here, is that we’re ruled by the science, not by any other consideration.” There is good reason to question Fauci.

That was supposed to reassure people that the authorities were being ultra-careful with the experimental covid medications which, after all, never have been mass-tested on humans before and have only gotten “emergency use authorization,” provisional FDA approval. The FDA quickly lifted the pause as J&J agreed to print that its vaccine could cause blood clots.

Yet at the same time, rival vaccine makers, Pfizer and Moderna, both using a hyper-experimental genetic treatment known as mRNA, were not being paused by “the science” despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of alarming vaccine-related severe reactions, including official data of several thousand deaths from both, had been recorded by CDC data base, VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System).

According to the CDC such “adverse” events, post-vaccine, include anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis, and death. For the week of July 16 the CDC VAERS reported an alarming 9,125 reported deaths since late December from the COVID-19 vaccinations. Never in history have such high death totals been associated with any vaccine, yet the media is deafeningly silent about this.

Their dismal science record

The wording of Fauci is precise and deliberately manipulative. It suggests that there exists some fixed thing we can call “The Science,” like some Vatican religious dogma, whereas the real scientific method is one of continuous questioning, overturning past hypotheses with newly proven ones, adjusting. Yet when it comes to “Science,” the handful of giant vaccine makers, sometimes known as Big Pharma, a cartel not unlike Big Oil, have a record of fraud, deliberate doctoring of their own tests, as well as widespread bribing of doctors and medical officials to promote their various drugs despite “Science” results that contradict their assertions of safety. A look at the major global pharmaceutical giants is instructive.

J&J

We begin with the Johnson & Johnson Company of New Jersey. On July 21, 2021 J&J and three other smaller drug makers agreed to pay a staggering $26 billion damages to a group of US states for their role in causing America’s opioid epidemic. Of that J&J will pay $5 billion. The CDC estimates that use of the highly-addictive opioids as painkillers caused at least 500,000 deaths between 1999 and 2019. Johnson & Johnson is accused of pushing the deadly painkillers for excessive use and downplaying their addiction risks. They knew better.

The same J&J is in a huge legal battle for knowingly using a carcinogen in its famous baby powder. A 2018 Reuters investigation found J&J knew for decades that asbestos, a known carcinogen, lurked in its baby powder and other cosmetic talc products. The company is reportedly considering legally splitting its baby powder division into a small separate company that would then declare bankruptcy to avoid large payouts. The J&J covid vaccine, unlike that from Pfizer and Moderna, does not use mRNA genetic alteration.

The two global covid vaccine makers which have by far the largest market to date are the two being personally promoted by Fauci. These are from Pfizer in alliance with the tiny German BioNTech company under the name Comirnaty, and from the US biotech Moderna.

Pfizer

Pfizer, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers by sales, was founded in 1849 in the USA. It also has one of the most criminal records of fraud, corruption, falsification and proven damage. A 2010 Canadian study noted, “Pfizer has been a “habitual offender,” persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results.” That’s serious. Note that Pfizer has yet to make fully public details of its covid vaccine studies for external examination.

The list of Pfizer crimes has gotten longer since 2010. It is currently engaged in lawsuits related to charges its Zantac heartburn medication is contaminated with a cancer-causing substance. As well, Pfizer received the biggest drug-related fine in US history in 2009 as part of a $2.3 Billion plea deal for mis-promoting medicines Bextra and Celebrex and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors. Pfizer pleaded guilty to the felony of marketing four drugs including Bextra “with the intent to defraud or mislead.” They were forced to withdraw their arthritis painkiller Bextra in the USA and EU for causing heart attacks, strokes, and serious skin disease.

Clearly in a move to boost revenue, Pfizer illegally paid doctors kickbacks for “off-label” use of more than one of its drug which resulted in patients being injured or killed. Among them were Bextra (valdecoxib); Geodon (ziprasidone HCl), an atypical antipsychotic; Zyvox (linezolid), an antibiotic; Lyrica (pregabalin), a seizure medication; its famous Viagra (sildenafil), an erectile dysfunction drug; and Lipitor (atorvastatin), a cholesterol drug.

In another court trial, Pfizer subsidiaries were forced to pay $142 million and release company documents that showed it was illegally marketing gabapentin for off-label use. “Data revealed in a string of U.S. lawsuits indicates the drug was promoted by the drug company as a treatment for pain, migraines and bipolar disorder – even though it wasn’t effective in treating these conditions and was actually toxic in certain cases, according to the Therapeutics Initiative, an independent drug research group at the University of British Columbia. The trials forced the company to release all of its studies on the drug, including the ones it kept hidden.”

