If ever there was a man there when you needed him in time of Covid, it is the wonderful Ivor Cummins.
When we are all being driven mad by the spurious scaremongering ‘variant’ claptrap that the increasingly deranged Boris Johnson (you have to be mad or evil to write this mendacious nonsense) and his SAGE-backing band keep spouting, there, thank goodness, is Ivor – cool, calm and collected, cutting through the waffle to the facts.
In his latest online update, the biochemical engineer tells us that the Indian Variant (if you have caught up with the latest terminology) is in fact the Delta Variant that’s been around for a while. It was just re-badged, and it has had zero impact on hospitalisations.
And where else does Ivor go but to Government data to demonstrate this. It actually makes you laugh (though it’s no laughing matter) to see that the hospitalisation graph runs in exactly the opposite direction to the ‘cases’ graph. While the so-called variants climb, the hospitalisations decline. You couldn’t make it up. Look for yourselves here.
So, no, Messrs Johnson and Hancock et al, there is no real-world impact of these variants (variant in fact) at all.
Ivor leaves it pretty much there, except for a reprimand to the sensationalising, scaremongering Press. And his conclusion is that what we are being subjected to is a political scariant, not a deadly variant.
Which is pretty much the verdict of TCW’s recent investigation into the Government’s manufactured ‘case-demic,’ based on the flawed and faulty (Test and Trace) Lateral Flow Test scandal.
We remembered all the miseries, all the injustices, our people and the conditions they lived, the coldness with which world opinion looks at our cause, and so we felt that we will not permit them to crush us. We will defend ourselves and our revolution by every way and every means.
George Habash (1926-2008)
A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
In December 1982, following Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/37/43 concerning the ‘[i]mportance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination’. It endorsed, without qualification, ‘the inalienable right’ of the Palestinian people to ‘self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference’, and reaffirmed the legitimacy of their struggle for those rights ‘by all available means, including armed struggle’. It also strongly condemned Israel’s ‘expansionist activities in the Middle East’ and ‘continual bombing of Palestinian civilians’, both said to ‘constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people’. In the four decades since then, Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people and its colonisation of their land has not ceased. Up to the present moment, all over historical Palestine, from the Gaza Strip to Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are still under that same occupation, subject to suffocating control over virtually every aspect of their lives – and the sadistic, unaccountable violence of the Zionist state.
In addition to its endorsement by the UN, the Palestinians’ right to resist their occupation is also guaranteed by international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to protect the ‘status quo, human rights and prospects for self-determination’ of occupied populations, and as Richard Falk – an expert in international law who later went on to be appointed the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – has explained, Israel’s ‘pronounced, blatant and undisguised’ refusal to ever accept this framework of legal obligations constitutes a fundamental denial of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and engenders their legally-protected right of resistance. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its flagrant disregard for international law through the construction of illegal settlements and other daily violations has continued unabated since Falk’s assessment was made during the al-Aqsa Intifada. In fact, the occupation has only become further entrenched since then with the collaboration of the comprador Palestinian Authority.
Furthermore, regardless of what is mandated by international law, the Palestinians possess a fundamental moral right to resist their ongoing colonisation and oppression through armed resistance, and that right must be recognised and supported. The multi-generational suffering of the Palestinians, perhaps none more so than those who live in the besieged and bombarded Gaza strip, is unremittingly cruel and has one central cause: Israel and the perpetual belligerence, expansionism and racism that is inherent to its state ideology, Zionism. Moreover, contrary to the Western media’s narrative that, without fail, portrays Israel as acting in ‘retaliation’, it is the actions of the Palestinians which are fundamentally reactive in nature, because the violence that Israel inflicts upon them is both perpetual and structural, and therefore automatically precedes any resistance to it. ‘With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun’, said Paolo Freire; ‘[n]ever in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed’. In Palestine, as Ali Abunimah recently wrote, ‘the root cause of all political violence is Zionist colonisation’.
Given that the Palestinians’ legal and moral right to pursue armed resistance is clear, endorsement of this position should be uncontroversial and commonplace among supporters of their cause. Yet in the West, such a position is rarely expressed – even by those who loudly proclaim their solidarity with Palestine. On the contrary, acts of Palestinian armed resistance, such as the firing of missiles from Gaza, are condemned by these ostensible supporters as part of the problem, dismissed condescendingly as ‘futile’ and ‘counter-productive’, or even labelled ‘war crimes’ and ‘unthinkable atrocities’, said to be comparable to Israel’s routine collective punishment, torture, incarceration, bombardment and murder of Palestinians. This form of solidarity, as Bikrum Gill has argued, is essentially ‘premised upon re-inscribing Palestinians as inherently non-sovereign beings who can only be recognized as disempowered dependent objects to be acted upon, either by Israeli colonial violence, or white imperial protectors’.
To sit in the comfort and safety of the West and condemn acts of armed resistance that the Palestinians choose to carry out – always at great risk to their lives – is a deeply chauvinistic position. It must be stated plainly: it is not the place of those who choose to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians from afar to then try and dictate how they should wage the anti-colonial struggle that, as Frantz Fanon believed, is necessary to maintain their humanity and dignity, and ultimately to achieve their liberation. Those who are not under brutal military occupation or refugees from ethnic cleansing have no right to judge the manner in which those who are choose to confront their colonisers. Indeed, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause is ultimately meaningless if that support dissipates the moment that the Palestinians resist their oppression with anything more than rocks and can no longer be portrayed as courageous, photogenic, but ultimately powerless, victims. ‘Does the world expect us to offer ourselves up as polite, willing and well-mannered sacrifices, who are murdered without raising a single objection?’ Yahya al-Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, recently asked rhetorically. ‘This is not possible. No, we have decided to defend our people with whatever strength we have been given.’
This phenomenon speaks to what Jones Manoel calls the Western left’s ‘fetish for defeat’ that predisposes it towards situations ‘of oppression, suffering and martyrdom’, as opposed to successful acts of resistance and revolution. Manoel continues:
People become ecstatic looking at those images – which I don’t think are very fantastic – of a [Palestinian] child or teenager using a sling to launch a rock at a tank. Look, this is a clear example of heroism but it is also a symbol of barbarism. This is a people who do not have the capacity to defend themselves facing an imperialist colonial power that is armed to the teeth. They do not have an equal capacity of resistance, but this is romanticized.
As a result, large swathes of the Western left express solidarity with the Palestinian cause in a generalised, abstract way, overstating the importance of their own role, and simultaneously rejecting the very groups who are currently fighting – and dying – for it. All too often, those who have refused to surrender and steadfastly resisted at great cost, are condemned by people who, in the same breath, declare solidarity with the cause. Similarly, it is common for these same people to either ignore or demonise those external forces that materially aid the Palestinian resistance more than any others – most notably Iran. If this assistance is acknowledged, which is rare, the Palestinian groups that accept it are typically infantilised as mere ‘dupes’ or ‘pawns’, for allowing themselves to be used cynically by the self-serving acts of others – a sentiment that directly contradicts Palestinian leaders’ own statements.
A specific criticism of Hamas that is frequently deployed in this context is the ‘indiscriminate’ nature of its missile launches from Gaza, actions which both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Intentional regularly label ‘war crimes’. As observed by Perugini and Gordon, the false equivalence that this designation relies upon ‘essentially says that using homemade missiles – there isn’t much else available to people living under permanent siege – is a war crime. In other words, Palestinian armed groups are criminalised for their technological inferiority’. After the latest round of fighting in May 2021, al-Sinwar stated clearly that, unlike Israel, ‘which possesses a complete arsenal of weaponry, state-of-the-art equipment and aircraft’ and ‘bombs our children and women, on purpose’, if Hamas possessed ‘the capabilities to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did. We are forced to defend our people with what we have, and this is what we have’.
This failure to support legitimate armed struggle is a part of a wider problem with the framing used by many supporters of the Palestinian cause in the West, that obscures its fundamental nature and how it must be resolved. Palestine is not simply a human rights issue, or even just a question of apartheid, but rather an anti-colonial fight for national liberation being waged by an indigenous resistance against the forces of an imperialist-backed settler colony. Decolonisation is a word now frequently used in the West in an abstract sense or in relation to curricula, institutions and public art, but rarely anymore in connection to what actually matters most: land. And that is the very crux of the issue: the land of Palestine must be decolonised, its Zionist colonisers deposed, their racist structures and barriers – both physical and political – dismantled, and all Palestinian refugees given the right of return.
It should be noted that emphasising the importance of supporting the Palestinians’ right to carry out armed struggle in pursuit of their freedom does not mean that their supporters in the West should recklessly call for violence or fetishize and celebrate it unnecessarily. Nor does it mean that non-violent efforts such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) are inconsequential or unimportant. Rather, BDS should be considered part and parcel of a broad spectrum of resistance activities, of which armed struggle is an integral component. Samah Idriss, founding member of the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel in Lebanon has stated: ‘[b]oth forms of resistance, civil and armed, are complementary and should not be viewed as mutually exclusive.’ Or, as Khaled Barakat has stressed: ‘Israel and its allies have never accepted any form of Palestinian resistance, and boycott campaigns and popular organizing are not alternatives to armed resistance but interdependent tactics of struggle’.
Nelson Mandela’s analysis is relevant in this context, when he wrote that, ‘[n]on-violent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do’, but if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end’. For Mandela, ‘non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy’, since ‘there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon’. Clarifying the rationale behind the African National Congress’ decision to adopt armed resistance, Mandela explained that it had no alternative course left available: ‘[o]ver and over again, we had used all the non-violent weapons in our arsenal – speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment – all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand’. This standpoint is reflected in the words of al-Sinwar, who when referring to the Great March of Return protests in 2018-19, during which Israeli snipers shot dead hundreds of Gazan protestors and seriously wounded thousands more said: ‘we’ve tried peaceful resistance and popular resistance’, but rather than acting to stop Israel’s massacres, ‘the world stood by and watched as the occupation war machine killed our young people’.
