The Biden administration’s position that Iran must return to “full compliance” with the 2015 nuclear deal before the United States would consider removing the economic sanctions is “nothing short of preposterous,” says an American political analyst, adding that sanctions relief is the “only plausible starting point” in any attempt to revive the landmark accord.
“Removing the sanctions imposed after the US repudiated the accord is the only plausible starting point for negotiations intended to revive the JCPOA. This is the only logical starting point. There absolutely cannot be any other,” foreign affairs journalist Patrick Lawrence told Press TV in an interview, referring by abbreviation to the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Sunday that [proclaimed] US President Joe Biden has spurned predecessor Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure policy” against Iran only in words, but has so far pursued the same course of action in practice.
“Nothing has changed. Biden claims that Trump’s policy of maximum pressure was maximum failure… But for all practical purposes, they are pursuing the same policy,” the top diplomat said in an exclusive interview with Press TV.
Lawrence said that Biden administration officials have acknowledged that the maximum pressure policy has been a failure, yet they are making demands they know Iran would never accept.
“Maximum pressure has proven a failure, as anyone who knows Iran and Iranians could have predicted. It has accomplished nothing other than to cause very many Iranians to suffer, and Iranians will never give into it,” the journalist said.
“The Biden administration is now trying to cover past US mistakes by announcing it wishes to recertify the JCPOA, but on conditions it knows very well Iran cannot accept. This is sheer posturing. As to what will happen next, in my view the answer is, ‘Nothing,’” he continued.
President Biden, who condemned Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA on the campaign trail, has signaled his intention to bring the United States back to the multilateral agreement, which was clinched when he was vice president under former president Barack Obama.
However, since taking office on January 20, Biden and his foreign policy team have been demanding to see changes from Tehran before Washington would consider lifting the sanctions. The Islamic Republic says as the party that has abandoned its international obligations, the US should make the first move by removing the sanctions in a verifiable manner and then rejoining the JCPOA.
In his remarks to Press TV, Foreign Minister Zarif reminded that Paragraph 36 of the JCPOA enables Iran to take “remedial action” against failure by other sides to implement their obligations.
Following the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, Iran waited for an entire year for the European signatories to hold up their end of their bargain and secure Iranian business interests, guaranteed by the deal, in the face of US sanctions. However, as the Europeans failed to deliver under US pressure, Tehran began to scale back its commitments in several phases in retaliation.
“At the very least, Washington must, as Minister Zarif frequently states, remove the sanctions imposed after the Trump administration withdrew from the accord,” Lawrence said.
In a symbolic gesture that US officials framed as a major step toward reviving the JCPOA, the Biden administration told the UN Security Council on Thursday that the United States was rescinding a Trump administration assertion that all UN sanctions had been reimposed on Iran in September– a claim that was repudiated by Tehran, the European signatories of the deal and the Security Council.
They argued at the time that the United States was in no position to invoke a provision in the 2015 Security Council resolution endorsing the JCPOA that allowed the “snapback” of international sanctions because it was no longer a party to the deal.
“The US position on the JCPOA is nothing short of preposterous at this point,” Lawrence said. “Secretary of State Pompeo, in his last year in office, tried at the United Nations to argue that the US still had standing to impose demands on Iran even though it had withdrawn from the agreement. Now Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, says, ‘The ball is in Iran’s court.’ This is patently ridiculous.”
Zarif said that the so-called snapback mechanism was an American distortion that was not at all incorporated in the text of the JCPOA.
As to why the Biden administration is making unreasonable demands concerning the JCPOA, Lawrence said, “Biden and his national security people are entirely beholden to Israel, and Israel has made it perfectly clear it opposes any attempt to revive the nuclear accord.”
“This will turn out the way numerous other Biden policies have already done: A statement of good purpose, no action whatsoever to follow it,” he regretted.
The Biden administration is expected to break the Trump-negotiated deal with the Taliban and keep NATO troops in Afghanistan, according to media reports, and this is supposedly the right thing to do.
The agreement signed in Doha in late February 2020 sets May 1 as the deadline for a full withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. The Pentagon currently has 2,500 service personnel deployed in the country, with NATO allies fielding some 7,000 more. Under the agreement, the Taliban pledged to make sure the territory under its control is not used by international terrorist groups to launch attacks on the US and to negotiate a peace deal with the US-propped government in Kabul.