In 2004 Pfizer subsidiary Warner-Lambert was forced to pay $430 to settle criminal charges and civil liability arising from its fraudulent marketing practices with respect to Neurontin, its brand for the drug gabapentin. Originally developed for the treatment of epilepsy, Neurontin was illegally promoted off-label for the treatment of neurological pain, and in particular for migraine and bipolar disorder – even though it wasn’t effective in treating these conditions and was actually toxic in some cases. Neurontin for unapproved uses made up some 90% of the $2.7 billion in sales in 2003.

A New York Times report disclosed in 2010 that Pfizer “… paid about $20 million to 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals in the United States for consulting and speaking on its behalf in the last six months of 2009.” It paid another $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and other research groups for clinical trials. In the US legal practice it is seldom that corporate executives actually doing the criminal deeds are prosecuted. The result is that court fines can be treated as “business costs” in this cynical milieu. In eight years of repeated malfeasance through 2009, Pfizer accumulated just under $3 billion in fines and civil penalties, about a third of one year’s net revenues.

In 2020 as its covid vaccine was in development, Pfizer paid $13,150,000 in lobbying Congress and officials in Washington among others. Also notable is the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation own shares of both Pfizer and their partner in the leading mRNA vaccine, BioNTech of Germany.

Moderna

The third covid vaccine producer today with FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is Moderna of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has yet to be sued for illegal practices unlike J&J or Pfizer. But that fact is likely only because before its EUA for its mRNA experimental vaccine, in its ten years existence since 2010 it had failed to get FDA approval to market a single medicine, despite repeated failed attempts. However Moderna has a red neon sign that reads “conflict of interest” that should give pause.

Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID have collaborated on development of vaccines using Moderna’s mRNA platform and NIAID of Fauci on coronaviruses including MERS, since at least November, 2015. On January 13, 2020, before the first case of a supposed Wuhan, China “novel coronavirus” was even detected in the United States, Fauci’s NIAID and Moderna signed an updated cooperation agreement which described them as co-owners of a mRNA based coronavirus and that they had finalized a sequence for mRNA-1273, the vaccine now being given to millions for supposedly averting the novel coronavirus. That means that Fauci’s NIAID and perhaps Fauci personally (it’s allowed in the US) stood to reap huge financial benefits from emergency approval of the Moderna jab, yet Fauci has never admitted to the conflict publicly when he was Trump corona adviser, nor as Biden’s.

Ten days later on January 23, 2020 Moderna announced it was granted funding by CEPI, a vaccine fund created by Bill Gates’ foundation along with Davos WEF among others, to develop an mRNA vaccine for the Wuhan virus.

Moderna was created by a venture capitalist, Noubar Afeyan along with Harvard professor Timothy A. Springer, and others. In 2011 Afeyan recruited French businessman and former Eli Lilly executive Stephane Bancel as CEO of the new Moderna. Despite having no medical or science degree nor any experience running a drug development operation, Bancel lists himself as co-patent holder for a hundred patents of Moderna tied to the different vaccines. Beginning in 2013 the tiny Moderna was receiving grants from the Pentagon to develop its mRNA technology. As of 2020 just prior to its receiving emergency use authorization from the US Government FDA, fully 89% of Moderna revenues were from US Government grants. This is hardly an experienced company yet it holds the fate of millions in its hands. As Fauci says, “Trust the Science.”

In February 2016, an editorial in Nature magazine criticized Moderna for not publishing any peer-reviewed papers on its technology, unlike most other emerging and established biotech companies. The company remains ultra-secretive. That same year, 2016 Moderna got $20 million from the Gates Foundation for vaccine development using mRNA.

Up to its receiving EUA approval for its covid mRNA product in December 2020 Moderna had only made losses since its founding. Then curiously, following a March 2020 personal meeting with then-President Trump where Bancel told the president Moderna could have a vaccine ready in a matter of months Moderna luck changed.

On May 15, Trump announced creation of Operation Warp Seed to rollout a COVID-19 vaccine by December. The head of the Presidential group was a 30-year R&D veteran of the large UK drug firm GSK, Moncef Slaoui. In 2017 Slaoui had resigned from GSK and joined the board of none other than Moderna. Under Slaoui’s Warp Speed, some $22 billion of US taxpayer money was thrown at different vaccine makers. Moderna was a prime recipient, a brazen conflict of interest but nobody seemed to care. Slaoui funneled some $2 billion in government funds to his old company, Moderna, to develop the mRNA covid vaccine. Only under public criticism did Slaoui sell his stock in Moderna, making millions in profit from Moderna’s role as a covid vaccine leading candidate. Shortly after resigning at the end of the Trump presidency, Slaoui was fired by his old firm GSK from a company subsidiary following charges of sexual harassment of a female employee.