Mandela’s reference to efficacy is crucial. Despite what many Western supporters seem intent on implying, although it comes at a huge cost, the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza is not ‘futile’ and has grown enormously in effectiveness and deterrent capacity. This was already evident after Israel’s failure to win the 2014 war on Gaza and has been underlined by the recent success of the resistance in May 2021, during which it launched an unprecedented number of missiles that can now reach deep inside historical Palestine. In spite of its devastating aerial bombardment of Gaza, Israel was unable to stop the launch of these missiles and, after the losses it experienced in 2014, is now too fearful of launching another ground invasion of the strip – notably as the resistance is now equipped with greater numbers of Kornet missiles previously used to such deadly effect against Israeli tanks in Southern Lebanon. The ceasefire that was declared on May 21st was widely seen in Israel as a defeat, and was celebrated by Palestinians across historical Palestine as a victory. The military balance has changed, and although Israel is still vastly more powerful by every conventional measure, the resistance is in a stronger position now than it has been for years. It has built upon the successes of Hezbollah against Israel in 2000 and 2006 and with the support, training and further aid of the Lebanese group and others in the Resistance Axis, it has taken its capabilities to a higher level. This change is reflected in the fact that since 2014, Israeli arms sales have stagnated and its aggressions against Gaza no longer lead to an immediate rise in the stock price of its arms companies that use Gaza as a training ground and stage for its latest technologies. Shir Hever has noted that after Israel’s failures in Gaza beginning in 2014, customers of its arms companies began to ask ‘What is the point of all this technology? If you cannot pacify the Palestinians with these missiles, why should we buy them?’.
In addition to its practical impact, armed struggle has significant propaganda value. The reality is that Palestine would not have dominated global news headlines in May 2021 in the way that it did were it not for the armed resistance in Gaza that – contrary to the Western media’s singular focus on Hamas – is composed of a united front of various factions including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP is a case in point in this regard, for it was their actions throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably a series of plane hijackings (in which passengers were released unharmed), that implanted the Palestinian cause in the consciousness of millions of people for the first time and marked a key turning point in raising awareness of the Palestinians’ plight globally. Indeed, the Palestinian writer and PFLP spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani, believed that armed struggle was the ‘best form of propaganda’ and that in spite of the ‘gigantic propaganda system of the United States’, it is through people who fight to liberate themselves in armed struggle ‘that things are ultimately decided’.
In 1970, after the Western-backed regime in Jordan had shelled Palestinian refugee camps in the country, the PFLP – under the leadership of Kanafani’s comrade (and recruiter) George Habash – took hostage a group of nationals from the US, West Germany and Britain (Israel’s primary supporters) at two hotels in Amman. In return for their safe release, the PFLP demanded that ‘all shelling of the camps be ended and all demands of the Palestinian resistance movement met’. Shortly before the hostages were eventually released, Habash addressed them apologetically and said:
I feel that it’s my duty to explain to you why we did what we did. Of course, from a liberal point of view of thinking, I feel sorry for what happened, and I am sorry that we caused you some trouble during the last 2 or 3 days. But leaving this aside, I hope that you will understand, or at least try to understand, why we did what we did.
Maybe it will be difficult for you to understand our point of view. People living different circumstances think on different lines. They can’t think in the same manner, and we, the Palestinian people, and the conditions we have been living for a good number of years, all these conditions have modelled our way of thinking. We can’t help it. You can understand our way of thinking, when you know a very basic fact. We, the Palestinians… for the last 22 years, have been living in camps and tents. We were driven out of our country, our houses, our homes and our lands, driven out like sheep and left here in refugee camps in very inhumane conditions.
For 22 years our people have been waiting in order to restore their rights, but nothing happened… After 22 years of injustice, inhumanity, living in camps with nobody caring for us, we feel that we have the very full right to protect our revolution. We have all the right to protect our revolution…
We don’t wake up in the morning to have a cup of milk with Nescafe and then spend half an hour before the mirror thinking of flying to Switzerland or having one month in this country or one month in that country… We live daily in camps… We can’t be calm as you can. We can’t think as you think. We have lived in this condition, not for one day, not for 2 days, not for 3 days. Not for one week, not for 2 weeks, not for 3 weeks. Not for one year, not for 2 years, but for 22 years. If any one of you comes to these camps and stays for one or two weeks, he will be affected.
You have to excuse my English. From the personal side, let me say, I apologize to you. I am sorry about your troubles for 3 or 4 days. But from a revolutionary point of view, we feel, we will continue to feel that we have the very, very full right to do what we did.
Habash’s words should be listened to carefully. The urgency that underlines his message is even more palpable half a century later, for the Palestinians – consistently refusing passive victimhood – have now lived in the wretched conditions Habash depicts for 73 long years, not 22.
Revolution, Mao Zedong once remarked, ‘is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle’. The same is true of decolonisation, in which although past struggles have been multi-faceted, armed resistance of some kind was almost invariably an integral component of the struggle. Palestine is no exception. Beyond endorsement of BDS and other civil society campaigns, the Palestinians’ unassailable right to pursue armed struggle must be supported by those who choose to stand in solidarity with them and their righteous cause.
A briefing from Public Health England (PHE) shows that as a hospital patient, you are six times more likely to die of the COVID Delta variant if you are fully vaccinated, than if you are not vaccinated at all.
The information shows up in Table 6 of the 77-page document, which the attendance to emergency care and deaths by vaccination status and confirmed Delta cases from February 1, 2021, to June 7, 2021.
Of 33,206 Delta variant cases admitted to the hospital, 19,573 were not vaccinated. Of those, 23 (or 0.1175%) died.
But, of the 13,633 patients who were vaccinated with either one or two doses, 19 (or 0.1393%) died, which is an 18.6% higher death rate than for the unvaccinated patients. Seven of the 5,393 patients who were partially vaccine with one dose died, or 0.1297%.
Of the 1,785 patients who had both vaccine doses 14 days or more before admission, 12 (or 0.6722%) died. This death rate is 5.72 times higher than that for unvaccinated patients. Put another way, if all 33,206 patients had been fully vaccinated, there would have been 223 deaths.
Announced at the archaic “Group of 7” summit (G7) in mid-June – the “Build Back Better World” (B3W) initiative is billed by Western governments and the Western corporate media as a plan that “could rival” China’s One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR).
Yet even its announcement – surely the easiest phase of the overall initiative – fell flat. Not a single actual example was provided of what B3W would provide prospective partners beyond the vaguest platitudes and most ambiguous commitments.
A “fact sheet” provided by the White House for what is essentially a US-led project – rather than clarify or solidify B3W’s vision – instead seems to suggest the “initiative” is serving as a rebranding exercise behind which US meddling abroad will continue.
The White House document mentions, “Development Finance Corporation, USAID, EXIM, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the US Trade and Development Agency,” as being involved – all of which are admittedly arms of US political interference abroad, not agencies involved in driving actual development.
USAID – for example – is mentioned by name 40 times in the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s counterinsurgency manual (PDF) which describes the tools and techniques the US military can use to defeat insurgency abroad – tools and techniques that are admittedly just as useful at undermining, overthrowing, and replacing a targeted government with.
In many instances, “counterinsurgency” strategies are employed by the US for precisely this purpose – cementing in power a client regime selected by the US to replace a targeted government toppled by Washington. USAID’s role is augmenting the insurgency-counterinsurgency strategy, not actually spurring development in any given country.
Other pillars of B3W like the “Millennium Challenge Corporation” qualify development through influencing policymaking.
One project on the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s official website featured in a post titled, “Social Inclusion in MCC’s Mongolia Compact: Affordable Water for all in Ulaanbaatar,” illustrates that US-funded “development” in Mongolia regarding “affordable water for all” is not building physical infrastructure that actually brings affordable water for all – but instead consists of conducting surveys and pressuring policymakers.
Rather than images of American construction crews building pipelines, digging wells, or putting up permanent water towers serving entire communities, the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s website features people with clipboards knocking on doors.
Myanmar: A “Sneak Peak” at America’s B3W in Action
Instead of actual development, US “development” agencies like these often channel money into political opposition groups specifically to block the construction of national infrastructure that would solve issues like energy, water, and food shortages – often predicated on false socio-political pretexts like “human rights” and “environmental” concerns.
In Myanmar for example, US government-funded opposition groups have worked for years to block the construction of Chinese-led projects including dams that would generate electricity, contribute to flood control, and aid in agricultural irrigation.
Wikileaks in a 2010 US diplomatic cable titled, “Burma: Grassroots Opposition to Chinese-backed Dam in Northern Burma,” would reveal US diplomats discussing the success of US embassy-funded “grassroots” opposition groups blocking Chinese-initiated dams. The cable noted:
An unusual aspect of this case is the role grassroots organizations have played in opposing the dam, which speaks to the growing strength of civil society groups in Kachin State, including recipients of Embassy small grants.
Once projects like dams, roads, rails, or ports are blocked in targeted nations like Myanmar, no Western alternative is ever offered.
Instead, organizations like USAID provide provisional infrastructure like solar panels and ad-hoc water towers providing recipient communities with minimum living standards. The goal is to disrupt unifying national projects and encourage local communities to make do without modern infrastructure. This in itself aids in arresting development across entire regions – allowing the US to artificially maintain “primacy” over them. This also contributes to separatism, with communities dependent on US handouts rather than working with their own nation’s government – which in Myanmar in particular has been the source of decades of armed conflict. This conflict also further arrests development.
All of this is in stark contrast to China’s OBOR which is building physical infrastructure that is transporting goods and people across entire regions and providing food, energy, and water for a growing number of people around the globe – all without political strings attached or armies of foreign-funded “activists” commandeering national policymaking and in turn, hijacking national sovereignty.
Nations have already tangibly benefited from Chinese-led infrastructure projects – including nations like Myanmar where projects have been completed. These include roads, bridges, and dams.
The Irrawaddy Bridge (also known as the Yadanabon Bridge) built by China CAMC Engineering and completed in 2008 – for example – finally allows heavy vehicles to cross the Irrawaddy River from the nation’s northwest to Mandalay and the nation’s interior beyond without using cumbersome ferries.
Also built with China’s help is the Yeywa Dam commissioned in 2010. It includes the nation’s largest hydroelectric power plant, providing energy to nearby Mandalay. It also significantly contributes to flood control.