While the Taliban did deliver on the promise it gave a year ago not to attack foreign troops, any hope of a reduction in violence in Afghanistan has faltered in the year since. The Biden administration has therefore ordered a review of the agreement, and “the overwhelming consensus among Afghan leaders, foreign diplomats and Western army officers” is that “the US will abandon the deadline,” according to the Sunday Times.
The prediction in the British newspaper comes from veteran war correspondent Anthony Loyd and follows a slew of other news reports outlining Biden’s Afghanistan conundrum and opinion pieces that rationalize breaking the deal.
The Democratic president has inherited a “mess” from Trump and has no good options, according to CNN, which said NATO allies are “growing increasingly concerned” about the situation. If he does withdraw, he would share some of the blame “if there is a collapse of the elected Afghan government,” the New York Timessaid. And a Taliban takeover would be disastrous for human rights, especially for the rights of women, Deutsche Wellewarned.
Keeping Trump’s word and leaving now “would carry a reputational risk for the United States,” because it would “embolden jihadists and perhaps rejuvenate their movement, which has been in retreat,” columnist David Ignatius said. “And there would be an unmeasurable cost to American credibility.” So, of course Biden should listen to his head, not his heart, and keep “a small but sustainable force in Afghanistan,” which would cost relatively little and give the benefit of “checking terrorists, supporting NATO allies, and giving the Kabul government a fighting chance.”
The nudging press stops short of calling the Doha agreement “the worst deal ever made” the way Trump did with the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, but they might just as well have done so. The accord with Tehran was scrapped by Trump, but Biden is reluctant to simply deliver on the commitments made by Obama, even if it was one of the crowning achievements of his former boss’ diplomacy. With the Doha deal, history may repeat itself.
But if Biden follows the advice and reneges on the terms agreed to by his predecessor, how will it be read by the Taliban? Or Tehran, or Pyongyang, or Beijing, or Moscow? Probably as the latest proof that a deal with Washington is not worth the paper it’s written on.
The pattern of the US back-pedaling on its promises once there’s a change of leadership in the White House existed long before Trump. This was the case with assurances made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe after the reunification of Germany, for example.
The same thing happened with the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. It was meant to prevent Pyongyang from going nuclear, and thus offered it some concessions, such as building proliferation-proof nuclear power plants. But the George W Bush administration eagerly scrapped it, courtesy of one John Bolton.
Even if given to an ally, Washington’s word is not necessarily solid. Pakistan, for instance, was famously denied the right to purchase F-16 fighter jets after the Soviet withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan in 1989 made Islamabad a less crucial partner for the US.
Proponents of US global dominance, such as Robert Kagan, say the US is indispensable as a custodian of liberal world order and lament the fact that many Americans are not willing to embrace this role. That they “refer to the relatively low-cost military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq as ‘forever wars’ is just the latest example of their intolerance for the messy and unending business of preserving a general peace and acting to forestall threats,” the neoconservative commentator and spouse of Victoria Nuland, the Biden-nominated under-secretary of state for political affairs, said in a recent opinion piece.
The ‘low cost’ in Afghanistan was 3,500 dead coalition troops and over $2 trillion dollars in direct and indirect spending. So, what does the US have to show for it? The longest-lasting war in its history that nevertheless failed to produce a self-sustaining government in Kabul. Withdrawal may be perceived as the US losing the war to the Taliban, but what a victory is supposed to look like remains a mystery.
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In March 2020, the CDC changed the way COVID-19 deaths are reported on death certificates, resulting in a dramatic — and possibly illegal — inflation of fatalities that drove restrictive public health policies threatening health freedom
Only 6% of COVID-19 deaths include only COVID-19 as the cause on the death certificate, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This means for the other 94%, additional causes are listed, with an average of 2.9 additional conditions or causes of death included.[i]
“This is the most important statistical revelation of this crisis,” according to a study by the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), as it reveals that many “COVID-19 deaths” may have been due to other causes. In fact, the CDC published new guidelines on March 24, 2020, which alter the way deaths are recorded exclusively in cases of COVID-19.