In February 2020 Trump Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, invoked the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) to exempt Moderna, Pfizer, J&J and any future covid makers from any and all liability arising from damage or death caused by their vaccines for the Wuhan coronavirus. The legal protection lasts until 2024. If the vaccines are so good and safe, why is such a measure needed? Azar was former head of the US drug giant Eli Lilly. There are some serious questions that must be raised openly regarding the vaccine makers who are now pushing experimental highly controversial gene-edited formulations in human experiments.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.

July 30, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve seen how climate change is being used by alarmist politicians to promote their own agenda

By Paul A. Nuttall | RT | July 28, 2021

Every time there is a so-called ‘freak’ weather event, we hear from politicians and scientists about how it is down to climate change. But my time as an MEP showed me how the issue is hijacked to further individual interests.

London, like parts of Germany and China, has suffered a series of flash floods over the past few weeks. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, warned that the recent flash flooding “shows that the dangers of climate change are now moving closer to home.”

In an article penned for the Guardian newspaper, Khan also stated that the recent flooding “should be a wake-up call, spurring us all to take much more ambitious climate action.” Of course, Khan has a motive for linking the recent floods to climate change, as he is committed to making London carbon neutral by 2030. He plans to achieve this by pushing through a series of controversial measures, including even more cycle lanes, which have already turned London into a car park, and by extending the expensive ultra-low emission zone.

For politicians like Khan to get their way, the public has to accept that these floods are a recent phenomenon, and primarily caused by man. We all must be prepared to self-flagellate. People also must believe that London has never flooded before, because that would negate many of Khan’s arguments.

It is like some wacky Jedi mind trick: “This is the first time London has been flooded, and it is all a result of man-made climate change.” Oh, but hang on, Obi Wan Khan, London has flooded before – in fact, it has flooded loads of times. In the last century alone, London suffered serious flooding on many occasions, with 1928 and 1968 immediately springing to mind.

But it is not just last week’s floods that are being blamed on man-made climate change, it is also the recent heatwave. The Met Office head of civil contingencies, Will Lang, warned that “as a result of climate change, heatwaves are becoming longer and more extreme, and many people’s health and wellbeing will continue to suffer as a result.”

Now hang on Will, hasn’t there always been intermittent heatwaves in the UK? I remember the heatwave of 1990. I was a schoolboy and had a great summer playing cricket and tennis. In August 1990, temperatures hit almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit, beating the previous record which went all the way back to the heatwave of 1911.

Also, I was born in 1976, which is famous for its heatwave and drought. That year represented the driest in over 250 years and rivers literally became trickles of water. It did not rain between May and September and hosepipe bans were imposed. However, was the 1976 heatwave blamed on man-made climate change? No, of course not, because these same climate ‘scientists’ were not worried about warming back then, they were warning of global cooling and the onset of another ice age. They are, of course, now busy trying to row back on the theories, but it still represents an inconvenient truth, if you don’t mind the pun.

The point I am trying to make is that none of these recent weather events is unique. They have happened before, and in our recent history. But if we go back even further, say to the medieval warm period, we find grapes being produced as far north as Scotland and we also know that the climate was warmer during the Roman period. And why was this? Julius Caesar’s gas-guzzling 4×4 perhaps? Of course not, it was all natural and mainly to do with the big yellow thing in the sky that we call the sun.

It is not just politicians who are using the man-made climate change hypothesis as a weapon; the media are equally culpable. Take, for example, the fact that April this year was the coldest since 1922, and the first week of May was the coldest since 1659. Did you see this sprayed all over the mainstream media? Of course not, because it does not fit with the warming agenda. If they had been the hottest weeks or months for a number of years, we would never have heard the end of it.

And when mainstream media outlets don’t play the game, they are forced to apologise. Take for example the fact that the RTÉ News and Current Affairs Managing Director Jon Williams had to say sorry for not linking the recent flooding to climate change. Williams said, “we were wrong not to make clear connection between recent extreme weather events and climate change.” You must be a good boy Jon, or you’ll be subjected to a lecture from Greta.…

Now I have, in the past, been called a “climate change denier.” This was a cheap shot because I am not, far from it. I believe that the climate has always changed, but I am not convinced by how great man’s role has been in that change. What I do know is that that the issue is being used by cynical politicians to further their own agendas. I saw all this first-hand when I sat on the European Parliament’s Environment Committee. You see, climate change is used as a principal reason why we need supranational organisations like the European Union. “The climate knows no borders”, you hear repeated as if it were a cult. It gives the organisation a reason to exist.