Opposed to its construction was the so-called “Burma Rivers Network” – an extension of “International Rivers” – funded by Western corporate foundations like Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust – all admittedly working in parallel with fronts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to advance US government foreign policy objectives.
Burma Rivers Network made claims regarding the dam including that the power would “likely” be “transmitted to China” – a claim that was and is completely false. The network also made baseless claims that villagers were “forcibly relocated without compensation” and that the dam would jeopardize their livelihood. This livelihood included unsustainable fishing and logging along the river – a livelihood necessitated by a previous lack of infrastructure needed for modern and sustainable economic opportunities.
As other adjacent projects to the Yeywa Dam are either proposed or in the process of being built – these same US-backed networks work tirelessly to derail compensation, relocation, and even public hearings to discuss either in the first place.
In some cases – like the proposed and partially constructed Myitsone Dam – work has been halted by not only US-funded opposition groups politically obstructing progress, but also by armed attacks by US-backed separatist groups.
The Guardian in a 2014 article titled, “Burmese villagers exiled from ancestral home as fate of dam remains unclear,” would admit:
As work got underway, the Kachin Independence Army broke a 17-year-old ceasefire to attack the dam site. In 2010, 10 bombs exploded around the dam site, killing a Chinese worker.
Kachin separatism is openly encouraged by the US as revealed through a series of leaked cables and the US government’s funding of Kachin separatist groups listed on the National Endowment for Democracy’s official website.
While the example of US interference in Myanmar and its open determination to arrest development is an extreme one – it is essentially the same process used around the globe to address – as the White House “fact sheet” regarding B3W calls it, “competition with China.”
It is also a “sneak peak” at what B3W will actually entail. Were it a genuine infrastructure drive – actual projects would have been showcased upon its inauguration. Instead, hand-waving and platitudes were used as stand-ins where real infrastructure projects should have been – an assurance that the US was merely rebranding its ongoing efforts to derail not just Chinese-led development worldwide – but development itself.
For a declining empire to maintain “primacy” over areas of the planet as the US insists it must do regarding the Indo-Pacific region – the only way to remain on top is to make sure everyone is declining at an equal or greater rate than the US – even if it means Washington knocking these nations down itself.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
Collusion by the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media resulted in disparagement, denial, and suppression of eyewitness testimony confirming that most POWs were actually well-treated by their North Vietnamese captors (in contrast to the brutal torture and death often meted out to North Vietnamese POWs by U.S. forces).
When numerous U.S. POWs began to understand the truth about the war they had been fighting, they spoke out against it—voluntarily—as an act of conscience. But they were cynically portrayed as traitors, turncoats and “camp rats,” their reputations and lives destroyed, driving many to despair and even suicide.
Among the few memories that most Americans still retain of the Vietnam War—now nearly 60 years in the past—one of the most vivid centers around the torture suffered by Senator John McCain at the hands of his brutal Vietnamese captors while a prisoner of war in Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (AKA The Hanoi Hilton).
This story has been told, retold, and continually burnished countless times by admiring media interviews and a flood of books and memoirs, including several by McCain himself.
Another memory of the war, still believed by millions of Americans, is that hundreds or even thousands of American soldiers classified as MIA (Missing in Action) are actually being held and tortured in secret North Vietnamese POW camps, callously abandoned by our government and desperately praying to be rescued—preferably in a Hollywood-style rescue by Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone, who starred in the spate of Commie-hating blockbuster movies inspired by their plight.
This belief is continually reinforced by POW/MIA flags which fly at every post office, and a ready supply of new books and movies, such as the 2018 release of the film M.I.A. A Greater Evil.
But both memories of the Vietnam War are false memories. However passionately believed, they were cynically manufactured fantasies implanted in all-too-willing American minds for political purposes.
How and why these counter-factual beliefs were so successfully foisted on the American public is the subject of the new myth-shattering book by Tom Wilber and Jerry Lembcke, Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).
Wilber is the son of a dissenting POW, Walter “Gene” Wilber, who is featured in the book, and has contributed to the award-winning documentary film The Flower Pot Story by Ngọc Dũng. Lembcke is a distinguished sociologist from College of the Holy Cross who has written a number of books debunking popular myths about the Vietnam War.
The two start their book by noting that the dominant war hero image of the POW—who endured torture and resisted service to enemy propaganda—was to a large extent created by high-ranking men like McCain who were captured early in the conflict.
John McCain embodied the war hero image of someone who endured torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors while retaining loyalty to the United States. [Source: nymag.com]
McCain’s oft-told story of ill-treatment and torture is contradicted by Nguyen Tien Tran, the chief prison guard of the jail in which McCain was held. In a report by The Guardian, “[Tran] acknowledged that conditions in the prison were ‘tough, though not inhuman’. But, he added: ‘We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded’. . . . [H]e denied torturing him, saying it was his mission to ensure that McCain survived. As the son of the US naval commander in Vietnam, he offered a potential valuable propaganda weapon.”
John McCain fit well with this group because he was also academically privileged and his family included high-ranking military officers like his father, Jack, who was an admiral and the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.
James Stockdale while in captivity. [Source: military.com]
Jeremiah Denton featured in famous film footage from his captivity. [Source: washingtontimes.com]
Robinson Risner, right, is celebrated in a parade in San Francisco in 1973 after his return following seven years in a North Vietnamese POW camp. [Source: nytimes.com]
With post-war military careers at stake, these high-ranking officers played up the alleged barbarity of the North Vietnamese, demanded resistance to interrogations from other captives, and threatened so-called deviants with disciplinary charges after release to the U.S.
The Nixon administration advanced their credibility and status in a desperate ploy to stir up support at home for an unpopular conflict abroad; and further concocted a story—announced in a press conference by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird on May 19, 1969—that 1,300 American soldiers deemed “missing in action” were believed to be prisoners of war.
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gives the opening statement of a press conference on May 19, 1969, to publicize the plight of U.S. POWs and MIAs in North Vietnam. [Source: courant.com]
The unaccounted for would now publicly be described as “POW/MIA,” implying that any serviceperson missing in Vietnam could also be a prisoner of war. This transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one, trading public support for sympathy. It didn’t matter why we were there in the first place: Our boys were there, and by God were we going to do anything to get them home.
Suddenly, the public image of Vietnam looked very different. The very real footage of brutalized Vietnamese bodies, wailing children, and napalmed villages was traded for a fantasy—all of the violence that had been done in Uncle Sam’s name was now being done to him.
Images like this famous one of a Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, running from a U.S. napalm strike, were supplanted by the fixation with the plight of American POW/MIAs. This was a brilliant public relations maneuver by the Nixon administration in collusion with the media. [Source: irishtimes.com]
The POW issue soon became a cause célèbre. In the early 1970s, millions of “POW bracelets” were sold by a student group called VIVA (Voices in Vital America), each branded with the name of a missing American serviceman.
These shiny nickel bracelets were spotted on the wrists of celebrities like Sonny and Cher—who had often before dressed like hippies—and Sammy Davis, Jr, and allegedly Princess Grace of Monaco put in an order for two bracelets.
Sonny and Cher with returned POW John “Spike” Nasmyth on their CBS comedy hour program in March 1973 in which they announced that they wore POW bracelets with his name. [Source: cherscholar.com]
The silver bracelets could even be spotted on the fashion runway, where models with an interest in political activism took to wearing them. A New York Times profile from the day quotes a model named Astrida Woods, who said she was “dissatisfied” with her life as a model and felt the urge to give back. “I began to do some work with Ralph Nader, and now [wearing the bracelets]. It’s a way to contribute something.”
Pretty young women showcasing POW bracelets as part of PR campaign to unify the nation around support for POW/MIAs, if not the Vietnam War itself. [Source: audacy.com]
Wilber and Lembcke conclude that “instances of brutal treatment” were “less common than [has been] purported” and that evidence of systematic torture drawn from visitor reports, POW statements, and oral histories was scant.
Those POWs who questioned the war were dismissed by the military for their supposedly “weak personal character” and “lack of education and backgrounds in broken and poor families,” a typical case of “psychologizing the political.”
These men were in turn stigmatized and then forgotten by the public amidst the manufactured concern about POW/MIAs who were supposedly brutalized and then kept in captivity and abandoned by their government.
The ranks of the POW dissenters included Lt. Col. Edison Miller, a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart from California who spent six years in captivity after his fighter plane was shot down over North Vietnamese skies on October 13, 1967.
A contemporary described Miller, a Californian who flew previously over Korea, as a “first-rate pilot with a zeal for combat but an independent sort.”
John McCain falsely accused Miller of being a turncoat because he appeared in North Vietnamese propaganda.
McCain said both “had lost their faith completely.”
“They not only stopped resisting but apparently crossed a line no other prisoner I knew had even approached,” McCain wrote. “They were collaborators, actively aiding the enemy.”
Miller’s anti-war views had been sharpened in conversation with Navy Commander Robert Schweitzer, a captive from 1968 to 1973 who died a year after his release while still on active duty in San Francisco.
Schweitzer felt that, because the U.S. had never declared war, there could not legally be any North Vietnamese prisoners of war, only “Americans detained by a foreign power,” Miller said.
A tape of a conversation between Miller and Schweitzer was played for other prisoners, who heard not only an anti-war message but a challenge to the legality of the U.S. military action in Vietnam.
In 1970, when Miller and Gene Wilber were interviewed on national television, Wilber called for an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal “so that the Vietnamese can solve their own problems.”
U.S. journalists at the time, however, did not take their interview seriously, regarding it rather as a North Vietnamese propaganda show.
The two men along with Schweitzer continued to write protest statements and together with fellow dissenters met with American peace activists visiting North Vietnam, including actress Jane Fonda and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Jane Fonda (center) during trip to North Vietnam in 1972. [Source: flickr.com]
Ramsey Clark (left) in North Vietnam in 1972. [Source: nytimes.com]
Most dissenting POWs came from a working-class background.
James A. Daly, an African-American infantryman from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, for example, was raised in poverty by a single mother.
His 1975 book, Black Prisoner of War, describes his three years of jungle confinement after his capture by North Vietnamese soldiers and the South Vietnam-based National Liberation Front (NLF), followed by a two-month trek north to Hanoi on the Ho Chi Minh trail where he experienced what it was like to be on the receiving end of U.S. ordnance.