The guidelines were published without peer-review or opportunity for public comment, and resulted in a dramatic and misleading inflation in “COVID-19” deaths, which would have been deemed due to other causes using the CDC’s longstanding system of data collection and reporting established in 2003. As IPAK’s report questioned:[ii]
“Why would the CDC decide against using a system of data collection & reporting they authored, and which has been in use nationwide for 17 years without incident, in favor of an untested & unproven system exclusively for COVID-19 without discussion and peer-review?”
CDC Changed Death Certificate Recording Rules for COVID-19 Only
IPAK’s report reveals a historical timeline of events showing how a number of incidents conspired to inflate COVID-19 fatality data and, in turn, justify restrictive public health policies like lockdowns, quarantines, business closures and social distancing. One key issue has to do with the way cause of death is recorded in the case of comorbidities.
In 2003, the CDC published the “Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting” and “Physicians’ Handbook on Medical Certification of Death.” Part I of a death certificate includes the immediate cause of death, listed in order from the official cause of death (a) down to underlying causes that contributed to death (in descending order of importance, as b, c, d).
Part II of the death certificate includes other significant conditions that are not related to the underlying causes in Part I. According to the report:[iii]
“Comorbid conditions have been listed on Part I of death certificates as causes of death per the CDC Handbook since 2003 to ensure accurate reporting can be developed. Comorbidities are seldom placed in Part II. Part II is typically the section where coroners and medical examiners can list recent infections as underlying, initiating factors.
Prior to the CDC’s March 24th decision, any co-morbidities would have been listed in Part I rather than Part II and initiating factors such as infections including the SARS-COV-2 virus, would have been listed on the last line in Part I or more commonly in Part II.”
After the March 2020 guideline change, however, comorbidities were to be listed in Part II, which meant COVID-19 could be listed exclusively in Part I:[iv]
“This has had a significant impact on data collection accuracy and integrity. It has resulted in the potential false inflation of COVID-19 fatality data and is a potential breach of federal laws governing information quality.”
New CDC Guidelines Inflate COVID-19 Deaths by at Least 16.7-Fold
The report examined COVID-19 fatalities through August 23, 2020 and compared them using the CDC’s guidelines that had been in place since 2003 and those put into place in March 2020 for COVID-19. You can see the results in their figure below, which shows, “Had the CDC used the 2003 guidelines, the total COVID-19 [fatalities would] be approximately 16.7 times lower than is currently being reported.”[v]
Image source: IPAK PHPI, COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Perspective October 12, 2020, Figure 9
‘This Leaves Me Speechless’
On Twitter, investigative health journalist Nicolas Pineault wrote, “If this is accurate, this leaves me speechless.”[vi] Indeed, not only did the CDC leave no records as to how it made the decision to change how deaths are reported, but some estimates suggest they may have resulted in an inflation of COVID-19 fatalities of over 90%, while violating U.S. law:[vii]
“Previous reports detailed the substantial changes on how causes of death were forcibly modified by the CDC through the NVSS, and how together, both federal agencies inflated the actual number of COVID-19 fatalities by approximately 90.2% through July 12th, 2020.
We believe this deliberate decision by the CDC and NVSS [National Vital Statistics System] to deemphasize pre-existing comorbidities, in favor of emphasizing COVID-19 as a cause of death, is in violation of 44 U.S. Code 3504 (e)(1)(b), which states the activities of the Federal statistical system shall ensure ‘the integrity, objectivity, impartiality, utility, and confidentiality of information collected for statistical purposes.'”
The public health implications of an artificial inflation of COVID-19 deaths are immense, as rates of anxiety, depression[viii]and suicidal thoughts[ix] are on the rise — a direct result of restrictive COVID-19 health policies.
Only with accurate data can individuals and health officials make decisions to truly protect health, and as the report noted, “It is concerning that the CDC may have willfully failed to collect, analyze, and publish accurate data used by elected officials to develop public health policy for a nation in crisis.”[x] It’s also one more reason why now is more important than ever to take a stand for health freedom.
John writes in to ask how a global conspiracy can function and how it can be kept under wraps. Good question. Join James for this week’s edition of Questions For Corbett where he tackles the most common objections of the skeptics and their fallacious counter-arguments against the global conspiracy.
In 2008, I was in my early 20s and about to complete my undergraduate degree in engineering. Despite being in a remote part of Asia with no Internet facility—except for the Internet cafes—the news surrounding global warming still managed to reach most of us.