The United Nations takes a similar line, and yesterday we had the toe-curling spectacle of Joyce Msuya, the assistant secretary general of the UN, claiming that Covid-19 was somehow linked to climate change. Now, as someone who is sitting here writing this article with Covid, I guarantee the dreary weather outside has absolutely nothing to do with my condition.

The one thing I can guarantee is that if you give a politician an inch, they will take a mile. Especially when they are backed by well-funded scientists and given a free pass by the cowed media. But this should not be the case. The science around man-made climate change is far from settled and the theories should be tested through rigorous debate. This is sadly not the case, as those who make an alternative argument are shouted down and abused. And that is why the climate alarmists can freely omit historical weather events to prove that what is happening now is unique, when it clearly is not.

Paul A. Nuttall is a historian, author and a former politician. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2019 and was a prominent campaigner for Brexit.

July 29, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The real pandemic is everyone doing as they are told

By Michael Driver | The Conservative Woman | July 29, 2021

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

– Henry David Thoreau

WE LIVE in the age of the oxymoron. Diversity means everyone thinks the same. Tolerance means the vicious exclusion of anyone who doesn’t. Levelling up is literally exacerbating inequality to medieval levels. Freedom passports means you require papers to watch football. Vaccines don’t prevent the infection or transmission of disease. Democracy is the imposition of new laws and policies no one voted for. Journalism is propaganda. Modern Monetary Theory means effect before cause, the ‘wet pavements cause rain’ branch of economics. Education is the process of removing information rather than importing it. That you don’t think but repeat is more important than that you learn and grow. Asymptomatic transmission means the healthy can infect the immunised. Sociopaths are philanthropists. Virtue signalling is camouflage for a collapse in morality. The green new deal is neither green, new or a deal. Environmentalists means a collection of the world’s most polluting corporations. Climate change policies are any act which preserves the most extreme forms of exploitation. War is peace, freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Owning nothing is happiness, as Orwell might have added if he were around today. Probably on social media (another oxymoron, they’re hard to escape).

A parlour game for this age of absurdity is to see how many of these logical inversions you can think of. Now I want to head in a different direction and consider two questions: What is the effect of collective cognitive dissonance? Where will it lead us?

I believe the effect of collective cognitive dissonance is the mass abdication of responsibility to authority. When something becomes impossible to understand or reconcile, the natural human instinct is to rely on authority figures – to herd. When people feel intense insecurity they abdicate freedom for perceived safety.

According to psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980): ‘Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.’

Fromm described the concept of automaton conformity as ‘changing one’s ideal self to conform to a perception of society’s preferred type of personality, losing one’s true self in the process’. Fromm described the desire to subsume the self into the herd.

The human species now sounds like a herd of animals with the relentless repetition of alliterative phraseology: for build back better I hear moo moo moo, new normal baa baaa etc. A cacophony of mindless agreement is expressed as poetic assonance: ‘double jabbed’, we yabber at each other like a flock of jabbering birds. Another parlour game for the next lockdown is to list all the new terms and phrases which sound like advertising slogans or neuro-linguistic programming. Why the repetition? Why the repetition?

The real pandemic is everyone thinking the same, a culture so mono it feels as if ISIS won. So why is this conformity reckless?

The width of the edge is what really matters in society. Too wide and we have anarchism, too narrow totalitarianism. Mass conformity is the mechanism of totalitarianism, it is the most reckless act. Progress is always ground up, never top down. All the good stuff happens at the edge. Great art is never produced by corporations. Scientific discoveries take place in patent offices, medical breakthroughs in dirty Petri dishes, great music is made by the unemployed, entrepreneurs succeed via repeated failure. Mandela didn’t change the world from Davos. The moment the pressure on de Klerk forced him to widen the edge, the idea of freedom nursed by Mandela blossomed like a giant protea. The campaigners for women’s suffrage were on the edge of society. Nothing changes from the middle. A third game might be to look around you and list everything born of the maverick. Start with the device you’re most likely reading this article on and work your way out.

Returning to the Thoreau quote at the top of this piece: mavericks need space to dance to a different tune. The edge needs to be just wide enough. ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music,’ as Nietzsche might have said. Reckless conformists hear only one note, mavericks the whole range. Think of us as the control group.

July 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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