Bob Chenoweth, from a white working-class family in Oregon, similarly developed an empathy for the Vietnamese people and a distaste for the racist views of most Americans toward the Vietnamese.
A helicopter crew member, before he was shot down and captured, Chenoweth said he “couldn’t see how U.S. forces could possibly be helping the Vietnamese given the attitude that GIs had, viewing them as ‘subhuman’ and disparaging them as ‘gooks and dinks.’”
Chenoweth and other of his contemporaries authored anti-war statements, wrote messages to GIs asking them to follow their consciences, sent letters to politicians, and recorded tapes to be aired via Radio Hanoi.
Bob Chenoweth speaking at Veterans for Peace conference in Spokane, Washington, in 2019. He was active in the Vietnam era anti-war movement upon his return from the war. [Source: wagingpeaceinvietnam.com]
Higher ranking POWs responded by trying to isolate the dissenters from other American prisoners while charging them with participating in a conspiracy against the United States.
One of the dissidents, Abel Kavanaugh, committed suicide as a result of the intense pressure and prospective stigma of a dishonorable discharge only a few months after coming home from Vietnam.
Charges against the POW dissidents were eventually dropped, Wilber and Lembcke believe, so as to not jeopardize the hero-prisoner story with too much attention on dissent and through a possible exposure of inconsistencies in the accusers’ own prison biographies.
Fear of Communist Infiltration
A critical trope in Cold War America was the fear of communist infiltration and internal subversion through brainwashing and mind control.
This trope was fortified by a CIA propaganda effort that depicted Korean War POWs who defected to the North Korean and Chinese side as having been brainwashed in interrogation.
CIA propaganda tract accusing Communist China of brainwashing U.S. POWs. The stereotype of cunning and evil Oriental communists endured through the Vietnam War and beyond and impacted how Americans viewed the dissenting POWs in Vietnam. [Source: goodreads.com]
Most of these defectors were in fact African-Americans who did not want to return to the Jim Crow South, while others were attracted by communist ideals or saw the U.S. war as immoral.[1]
Clarence Adams with Korean POWs and Communist captors in 1954. Adams lived in China for 12 years. He said he was well treated in captivity and stayed on in China because he was offered the chance at education there. Later he made propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi, eventually returning to his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, where he ran a chain of successful Chinese restaurants. [Source: u.osu.edu]
The stereotype of the brainwashed POW of the Korean War turned collaborator and traitor because of his weak character would become the backdrop for the discrediting of the dissident POWs of the Vietnam War.
POW defectors in the Korean War who stood for peace. [Source: newyorker.com]
In an appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Gene Wilber was grilled on whether he had given in to the enemy to make antiwar statements. That he had acted on his own “conscience and morality” was drowned out by host Mike Wallace’s implications of collaboration and opportunism.
When he was subsequently invited to the White House POW reception, Wilber found his hotel room broken into and marked with accusations of treason when he returned from the reception.
In the summer of 1973, James Stockdale charged Wilber and Edison Miller with collaborating with the enemy, mutiny, and inciting personnel to insubordination. However, military judges found insufficient evidence to prosecute the case, and Wilber and Miller instead received letters of censure for their failure to meet the standard expected of officers.
Hollywood Revisionism
POW films starting from this time focused on returnees’ estrangement with their families and society and were told as stories of spousal infidelity, representing both individual drama as well as a sense of “home-front betrayal.”
These films were part of a post-war revisionism, which included a spate of films that contributed to the legend of American servicemen left behind in Vietnam.
In the 1980s, a new subgenre emerged focused on Vietnam veterans heroically taking on the task of returning to Indochina and liberating the left-behind POWs, who had been betrayed on the home front and abandoned by the U.S. government.
The POWs were depicted as victimized and emasculated captives who needed to be rescued by individualist heroes and whose honor as Americans was to be restored.
This image, Wilber and Lembcke argue, fits the post-war efforts to psychologize the once political conflicts of the Vietnam War and to depict the veteran as a victim and loser.
More of a heroized image and the POWs’ endurance of torture was revived with the 1987 film, The Hanoi Hilton, which starred Michael Moriarty, Ken Wright and Paul Le Mat as U.S. POWs who defy their captors while enduring brutal treatment at Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (aka The Hanoi Hilton).
This film meshed particularly well President’s Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause,” fought by noble men, with the POW dissenters by implication being ignoble.
Persistence of the Hero-Prisoner Story
In their quest to comprehend the persistence of the hero-prisoner story, Wilber and Lembcke take their readers back to American colonial history and the captivity narratives emerging during that time.
These stories are about a complex mix of violence against captives, temptations to stay with their captors, the ideal to remain loyal with their fellow colonists, and their Christian beliefs.
Such tensions and correlations between the Self and the Other were critical in the making of an American identity. The wars in Korea and Vietnam and the POW experiences there can be understood as a new chapter of this identity-making process. Here, too, Americans must prove their will and ability to endure the brutality of a racialized Other.
A wrench in the story, however, is revealed in the autobiographical accounts of POW-heroes like Stockdale, Denton, and Risner. They wrote about fasting as a way of enforcing self-discipline and self-assurance, sometimes with a religious subtext.
More bizarrely, they also wrote about self-mutilation—the deliberate infliction of physical wounds on themselves that would be visible during filmed interviews.
The aim was to make it appear to other POWs (and to the U.S. public) that they had been tortured. One officer wrote of how he purposely damaged his vocal apparatus so he could not be forced to make propaganda statements.
In addition to some high-ranking officers attempting to portray themselves as heroes by means of self-mutilation, Wilber and Lembcke also noted that they tried to keep political literature and news of dissent back home away from other POWs, fearing that these would enhance critical positions on the war and against their authority within the prison population.
Moreover, these ranking officers often despised the more humane view of the Vietnamese displayed by other prisoners, including an interest in their language and culture, and an understanding of why they were fighting back against an invasion of their country by the most powerful military force in the world.
Bringing Back Forgotten Dissenters
Wilber and Lembcke’s book helps restore these forgotten POW dissenters to their rightful—and honored—place among the large and diverse Vietnam generation of dissidents, draft resisters, oppositional GIs, veteran activists, deserters, and all those who supported them.
The book also shows that, despite all destruction and death brought by the invaders from the sky, North Vietnam maintained a moral superiority through oftentimes fair treatment of the captured Americans. This was in stark contrast to the more systematic adoption of torture methods by USAID and CIA-trained police under the Operation Phoenix and like-minded programs.
Vietnam War protesters create mock Tiger Cage, replicating one in the USAID-run Con Son prison where Vietnamese inmates were tortured in a way American POWs claimed they had been tortured. [Source: easyyolktoofiles.wordpress.com]
The POW/MIA flag that flies today over the White House is intended to honor the men who endured captivity; however, it continues to perpetuate a distorted understanding of a war that was as abominable as it was unjust, and helps to advance a dangerous nationalist ideology that will lead to future Vietnams.
See Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). ↑
The rise in the use of Do Not Resuscitate orders (DNRs), and the suggestion that patients are being compelled to sign them, or even having them signed on their behalf in secret, has been one of the more concerning narratives to come out of the last year of “pandemic”.
As early as April of 2020, entirely mainstream publications, such as the Health Service Journal (HSJ), were running articles expressing concern over the “unprecedented” rise in “illegal” DNR orders for those with learning disabilities.
In June 2020 the Independentpicked up the story, citing some troubling examples found by charity workers and family members:
In one example, a man in his fifties with sight loss was admitted to hospital after a choking episode and was incorrectly diagnosed with coronavirus. He was discharged the next day with a DNR form giving the reason as his “blindness and severe learning disabilities” […] Marie-Anne Peters, whose brother Alistair has epilepsy but no other health conditions, overturned a DNR on her brother which included instructions for him not to be taken to hospital.
The BBC reported that, in Wales, some people were sent letters instructing them to sign DNRs, and their families not to call 999 in the event of an emergency. While, in Somerset, Sussex and Derbyshire, autism support groups were sent letters by GP surgeries telling them their members had to sign DNR orders.
As you can see, we’re not talking about people who are severely ill in the least. Autism, sight loss and epilepsy are not conditions that would ever, under normal circumstances, have patients deemed unworthy of receiving life-saving treatment.
It wasn’t just the ill or disabled who fell victim to this, either. In June last year, it was revealed that “blanket” DNRs had been applied to nursing homes by GPs all around the country.
Other surgeries and hospitals sent out letters to elderly patients, and other “at risk groups”, instructing them they needed to sign DNRs to protect the NHS.
Some care home residents were wrongly subjected to decisions ruling out attempts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, leading to potentially avoidable deaths
The root cause of this can be traced back to two sets of NHS guidelines, both written and published in the spring of 2020.
Then came the NICE guidelines for critical care admissions, which Dr Vernon Coleman did a video on last summer, which suggested doctors:
Sensitively discuss a possible ‘do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ decision with all adults with capacity and an assessment suggestive of increased frailty
This was, allegedly, to protect the NHS from the influx of Covid patients and to try and keep ICU beds open. This rush, of course, never materialised, and in 2020 NHS critical care beds were actually emptier than usual.
This policy was not solely isolated to the UK either. The “Undercover Nurse” reported in Perspectives on the Pandemic, the hospital she worked at in New York had widespread abuse of the DNR system, and Rosemary Frei wrote an article breaking down the way deaths were “created” in Canadian care homes.
So, we know that people have – in all likelihood – been allowed to die during this pandemic. That has been as good as officially admitted. But does it go further? Are people being actively euthanised?
Euthanasia has already been hinted at by other whistleblowers, specifically through the use of ventilators on patients who never needed them. (The Undercover Nurse discusses that too).
It’s certainly true that the use of ventilators was pushed in guidelines from the NHS, CDC, ECDC and WHO as soon as the “pandemic” started. And it’s very probable that this did a lot more harm than good, killing huge numbers of patients who may otherwise have survived (though obviously it cannot be proven – at this stage – that this was deliberate).