Being an ardent lover of the environment and passionate about conservation, I decided to pursue a career in environmental sciences, especially given the “rising problem” of global warming.
Al Gore’s 2006 climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth made global warming an extremely popular topic in those years all over the world.
Like millions of others, I trusted Gore’s predictions. I had no reason to doubt them. The thought of global climate doomsday and the call to avert it struck a chord with my passion for nature and conservation.
Hence, I pursued my graduate studies at one of the world’s leading universities for climate studies, the University of East Anglia in the UK. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) there is responsible—along with the Hadley Centre—for developing global temperature datasets, known as HadCRUT datasets.
But my perceptions about global warming and the science surrounding it were about to be shaken. As I was attending one of my lectures, we received an email from the University asking us to change our email passwords immediately.
A week later that I understood that the University’s email system had been breached, and email content scientists from the CRU leaked to the public. The event is infamously known as “Climategate.”
It took me a few more years before I completely understood the implications of that email leak. Email exchanges between scientists from the CRU and other universities revealed a deliberate attempt to exaggerate the present warming and make it appear unprecedented.
Ross McKitrick in “Understanding the Climategate Inquiries” showed how the evidence proves that “The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and WMO [World Meteorological Organization] reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers.”
Besides, upon foreseeing inquiries coming their way, “The scientists took steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work.”
McKitrick noted that Phil Jones—one of the scientists from CRU—admitted to deleting emails, in a likely attempt to prevent disclosure of information subject to freedom of information laws, and had asked his colleagues to do the same.
Numerous enquiries and boards investigated the leak and declared the scientists not guilty. In two detailed, assiduously documented book-length analyses, Andrew Montford, author of the climate books Hiding the Decline and The Hockey Stick Illusion, summarized his findings in a shorter paper: “the inquiries into the conduct and integrity of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit were rushed, cursory and largely unpersuasive.”
Commenting on Climategate, Andrew Turnbull, who served as the Permanent Secretary of Environment Department (1994–1998) and Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (1998–2002) in the United Kingdom, said, “Only if the integrity of the science is reestablished and the strengths and weaknesses of the main propositions are acknowledged will there be the basis of trust with the public that policymakers need.”
But that integrity was never reestablished.
For example, the work of the very same scientists involved in climategate is treated as the ultimate standard of climate science. Some of them, like Michael Mann, are among the most influential people in the IPCC and chart the climate blueprint for policymakers, whose policies then are implemented in many nations.
The Climategate episode certainly made me question whether the global warming was as dangerous as it is made up to be.
The answer to my question trickled in slowly over a number of years. Evidence began to emerge that scientists acknowledged a large gap between the actual observed real-world temperature datasets (from satellites) and those temperature predictions from computer climate models.
While these differences may not prove the allegations against the Climategate scientists, they do confirm us about one thing: the computer climate models exaggerate the future warming rate due to their high sensitivity to carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, the models continue to show an excessive and unreal warming rate for future decades.
Despite plenty of evidence, the IPCC continues to use these faulty model predictions to inform the public and policymakers about future changes in temperature.
A steady stream of scientific studies has documented the evidence for lack of dangerous warming—IPCC’s level of warming based on fifth- and sixth-generation (CMIP5 and CMIP6) models and the apparent absence of climate-induced ecological collapse.
In 2020 alone, over 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers took up a skeptical position on climate alarmism. These papers—and hundreds from previous years—address various issues related to climate change, including problems with climate change observation, climate reconstructions, lack of anthropogenic/CO2 signal in sea-level rise, natural mechanisms that drive climate change (solar influence on climate, ocean circulations, cloud climate influence, ice sheet melting in high geothermal heat flux areas), hydrological trends that do not follow modeled expectations, the fact that corals thrive in warm, high-CO2 environments, elevated CO2 and higher crop yields, no increasing trends in intense hurricanes and drought frequency, the myth of mass extinctions due to global cooling, etc.
Academia is filled with scientific literature that contradicts the position of those who believe climate change is unprecedented.
Also, during the course of the last decade, it became apparent that most of Al Gore’s claims in his 2006 documentary were false. Contrary to his claims, polar bear populations remained steady, the Arctic did not become ice free during the summer of 2014, and storms did not get stronger due to global warming.
In simple words, Gore misled the world and promoted falsehood as science, and he continues to do so while profiting from a renewable industry that is sold as the cure for global warming. Yet, he himself generates carbon dioxide emissions and many times higher than an average family’s.
So, not only are the predictions of models are wrong, but also the interpretations of climate data and the propaganda of a climate doomsday were also wrong.
Today, we know the modern warming rate is not unprecedented. Warming of such magnitude has happened twice within the past 2000 years. Further, ice at both poles is at historic highs, even compared with the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.
Besides, there has been no increase in extreme weather events due to climate change and the loss of lives due to environmental disasters has drastically reduced during the last 100 years.
So, I am a climate realist. I acknowledge that there has been a gradual increase in global average temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. I acknowledge that climate change can happen in both ways—warming and cooling. I do understand that anthropogenic CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases could have positively contributed to the warming from mid-20th century onwards.
I also acknowledge that warming and the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide that has contributed to it have actually helped society. The current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, nearly 50 percent higher than in the 17th century, and the warming—which has occurred chiefly in winter, in higher latitudes and altitudes, and at night, thus raising cold temperatures but with little effect on hot temperatures—have actually resulted in optimal conditions for global plant growth, thus aiding in the flourishing of the agricultural sector.
The Bengal tiger populations have bounced back, and polar bear populations are steady, thanks to conservation efforts. Forest area in Europe is increasing every year, and countries are planting tree saplings at a record rate. Life expectancy has reached all-time highs in many countries, and more people are constantly pulled out of extreme poverty every year (although business lockdowns to fight COVID-19 threaten to reverse that trend). Access to freshwater has improved and human productivity has increased drastically.
So, there is no actual climate emergency. Instead, what we have celebrities, activists, un-elected political bodies like the UN, and even some climate scientists religiously promoting a popular doomsday belief.
The models do not know the future, and neither do the Climategate scientists. But an exaggerated view of future warming provides the ideal background for anti-carbon-based fuels policies that will undermine the economic well-being of every society in the world. We must not allow that.
Be a climate realist.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), is a Research Contributor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and resides in New Delhi, India.
Governments are currently fighting climate change to the tune of billions. For this to make sense, each idea in the following chain of reasoning needs to be bulletproof:
#1 – scientists know there’s a climate crisis
#2 – scientists know it’s humanity’s fault
#3 – scientists know we can alleviate the crisis by changing our behaviour
But each of these amounts to a leap of faith. Let’s start with the conviction that something unusual is going on. This planet is more than 4 billion years old. The climate was marching to its own drummer long before humans appeared. It has changed numerous times – sometimes gradually, sometimes violently. Twenty thousand years ago, much of North America was covered by ice.
Because humans weren’t recording and analyzing those billions of years of climatic history, today’s scientists have no way of knowing if anything unusual is going on now.
They can surmise. They can speculate. They can extrapolate. But they have no smoking gun. I’ve written twobooks about the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That organization says it’s “extremely likely that more than half” of the global warming between 1951 and 2010 was caused by human activity. It talks about its “best estimate.”
Please note the startling imprecision here: Extremely likely. More than half. Best estimate. These aren’t facts. They’re educated guesses. They’re opinion. It’s absolutely crucial that we grasp this point: the IPCC has no hard evidence of a crisis. It has no math that can be examined and verified. It has only expert opinion. Estimates.
If you choose to take this leap of faith, you’re immediately invited to take another – to embrace the notion that the alleged climate crisis was triggered by human activity. As I’ve just outlined, the IPCC can’t prove this. It merely believes humans caused more than half of the warming over a 60-year period. That’s a long way from demonstrating clear human responsibility for imminent catastrophe.
On these two decisive questions – is there really a climate problem, and are humans really to blame – the IPCC has nothing definitive to contribute. Governments have, nevertheless, taken these leaps of faith.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that scientists are fallible. Like the rest of us, they know a great deal about their own field, but can be surprisingly misinformed about broader trends. Like the rest of us, they are susceptible to groupthink. Many IPCC personnel subscribe to a belief system that regards human activities as unnatural and therefore automatically threatening to the natural world. But belief systems are not proof.