In this June 10th episode of Richie Allen’s podcast, he talks to independent journalist Jacqui Deevoy about the possibility of widespread euthanasia of elderly patients in the NHS during the Covid “pandemic”. They are joined by several people who claim their parents died in as-yet-unexplained circumstances.
Listen to the testimony of the people who may have lost parents to this policy. They certainly raise a lot of important questions.
How many people, who lost family members in the last year, are in the same situation and don’t even know it? How much of the UK’s excess mortality in 2020 – currently attributed to Covid19 – was in fact caused by these callous (and potentially criminal) practices?
And, more importantly, was that all part of a plan? Were these people deliberately allowed to die in order to create an illusory “pandemic”?
You can listen to other episodes of Richie Allen’s podcast here, and follow Jacqui Deevoy’s work here.
The thesis is that lockdowns did not protect the vulnerable, but rather harmed the vulnerable and shifted the morbidity and mortality burden to the underprivileged. Devastatingly so! We instead locked down the ‘well’ and healthy in society, which is unscientific and nonsensical, while at the same time failing to properly protect the actual group that lockdowns were proposed to protect, the vulnerable and elderly. We actually did the opposite. We shifted the burden to the poor and caused catastrophic consequences for them. They were in the worst economic situation to afford the lockdowns and estimates are that it will be decades for them to recover from what we did. Wealth disparities placed those who were more vulnerable economically in a very difficult position in terms of sheltering from the pandemic. It was devastating for them for they could not shelter. It left them exposed! COVID-19 has emerged as a boon for the rich ‘laptop’ class and a disaster for the poor. The actions of our governments hurt the poor in societies terribly, and many could not hold on and committed suicide. Deaths of despair skyrocketed. Poor children, especially in richer western nations such as the US and Canada, self-harmed and ended their lives, not due to the pandemic virus, but due to the lockdowns and school closures. This is the legacy for our governments and their inept COVID advisors. Full of arrogance, hubris, and self-righteousness, in spite of their catastrophic failures. Their actions were detrimental and costed lives.
How did we get here? The reality is everything about the response to this pandemic, by the governments, bureaucrats, technocrats, their medical advisors, and the television medical experts have been catastrophically wrong! Even medical doctors have become politicized and biased in their reactions and how they have managed this. Doctors (not all) but a vast majority just decided that they would not treat COVID-positive high-risk patients and took a hands-off ‘therapeutic nihilism’ approach, while the high-risk infected worsened and declined. While empiricism traditionally underpins clinical practice and doctors even take eclectic approaches, with COVID, the approach was ‘do nothing’ until the patient cannot breathe anymore and requires oxygen. This while we had effective and cheap anti-virals and corticosteroids and anti-clotting drugs like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, colchicine, favipiravir, budesonide, dexamethasone, methylprednisolone, high-dose aspirin, heparin etc. as part of sequenced, multi-drugearly treatment ‘cocktail’ protocols devised by pioneers such as McCullough, Risch, Zelenko, Smith, Fareed, Kory, Oskoui, Urso, Ladapo, Lawrie etc.
They, these specious and inept Task Forces and medical advisors to these unreasoned government leaders have been flat wrong on all and have failed and costed tens of thousands if not millions of lives! These advisors and governments lied about equal risk to all of becoming ill if infected, and this damaged the response. They lied about asymptomatic spread and recurrent infection, for our detailed examinations have shown these to be very rare if at all. They lied that the RT-PCR test was a valid test and to be used. They set cycle count thresholds (Ct) for PCR positive of 40 and above knowing that 20 to 24 was the threshold for viable, culturable infectious virus. They knew that Ct of 30 and above was denoting viral dust and fragments and non-infectious, non-pathogenic virus. They also misled the public that COVID recovered persons are to be vaccinated, and that children are to be vaccinated. They know the risk to children is so very negligible (even less than the seasonal flu) and that the vaccine has potential harms for children, yet they, combined with the CDC and Fauci, continue to provoke fear into parents to vaccinate their children. They have lied on everything COVID and all of these duplicitous statements and policies carry deep consequences. Nothing they have ever said turned out to be accurate and they have done this with reckless abandonment.
Our focus is on the devastating burden shifted to the poor in our society by the lockdowns and we begin by arguing vehemently that any epidemic or pandemic steps to mitigate severe outcomes cannot only focus on the harms from the pathogen, but must also focus on the harms from the policy steps such as lockdowns and school closures. Why? Because lockdowns (also known as non-pharmaceutical interventions) have crushing effects and function to exacerbate inequalities. Women and children and especially the poorer among them, have fared worst of all due to the effects of lockdowns! Look at the devastation visited upon women in our societies. She has lost most! We have learned a terrible lesson now that these specious, unsound, restrictive lockdown and school closure policies carry costs that may well be life-long, and especially on the backs of the poorer among us, who are least able to afford. We have argued with governments since spring 2020 against these draconian and unscientific policies, and that the approach must be nuanced and finessed, tailored and ‘focused’ with an age-targeted, risk-based approach. We had learned very early on that COVID-19 was amenable to risk stratification, and age (and obesity) were the principal risk factors, along with diabetes, renal disease, cardiovascular disease etc. We pleaded for an age-risk stratified approach to the pandemic response yet were dismissed and sidelined.
We argued about strongly protecting the vulnerable first (e.g. elderly and especially those with underlying medical conditions) as they were the key target group for the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, and allow the rest of the low-risk ‘well’ healthy population to live reasonably normal lives, taking sensible common-sense precautions. We knew that simple hand-washing and isolation of the ill/symptomatic persons was the key step. No isolation of asymptomatic persons, no testing of asymptomatic persons. Contact tracing after the pathogen had breached the borders and had spread was useless. These harmed people and populations and did not help in any manner. We knew this, we told the illogical and irrational, often hysterical and inept Task Forces and COVID advisors and governments this, but they did not listen.
Early data was showing us that people over 75 to 80 years old were over 10,000 times more likely to die of COVID-19 if infected than someone under 10 years old. Thus, why would we have a blanket carte blanche lockdown when there is so much risk differential? We could look at the situation in the rest of the low-risk ‘open’ population and monitor, and only if we saw infections and hospitalization increase markedly then we would move to impose restrictions etc. on them. As needed. No mass testing of asymptomatic persons and no quarantine of asymptomatic persons.
We knew that once the high-risk and elderly were properly protected, that we could reduce hospitalization and death. We also knew that if we used early drug treatment in these groups, that we would dramatically cut hospitalizations by 85% and save thousands of lives. But these maladroit and inept, unscientific Task Forces and television experts did not listen. We did not think that we were any smarter than the Task Force and lunatic television medical experts, by any means, but we knew that they were seemingly averse to the science and that we were literally studying the data and basing our decisions on balancing the benefits versus the harms to any decision. They had to be averse to the data for how else could you explain the often idiotic and nonsensical tripe they would spew 24/7 to the public? Consider Dr. Anthony Fauci as an example, for near 16 months now, we cannot think of or locate one statement that he has made publicly that made any sense whatsoever, and could be backed up by any data or science. None! Not one. We continue to look and ask if anyone can locate such, if they can bring it to our attention urgently for us to correct this record.
We felt strongly that if we indeed secured the high-risk elderly and vulnerable, then lockdowns would not have to be applied across the board. We were always confident in this, the question really being would those in decision-making positions understand this. Would they, the bureaucrats and technocrats and their illogical advisors be able to understand that the key is to drive a risk differential between the high and low-risk in a population whereby the low-risk of severe illness be allowed harmlessly and naturally to live lives normally and if exposed, become infected and to clear the virus with full, broad, and robust resulting natural immunity?
In other words, we do not impede the low risk of severe outcome of becoming infected and we leave them largely unrestricted with common sense safety precautions. We knew they would have no symptoms or very minimal and recover quite well. The evidence was clear in this. We heighten their risk of transmission (we increase the probability of infection among the younger and low-risk persons, low-risk adults etc.), so to speak. And that at the same time, we secure the high-risk of illness persons so that infection risk is reduced for them. We mitigate the chance of infection in the high-risk of illness. We create a risk differential of contracting the virus that is skewed towards the young and healthy. And we do this harmlessly and naturally. We do this so that the low-risk who become infected can become immune, and they can then help protect the high-risk vulnerable persons in a society.
Would they, these lockdown lunatic advisors understand that you do not lock down the well and healthy so that you effectively cause the low-risk of severe illness to have low risk of becoming infected and that this only works to delay moving toward population immunity? That this is the worst step you can take? That you also put selection pressure on the virus when you lockdown, that drives mutations? Akin to the mutations driven by vaccinating during a pandemic, this itself being a terrible step. That with lockdowns, the pathogen does not go away and waits for the restrictions to be loosened and infections will always go up once restrictions are loosened. That this also denies them, the low-risk persons, the opportunity to clear the virus and become naturally immune? That this mistake actually harms the elderly who are then not protected by the population immunity that was not gained by the low-risk? We use the low-risk in the population to protect the high-risk as the full strategy, or in combination with a properly developed and safety tested vaccine. Everything these lockdown lunatics in charge did, was wrong! Did they not think these things through?
The stark reality is that our lockdowns badly harmed the elderly for it left them confined in their nursing homes and extended the window of exposure to the virus for them. And they were subject to repeated exposure from staff who brought pathogen into the confined settings and drove the hospitalizations and deaths. Lockdowns worked to kill the elderly! Lockdowns thus reduced the movement of the younger low-risk persons to the same level of movement and mobility as the elderly higher-risk persons (basically none) and thus equalized the chance of infection between the low-risk and high-risk (young and old). This was devastating.
While we knew this and spoke of this repeatedly to inform the policy makers, they, the media, and the inept television medical experts attacked us and smeared us. Pilloried us. They, the governments and their utterly bogus scientific advisors ‘knew best’. They were so inept and academically sloppy, and refused to do the work and abreast themselves of the science and to think this through. They were lazy and either did not understand the science, did not read it, did not ‘get’ it, or were blinded to it by their cognitive dissonance of any information that did not align with their politicized views. This led to catastrophic decisions that continue even today. Again, just look at Ontario in mid-June 2021, it is as if it were February 2020.