Leap of faith #3 – the idea that humanity can fix whatever is currently going on with the climate – is equally dubious. Even if something alarming is happening, even if it is our fault, that doesn’t mean it lies within our power to influence, interrupt, or steer the powerful natural forces that have already been set in motion. It certainly doesn’t mean there’s only one sure-fire, anointed fix – slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Governments are obsessed with greenhouse gases because they signed a UN treaty back in 1992. Long before the IPCC had produced its multi-thousand-page reports the cart was put before the horse. The UN – a political body – decreed that human-generated emissions were a problem that governments should do something about. The IPCC has struggled ever since to build a scientific case in support of that position.
No one actually knows whether reducing emissions will work. No one knows how long it might take to ‘stabilize’ the climate via this means. Yet governments are piling on the carbon taxes. Year after year, they divert billions away from healthcare and education to fight climate change with ever-expanding emissions reduction policies.
In 1992, the UK was led by John Major, Germany was led by Helmut Kohl, America was led by George H.W. Bush, and France was led by Francois Mitterrand. The Internet barely existed in 1992, the founding of Google was still years away.
That treaty belongs to a different era. There is no shame in walking away from outdated, 30-year-old thinking.
Habitual use of vitamin D supplements and risk of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection: a prospective study in UK Biobank (29th January, 2021)
Vitamin D supplementation, lower risk of acute respiratory tract infection
Emerging evidence, vitamin D insufficiency is related to a higher risk of coronavirus infection and disease
Objectives
To investigate the prospective association between habitual use of vitamin D supplements and risk of COVID- 19 infection
Associations according to levels of circulating and genetically predicted vitamin D
Methods
N = 8,297 adults
Records of COVID-19 test results from UK Biobank
16 March 2020 to 29 June 2020
Results
Of the 8,297 adults, 1,374 (16.6%) tested positive
Vit D users, n = 363
Non-vit D users, n = 7,934
Unadjusted model
OR 0.78 (p = 0.105)
Adjustment for covariates
Age, sex, race, origin (outpatient or inpatient), blood-type, years of education, TDI, smoking, moderate drinking, physical activity, healthy diet score, use of any other supplements
Inverse association emerged
Between habitual use of vitamin D supplements and risk of COVID-19 infection
OR, 0.66, (P = 0.038)
Habitual use of vitamin D supplements was significantly associated with a 34% lower risk of COVID-19 infection
No association with baseline blood vitamin D levels and risk of COVID-19 infection
Associations between the risk of COVID-19 infection and habitual use of other individual supplements
Vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E, folic acid, a
multivitamin,
Calcium, zinc, iron, selenium, glucosamine, fish oil
Vitamin D Deficiency and Outcome of COVID-19 Patients
Medical University Hospital Heidelberg, (September 2020)
Identification of modifiable prognostic factors may help to improve outcomes
N = 185, diagnosed and treated in Heidelberg
Median Vitamin D level was 16.6 ng/ml
Associations of vitamin D status with disease severity and survival
Vitamin D status assessed at first presentation
Deficient
25-hydroxyvitamin D (Calcifediol)
level less than 12 ng/mL ( less than 30 nM)
N = 41 (22%)
Median IL-6 levels at hospitalization were significantly higher
70.5 versus 29.7 pg/mL
Insufficiency
Less than 20 ng/mL (less than 50 nM)
N = 118 (64%)
Higher levels
N = 26
Median Vitamin D level was significantly lower in the inpatient versus the outpatient subgroup
Results
Median observation period of 66 days
93 (50%) patients required hospitalization
28 patients required ventilation
Including 16 deaths
Adjusting for age, sex, comorbidities
Deficiency was associated with higher risk of ventilation and death
Mechanical ventilation
HR 6.12
p less than 0.001
Death
HR 14.73
p less than 0.001
Other hazard ratios
Male, 1.69 2.5
Over 60, 3.2 7.7
Comorbidity, 2.7 5.3
Need for interventional studies
Cholecalciferol
Calcifediol
Active form of vitamin D3, 1, 25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25D3), calcitriol, is pluripotent hormone and important modulator of both innate and adaptive immunity
Well, as usual, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has finally received authorization to proceed with the investigation of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel-Palestine, to include both the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and also Hamas in Gaza. On February 5th ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that her office is now studying the decision made to confirm ICC’s jurisdiction and would be “guided strictly by its independent and impartial mandate” to investigate and prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC has already ruled in December 2019 that “war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip” but was waiting for confirmation that it had jurisdiction to proceed. Both the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and armed groups including Hamas were named as possible perpetrators.
The bad news is that Bensouda has been replaced as the United States is already intervening in support of its best friend and closest ally in the whole world and will inevitably do all sorts of stupid things that do not serve its own interests when the Israeli tail starts wagging the American dog. Count on it. That has apparently already included pressure exerted both by Washington and Jerusalem behind closed doors to make Bensouda go. She was replaced last Friday by British human rights lawyer Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, who is expected to be more accommodating to Israel and might even decide not to proceed with the investigation.
There has also been some speculation that the ICC was waiting for Donald Trump to be gone as Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already more-or-less declared war on the ICC back in June 2020. The Trump White House had sanctioned key members of the court and had also blocked the travel to the U.S. by investigators associated with it. It threatened to arrest anyone who cooperated with the investigation. Washington also warned in the strongest terms that there would be “consequences” for any attempt by the court to investigate or punish Israel.
The Joe Biden White House clearly is on the same page on the issue, releasing the following State Department press statement on February 5th, immediately after the ICC decision became public: “Today, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a decision claiming jurisdiction in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, while expressly recognizing the serious legal and factual questions that surround its ability to do so. As we made clear when the Palestinians purported to join the Rome Statute in 2015, we do not believe the Palestinians qualify as a sovereign state, and therefore are not qualified to obtain membership as a state, or participate as a state in international organizations, entities, or conferences, including the ICC. We have serious concerns about the ICC’s attempts to exercise its jurisdiction over Israeli personnel. The United States has always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the UN Security Council.”
State Department Spokesman Ned Price provided additional commentary on the press release, saying “We will continue to uphold President Biden’s strong commitment to Israel and its security, including opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.” Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the ICC. The argument Washington is using is essentially a legal one, at least at this point, that Palestine is not a “sovereign state” and that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over any county that is not a signatory. Both are, of course, debatable. Israel has also taken steps to prevent any investigation by the court on its soil, to include the occupied territories and it is not clear if Egypt will allow ICC investigators to enter Gaza from Sinai.
The initial issue that turned Washington against the court in 2018 was the concern that it would begin inquiries into possible U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan since 2003, where both avoidable deaths and torture have been well documented. The U.S. used at the time the argument that it was not a signatory to the ICC but, as Prosecutor Bensouda observed, one does not have to be a signatory to be investigated as the court was specifically set up by the Rome Statute in 2002 to inquire into atrocities where there had been no accountability, either because the local government had no ability to do so or chose not to investigate itself.
So, it is all a bit of a non-starter since Israel and friends are non-signatories and will not cooperate while the United States will be using all its resources to stop the process stillborn. But that is not exactly the way it might play out. If the court holds the Israeli government accountable for war and human rights crimes those countries in Europe and elsewhere that are signatories to the ICC might consider themselves obliged to honor arrest warrants naming senior Israeli government officials whenever they are traveling. Israel is predictably reported to be already seeking to make arrangements whereby it will be warned by “friends” in foreign chanceries whenever such warrants are issued.
And then there is the matter of Israel’s approval rating vis-à-vis the rest of the world, which is already low, hovering down at the bottom of the list together with the United States. To be sure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands all that and has reacted sharply to the ICC decision to proceed. He said: “When the ICC investigates Israel for fake war crimes, this is pure anti-Semitism. The court established to prevent atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people is now targeting the one state of the Jewish people. First, it outrageously claims that when Jews live in our homeland, this is a war crime. Second, it claims that when democratic Israel defend itself against terrorists who murder our children, rocket our cities, we’re committing another war crime. Yet the ICC refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria who commit horrific atrocities almost daily. As Prime Minister of Israel, I assure you, we will fight this perversion of justice with all our might.”