Now look at what they have done to the globe by their hubris and arrogance and ineptness. Look around you. We were always right for we took the time and thought this through and understood the catastrophic mess the lockdowns would cause. We knew that a finessed, nuanced ‘targeted’ approach was needed here. We studied the policy implications and considered the harms from the lockdown policies. In the end, still to this day, they have failed to properly protect the elderly while damaging the well in the society with crushing lockdowns and closures. Thousands of Americans, including children, died due to suicides and deaths of despair, needlessly. The effects will be felt in some models for the rest of the 21st century. In no country, no setting, is there any evidence that lockdowns, school closures, shelter-in-place, social distancing, mass asymptomatic testing, and mask mandates worked. None! Zero! This is why the father of epidemiology and eradicator of small-pox, Dr. Donald Henderson, argued in 2006 against these devastating measures even for more lethal pathogens, for he knew of the disastrous outcomes. He did not advocate for them for he knew of the devastating consequences.
What have we found out about the illogical and unscientific societal restrictions since March 2020? This is not ‘new’ data or evidence as the CDC would tend to say, for this data began emerging soon after the catastrophic lockdowns and school closures began in spring of 2020. We learnt about the catastrophic harms (consequences) and failures of lockdowns (AIER lockdowns) and principally that they do not work and are ineffective and detrimental to societies rich or poor, whereby lockdowns decimates a society as it drives desperation especially among the disenfranchised and marginalized. We learnt that school closures (AIER school closures) was and remains a catastrophic failure whereby keeping children out of the school system harms them. Many children get their only meal in the school, get their eyes and hearing tested, and the school acts as a safety valve for possible physical and/or sexual abuse. These are normally noticed from the school initially. Many children killed themselves in the west due to the school closures, and the US Task Force led by Fauci et al. wears this. Moreover, we learnt about the catastrophic harms of mask use especially for children. In addition, we learnt of the ineffectiveness of masks (blue surgical as well as cloth face-masks) (AIER masks) as well as the failure of mask mandates (especially for children who are damaged socially, emotionally, and health-wise due to the masking).
We learnt that everything that the US Task Force and other medical advisors called for and implemented (especially the British and Canadian Task Forces), was destructive and caused devastating consequences to economies and lives. Just look at the insanity Canadians are living now, 16 months in, especially in the province of Ontario. Look at the economic destruction, lost businesses, jobs, and lives. What a catastrophic mess and every single step the provincial government takes is nonsensical and unscientific and completely irrational. None have worked. Who comprises the Ontario government’s Task Force? They should have all been fired 12 months ago and all their salaries recouped. What an inept, highly incompetent, senseless bunch, a clown car out of control! Hundreds of thousands of people died not due to COVID, but as a result of the damaging restriction policies by these absurd and reckless medical experts who should all have been fired after one month of their lunacy!
Acquired immunity due to exposure, some cross-reactivity cross-protection to other coronaviruses (common cold), as well as innate resistance to begin with was the pattern we were observing. How come we saw and knew this but these Task Forces could not? We were seeing that the vast majority of persons were at no risk for serious illness or death and only a small sliver of the population, was at risk. An approximate 99.98% risk of survival. In fact, the specific high-risk group e.g. elderly persons with underlying medical conditions, was more focused on by SARS-CoV-2 than for influenza since influenza cuts a wide swath including devastating to children. We knew COVID was clearly devastating for high-risk vulnerable people. But we knew quickly how to manage COVID and that the virus was treatable with existing cheap, safe, and effective therapeutics, when applied early in the disease sequelae. Yes, early outpatient treatment with existing repurposed therapeutics would have played a major role in closing off this pandemic much earlier. Yet, what did we do? We shut our societies down and moved massively toward vaccinating the nation(s). We refused to consider the potent role of natural immunity and COVID recovered immunity, as well as cross-protection immunity. It went counter to all of what we knew and were seeing.
Perhaps Dr. John Lee wrote it best by stating, “The moral debate is not lives vs money. It is lives vs lives. It will take months, perhaps years, if ever, before we can assess the wider implications of what we are doing. The damage to children’s education, the excess suicides, the increase in mental health problems, the taking away of resources from other health problems that we were dealing with effectively. Those who need medical help now but won’t seek it, or might not be offered it. And what about the effects on food production and global commerce, that will have unquantifiable consequences for people of all ages, perhaps especially in developing economies”?
Lockdowns did not protect the vulnerable and defenseless among us, no, it actually harmed and devastated the vulnerable people, for lockdowns work to expose vulnerable people. These lockdowns, these school closures, these mask mandates, these shelter-in-place edits and polices were all Fauci’s and Birx’s policies. These were their policies that the President implemented and the gross error he made was listening to these inept illogical so-called ‘experts’ and not firing them on day one! How could he be so misled? Their lockdown polices costed lives! What a clown car of disaster visited upon the United States for near 16 months now and it continues under the new administration. Even worse!
Gupta and Kulldorff write, “a key feature of COVID-19 is that there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the oldest and the youngest”. We agree fully and this is a core theme of this offering, in that the crushing burden of the forced societal lockdowns that time has shown us were very harmful, is shifted from the richer and middle class to the poor. For example, in Toronto, one can see graphically the shift in burden to the poorer in the society where the incidence rates were the same at the beginning of the pandemic, but after the March 23 lockdowns, detected infections/cases declined in affluent neighborhoods while they skyrocketed in less affluent, poorer areas. A similar effect was subsequently observed for mortality.
In a similar light, Chang published an informative paper in journal Nature that examined mobility network models of COVID-19 to explain inequities and inform reopening. They found that higher infection rates (and subsequent deaths) among disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic groups could be predicted “solely as the result of differences in mobility: we find that disadvantaged groups have not been able to reduce their mobility as sharply, and that the points of interest that they visit are more crowded and are therefore associated with higher risk”.
In both affluent first world nations and even lesser developed nations, the more wealthy in these societies have basically not been impacted by the lockdowns as did poorer persons, the underprivileged class. Their concerns were not pressing, they did not need worry about the children when the schools were closed, or the need for proper lap-tops and internet access and tutors etc. They had home offices they could remodel and make their accommodations more comfortable, as the poorer had to go out to ‘in-person’, often high-risk employment. Why? Because they were the ‘essential workers’ and had the front-facing, high-contact, high-risk jobs. Poorer persons suffered two pandemics, one due to the virus, and the other which operated in insidious ways, was due to the impact of the societal lockdowns. And their children fared worst of all!
The persons who made the decisions to lockdown and close schools had the type of jobs that could allow for remote working and this could continue forever if they could have it. The bureaucrats, technocrats, and COVID medical advisors were always far removed from the crushing impact of their policies. They did not ‘feel’ the lockdowns and for some, it was like an extended vacation where Amazon and UBER became staple names in their households. It’s actually fun and relaxation for many. You could walk your dogs at your own pace, and tend to your garden, fix up the house, do your chores, relax, shop online etc. Even vacate. The poor had no such avenues and were ravaged by the lockdowns and incurred losses that by some estimates, will never be recovered and to think that lockdowns worked to protect vulnerable persons is indeed a fallacy and terrible misconception. It is actually cruel and misguided and something very perverse really has happened here when you do take time to think about it.
So now, given we spent the last 15 to 16 months shielding the wealthier from the ravages of the lockdowns, we even have them, the more financially able, rumbling about why should we even lift the lockdowns. Why? Because they are now settled into a flow of things that does not cause them any substantial challenges. Just some re-arranging. The questions they pose are quite different to the dire ones by the poorer in societies. Do we do it now? How about we wait? Yeah, let’s wait, we do not need to rush this re-opening. Do we move to re-open schools? To this ‘lap-top’ class, the lockdowns are a mere small inconvenience and why lift them? Heck, keep it going if you have to. Remote schooling or in-person? Either way my child has no risk so, what’s the bother, what’s all this fuss, any format will do. Just tell us. No problem, we got pods and tutors etc. We do not need to re-open, what’s the rush?
We are so outraged about what was done to whole societies by these lunatic medical experts and Task Force advisors. We say ‘never again’ must we allow these absurd and reckless technocrats and bureaucrats with their failed medical COVID Task Force advisors do this to us! Never again! These unscientific ever preening Task Force advisors and medical experts, with their tripe! Their daily drivel. Their absurd drivel 24/7 that is never backed up with any science or when there is any ‘so called’ science, it is utter junk pseudoscience. Case in point, CDC. Not one proper cost-effectiveness analysis has been done by anyone regarding these lockdowns and restrictive policies. You would think this was would have been a basic step to inform decision-making and even calibrate it enroute. It was as if the decision-makers did not want to know the truth. Akin to how no proper mask or social distancing studies were ever done given what the findings would have shown.
Fire all the governments at the next polls for what they have done here! Fire these inept bureaucrats. All of them. The truth is that we delude ourselves, we lie to ourselves when we live in a fantasy that the forced societal lockdowns, school closures, and associated COVID-19 pandemic mandates and edicts work to protect the weak and vulnerable. It never did. It never worked to protect the vulnerable elderly and we failed to protect them. That is the biggest running joke among these Task Force morons, they lied to us telling us para ‘we are doing this to protect the vulnerable and elderly’.
What a load of nonsense and garbage and the tragedy is that people like Fauci by his emerging e-mails showed that he and they always knew the actual science. While we felt that they could not be that inept, we were right. They were actually corrupt and duplicitous too. They knew what they were doing was inaccurate and deceitful and said one thing behind the scenes and another on the podium (see Fauci’s trove of e-mails), lying to the people who only sought truth.
These corrupt inept advisors and government leaders shelved all of the important evidence they already had to guide them (e.g. see WHO’s non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza ISBN 978-92-4-151683-9). Something other than science was at play, and while at it, the poor suffered irreparably! The burden was shifted to them near entirely and they, near entirely, are left to pick up the pieces of the disaster visited upon them by all these so called ‘good people’ wanting to ‘do good’ by them.
DOCTORS, scientists, politicians, pharmaceutical companies and media promoting the experimental Covid vaccines as being safe and effective are rapidly being confronted with a stark choice: to save face or save lives.
As fresh evidence mounts supporting long-standing claims that the entire system of counting Covid ‘cases’ is bogus, grounds for repeatedly telling the public that the vaccines are safe are also collapsing.