Israel’s security cabinet subsequently endorsed Netanyahu’s criticisms, describing the “outrageous” decision as one that “exposes the court as a political body, standing in one line with international organizations driven by antisemitic principles.” The Netanyahu government’s response is, of course, typical boilerplate that seeks to cast the Jewish state as a perpetual victim surrounded by a sea of anti-Semites. The only thing Netanyahu’s statement left out is the claim that Iran will have a nuclear weapon in weeks, but the Biden Administration’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken has already said that for him. The drum roll includes “fake war crimes,” “Nazi Holocaust,” “pure anti-Semitism,” “defend itself against terrorists who murder our children,” and “brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria who commit horrific atrocities almost daily.” The reality is quite the reverse with the Israelis committing real war crimes by attacking its neighbors almost daily to include frequently killing Palestinian children. The horrific atrocities are being committed by the Israeli Army and the armed monstrous settlers against helpless Palestinians on both the West Bank and in Gaza. One might add the theft of Arab land, the destruction of their houses and livelihoods, and the lack of any due process for those who live and die under the brutal occupation. The numbers tell the tale. According to United Nations records, 3,601 Palestinians have been killed and over 100,000 injured by Israel between 2010 and 2019, versus 203 Israelis killed and 4,700 injured in the same time period.
And now, when there at last might be some real accountability for Israel’s crimes, the United States, under Netanyahu’s thumb, is yet again on the wrong side of the argument.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
The New York Times hastaken eco-nuttiness to a new level by publishing a podcast speculating whether the solution to fighting climate change will include — wait for it — dimming the sun.
Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein took his new interview podcast of global warming fearmongerElizabeth Kolbert and turned it into an op-ed. Klein began his piece with a creepy quote from environmentalist Stewart Brand, “‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’” He later spewed that one solution he was obsessed with for fighting climate change was “solar geoengineering … Are we really going to dim the sun?” [Emphasis added.]
Klein’s predominant disagreement with Brand was that he was “overly optimistic. We did not get good at [being gods]. We are terrible at it, and the consequences surround us.” In effect, according to Klein, we should consider that we may end up having no other choice than to be “gods” and “dim the sun.”
“Dim[ming] the sun” sounds about as realistic as when climate change extremists were advocating for “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot” to stave off global cooling in the 1970s. The idea is also just as crazy as when George Soros-funded economist Mariana Mazzucato raised the possibility of a global “climate lockdown” if the world didn’t undergo a “green economic transformation.”
[A]ny reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer. With every subsequent day that our politics fails, the choices that we will need to make in the future become worse.
The transcript of Klein’s interview with Kolbert was just downright scary:
Ezra Klein: You have a wonderful quote in the geoengineering chapter of your book from Andy Parker, who is a project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative. He says, ‘We live in a world where deliberately dimming the [expletive] sun might be less risky than not doing it.’ That feels like quite an indictment of the human race and where we’ve gotten ourselves to with all our knowledge and all our power.
Elizabeth Kolbert: I think that does sort of sum things up. We are in this very deep — there are only wrong answers, only hard choices at this point. Nothing easy from here on in.
Ezra Klein: What do you think of geoengineering?
Elizabeth Kolbert: I very consciously avoided coming down very clearly on that. But some very, very smart people are thinking about it and are very worried that it may be our best option at a certain point. And I think they may, unfortunately, be right — but wow, it’s dimming the [expletive] sun, you know?
The new Black Panthers movie is one of the best of the year. But it’s being critically misinterpreted in order to scuttle working class solidarity in favor of maintaining the status quo through racial hysteria.
Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.
The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, making it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.
Predictably, many critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panthers of the 1960s spotlighted in the film.
This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.
The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race; it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it in an effort to maintain the status quo.
Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” because, among other reasons, their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids, but for all kids.
In response, Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers, just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.
As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers and Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the US, because they worked to bring all poor and working-class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino, and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.
Hampton, Malcolm X, and MLK weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were trying to bring all people together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting the poor and working class in America and across the globe.
In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King, and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.
The FBI obviously doesn’t see BLM as a threat; hell, it is such a collection of useful idiots, you wonder if the feds started it in the first place? The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race – conveniently divided and conquered.
This is how something as innocuous as ‘All Lives Matter’ is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving it would rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.
There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.
For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the Capitol building turned into a riot, it was immediately labeled an ‘insurrection’ and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media, with the feds hunting down the perpetrators. But these same feds and media supported BLM’s “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings, took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned others into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.
Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (‘Defund the Police’), and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness, or homicide rates.
What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, has always been the front line for American fascism, and its victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.
This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling, racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the ‘hope and change’ charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance, while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.
The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills, and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah… not just for the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield, but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bulls**tters.
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota.
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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