The latest bombshell comes from Dr Robert Malone, an American vaccine specialist who invented the mRNA technology which is the basis of most Covid jabs, including Pfizer, Moderna, and Oxford AstraZeneca, allowing them to deliver the genetic code for the coronavirus spike protein.
The vaccine instructs body cells to produce small quantities of this toxic protein, so that the immune system can deal with it more effectively when it encounters the virus itself. Trials showed fewer patients who received the jab developed Covid-19 than those who received a placebo injection, though the numbers in both categories were very small.
But as reported here earlier this month, an unexpected and potentially lethal problem has arisen, in that the protein produced by the vaccine does not just act at the site of the jab. Animal studies using radioactive tracing have shown that it is carried through the blood to many other body sites, including the adrenal glands, heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, ovaries, pancreas, pituitary gland, prostate, salivary glands, intestines, spinal cord, spleen, stomach, testes, thymus and uterus.
Once in the blood, the protein is also now known to bind to cells that line blood vessels, causing both blood clot formation and abnormal bleeding. It seems that such cases are rare, though the crazy climate of government-driven fear surrounding Covid has made many doctors reluctant to report ill-effects.
The discoveries have led some researchers to say the risks arising from the jab may be greater than those from the actual virus, since a healthy immune system deals with the virus successfully. Young people, especially, are at minimal risk of Covid-19 disease regardless of their vaccinated status.
The jab, on the other hand, has a device which protects the spike protein mechanism against immediate destruction by the body, in order to promote the immune response. At present, no one knows how much toxin is produced, nor how long it lasts in the body.
In a social media tweet posted yesterday, Malone declared: ‘The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is cytotoxic [it poisons body cells]. That is a fact. Who says so? Multiple peer-reviewed references. The Salk Institute. It is the responsibility of the vaccine developers to demonstrate that their expressed version is not toxic. Show us.’
And in a long interview with evolutionary biologist Dr Bret Weinstein, Malone says he warned US regulators many months ago that the vaccine could be dangerous. But proper evaluation of the risks is still not being carried out, he says, despite thousands of reports of deaths and disease associated with the vaccination drive.
Malone has issued a warning to public health experts, researchers and vaccine developers that if they fail to carry out rigorous, fact-based and transparent safety evaluations, ‘we play right into the hands of anti-vaxxer memes and validate many of their arguments. The suppression of information, discussion, and outright censorship concerning these current Covid vaccines which are based on gene therapy technologies cast a bad light on the entire vaccine enterprise.’
Writing in TrialSite News, an independent news and information platform dedicated to clinical research transparency and biomedical research, he says a Canadian primary-care physician told him recently of six cases of post-vaccination adverse events, all highly unusual in his own experience, after his patients received the Pfizer product.
‘What was most alarming to me was that each of these cases were reported as per the proper channels in Canada, and each was summarily determined to not be vaccine-related by the authorities, without significant investigation.
‘Furthermore, he reported to me that any practising physician in Canada who goes public with concerns about vaccine safety is subjected to a storm of derision from academic physicians, and potential termination of employment.’
Malone goes on: ‘What are official public health leaders afraid of? Why is it necessary to suppress discussion and full disclosure of information concerning safety risks?
‘Let’s analyse the vaccine-related adverse event data rigorously. Is there information or patterns that can be found, such as the recent finding of the cardiomyopathy [heart muscle damage] signals, or the latent virus reactivation signals? We should be enlisting the best biostatistics and machine-learning experts to examine these data, and the results should – no, must – be made available to the public promptly.’
Because of the experimental nature of the vaccines, the public receiving them are basically research subjects, and ‘fundamental bioethical principles for clinical research’ are being violated through the suppression of information and debate. ‘I believe that this must stop,’ Malone says.
He also has a warning – which should perhaps be heeded by UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who this week floated the idea of lifting Covid isolation rules for those who have had two jabs – against public health policies involving coercion in medical research. (Currently, anybody told by NHS Test and Trace that they are a contact of somebody who has tested positive for the virus must self-isolate for ten days.)
‘The Geneva Convention, the Helsinki Declaration, and the entire structure which supports ethical human subjects research requires that research subjects be fully informed of risks and must consent to participation without coercion. Has that bright line been crossed?’
In the same video featuring Malone, Bret Weinstein also interviews Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur who recently published an article in TrialSite News describing how he has changed his mind over the Covid vaccines after researching their adverse effects. He and his three daughters all received two doses of the Moderna shot. He writes:
‘I recently learned that these vaccines have likely killed over 25,800 Americans (which I confirmed three different ways) and disabled at least 1,000,000 more. And we’re only halfway to the finish line. We need to PAUSE these vaccines NOW before more people are killed.
‘Based on what I now know about the minuscule vaccine benefits (approximately a 0.3 per cent reduction in absolute risk), side effects (including death), current Covid rates, and the success rate of early treatment protocols, the answer I would give today to anyone asking me for advice as to whether to take any of the current vaccines would be, Just say NO.
‘The current vaccines are particularly contraindicated if you have already been infected with Covid or are under age 20. For these people, I would say NO! NO! NO!’
In 2009, a whistleblower released emails showing how climate academia was manipulating/destroying data, and blocking publication of articles which didn’t support their anthropogenic global warming agenda.
“Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash,” wrote reporter Christopher Booker for the Telegraph.co.ukback in November, 2009.
Even The Guardian’s George Monbiot expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the hacked emails, as their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.
“Their importance cannot be overestimated,” continued Brooker.
“What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
Professor Philip Jones was the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) from 1998 to 2016 — during this time, Jones was in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports.
Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, Jones’ global temperature record was, and remains, the most important on which the IPCC and governments rely when making policy decisions — not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, which turned climate history on its head by claiming that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history:
Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph.
Mann’s “hockey stick” was the basis for the IPCC’s conclusion that “there is discernible human impact on climate.” However, and in a first step toward restoring the rigor of science in the global climate debate, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences back in 2006 presented the results of its directed study of the science behind the infamous graph.
The Academy’s report identified the failure of the hockey stick to model climate beyond the past 400 years, as evidenced by its inability to reflect the medieval climate optimum (MCO).
The optimum has been extensively documented by recorded human history and proxies, but cannot be explained by computer models based on equations that assume that greenhouse gases dominate climate change. These same models predict massive increases in Earth’s atmospheric temperature because of the additions of a small percentage of human-derived carbon dioxide.
The IPCC needed to remove the MCO from the historical record books because the period blew apart their global warming theory: any forcing other than CO2 able to cause terrestrial warming is an inconvenient spanner in the works, and so, with the help of Mann, the panel completely erased every one of them from history in one clean swipe.
This was a brazen plan, particularly given the extensive data, records and proxies out there demonstrating that the MCO did indeed occur. These same natural records also prove the existence of the cyclic and preceding Roman-era warm event, and the very same data, records and proxies are on show again today during our modern warming event.
Climate, it turns out, is driven mainly by the Sun and the impact solar activity has on the oceans: ironically, it is the IPCC that are the true climate deniers.
Dr. Tim Ball’s temperature graph for the past 1,000 years is generally considered much closer to the actual reality
Below are a few of the ‘hacked’ exchanges between Philip Jones and Michael Mann between 1999 and 2008 (courtesy of The Guardian):
1) CONFLICT OF INTEREST
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Date: Wed Mar 31 09:09:04 2004
Mike,
… Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil
Jones did not specify which papers he had rejected. But one appears to have been by Lars Kamel, which claimed to have found much less warming in Siberia than Jones.
It was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones’ analysis — one of the key ways in which science validates itself. So on the face of it, there was good reason to publish, even if flaws needed correcting. But the paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters, partly it seems because Jones “went to town”.
This raises important questions about conflict of interest in scientific peer review, and how Jones wielded his power as a reviewer.
2) BIASING THE IPCC ASSESSMENT
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004 Mike, … I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is ! Cheers Phil
Jones is writing about two new papers. One, from two known skeptics Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels, claimed to show a correlation between the geographical patterns of warming and of industrialization, suggesting that local urbanization rather than the global influence of greenhouse gases were often key in warming on land.
Jones evidently wanted to use his position as a lead author to keep the paper out of the IPCC report. In the event, the paper was not mentioned in early chapter drafts, but was added to a final version, where its findings were dismissed as “not statistically significant”.
Critics say that by keeping it out of early drafts, Jones prevented reviewers scrutinizing his conclusion.
3) REWRITING THE RULES OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> To: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> Date: Wed Dec 3 13:57:09 2008 Ben, When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [ClimateAudit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals… Cheers Phil
Climate Audit is the web site run by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician peppering Jones with requests for his data. There is no legal basis for rejecting FOI requests on the basis of the “types of people” they are.
The records show that the university turned down most FOI requests, from McIntyre and others, for CRU data. Of 105 requests concerning CRU submitted up to December 2009, the university had by late January 2010, acceded in full to only 10.
4) DELETING THE EVIDENCE
Phil Jones wrote to Mike Mann in 2008:
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise… Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise…
Cheers
Phil
British skeptic David Holland had recently asked CRU for all emails sent and received by its tree-ring specialist Keith Briffa about the recently published IPCC report, of which Briffa was a lead author.
Briffa had been in correspondence with Mann and two American researchers, Gene Wahl and Caspar Ammann, who had a forthcoming paper defending Mann’s controversial “hockey stick” graph.
This secret correspondence was outside the IPCC’s formal review process and seemed to break its rules.
Clearly, CRU people wanted to hide this correspondence from FOI requests. This email persuaded the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office that the university was “acting so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information”, and thus requests were “not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation”.
‘Climategate’ runs a lot deeper than the four emails and two scientists shown above.
The scale is actually jaw-dropping, and the email hack should have been enough to take the AGW scam down.
Here are two additional emails (images & highlighting courtesy of Tony Heller over at realclimatescience.com):
All this clearly reveals that fraud, lies and cover-ups are the backbone of the ‘global warming theory’.
The fact that the scam is still ongoing, and has actually gained further-traction in recent years, is testament to the agendas and powerful propagandizing at play.
The moronic masses have been duped into thinking the world is actually ending.
Our youth have been completely corrupted, transformed into a parroting mob devoid of ANY understanding of the topic at hand. The boredom of teendom has been given a phony purpose: to fight the threat posed by rising carbon dioxide emissions, and in future years, as these noisy, entitled pricks come of age –and win elected office– I can only imagine the devastating, economy wrecking and fuel poverty-inducing policies they will keenly implement.
Globalization, socialism, population control, and an overall redistribution of power appear to be the end goals here, with –as is always the case– “fear” being used as the driving force.
I can’t picture a better way to thumb-down the masses than making them think world is ending, and moreover, convincing them that it is their modern, comfortable way of life that is the root cause.
Will the Great Pandemic permanently unleash governments around the world? Covid-19 is enabling politicians to turn freedom from an individual right into a conditional bureaucratic dispensation. Defining down freedom was exemplified by the G-7 Summit that became a ludicrous and hypocritical Lockdowners Victory Lap.
The G-7 leaders, meeting in Cornwall, issued a communique pledging to “protect individuals from forced labour and to ensure that global supply chains are free from the use of forced labour.” But the political bosses had no concern about “forced non-labor” – their own decrees that destroyed tens of millions of jobs. That was no problem because, as the G-7 leaders boasted, “We have provided unprecedented support to citizens and businesses… totalling over $12 trillion including fiscal support and liquidity measures.”
But handouts are no substitute for freedom and self-reliance. Government aid is always only one decree away from mandating terms of submission. In 1942, the Supreme Court declared, “It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes.” The G-7 Summiteers proclaimed a boatload of environmental goals. Will future “stimulus payments” be restricted to people who reduce their “carbon footprint” or abandon their non-electric vehicles?
The Biden administration was thrilled that G-7 Summiteers adapted its slogan, “Build Back Better,” in the communique. That slogan will entitle politicians to snare more revenue and power to repair the damage from the shutdowns they inflicted. Biden-style rebuilding presumes that any government spending confers vast benefits, at least on politicians. Biden’s colleagues also seconded his call for placing at least 30% of all land and water under government restrictions in the name of conservation.
G-7 leaders enjoyed parties and plenty of backslapping – privileges denied to nearby British citizens whose lives continue semi-paralyzed by pervasive government restrictions. Brits were told that their lockdown misery would end on June 21, which became known as “Freedom Day.” But British politicians have invoked the fear of new variants to justify extending the lockdown at least another month and possibly far longer. Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared on Monday, “Now is the time to ease off the accelerator,” regardless of how many individual rights become roadkill. Spiked editor Brendan O’Neil declared that “this further suspension of liberty, is only possible in a society that has thoroughly devalued freedom” and derided the “creeping embrace of the lockdown lifestyle among significant sections of the Smart Set.”
In the U.S., President Joe Biden designated the Fourth of July as Americans’ shrink-wrapped “Freedom Day.” On March 11, Biden declared that, if people obey government decrees, “there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be [permitted] to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.” Biden repeated his declaration on April 21: “To celebrate our independence from this virus on July 4th with family and friends in small groups…. We all need to mask up… until everyone has a chance to get their shot.” Biden converted the Fourth of July into a benchmark of submission to presidential decrees. On May 4, Biden announced that he wanted 70% of American adults to have at least one Covid vaccine by July 4. On June 2, Biden declared that people should “exercise your freedom” to get vaccinated so Americans can enjoy a “summer of freedom.” Freedom to get politically-mandated injections was not one of the clauses included in the Bill of Rights. Regardless of the Biden administration’s alarmism, most states have already lifted lockdown orders.
Biden’s attempted expropriation of Independence Day had no impact on his honeymoon with the media. When the Pulitzer Prizes were bestowed last Friday, no awards were given for exposing the frauds and follies of repressive Covid-19 policies that ravaged prosperity and freedom. Instead, the Pulitzer for Public Service was awarded to a New York Times team that included Donald McNeil. As Jeffrey Tucker reported, early during the pandemic, McNeil fanned fear with a bizarre article headlined, “To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.” He urged American policymakers to rely on tactics “from the era of the Black Death… pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities… Harsh measures horrify civil libertarians, but they often save lives, especially when they are imposed in the early days.” McNeil turbocharged his alarmism by overestimating the likely death toll by over 20-fold. Ironically, at a time when the American media has become far more critical of police power, pundits have consecrated bureaucratic power.
In the Covid era, destroying freedom is a negligible loss, akin to a government agency misplacing a few hundred filing cabinets. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti faced minimal criticism last December when he banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” The mayor offered no evidence to justify placing four million residents under house arrest. Similar restrictions hit residents of Michigan, New York, Oregon, and other states. Federal judge William Stickman IV aptly declared last September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But the scant controversy over lockdowns is a sign that many media outlets are happy to see liberty “inverted” into unquestioning obedience to any command issued by any government official.
Politicians could decimate freedom because their Covid-19 decrees almost instantly became hallowed with the aura of “science” – regardless of how often the official guidance changed. Since Biden became president, Covid vaccines have also become sacrosanct and casting any doubts on their safety or efficacy is portrayed as proof of idiocy or villainy. Politicians and their media allies now talk as if the only reliable gauge of health and safety is the percentage of Americans who have been injected (ignoring the natural immunity that the 115 million people who had Covid infections enjoy). The result is a long series of socialist-style victory proclamations, substituting the number of arms injected for bogus statistics on the wheat harvest from collective farms. And anyone who refuses to be vaccinated is the new Kulak, reviled and portrayed as a dire threat to the survival of everything decent. It would not be surprising if politicians limited future Covid handouts to individuals who could prove they were vaccinated.
Many Americans presume that the political travails of Covid are mostly in the rearview mirror. The small print of the G-7 Communique is hell on such optimism. “The COVID-19 pandemic is not under control anywhere until it is under control everywhere,” the Summiteers warned. And as long as the pandemic is out of control, rulers must remain unleashed. If anyone has the virus, then no one is free – or at least no one should be permitted to be free. The prerogatives and precedents that multiplied during the Covid pandemic are waiting to be exploited for the next viral outbreak – or maybe simply to make some really dramatic gestures on climate change.
The G-7 Communique endlessly promised “transparency” but only fools should expect official candor during pandemics or other politically-proclaimed emergencies. British scientists who shaped government Covid policies recently admitted using “unethical” and “dystopian” fearmongering to terrorize people into submission. One scientist declared that “using fear smacks of totalitarianism,” and another scientist admitted being “stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology” to enforce compliance with Covid dictates.
American politicians and government agencies relied on many of the same fear tactics in this country. Docile media helped sway people to viewother Americans’ freedom as the deadliest threat to their own health. Instead, the biggest danger citizens faced was that their rulers would not have sufficient power to force everyone else to stop working, stop worshipping, stay inside, and get injected.
No-fault Czars are no substitute for individual liberty. Politicians vindicated lockdowns by claiming that all the sacrifices are justified if they “save just one life.” But what about “just one freedom” – especially freedoms previously enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people? Instead of “Build Back Better” further empowering reckless rulers, we need to “Build Back Freer.”
James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative.
In a report published by CBC in Canada, government health officials are saying that they have not found a single case of seasonal flu this year.
Health officials in B.C. have not detected a single case of influenza circulating in the community since flu season began, continuing an “exceptional” nationwide trend even as the province sits in the thick of its regular flu season.
The B.C. Centre of Disease Control (BCCDC) confirmed the non-existent seasonal flu numbers to CBC News on Monday.
“It’s still a big goose egg in terms of influenza detection provincially. It’s really quite exceptional how low the influenza activity is,” said Dr. Danuta Skowronski, the lead for influenza and emerging respiratory virus monitoring at the BCCDC.
“I’ve been on the influenza beat for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this … and that’s not for lack of trying.”
But if you continue reading the article, you will see that they have actually tested some people positive for influenza via nasal swabs: those who were injected with the live-attenuated influenza vaccine.
The BCCDC has tested 30,000 samples for influenza this year. Only a dozen of those tests came back positive and all were linked to people who’d received a vaccine, which doesn’t count as community spread.
By comparison, the centre found 861 positive tests last year with roughly one-third of the testing.
B.C.’s experience is reflected across the country. A report from the Public Health Agency of Canada on Thursday said there hasn’t been enough influenza cases to even declare that the 2020-21 flu season has begun in Canada.
The 30,000 tests run for the flu this year is four times the average number of tests B.C. has done over the past five flu seasons. The dozen positive results were all connected to people who’d received the “live attenuated” flu vaccine, which is made from weakened influenza virus and delivered by nasal spray.
“It’s not unusual to pick up the vaccine virus in the nose swab,” Skowronski said. “What is unexpected is to find no influenza viruses otherwise at all in the province.” (Source.)
This is not a new phenomenon, of course. For years now there have been no cases of polio in most countries around the world, except among those who are vaccinated for polio. See:
I wondered if this phenomenon of zero flu cases was also being experienced in the U.S., so I did a search on the term “zero flu cases.” The result is in the graphic at the top of this article, which shows that many communities, hospitals, cities, and even states, are reporting the same thing as Canada.
The first 9 results found articles reporting zero cases of the flu this year, while the 10th result was a “fact checking” article stating that reports on Facebook stating that there were zero cases of flu this year were FALSE.
Of course the reason being given as to why the flu just all of a sudden disappeared is because of COVID-19 measures, which stopped the flu, but not COVID-19. Not even the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines” have stopped COVID-19, as the majority of people dying today with a COVID-19 diagnosis have been “fully vaccinated.”
And yet people in the public actually believe this explanation as to why the flu has suddenly disappeared??
Who are these people running these government health agencies and telling the public such bold-faced lies?
Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of mRNA Vaccine technology. Mr. Steve Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has been researching adverse reactions to COVID vaccines. Bret talks to Robert and Steve about the pandemic, treatment and the COVID vaccines.
Spike proteins are very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic. Clip from DarkHorse podcast. Full livestream now CENSORED on YouTube. Odysee for backup: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/h…
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Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph.
Dr. Tim Ball’s temperature graph for the past 1,000 years is generally considered much closer to the actual reality
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